DVD Review: Carnivorous (2008)

One has to wonder what the distributors of this production intended to gain here. Originally bearing the far more original title Lockjaw: Rise Of The Kulev Serpent (seriously), this no-budget direct-to-video monstrosity starring recording artist/clothing entrepreneur/felon DMX finds its way to DVD under the less-impressive and very unimaginative title, Carnivorous.

One night, while his drunken, backwoods, redneck father is being, well, drunken, backwoodsian, and redneck-like, young artist Alan sneaks out with his girlfriend Becky and heads over to the shack of the local voodoo man and his son Nick (who is maybe a year or two older than Alan).

The voodoo man’s house (is that asbestos siding I see?) is a bargain shopper’s dream come true, with dozens upon dozens of cheap plastic Halloween toys and garden ornaments galore. As is the custom of two white kids in Louisiana, they walk right in the black man’s house and promptly steal something: in this instance it's a Dollar Tree pen with a serpent head (and eyes that light up).

Returning home, Alan decides to fashion a drawing with his new found toy of a giant snake-like critter eating his dad. Guess what happens then?

Fast forward to modern times. Alan (Louis Herthum) and his bride Becky are now in their fifties. Time has been a little nicer to Nick (DMX) on the other hand, as he is still only in his thirties.

Meanwhile, just two hours away in the city, several completely unlikable local college-age kids (one of whom looks like Patrick Duffy) with Southern California accents are preparing to drive into the Louisiana backwoods to get drunk and act like irresponsible jackasses. Why they have to drive two hours to do so is beyond me; they’re in the Bible Belt after all.

En route, the beer-guzzling driver sideswipes Becky with his monster truck and kills her, sending Alan into a scotch-induced rage and forcing him to draw another picture with the pen (which still lights up and writes well considering how long it’s been).

Cue giant unconvincing CGI reptile animation. Also cue viewers’ incurable boredom and sense of meaningless. While you’re at it, you might as well take your cue and return the DVD to the store whence it came and demand your money back.

Carnivorous is an awful film that has been unleashed onto an unsuspecting public from North American Motion Picture Entertainment, a company with way too long of a name to produce crap like this. I suppose it’s a good party-till-you-puke film, as it would probably be a lot more fun to watch if you’re drunk and high, especially when DMX pulls out a bazooka from his extensive collection of voodoo instruments and then abruptly seems to walk off from the picture entirely.

The DVD sent to me for review was a screener copy, so I can’t give you any fair critiquing on the audio/video/special features content, but I can imagine I would have been as “fair” with them as I was with the movie (which sucked, in case I did not iterate that properly enough).

Watch Anaconda III instead. It at least had David Hasselhoff in it as opposed to DMX.