NECESSARY EVIL

CONTAINS UNNECESSARY SPOILERS

I'm actually considering not bothering with a lot of movies - principally of the horror, SF and fantasy genres - unless they have been, or will be, projected somewhere at some point. Increasingly I'm of the persuasion that so many of these movies are made with the home viewing experience in mind, and ambitions are thus lowered. Well, expectations aren't, or at least they shouldn't be. You're still expecting me to pay for it the same as I would for Lord Of The Rings, Blade Runner or Dawn Of The Dead, so do something to justify the money. Besides, if you're aiming it at the home video market, that's television. And I don't really care very much about television - particularly bad television.

Besides, any version of Necessary Evil that ran three and a half hours would send me running for the knife drawer, and I don't see a five-disc box set of Director's Cuts and different international release versions any time soon. Frankly, they're damned lucky this miserable piece of underachievement got picked up at all. Lance Henriksen is a mad scientist seeking the Fountain Of Youth in the form of DNA extracted from some kind of demon creature that was buried in the desert millenia ago, and is now kept in a metal box in the basement of Henriksen's California psychiatric hospital. His ReAnimator-style serum also gives you glowing green eyes and telekinetic powers, but for the last sixteen years he's still been experimenting on the local townspeople, abducted children, and the mercenaries who found the demon thingy in the first place. Meanwhile, a moody cop with a personal agenda, and a crusading (and significantly pregnant) journalism student, investigate.

There's a half-hearted stab at corruption, with evil trillionaire pharmaceutical companies running unethical experiments while buying off local authorities, but in the main this is a mixture of sub-X-Files conspiracy hogwash and man-in-a-suit monster action. Lance Henriken is great, as ever, but it's not worthy of him. Having Danny Trejo as the artwork centrepiece is a tad dishonest as he's not actually in it very much. It's dull, needlessly convoluted and visually uninteresting; you don't care what's going on and the acting is rudimentary at best. Rather than aim high and miss, they've aimed low and missed. Poor.

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