A genetically-engineered sabretooth tiger, created to prove the viability of cloning human organs for medical research, gets freed when the truck carrying it crashes into a Californian park. The woman who created it & her boss decide to hire Thatcher, a hunter who has experience with big cats, to capture it, but tell him that he's hunting an African lion. Together they head off to track down & hopefully capture the tiger. But while they are tracking it, the sabretooth has some tracking of its own prey – a group of campers on a training course in the wilderness.
James D. R. Hickox (who does a cameo in the film as a silent hillbilly playing cards) is a director who is the youngest son of Douglas Hickox, the director of the Vincent Price classic THEATRE OF BLOOD & the younger brother of Anthony Hickox of HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH fame. James has followed his father & brother into the directing business & seems to specialise in B-grade monster flicks.
Sabretooth is a most unusual JAWS knockoff. For one, it has a unique monster – a sabretooth tiger cloned for medical research. Sabretooth tigers (think Diego from the Ice Age films) lived & died out something like 10,000 years ago. They were known as exceptional killers & had teeth that were at least a foot long. I went into Sabretooth expecting a silly monster flick like the director's previous film, the monster crocodile film BLOOD SURF, which I have previewed recently. Well, it was silly at times but was a considerably better film than Blood Surf. James is improving his skill at this sort of thing.
Sabretooth is not anything close to being a classic film but is an enjoyably silly & passable monster flick. The sabretooth is realised by close-up animatronic head & laughably mediocre CGI. The exercise is conducted in poker-face seriousness, which makes the antics on screen even more hilarious. Not just that, but the acting is good, with input from David Keith as the chisel-jawed hero of the piece & the legendary John Rhys-Davies, who has starred in classics like the Indiana Jones films & the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as numerous B-grade action & genre films like CYBORG COP to give an example. Speaking of Cyborg Cop, another of that film's actors makes an appearance in this one – Todd Jensen, who played one of the cyborgs in Cyborg Cop, does a cameo as a horny guy who gets ripped apart by the sabretooth through his front door. And it's quite hard to hate a film where a guy takes on the sabretooth in melee combat armed with a pair of knives. Hilariously silly monster hokum.
James D. R. Hickox (who does a cameo in the film as a silent hillbilly playing cards) is a director who is the youngest son of Douglas Hickox, the director of the Vincent Price classic THEATRE OF BLOOD & the younger brother of Anthony Hickox of HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH fame. James has followed his father & brother into the directing business & seems to specialise in B-grade monster flicks.
Sabretooth is a most unusual JAWS knockoff. For one, it has a unique monster – a sabretooth tiger cloned for medical research. Sabretooth tigers (think Diego from the Ice Age films) lived & died out something like 10,000 years ago. They were known as exceptional killers & had teeth that were at least a foot long. I went into Sabretooth expecting a silly monster flick like the director's previous film, the monster crocodile film BLOOD SURF, which I have previewed recently. Well, it was silly at times but was a considerably better film than Blood Surf. James is improving his skill at this sort of thing.
Sabretooth is not anything close to being a classic film but is an enjoyably silly & passable monster flick. The sabretooth is realised by close-up animatronic head & laughably mediocre CGI. The exercise is conducted in poker-face seriousness, which makes the antics on screen even more hilarious. Not just that, but the acting is good, with input from David Keith as the chisel-jawed hero of the piece & the legendary John Rhys-Davies, who has starred in classics like the Indiana Jones films & the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as numerous B-grade action & genre films like CYBORG COP to give an example. Speaking of Cyborg Cop, another of that film's actors makes an appearance in this one – Todd Jensen, who played one of the cyborgs in Cyborg Cop, does a cameo as a horny guy who gets ripped apart by the sabretooth through his front door. And it's quite hard to hate a film where a guy takes on the sabretooth in melee combat armed with a pair of knives. Hilariously silly monster hokum.