UK DVD Review: Low Rent Creature Feature ‘The Rig’

The Rig (2010)
Distributor: Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date (UK): 8th August 2011
Directed by: Peter Atencio
Starring: Serah D’Laine, William Forsythe
Review by: Aaron Williams

Be honest with yourself for a second. If you’ve seen the poster to The Rig (below) then you should have some sort of idea of what to expect by now and if you don’t, then shame! Shame on you! If you do, then do you really need to read a review for said flick? Perhaps you’re thinking the same thing I was when I whacked this into my player – is this any fun?

The Rig is pretty damn simple to explain. We open on a ‘drill cam’ owned by Weyland Drilling (their logo appears on a wall later on and it’s exactly like the company of the same name in Alien) as they dig in the sea bed. We know this because there’s a walkie talkie voice over between an American and an American doing a seriously fucking piss poor job of sounding Scottish. Other than that this is just a shot of somebody filming a pipe under water. They seem to disturb a fish like beast that resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon; fins, gills the whole works. The monster makes its way to the surface and boards an oil rig in the midst of a storm and proceeds to kill the roughnecks.

Now this easily could have been a fun 90 minutes of silly bargain bin horror. It wasn’t. There’s no build up, no apparent attempt to establish a sense of dread. For the better part of twenty minutes the film takes you through a long and ill conceived attempt at making the audience relate to the roughnecks. William Forsythe (lending what star power he has to proceedings) is the roughneck boss and over protective father to Serah Delaine’s Carey, who has a romantic relationship with one of his crew. So far so dull. Come to think of it this takes up a large chunk of the running time, almost turning this into a soap opera on an oil rig with the occasional monster glimpse popping up.

The monster is another matter. Wisely the film makers have chosen to keep their creature off screen for the most part. The said beastie really is just a man in a rubber fish man outfit, the film sped up a few frames to add ferocity to his sporadic attacks. I’m not joking, this monster is that bad, looking like it escaped from the fifties. Now you’re probably asking if there are at least any cool splatter scenes, some gore that would make this at least worth a rent? You’d think so wouldn’t you? Where there are some brutal kills (that would have benefited from darker lighting to hide the clearly fake blood colour) they are too few and over far too quick. I can only assume that the producers behind this are simply out to turn a quick buck and wanted to keep the rating as low as possible to get more asses on seats (or rather more DVD sales).

I think the biggest problem with this is it tries way to hard to be something other than a creature feature. We spend way too much time with, lets face it, uninteresting characters that have been poorly written with nothing to do but wander carelessly around an oil rig looking for a fish monster. The result is a film that doesn’t know where to go next, with a hugely unsatisfying pay off. In certain subgenres I think it pays to stay close to formula whilst adding your own twist to things. This is one of those films where you have to wonder if the director has even seen a horror film and if he has, how long ago was that?