Customer Reviews

Organizm

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are a fan of modern creature features like "Slither", "Tremors" or "Splinter" then you will enjoy "Organizm". It's your typical mutant-biological-threat-that-can-destroy-the-world type of flick that is perfect viewing late on a Saturday night.

The basic story is that a biological weapon is unwittingly released in the American Southwest (these things always happen in or around the desert dontchyaknow?). Escaping from its confines the titular organism which looks like fleshy ropes seems unstoppable! Boring through concrete, steel, traveling underground....it doesn't seem like there is any way to stop this creepy menace as it bores into and feeds on anything in its path.

I liked the "monster" in this creature feature, it acted in a similar fashion to "The Blob"...only much quicker, and more aggressive in tracking its meals.

The special effects are a notch above Sci-Fi Channel produced movies, and the cast is made up of your typical b-movie horror character actors, but they do a good job with the what they are given.

If you are in the mood for a fun little sci-fi/horror ride, and don't mind direct to DVD effects and some loopy plot holes, give "Organizm" a shot, it's a fun 90 minutes.

Organizm is a pretty solid movie that suffers from two problems. The movie contradicts itself at times, and some of the most atrocious CGI and green screen work I have ever seen. Bad CGI usually doesn't bother me because its par for the course in low budget movies, but it is just so bad that it deterred me from fully enjoying the movie. And another problem is that the movie seemed to have some sort of budget because everything else about it was pretty good, so the CGI issue really is unforgivable. Now thus far it may seem as though I'm bashing the movie, but I did enjoy it. In fact, if the CGI had been in the hands of more competent individuals, then this would have received a four star rating easily. But as it stands, we are left with a nice Sci-Fi / Horror time killer worthy of watching, but just don't expect the next classic here.

I picked this up under the misleading title 'Living Hell' for 4.99 Eur in Germany and to be honest didn't have particularly high expectations having had many disappointments with similar low-budget DVD titles. Maybe there was something in the description that set it apart that I decided to give it a go and I'm glad I did. A surprisingly well-acted, well-paced and plotted bio-horror with quite an original premise. A creeping monster-virus - the result of a Cold War experiment gone horribly wrong (surprise!) - that absorbs energy to grow exponentially, remorselessly enveloping everything in its path and defying all efforts to stop it, not least the US Army's predictably mindless attempts to bomb it out of existence. Clearly done on a small-budget, the actors and the director make the most of their limited resources to produce a surprisingly convincing and reasonably scary experience that if it had a slightly larger budget, might have got more attention. I can see Hollywood seeing enough merit to do a big-budget remake. Far superior to most of the straight-to-DVD horrors you see in video stores.

The cgi effects in this movie are actually pretty good. The acting is good and the movie is exciting and action-packed. I wasn't sure how this movie would turn out but I was very pleased and entertained when I watched this movie. It's a really neat sci fi movie and I highly recommend it.

This is a movie that reminded me of the great b movies of the fifties.
Many of them took place in and or around small desert towns like this one does. Many of them feature the army fighting some kind of monster and this one does and the acting is solid and done by decent actors who pull off the monster on the loose story with gusto. This movie even has a long dead mad scientist who unleashed the creature back in the fifties.
It's just a good romp of a movie and if you enjoyed those old movies this is a salute to them except of course in the special effects department.
This one has effects of this decade (the early 21st century).
The effects look great in this movie and make the film seem as though it was made with a higher budget. Just ten years ago a movie of this budget with cgi looked cartoony. This movie doesn't look like that at all in fact it looks pretty good and the monster is a creeping menace straight out of a vintage quartermass movie. On the scale of low budget sci fi this is a good sci fi monster attack flick that will please fans of that type of movie very well.

Don't let the fact that this film was produced for the Sci-Fi Channel keep you from giving Organizm (also known as Living Hell) a try because it's a pretty darn good movie. While it is somewhat derivative of some films that have come before, it sort of hearkens back to the good old monster movies of the 1950s - only now, the scientist trying to figure out how to save the world from the horrors of the colossal beast is a woman rather than a man.

Back in 1959, ten-year-old Frank Sears' kooky mother conveyed a very important message to her son, going so far as to carve that message into the palms of his hands in what would be the final moments of her life. 33 years later, Frank, now a biology teacher in New Jersey, drives all the way to Fort Lambert in an effort to convey that message to those in charge. Having learned that the fort was being torn down, he feels duty-bound to warn them not to disturb whatever is hidden in a secret area of the camp. Naturally, the military folks check the area out, gain access to the secret vault, and seriously disturb the thing they discover there. Before you can say Jack Sprat, this Organizm wakes up and starts spreading - very quickly. It has these octopus-like appendages that spread everywhere like wildfire, destroy anything - and anyone - it comes in contact with. The military evacuates to a local town and sets up a command center. None of their weapons are of any use against the rapidly growing creature, but those in the chain of command pursue a contain and destroy strategy against it. Meanwhile, Specialist Carrie Freeborn (Erica Leerhsen), whose job it is to dispose of hazardous materials, defies orders and teams up with Frank, convinced he is somehow the key to understanding and thereby stopping the monster.

Admittedly Organizm doesn't deviate far from the standard science vs. man-made monster modus operandi - but that's okay. It gives the film a sort of old school feel about it. Of course, there's nothing old school about the special effects, which feature a great deal of CGI animation. Without a big budget, the filmmakers couldn't afford to make every scene ultra-realistic, but I think Organizm's special effects work quit well for the most part.

Erica Leerhsen is building a pretty decent horror resume for herself (some may remember her from Wrong Turn 2), and I think she turned in an excellent performance in this film. Johnathon Schaech acquits himself quite nicely, as well, but he could never have carried this film on his own. I read somewhere that the film was shot in a mere 20 days (at a budget of four and a half million dollars), if that's true, then I'm even more impressed with what I saw here. The cast and crew really came together as a team and turned out a film they can be proud of (in my opinion, anyway). Organizm could easily have turned into a total cheesefest, but the strong cast and action-packed storyline never let that happen. I don't care how outlandish a film is, as long as I find it entertaining - and this one took me for a pretty entertaining ride.

This movie keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time....no getting up to the kitchen on this one! Can't believe I had never heard of it or seen previews....a fantastic movie and will watch again and again!!

This movie has a stupid title.

It's obvious that Syfy was ambivalent about it too, as the movie was later released on DVD as Organizm. With a "z," which isn't much better than Living Hell and just makes it look like Syfy doesn't know how to spell "organism."

But the naming difficulties suit the movie, which is difficult to quantify. Although there technically is a monster, it's a living cancer. And if you look at it that way, Living Hell is a manifestation of our worst fears about inheriting our parents' genetic abnormalities. If your dad gets cancer, you could get it too!

Frank Sears (Johnathon Schaech) is the child of a terrible legacy; his mother forced him to memorize a message before murdering his adopted father and killing herself. Haunted by the message, Sears panics when he discovers a military base is about to be torn down - the same base alluded to by his mother. So doing whatever it takes, Frank breaks into the base to warn the Army: DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT!

Which they do. Of course.

Leading the expedition to decommission the base is wife-and-husband team Carrie (Erica Leerhsen) and disabled Glenn (Jason Wiles) Freeborn under the command of Col. Erik Maitland (James McDaniel). Things go south almost instantly as Sears' real father is discovered, a floating corpse in a tank of full of formaldehyde. The organism (or is it organizm?) feeds on energy and instantly grows like a giant, malignant tumor once it is in the military's lights. In the span of a few minutes, the entire base along with Carrie's husband is overrun.

The military is in retreat. Their inevitable response is a standard horror movie trope: nuke it from orbit. Since the creature feeds on energy, a nuclear bomb seems like vitamins, more likely to make the thing bigger and stronger than actually kill it. But then, the Army isn't interested in listening to half-baked theories about a central nucleus that can be killed with Sears' blood.

Yeah, we've seen this before. In fact, we've seen it in Infected, which was about a similar concept with a similar hero who has a similar bloody solution.

It's not great -- there's a squicky blood-bathing scene that cleverly gets fetching Leerhsen naked without making the audience hate her after her husband's recent death - but the film is briskly paced, the monster is interesting, the effects are passable, and Sears' response to his father's legacy is poignant. This is a competently filmed horror movie more along the lines of the Andromeda Strain than the typical monster-of-the-week drek.

But it really needs a better name.

Finally saw this over the weekend on TV under the title "Living Hell" and enjoyed it. Once you ignore the lousy CGI (as usual) and the clueless military officers the film is very creepy and well made. The acting is pretty decent as well. Much better than the usual Sci-Fi (aka SyFy) nonsense. Reminds me a lot of the very cool Blob remake from the 80s. One thing though, I feel it needed more graphic depictions of how the organism killed people. I never got the sense that the thing was that dangerous even though people were dying.

Organizm (Richard Jefferies, 2008)

When I originally looked this dog up at IMDB, it was sitting there with an 8.2 rating-- one would, were there not a floor on number of votes necessary to enter it, put this in the top 250 films of all time. (Cooler heads have prevailed in the past twenty-four hours, it seems; another sixty-odd votes have dropped it to 4.7.) That's depressing. There are really people who thought it was that good?

The plot: An army base is in the process of being decommissioned when a high-school biology teacher, Frank Sears (The Doom Generation's Jonathon Shaech), shows up out of nowhere (having managed to drive from Trenton, New Jersey, to rural New Mexico in thirty-six hours; quite a vehicle he's got there) to give the commander of the operation, Colonel Maitland (NYPD Blue's James McDaniel), a message: whatever's in section 12 vault 3, don't disturb it. Of course, they do, and it's up to Sears and eye-popping, uniform-filling beauty Carrie Freeborn (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Erica Leerhsen) to figure out how to stop the seemingly invincible creature the Army has let loose.

Now, before I trash this entirely, I will say that no movie containing Erica Leerhsen, who seems to have set herself up as a slightly dirtier, lower-rent Charlize Theron, is a complete waste of time. Why? Because you get to stare at Erica Leerhsen. It's like watching The Astronaut's Wife just so you can stare at Charlize Theron. There's certainly nothing else to like about The Astronaut's Wife, and there's nothing else to like about Organizm, either; when your film contains, in its first five minutes, both CGI blood and CGI vomit, you have entered a realm in which all movies are a waste of celluloid. The thing of it is that the special effects guys (whose names are going to be so obscure after this I didn't even bother to scroll down and look them up) didn't even bother to line up the effects with the actors; in one memorable (only because we see it multiple times, and once in close-up) scene, a bullet that's supposed to be shot through a person's hand into his head creates a very unconvincing hole about three inches to the left of the person's hand, complete with atmospheric blood spatter. Who knew atmosphere had blood?

Jefferies took the director's chair for only the second time in his career; his last film was Blood Tide, the James Earl Jones Greek-Island monster movie from 1982. While Blood Tide is good cheesy fun-- I watch it every year or so just to remind myself how charmingly awful it is-- I didn't really think Jefferies could do any worse. Guess what? He did. *