Proteus -1995

Proteus was never going to win any sort of awards for being great, original, or even entry-worthy.  It was simply made to be a action-adventure flick with a science fiction horror twist.  This late in the game (1995) it would not be fair to call it an Alien/Aliens rip off, but what it is really is another rehash of the tried and tired genre of "take a bunch of criminals, put 'em in an isolated environment, and unleash a monster".  This is followed closely by "throw in some character conflicts, this guy hates that guy etc, throw in some girls who never do anything of value, and make the death toll start to rise".  Don't ya just love mindless action films?

That's the plot right there above also.  In more detail, Alex, Rachel, Paul, Linda, etc (I don't remember) are all on this oil rig in the middle of the ocean, and they are doing some sort of heroin trade.  Paul's a big junkie, also a dealer, and no one seems to mind this.  Linda is his girlfriend I think and Rachel is Alex's girl.  Some monster is loose though, and at first they are all unsure of course until it's glaringly obvious.  It leaves slime everywhere a la Alien, and it can shapeshift into whoever it kills, as well as gaining their memories.

This is one of those movies where, at one point one of the characters watches a video that's basically plot detailing and synopsis.  In this it's main beefy guy Alex, who watches a video that an old scientist guy made where he explains all about the creature.  The creature is called Proteus, it's made from a Carcharodon (aka great white shark) and it takes different parts of the peoples personalities as it consumes them.  Also, it has a weakness to heroin from injecting it once.  Okay, stop stop stop.  At what point did the scientist guys decide to inject their weird shark monster with heroin?!  Why, how, when would they have possibly tried that?? That seems illogical at any length.

The end is like a veritable checklist of action movie cliches:  it's raining, there's a countdown until the whole f'in place is going to blow up, there's a guy in a t-shirt who jumps away at the last second before several explosions, there's a helicopter, there's even a stupid joke at the end as well as a unexplained teasing at a sequel (yeah right).  Why do places like these in movies always have an auto-destruct system?  What possible use would that have in the day to day life of an oil rig?

We do get to finally see a few cool creature shots crammed into the very ass end of this film, they are okay but nothing too exciting.  No nudity, not even very much blood.  Perhaps they were hoping they could pawn this off to the SyFy channel or something if they didn't make it too R-rated.  I dunno what the situation was but it leaves us with very little besides the "tension" to keep us interested.

It does do a OK job, it's just that we've seen this all before and this movie brings nothing new to the table.  The actors are all second rate but do their jobs, and actually pretty much everything in this flick could fall into the same category.....  It's second rate, but does it's job.  If you're looking for scares, there's zero, blood zero, tension zero, but if you're looking for a B movie, low rent, and a mindless way to kill some time....sure, put it on, I won't stop you.  2.5 stars.