CHUPACABRA TERROR [2005]

 A SYFY CHANNEL HORROR MOVIE FROM FIFTEEN YEARS AGO . . . .YEP, I THINK WE ALL KNOW WHAT WE'RE GETTING. 

Let's be fair.  I never expected this to be good even for a moment.  So going in, we all know it's gonna have a lot of people who can't act and a lot of really bad CGI.  And this it does.  John Rhys-Davies is the only name in the film and he struggles his hardest to bring something to the production but he's only human, after all.  No, he's not really a dwarf; that was just him in THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies.  Rhys-Davies is the captain of a cruise ship who finds that a nitwit "cryptozooligist" has smuggled a chupacabra on board.  Giancarlo Esposito is laughably bad as cryptid catcher Dr. Pena; one wonders if he's not deliberately acting way over the top as his appearances in such films as THE USUAL SUSPECTS, BOB ROBERTS, MALCOLM X and DO THE RIGHT THING show him acting normally and well.  The "chupacabra" is a man in a suit and not anything like the descriptions of a chupacabra anyone knows.  The suit, for what it's worth, is fun in a retro kinda way. 

And some of the cast, those who are better bad actors than the other bad actors, manage to inject a glimmer of humour; notably David Millbern (SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, ICE SPIDERS) as a fey gentleman crook wearing an ascot and stealilng everything that's not nailed down!  At one point, his character even tries the wellworn cliche of dressing up as a woman so he can board the lifeboats.  Internal movie logic is thrown to the winds (particularly when the military starts firing machine guns inside a steel bulkhead.  

Been wanting to watch this silly movie since over a decade ago when Gene & Bryan kept mentioning it on their podcast HOMETOWN TALES when Netflix was their sponsor.  Well, now I've watched it.  CHUPACABRA TERROR is a film which just manages to step over the line into the "so bad it's good" category.  It is ridiculous and funny and I was never bored.  Scenes like the Captain's daughter, who is a Tae Bo instructor onboard ship, starts kickboxing the snot out of the Chupacabra (who has been shown to be armour-plated and impervious to machine gun fire) and actually making progress towards beating the creature up is priceless dopeyness.  So if you're in the right frame of mind for a terrible movie that's kinda fun, CHUPACABRA TERROR may be for you. 

The only one in the movie smart enough not to mess with Chupacabra!