Director: Jack Ayers
Year: 2022
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: Devolution
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Getting wind of dangerous experiments, animal-rights activists team up with an insider to raid a facility owned by a large corporation conducting work on primates, only to discover the company's dark and terrible secret has instead unleashed a massive killer gorilla loose on them.
Review:
This was a pretty solid and enjoyable effort. One of the more likable elements is the cheesy and workable setup that gives this a great reason to have the group together and explore the treacherous facility. Getting just a bare hint of the company's intentions at the facility working on primates to tap into their enhanced strength and dexterity genes to aid in mankind's next evolutionary step, their quest to expose what's going on for the sake of the animals in captivity offers a highly enjoyable setup that's handled well enough with their quest to venture inside and stop them. Realizing what's happening at the facility with their experiments going further beyond what was expected and finding the truth behind what's happening, generates a lot of fun with the reveals and twists going on that come into play here.
That setup provides a lot of fun creature action as a result of it going through the facility taking out whatever it can get its hands on. The initial sequence of it attacking the group and ripping the one friend to pieces in front of them offers a strong starting point to this with the resulting chaos and confusion leading to them being captured later on after escaping, while later scenes of the ape running wild taking out the security force or the scientists in charge feature some solid bloodsoaked kills as it also tears them apart. While offering more bloodshed than normal, these are more done in service of setting up the big sequence at the end with the transformation taking place as the one victim injected with chemicals during the film is turned into a deformed monstrosity to pay off that storyline quite nicely while also giving this it's positive moments.
There are some minor issues holding this one back. The main factor here is the jumbled and chaotic order of events that tends to bring about some rather bizarre antics here. The group is captured and held by the security team near the start of the film and then we get an info dump about what's going on before the creature arrives to take the security out. This leaves the film without much in the way of villains for the vast majority of the running time with the creature's backstory invoking plenty of sympathy and the heavy forces group wiped out halfway through which causes a flat and underwhelming finale. As well, there's also the obvious CGI used for the creature which features an endless array of tactics that will be familiar to anyone who watches these kinds of films that isn't as painful as the other detriment that rightfully holds it down.
Overview: ***/5
A generally fun cheesy creature feature, this one manages to be highly enjoyable for what it is while also having a few minor drawbacks to hold it down somewhat. Those that enjoy this kind of cheesy creature feature or are fans of the creative crew's previous works will have a lot to like here while most others that don't appreciate the style or approach here should heed caution.
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