THE RELIC
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Paramount) Starring: Penelope Ann Miller, Tom Sizemore, Linda Hunt, James Whitmore. Screenplay: Amy Jones & Jon Raffa and Rick Jones & Amanda Silver. Producers: Gale Anne Hurd, Sam Mercer. Director: Peter Hyams. MPAA Rating: R (graphic violence, profanity) Running Time: 110 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Don't be misled by advertising which suggests that THE RELIC is some sort of sublimely spooky thriller, because it is nothing of the kind. If you sit through the film long enough (and several people at the screening I attended threw in the towel somewhere before the end of the third reel), you many begin to wonder if you have stumbled through a time warp back to the early 1980s, when horror films were an excuse to play "can you top this" with graphic depictions of murders. For all its ostensibly classy trappings, THE RELIC is simply a mad slasher film with a monster instead of a maniac, as relentlessly violent and unpleasant as any film in recent memory.
In THE RELIC, Tom Sizemore plays Chicago homicide detective Vincent D'Agosta, who investigates a Brazilian cargo ship which drifts into Lake Michigan with the entire crew brutally murdered and decapitated. When a similar murder occurs at the Museum of Natural History, D'Agosta tries to determine the connection between the two incidents. One possibility may be a shipment which arrives at the museum from a field anthropologist, a crate containing mysterious leaves. When evolutionary biologist Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) examines the leaves, she discovers that the plant may have the contain hormones which cause extreme mutations in whatever consumes it. This discovery may come too late, however, as the museum prepares to hold a gala benefit which may end with several guests lacking much above their black ties.
If you saw Wes Craven's current horror homage/satire SCREAM, you are acquainted with the "rules" of horror films; if you didn't see SCREAM, you can learn most of them from THE RELIC. The likelihood of any given character to die is proportional to his or her demonstrated vices, so you can bank on the fact that a security guard who lights up a joint is not long for this world, nor is a notable nasty like the obnoxious scientist (Chi Moui Lo) who threatens to steal away Dr. Green's research grant. Splitting up a group is also a sure sign of carnage to come, especially if one person alone is carrying a flashlight or investigating any sort of strange noise. You can also count on at least one startled animal to provide a gratuitous shock to the system, to be followed closely by something genuinely horrifying.
These elements are familiar for some bad reasons -- usually laziness -- but also for the good reason that, when put to good use, they can be part of a truly tense film. The original ALIEN was a classic bug hunt crafted with such style by Ridley Scott that everything old seemed new again. Peter Hyams pretends to be interested in that kind of primal chiller, but he has neither the patience nor the skill for it. The multi-attributed script tosses personality quirks at its character hoping something might stick, but only Audra Lindley as an acerbic coroner seems remotely human. More often the script resorts to exposition enhancers like the two kids who turn up to ask what Miller's character does for a living (there's nothing like turning a screenplay into a catechism to make sure no one is confused). Hyams, who has always acted as his own cinematographer, shoots everything with as little light as possible, clearly under the impression that atmosphere can be manipulated with a dimmer switch; meanwhile, the last half of THE RELIC is edited with a gross disregard for anything resembling building tension. THE RELIC just gets louder, darker and more hectic with each passing minute, as Hyams repeatedly confuses murky with moody.
There is also something terribly dishonest about the way THE RELIC is shot, because there is virtually nothing creepy about it. The old slasher films of the 80s had no pretensions about what they were there to show the audience; when someone was going to die a horrible death, they turned up all the lights and showed you a horrible death. There are easily a dozen severed heads which roll through the 110 minutes of THE RELIC, and people are torn apart with such regularity during the last 50 minutes that it no longer matters how quickly the light shines on the corpse or how rapid the edit is. Hyams finally shows his hand in a sequence where a S.W.A.T. team enters the museum in an attempt to rescue trapped patrons. The first man drops in on a rope and is promptly drawn and quartered; a second man drops in after him and is separated from his head quite graphically; #3 is snipped in half below the waist. At that point, THE RELIC becomes a turkey shoot where so many anonymous individuals are killed that the survival of the two main protagonists doesn't matter. THE RELIC is an ugly and stupid film, which is bad enough. It also proves to be a terribly dehumanizing one. Special effects wizard Stan Winston might have created a nifty creature to trot out for the climax, but for all it mattered to the story, Hyams might as well have saved the budget and used a guy in a hockey mask.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 severance plays: 2.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews