- Directed by Peter Hyams
- Written by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Amy Holden Jones
- Stars Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, Linda Hunt, James Whitmore
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 50 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFbvUDpRBuo
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s not one to think about deeply. There are a number of points that really don’t hold up to scrutiny. But those aside, they still managed to put together a pretty entertaining movie. There’s a story that pulls you along; the cast is good, and the effects are decent. It entertains despite the faults.
Synopsis
A photographer takes photos of natives doing a fire dancing ritual. They cook up a pot of something that the white man drinks. He soon gets terrified of a man in a costume; it’s some kind of drug.
We cut to the shipyard. John Whitney, the man from before, yells at the captain that the crates he’s sending to the museum need to come off the ship. The captain refuses to unload the crates, so Whitney stows away with the crates. Turns out, it’s the wrong boat, and his crates go another way.
Six weeks later, Lt. D’Agosta, a detective, shows up on the scene; the boat has drifted in, apparently abandoned in Lake Michigan. There’s blood but no bodies. He and Detective Hollingsworth find the bodies of the missing sailors torn apart.
A week later, we follow a bunch of kids as they go to the museum. Dr. Green, an evolutionary biologist, is there. Dr. Cuthbert stops her to mention that Green’s grant is being delayed. Her nemesis, Greg Lee, is also up for consideration for the same grant. Green calls Lee a gerbil.
Green goes into Dr. Whitney’s lab and finds a bunch of crates. Dr. Frock explains that they came in by air freight this morning. There’s a bunch of relics from a South American lizard god. One of the crates is empty except for a bunch of leaves with little insect eggs on them. She takes a sample of the leaves, and the rest goes into the incinerator.
Some kids have hidden in the museum until after it closes that night. A big lizard-thing kills the security guard. Dr. Green sends her staff home and works there alone.
The next morning, the two detectives show up to investigate the dead guard. Dr. Green was the last one out the previous night, so the cops want to talk to her. D’Agosta talks to Cuthbert about her employees. Green gives the detective a tour of the science areas of the museum. He mentions that Whitney’s office was vandalized last night. They go in to look at the relic that came in the crates; it’s some kind of chimera creature.
D’Agosta goes to the morgue. The medical examiner thanks him for sending in seven decapitations this week. They do the autopsy on the guard, who has been clawed by something huge, even before losing his head. The skull is empty; the brain is gone. Where did it go?
That night, Dr. Green wanders around in the new “superstition” exhibit and hears something in there with her. No, that’s not a monster breathing heavily; it’s just a cleaning woman with asthma.
Cuthbert and D’Agosta talk about the big fund-raiser party tonight. The police are still searching the building for the murderer and find some bloody footprints. Hollingsworth reports that all the dead men on the ship were missing their hypothalamus, just like the guard. The detective talks to Dr. Frock about Whitney’s work.
The cops find and shoot a man in the basement; he turns out to be a convicted rapist, and he’s got the dead guard’s wallet. D’Agosta doesn’t think he’s the murderer. The mayor calls D’Agosta and orders him to let the gala go on tonight.
A bug got into Green’s leaf samples, and it grew huge. She talks to Dr. Lee, who says it’s the DNA of a beetle and a gecko.
The party at the museum begins. The mayor and his wife are there, as are Mr. and Mrs. Blaisedale, the big-money donors. Meanwhile, the police are still searching the basement with dogs in case there’s someone else down there.
Security wants to shut down the lab area where Green and Frock are working. Lee tells them there’s no one there, so they lock all the doors. Lee then monopolizes the Blaisedales for his grant speech.
D’Agosta learns that there are old tunnels under the museum that lead all the way to Lake Michigan, where the boat was found. The search dogs run ahead, but something kills them. D’Agosta, in the tunnels alone, finds a whole nest full of skeletons.
Hollingsworth runs upstairs to shut the party down, but they’re all in the “superstition” wing looking at the Kothoga relic from Brazil. Suddenly, a dead body falls into the exhibit, and everyone panics. The alarm goes off, so the security people watch as all the doors close in an emergency lockdown. The whole power grid shuts down (why?). The fire sprinklers go off. The partygoers break windows and generally stampede like lunatics. Some are trapped inside behind the security doors.
The building engineers go to check out why the power went out, and find that the generators have been trashed. Before long, the engineers have been trashed as well. D’Agosta tells Hollingsworth where to go, and he’s going to lead everyone outside through the tunnels. The Blaisedales decide to stay put and wait it out.
D’Agosta finds Green and Frock in the tunnels, and they all see the lizard monster clearly. Green talks about the leaves, the eggs, and the virus that came on them. It’s probably just a local lizard that ate those leaves. Frock explains how the old-time natives used the leaves to defeat their enemies. They’d send in a monster and go into hiding until it ran out of enemy brains to eat and starved. She does some tests on the creature’s blood and says it’s probably still evolving.
Meanwhile, the monster attacks the mayor’s group in the tunnels. It kills the security chief and one of the cops. Dr. Lee tries to sneak away, but it gets him as well.
The SWAT team breaks in through a skylight and is immediately eaten. We see that Kothoga can climb walls. It then eats Dr. Frock. Green says the creature has a lot of human DNA. It may have started out as human and evolved into a monster.
D’Agosta and Green make their way through the tunnels, and the monster is right there with them, under the water.
Hollingsworth gets the mayor, Dr. Cuthbert, and some others out safely. Green goes back to her lab, and the computer reports that the monster is actually John Whitney, who has been mutated. The monster chases her through the back rooms and labs of the museum. She pours all kinds of flammable things on the floor.
The monster approaches but takes time to lick her all over. She throws her bomb and traps the creature in the now-burning lab. The monster explodes excessively.
The mayor shows up and sticks up for D’Agosta, whom he’s been yelling at throughout the film. Inside, D’Agosta lets Green out of the water tank she was hiding in.
Commentary
It’s a monster lizard. How or why would the museum’s computerized security system, the doors, and the sprinklers all go off while the entire power system fails? There are a lot of things in this film like that that make no sense at all. Doors that can’t be opened manually, even by the fire department? The creature seems to be in multiple places at once; it couldn’t possibly be all over the tunnels, the basement, and the museum labs at the same time.
It’s quite long, but it moves along pretty well and never takes the time to get boring. The acting is decent enough, and there are a lot of familiar faces in this one.
They were hanging those leaves in the sewers as bait. Wonder what’s gonna happen when the rats eventually eat them?
As long as you don’t think too hard about some of it, it’s pretty entertaining.