#179 - Enemy Unseen (Elmo de Witt; 1989)
End my life, Lord. Please do it now. It normally takes me about a day of thinking to pick a movie to watch. In this case, it took me a week of deliberating. I finally went with an obscure movie called Enemy Unseen. All I wanted was some crazy crocodile killing. Is that too much to ask for, God? What in the world would make me think that a movie with a giant blood-thirsty croc on the cover would have that?
When the movie opened with a song I swear was featured during a Dylan and Brenda 90210 montage I was nervous. "Unique choice of music," I thought. "But maybe they are going with music you wouldn't expect to hear to throw the audience off ala Cannibal Holocaust," I hoped. Nope.
A man and woman are wandering around the jungle for some reason when they notice a weird ritual being performed by some natives. During the ritual a woman sacrifices herself to a crocodile and dies. The death was highly underwhelming and entirely off-screen, but I still had hope. Instead of running, they stick around and are immediately noticed by the natives and chased down. The guy is then shot with arrows and falls into the water where a crocodile kind of eats him, but not really. And yes, you read that right. He is shot and killed first, then the crocodile gets to him (although leaves no visible marks of any kind when we see the man's body later on). The woman is captured and taken hostage.
By this point I was very skeptical of the film and began noticing that it was more focused on the natives than on the crocodiles, but I still kept watching. The owner of this foreign land (known as Crocodile Valley -- good choice when buying property) is the girl's father, who hires a hodgepodge team of mercenaries to go into the jungle to find her. How a team this bad was assembled is beyond me, but they immediately start dying off and fighting each other. The only two people in the group that matter are Steiger (played by Vernon Wells) and Josh (played by Stack Pierce). These two actually have fun chemistry and manage to make for some enjoyable moments. It basically plays out like any other 80s low-budget action movie. They end up getting caught by natives, breaking free, saving the girl, and then the girl falls in love with Vernon (just six days after her best friend/boyfriend died). Credits.
What could have set this movie apart would have been some crazy fucking crocodiles, but sadly that never occurs. We get a few scenes of crocodiles biting people a little bit, we get a couple scenes where the crocodiles lay around on the land and watch people, and then we get one or two implied crocodile deaths. Highly disappointing on that front. If you go into this movie expecting the horror elements to be extremely, extremely minimal and the action elements to be extremely, extremely stock then you won't be disappointed. It's just an easy to watch, cheesy action movie in the vein of most other AIP movies.
Speaking of AIP Home Video, I think this might actually be the first film I've ever reviewed released by them (which is crazy to think about considering they've released so much weird/unknown stuff). They were the kings of releasing sleazy movies during the video boom. They released everything from David Prior action films to the Christmas-themed horror masterpiece, Elves. Some of their titles are extremely obscure and are never really talked about, while others are heralded as cult classics. With a catalog as vast and (mostly) fun as AIP's, they are always worthwhile tapes to grab if you see them. I love picking them up, especially since you never know what you are going to get and a lot of the stuff hasn't made it to DVD (Enemy Unseen included). I wouldn't tell anyone to hunt this movie down, but it wasn't bad per se, it was just disappointing. Kind of like when a mother says, "I'm not mad at you, I'm just disappointed." Which, come to think of it, is usually much worse.
