Megaboa (2021) poste

Megaboa (2021)

Rating:


USA. 2021.

Crew

Director – Mario N. Bonassin, Screenplay – Alex Heerman, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Jake Jalbert, Music – Christopher Cano & Mikel Shane Prather, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Kevin Rego. Production Company – The Asylum.

Cast

Eric Roberts (Dr. Malone), Michelle O’Shea (Allison), Emilia Torello (Grace), Joe Herrera (Joaquin), Garrett Schulte (Adam), Vimala Veera (Benji), Ray Acevedo (Rex), Sharon Desiree (Rita), Michael Devorzon (Jake)


Plot

Dr Malone leads a group of students to an island off the coast of South America in search of caves containing petroglyphs. There they encounter Joaquin who says his ship was wrecked. Dr Malone is then bitten in the leg by a hornet spider. He has 36 hours before the bite proves fatal. However, their helicopter is not able to fly in to pick them up because of bad weather. Joaquin suggests a trek to a special tree that has a unique orchid with healing powers. While Dr Malone stays behind, the rest of the group set out to the tree only to find it overrun by snakes and guarded by a megaboa. Hunted by the megaboa, they try to find a way to get past it to the tree and get one of the orchids.


The Asylum is a company regularly produce low-budget films designed to copy the titles of big-budget releases and are released just as the other work comes out to capitalise on publicity and anticipated interest – something they call ‘mockbusters’. The Asylum’s mockbusters have included copycat titles such as The Da Vinci Treasure (2006), Snakes on a Train (2006), AVH: Alien vs Hunter (2007), The Hitchhiker (2007), I Am Omega (2007), Transmorphers (2007), Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008), The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), 100 Million BC (2008), Sunday School Musical (2008), The 18 Year Old Virgin (2009), Almighty Thor (2011), Battle of Los Angeles (2011), Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (2012) and Age of the Hobbits (2012). (For a more detailed listing see Mockbusters).

The Asylum also have a prodigious output of deliberately ridiculous killer shark films, having made Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and 2 Headed Shark Attack (2012) and a string of sequels to either, in the latter case adding a head onto the shark with each sequel. Their magnum opus was the bad movie hit of Sharknado (2013), which duly led to a series of sequels too.

Eric Roberts and students in Megaboa (2021)
Eric Roberts (c in white with gun raised) and students vs the megaboa

Megaboa seems a throwback to one of the Monster Movies that The Asylum were making during their early days. Following the success of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, they spun out a series of sequels and then similarly titled films with the likes of Mega Piranha (2010) and Mega Python vs Gatoroid (2011). Around this same time, a host of other low-budget filmmakers began devising a series of similarly titled creature mash-ups – Dinocroc (2004), Supergator (2007), Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010), Piranhaconda (2012) and Cobragator (2018). “Bigger than Titanaboa – that’s Megaboa,” Eric Roberts says at one point, commenting on the philological absurdity of these mash-ups.

Megaboa has the patina of a bad movie, even though there is nothing about it that specifically resembles a bad movie. The effects of the giant snake are competently cheap. The cast are all reasonable in their roles. The only recognisable name is Eric Roberts, an actor who seems incapable of turning down any paying role no matter what. As perhaps evidence of his limited participation (usually name actors will get paid a certain amount of money for turning up a couple of days), he is sidelined with the spider bite and most of the action with the megaboa is carried out by the younger unknown faces until he reappears again at the climax.

Director Mario N. Bonassin had worked as a post-production coordinator on a host of other films for The Asylum. He had previously directed Alien Conquest (2021), a modernised version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), and subsequently went on to make America is Sinking (2023).


Trailer here


Director:
Actors: , , , , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , ,