19 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Relic (1997)

Humans are obsessed with monsters.  We use the word to describe anything that causes us to fear, including other humans, and to describe anything that seems beyond empathy.  We also use it to describe any type of predator creature that could kill us.  We're naturally terrified of the idea that we are not above decimation by something bigger and meaner that doesn't give a single care to our well being in the world.  We create monsters for a variety of reasons, some even spiritual, but the end game seems to always come back to fear.  How else do you describe Peter Hyams' The Relic.

An anthropologist is documenting a Brazilian tribal ritual.  The shaman gives him tea which he drinks and he suffers a particularly violent reaction.  Later that evening he rushes to a cargo ship begging the captain to remove a crate that he was sending to the Chicago Natural History Museum, but he is denied.  He sneaks aboard the boat to find his crates, but discovers that they've accidentally been left on the dock and he is now out to sea with the ship.  Six weeks later, the ship is found floating, it's entire crew killed and brought to the Chicago Harbor where superstitious Lt. Vincent D'Agosta (Tom Sizemore) is investigating it.  Another week later, crates from Brazil full of strange leaves show up and the night that Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) is studying them, a guard is murdered at the Chicago Natural History Museum in a similar fashion as the crew on the boat.  A huge gala is approaching and all signs are pointing to something other than a simple criminal mind.

Where do I begin with this film?  While the subtext has many interesting ideas floating around it's nothing more than a basic creature feature.  Rather than focusing on the mythos behind the creature's creation and the implications of that mythos the audience is taken into a serious of under lit situations where people are grabbed by a wheezing off camera monster who viciously decapitates them and eats part of their brain.  For a bunch of supposedly intelligent scientists everyone in the film makes increasingly stupid decisions (aside from D'Agosta) that usually end up with them getting killed brutally.  The first have focuses primarily on tension and suspense but as soon as the creature shows it's face it's an all out action movie of people running away from a truly terrifying looking beast designed by Stan Winston.

This film came out at the same time as Mimic and I recall the trailers on TV being pretty similar looking.  Though The Relic got a much bigger budget Mimic is ultimately a far more unsettling film with a much more terrifying premise.  Both films falter in the second half, Relic with it's sudden shift in genre and Mimic with it's anticlimactic "happy ending."  The thing is that even while Tom Sizemore pulled off a great subdued performance as an edgy superstitious detective, none of the characters really draw sympathy from the audience.  They're caricatures at best and the only one I found myself caring about was a wheelchair bound Dr. Frock (James Whitmore) who has about as little screen time as Dr. Cuthbert (Linda Hunt).  At the end of the day, it's a monster movie that takes itself a little too seriously and doesn't really offer anything more than the typical jump scares and creature kills.  But I suppose with a couple of friends, a case of beer, and all the lights off it can make for a sort of entertaining watch.