HYBRID

CONTAINS BIG SPOILERS AND, ER, BIG SPOILERS

Oh, for Christine's sake! There've been a few homicidal vehicle movies over the years. The Car, Duel, Christine, Maximum Overdrive. And I suppose the Transformers movies count as well. I don't know of there's an episode of Knight Rider where KITT goes mental and starts mowing people down like Grant Theft Auto, but if there isn't, there should be. And we mustn't forget Killdozer! Still, silly as they are, they're slightly less silly than this low-budgeter in which a bunch of mechanics and idiots are chased around a multi-level garage by a car. Or something that looks like a car.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the Hybrid is not a car: it's actually a giant shape-shifting multi-tentacled cephalopod thing that's evolved to disguise itself as a car so idiots will climb in and it can eat them. No, seriously. That's the premise. But following a road smash, it's towed away to a police garage where it proceeds to pick off the half-dozen mechanics working late to get the building ready for renovation. With the doors locked, the exits welded shut and the octopus/hatchback thing prowling the lower levels, can the remaining humans put aside their petty bickering and devise some way of killing it?

This is nonsense, and it's not even good-looking nonsense. It's shot on digital but it's been given no filmic filtering to it to just make it look better. More mysteriously, it's been made available in 2D and 3D versions and both are available on the UK BluRay. My TV set can't handle 3D anyway, which is fine by me, but even if it did there's nothing in Hybrid that's going to be made any better by an artificial depth effect. Much of the cinematography (videography, more accurately) is handheld and shaky and most of the movie takes place in the dimly lit recesses of a windowless car park at night; if it was barely worth looking at in two dimensions it certainly isn't worth it in three.

It's really not good enough. The characters aren't really worth saving and so an absurd concept, even by the standards of dumb B-movies, is wasted because you're kind of on the monster's side. Minor moments amuse, such as the obligatory twist ending, but it's hard to care and the creature CG effects are pretty perfunctory (the beast sort of reminded me of the Jagrafess monster from the revamped Doctor Who episode The Long Game, but not as well rendered). Directed by Eric Valette, who did the French prison horror Malefique and a decent enough rehash of One Missed Call.

**

Brrrrm brrrrm: