Now available on DVD
Cast:
Max Martini as McCall
Betsy Russell as Felicia
Benito Martinez as Harry Vargas
Nick Gomez as Santiago
Wayne Pere as Lin
Jon Mack as Carla
Directed by Tripp Reed
Review:
The SyFy Channel has done it again.
They have tricked me into watching another painfully lame horror movie that I thought was something completely different.
On the surface, Mandrake seems like it could be extremely interesting. An ancient evil that uses the forest around it to kill, mame and disembowel those that disturb its territorial grounds.
In reality, it is yet another movie with only one location, probably in the backwoods of some Southern state in the Union, with a host of characters we could give a rat’s ass about and laughable CGI.
For whatever reason, a group of scientist types are trying to find a burial ground in some unnamed backwater South America country. There a jeweled dagger resides that is of considerable wealth and prestige to the wealthy benefactor that sent them there. After one expedition is lost, another small group is sent into the jungle to recover the artifact including a doctor, an anthropologist, an ex-military type and a couple of native trackers.
Without much trouble, they find the cement coffin where the dagger resides. Without much trouble because the cement coffin is just out in the open as plain as the eye can see and about as out of place in the “jungle” as you can get. You can almost see a kid climbing a tree in his backyard, the set it so lame.
Of course, when they take the dagger out of the coffin all hell breaks loose as some crazy tribe attacks them and an ancient evil is unleashed. What we get next is a whole bunch of running around through this so-called jungle, lots of spooky scenes where vines and roots grab someone (scary!), a hilarious attack on the tent camp of the scientists where dudes with guns get overpowered by painted dudes with sticks, unbelievably bad Spanish accents, a “nice” wealthy businessman that continually pushes people into the creature so he can get away and quite possibly the worst tree creature to ever be created on film (The Two Towers it ain’t).
Plus, there are multiple nonsensical scenes where the native tribe that is killing hordes of people get attacked by the creature (we don’t know why), then they tend to help out the white invaders, then they want to kill them again, then they want to help them again.
Needless to say, this isn’t one of the SyFy Channel’s crowing achievements. But since they tend to put literally every film on DVD, if you have nothing else to do and have some spare cash, check it out. Otherwise, definitely skip it.
