Review: Project Metalbeast (1995)

(aka Project Metalbeast: DNA Overload)
Directed by: Alessandro De Gaetano
Starring: Barry Bostwick, Kane Hodder, Kim Delaney
Written by: Roger Steinmann, Timothy E. Sabo, Alessandro De Gaetano
Music by: Conrad Pope
Country: United States
Available on: DVD (Invincible Pictures)
IMDb

A movie about a military experiment to create a super-soldier werewolf with metal-plated skin (that of course goes awry) should be awesome. And while there are a few awesome things about Project Metalbeast, it’s sadly artless and disappointing. The highlight of the film is the design of the titular beast, which is great, but also looks sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog if he had been created by the kid from Twilight Zone: The Movie and fed a steady diet of steroids and rabies. The metalbeast is played by Kane Hodder, and that’s cool, but he’s a husky dude and he’s wearing a husky costume, so our metal lycanthrope is a bit of a chonker. And this chonker is shown a whole lot; eventually, the sight of the thicc boi laboriously huffing and puffing his way at a leisurely yet taxing pace down a lengthy hallway of the laboratory where 98% of the movie takes place becomes kind of hilarious. Storywise, this doesn’t really go anywhere, nor did it really come from anywhere. How did the military discover werewolves existed? Why did one crazy military guy inject himself with werewolf blood? Why did another crazy military guy decide to cryo-freeze that other crazy military guy and then wake him up and give him metal skin grafts? Why does the second crazy military guy randomly shoot people who are trying to help him? And why does he stop to fix his hair in the middle of being fucked up by the metalbeast? Who knows. Additionally, this is probably the largest congregation ever of mumbly actors who were having their lines fed to them off-screen before the take, which makes the story that much harder to care about. None of the characters are given any kind of personality, so their garbled dialog is just something else taking up time until the metallic monster mutilates someone else. Most of what they’re saying is the same nonsensical scientific and military jargon that plagues most movies of this ilk anyway. But speaking of mutilations, the gore here is pretty decent, but way too little of it is actually shown — which is surprisingly considering the werewolf basically looks like the alien from the middle of the dog scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing. You’re already getting gross, people, keep it up! Regardless of its shortcomings, it’s still kind of cool that a movie like this was released when it was. The latter half of the ‘90s were a downward slope into CGI and ironic self-awareness, and Project Metalbeast is blissfully practical and nescient.

Overall rating: 5 out of 10