This is the seventh film I've seen by Filipino director Cirio H. Santiago; of the previous six, I've only rated one higher than 4/10 (the gloriously daft Future Hunters). Demon of Paradise does nothing to raise my average rating for Santiago's movies.
Set in Hawaii, but most likely filmed in the Philippines, the film is an aquatic B-movie creature feature that features one of the worst man-in-a-rubber-suit monsters I've seen - not quite Zaat or Octaman bad, but still more likely to elicit laughs rather than screams of fear. Not that we get to see much of the 'demon', the majority of the film revolving around the human characters, with only the briefest glimpses of the monster as it pokes its ridiculous looking head out of the water looking for victims.
A carnivorous humanoid reptile from the Triassic period, Akua (as the locals call it) is woken from hibernation by hunters using dynamite to fish the waters of a lake. Herpetologist Annie (Kathryn Witt) hopes to catch the creature alive so that she can study it, but local cop Keefer (William Steis) wants it dead before it kills any more people, in particular the guests at the local resort owned by Cahill (Laura Banks), who has used the rumours of a legendary lizard monster to bring in more business.
With plenty of scope for exploitative fun, this should have been a corker - a Filipino Humanoids From The Deep - but Santiago's dull direction, the tedious talky script, the risible creature, and not nearly enough gore and nudity all go to make this film quite the snooze-fest for most of the time. We get a total of two mauled bodies (mediocre make-up), only one pair of breasts (courtesy of Leslie Scarborough as coke-snorting glamour model Gabby), and the hilarious sight of Akua leaping into the air to pull a helicopter into the water (just how much does that creature weigh?) - I expected more.
The awful ending sees the apparently bullet-proof monster finally being blown to pieces by hand-grenades, with Annie remarking ominously to Keefer, 'You ever pull the tail off a lizard?'. Sure, Annie, but I've never seen a lizard put itself back together after being reduced to bloody chunks by high explosives.
3/10.
Set in Hawaii, but most likely filmed in the Philippines, the film is an aquatic B-movie creature feature that features one of the worst man-in-a-rubber-suit monsters I've seen - not quite Zaat or Octaman bad, but still more likely to elicit laughs rather than screams of fear. Not that we get to see much of the 'demon', the majority of the film revolving around the human characters, with only the briefest glimpses of the monster as it pokes its ridiculous looking head out of the water looking for victims.
A carnivorous humanoid reptile from the Triassic period, Akua (as the locals call it) is woken from hibernation by hunters using dynamite to fish the waters of a lake. Herpetologist Annie (Kathryn Witt) hopes to catch the creature alive so that she can study it, but local cop Keefer (William Steis) wants it dead before it kills any more people, in particular the guests at the local resort owned by Cahill (Laura Banks), who has used the rumours of a legendary lizard monster to bring in more business.
With plenty of scope for exploitative fun, this should have been a corker - a Filipino Humanoids From The Deep - but Santiago's dull direction, the tedious talky script, the risible creature, and not nearly enough gore and nudity all go to make this film quite the snooze-fest for most of the time. We get a total of two mauled bodies (mediocre make-up), only one pair of breasts (courtesy of Leslie Scarborough as coke-snorting glamour model Gabby), and the hilarious sight of Akua leaping into the air to pull a helicopter into the water (just how much does that creature weigh?) - I expected more.
The awful ending sees the apparently bullet-proof monster finally being blown to pieces by hand-grenades, with Annie remarking ominously to Keefer, 'You ever pull the tail off a lizard?'. Sure, Annie, but I've never seen a lizard put itself back together after being reduced to bloody chunks by high explosives.
3/10.