Vicious

Tom Savini is the star of this tale of military science gone wrong. A general has the idea of creating monsters as weapons. Tom is supposed to be testing a subject near one of their bases. But Tom has his own ideas. Instead of just putting the creature through its paces, he has been feeding it. Three guys on a fishing trip, and a tag-along girlfriend, wind up in the danger zone. Back at the base, the General is coming under fire because of Savini's lack of following orders. A special team is sent in to eliminate Savini.This part looks like it was written for Savini. He is the true star. The monster is a major force but we see very little of it (this seems to be a current trend). The rest of the cast is OK. There are a few little problems with the script such as setting off at 2 PM for a long hike to a fishing location and expecting to be back soon but it doesn't really get in the way as the film is driven by action and not dialogue. If you want your monster films to have victims torn asunder then this is not for you as this type of action is mostly off-screen. But if you are looking for action and like to try and guess who will survive, then this one is for you. Check it out.

Bad

Matt Green ...a Great Director, well that's up for debate....I think his better Movie was SeveredBut I have music in Vicious so I think it's Great :0

This simple to follow creature flick can be entertaining if you're looking for something low-budget, non-complicated, and if you're not difficult to please. There's nothing original here. The typical story involves the military creating a monster, and Tom Savini is a psycho who feeds the creature. It basically takes place with a small cast in the forest, is decently directed, and the acting is OK for this type of cheap horror movie. There's some parts when you see the creature's jaws that are practical, but the rest of the monster is CGI when you see it. It moves at a decent pace, but there're too many deaths that are off-screen There's some gore in the movie, but there's no extreme gore. The best onscreen death, I suppose, is a bloody headshot when Savini kills someone. It also has no nudity. It looks like it was made kind of quickly and cheaply. You just got these people in the woods and a mostly CGI monster that looks cheap, along with Tom Savini the psycho. It's simple, and it has no elaborate effects of any kind. The locations are decent, and there's no effective atmosphere. The movie is nothing spectacular, just don't expect that much. I'd give it three and a half stars.Some may be disappointed in the DVD quality. Most likely, many may want a sharper picture. I thought it looked good overall, but it would've been a more enjoyable film with a nice anamorphic transfer with better picture quality. It's a cheap film and it's non-anamorphic, so don't expect that much with the transfer.

When I was just a wee lad several thousand years ago, I spent most of my weekends at the local theater, basking in double features of such classic horror films as THE TINGLER, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, DEMENTIA 13, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, so on and so forth. Over the years, I have maintained my affinity for horror films and sadly in the past five years, many of the horror films have gone the way of mindless drivel like VICIOUS. It's gotten so that I am extremely surprised when I find a really good horror film (don't even think of films like THE VILLAGE or THE GRUDGE as good horror films). So when one decides to either rent or buy some of these films from studios like MTI, FULL MOON and God forbid DEAD ALIVE PRODUCTIONS, one must not set expectations high. In VICIOUS, we once again get a government controlled mutation going awry, this time with kind of a zookeeper who gets food for the mutant beast. We hardly get a good look at the monster in this one, and it's probably for the best, because the few times we even get close to a glance, it looks pretty awful. Horror "legend" Tom Savini plays the unusually sane psycho, and the rest of the cast, well don't hold your breath for Oscar nominations for any of them. Even the usually interesting Brinke Stevens (one of those awful scream queens like Linnea Quigley and Debbie Rochon) is wasted in a brief cameo at the beginning of the film. Marco St. John who plays the colonel got his start years ago on the AS THE WORLD TURNS soap opera, and I'm sure he would rather be remembered for that than his awfully performed role in this one. But then again, since this is the kind of film we get these days, VICIOUS isn't as bad as some of the other terrible films I've viewed recently (TAIL STING, THE VAULT, etc.). Be warned---this is not a great horror movie.