After a Komodo dragon was utilized to wondrous comic effect in 1990’s The Freshman — stealing the show from stars Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick — it’s tough to find the lizard threatening. It’s even tough to do so after watching the dreadful Komodo, in which three or four of these oversized reptiles menace a sparsely populated island.
The lone directorial outing for Michael Lantieri, who had won a much-deserved Oscar for Jurassic Park’s special effects a half-decade prior, the straight-to-VHS film begins with a Komodo eating a dog and its entire vacationing human family, save for one spooked teenage boy (Kevin Zegers, Wrong Turn). A year later, renegade psychiatrist Victoria (Jill Hennessey, Exit Wounds) thinks it’d be good therapy to return the emotionally troubled lad to the scene of the slaughter. Of course, she doesn’t realize the Komodos have called dibs on the turf, and not even her deep and manly speaking voice can turn them away.
The dragons are all-artificial, including computer-animated — mostly pretty well, surprisingly. But the story by Anaconda’s Hans Bauer and Milo’s Craig Mitchell is so routine and connect-the-dots, it might as well not have killer animals in it at all. However, I confess to enjoying the scene in which a dragon appears to dry-hump a moving station wagon. Needs are needs. —Rod Lott