There are times when the phrase “practical effects” hardly seems adequate.
Take Maggots, one of the lowest budgeted films I’ve ever seen with Fred Olen Ray’s name on it (as producer, not director): there is a practical monster, and we see a lot of it.
The only problem is that it is a hand puppet about the size of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
And it can barely move its toothy jaws or whatever you’d call them.
Oh, and all that blood spraying about when it bites someone is very bad digital blood which makes no real effort to look real.
This short, leech-like critter, however, is then blown up to ridiculous sizes thanks to green screen technology, and shown looming over houses or crawling over cars.
Without doing any damage.
Or doing much more than opening and shutting its mouth.
Meanwhile, even if we hadn’t noticed how minimal those maggots were, it’s fairly obvious that this is a cheap film (despite the thoroughly adequate cinematography and editing) because there are a lot of minor characters introduced in unrelated sequences, who get killed off without meeting up with our main cast.
That means they don’t all have to show up on set at the same time, thus making it easier to find someone willing to show up on any given day. It’s a classic Indie film trick.
Oh well. You know the drill. Meteor lands, alien maggots attack and eat people, the survivors squabble until they finally unite to try to stop the invasion.
Meanwhile, there is a lengthy intro about “The War of the Galaxy” and a rocket launch full of hungry monsters, along with a lengthy, subtitled villain rant in worm speak (in actual worm-ese, that is, not their constant high pitched, whispered babble about destroying us that no one in the film ever seems to hear ) which offers us a vision of the film wildly at odds with the kids in the woods and monsters film it seems to be.
Ummmmmm…
Right.
It’s not like someone would cram pages of exposition into a film after it was complete, right?
Now we are talking about a technically polished grade Z film, much like something the Polonia Brothers might have made in their post-Millennial era. It’s better than most, in fact, even if it has nothing to say about the Alien’s invasion of Earth back in the Nineteen-Twenties other than all that text. I’m mildly surprised that its director, Bob Bragg, has a whole slew of such movies to his credit, most of them apparently direct to video.
And I do admit I’d love to see his short film, Sasquatch Terror, which shows up on TV in this film. It looks like fun.
After all, the redneck watching it seems to love it.
At any rate, this one can best be summed up this way:
Watch at your own risk.
rivets on the poster 