The Horror Geek - News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

After sitting on a shelf in the Weinstein’s impenetrable film vault, director Greg McLean’s killer crocodile flick, Rogue, finally hits DVD (with a brief stopover in a few theaters for posterity’s sake). Is this newest entry in the ever-burgeoning monster crocodile/alligator subgenre (which has seen the release of this film, Primeval, Lake Placid 2, and Black Water all in the very recent past) the one predator to rule them all or is Rogue just another pretender to the throne?

Michael Vartan is a travel writer working on a piece about the Australian outback. As part of the story, he decides to take a ride on Kate Ryan’s (Radha Mitchell) river boat tour. Before you can say “crocodile”, the boat and its bevy of passengers (including a grieving husband, token Americans, a young girl, her terminally ill mother, and pretty much every other cliché they could pull up from central casting) have been rammed by a giant croc and stranded on an isolated island. To make matters even worse, they island is in a tidal area-and will soon be underwater. Quite the conundrum…

Rogue is writer/director Greg McLean’s second feature film (the first being the very good Wolf Creek). In his evolutionary trajectory as a filmmaker, it’s a bit more of a sidestep than a full foot forward, but at least there’s a positive on display for almost every negative found in Rogue.

Rogue’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is its story. The fact that one film element is both a plus and a minus should tell you just how odd a film this is. On the one hand, Rogue is a pretty solid thriller about an aquatic animal gone wild-one that can trace its lineage back to Spielberg’s Jaws and Lewis Teague’s Alligator. It offers up an antagonist that would have made Steve Irwin quake with fear in the form of a twenty or twenty-five foot long monster with a predilection for human flesh and places a crew of potential meals right in its path.

The other side of the coin, though, is that film plays with our expectations and doesn’t always fulfill them. In some instances, this is a good thing (I saw lots of things that looked like potential foreshadowing of future deaths, saw situations where I was sure those deaths were coming, then watched in amazement as McLean took things in a different-and unexpected-direction.) In others, it doesn’t work nearly as well-I was watching a film called Rogue, about a giant killer crocodile, with a case that proclaims the film “unrated” and featuring a bloody crocodile mouth. For me, that creates some expectations-as does it being released on the Dimension Extreme label-as far as what I’m going to see in this film. Unfortunately, Rogue never really delivers the gore goods so inherent in the premise, instead content to work more as a standard thriller or disaster movie that just so happens to have a large reptile as the bad guy.

Now, before you can say “but Mike, you love Jaws, and that’s not incredibly gory despite the premise” I’ll agree with you. Spielberg didn’t go the full gore route with Jaws nor did he cram the shark down our throats. However, when the time was right, Spielberg gave us both elements (the gore and the shark) and the film works because of it. Rogue shows far too much restraint in this department-it’s almost gore-less with numerous deaths taking place completely off-screen. I can live with him keeping his crocodile mostly in the shadows (because I know what a crocodile looks like and I know that this CGI crocodile isn’t going to look particularly awesome), but the decided lack of onscreen carnage is a major disappointment in a film like this. It’s even more troubling since McLean clearly had no problem with pushing the boundaries of gore and cinematic carnage in Wolf Creek. I’m not sure why this film is trumpeted as “unrated”-there’s nothing here that couldn’t have passed in the R rated theatrical cut of the film.

Compounding this problem is the fact that Rogue features a veritable smorgasbord of potential victims, yet there aren’t that many deaths in the film. Mitchell and Varatan are likeable enough leads, but the rest of this cast deserves to be eaten-and when some folks don’t meet their demise inside a giant croc’s stomach, it’s pretty disappointing.

Enough of the negative, though. While it almost certainly seems like I’m really down on this film, that’s not the whole truth. McLean’s direction here is amazing and makes up for numerous shortcomings in the script. The director captures the beauty and foreboding of the outback in a way that’s nothing short of breathtaking. The film may not be particularly brutal but it is incredibly well shot and genuinely suspenseful. McLean may not be Spielberg, but he has learned a few things from Jaws. He makes the water in general as scary as the monster we so rarely see. He misdirects our expectations about things to come by foreshadowing and then not following through. He’s crafted a solid film, at least until the final act, wherein he goes for the safe, Hollywood ending which features a “dead” character surviving that’s almost as improbable as Mario Van Peebles surviving the end of Jaws: The Revenge (which is the alternate ending to that film, shot after test audiences didn’t like seeing his character die. I can imagine something very similar having happened here).

So, here we are at the end of the review and you might still be wondering if Rogue is really worthy of your time. The short answer is yes-despite the problems and the disappointments I have with parts of the film, Rogue is still a solid killer crocodile movie. It’s certainly better than Primeval and Lake Placid 2. It’s not quite as good as Black Water or Alligator. If you approach the film with the right expectations (expecting a horror-thriller hybrid with very little gore, a low body count, and a lot of suspense), it’s actually pretty entertaining. Just don’t be fooled by the “unrated” on the box or the gruesome cover picture.

Horror Geek Rating: 3 out of 5

Tags: crocodiles, Film Reviews, Greg McLean, killer croc movies, Rogue

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.