A brave attempt at an over-complex horror-sci-fi-action flick.
by Nav Qateel
When extremely dangerous spores are found growing and contaminating an elderly woman’s basement, military-led scientists realise they have a potential bioweapon on their hands. The elderly woman, Granny Sara, has lived among this virus for years, apparently unaffected.
When her grandson Dean finds out that she is facing eviction, he and his buddies take a detour from their road trip to help the old woman any way they can. They inadvertently become part of a top secret experiment and leaving the Granny’s house may no longer be an option.
- Toxin
- Directed by
Jason Dudek - Cast
Taylor Handley, Danny Glover, Vinnie Jones - Release Date
30 January 2015 - Nav’s Grade: C
I must give credit to writer-director Jason Dudek for at least trying to give his characters a bit of depth, especially in a film that already had an awful lot going on with the story. Unfortunately, the writing made for some uneven decisions as Dudek tried to stay focused on the main story but tended to drift away when he had to jump from the labs to the house frequently.
I don’t know what the budget was but I assume it was fairly limited, although, the sets were certainly quite good. Having C.S. Lee of Dexter fame playing a scientist was a nice touch, even if it was a rather transparent attempt. Heading the lab was Dr. Locke, played by “I’m getting too old for this shit” Danny Glover. He was playing a bad guy here and was in charge of creating the toxin and the anti-toxin for the military. Dudek did give Locke a bit of a perfunctory backstory, as he did with Dean and his grandmother, played by the amazing 88-year-old Fiona Hale.
*****
Dean was comfortably played by Taylor Handley in the lead role. Dean’s backstory was the only one with a bit more depth than the rest. He’s just back from fighting somewhere in the Middle East and is having flashbacks of his buddies being shot and killed all around him. Dean’s girlfriend does the whole “you’ll have to talk to me about what happened over there” bit. But that part of the story never really gets much traction.
Vinnie Jones plays a soldier in charge of security at the lab and also Dr. Locke’s main go-to guy. Jones’ character starts off as exactly the type of character we’ve seen him play countless times before, then Dudek seems to decide to try something different with the scowling Londoner that really didn’t work for me at all. I don’t want to give anything away about Vinnie so I’ll leave it at that.
There is the odd cliche in evidence but there’s also an effort by Dudek to try and avoid them and he scores points for at least trying to be different. Unfortunately, he started off with a very photogenic cast and that’s cliche number one right there. No one has unattractive friends anymore?! Thankfully there’s no preamble as we cut to the chase almost immediately as the film opens, which is yet another point in Dudek’s favor. Additionally, Toxin is a film that’s not sure what it’s supposed to be and that didn’t help matters when it came to rooting for the characters. Not that it wasn’t obvious who the real hero was and what the outcome would be.
Anywho, Toxin isn’t a film to get over-analytical over, with its bogus science that simply couldn’t work in a million years. The acting was mostly good and the production values were decent. You just need to sit back and enjoy the ride and take the good with the bad. Definitely worth seeing once, but I doubt anyone will be up for a second viewing.
