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The Relic

The Relic

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $11.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: ever read the book?
Review: Or any book by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child? Great storytellers, intelligent writing that absorbs the reader. The original book version of The Relic is a great place to start. As for the movie, your time is too valuable; life is too short. Avoid it at all costs.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Grab a can of pop, some chips and sit back & enjoy the movie
Review: This is a great monster/creature movie for a rainy afternoon. The movie takes place in Chicago's Field Museum with towering great halls, dark corners and sub-basements that have sub-basements. People start to disappear and the police begin to search the museum. As the gala opening night of a major exhibition approaches and the body count goes up museum officials try to downplay any possibility of danger to the invited guests. Of course an uninvited guest literally drops in with the idea of dining on Society's Upper Crust.

The movie was based on the book "Relic" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The book was more gruesome than the movie and I couldn't put it down until the last page even though I had to go to work the next morning. Preston and Child have written several books since Relic, set in various locales, and each with a new twist.

These are books I don't loan out, I read them again and again.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Oh god this is good
Review: It's not every day that I find a creature movie that I really like, but THIS ON IS AWESOME! The creature effects are by Stan Winston whom I love and admire so much. The creature is nothing short of cool and the story is pretty good. I actually liked the book more, but that's you call. This movie features very creepy environments, wonderful editing, and I just love that monster! It has some cool action scenes too that are definatley worth seeing. If you like good special effects, Tom Sizemore, the very hot Penelope Ann Miller, or just a good scary movie, then pick this one up! You won't be dissapointed!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Fantastic Dan and Bugster say
Review: This is one hell of a creature feature. It may not be much on the horror side, but for monster action this movie can't be beat. There are some startling moments but nothing too terrifying. And the monster... This thing'll tear you up faster than a kleenex at a snot party. its one of the coolest monsters in modern horror. In your face Blair Witch.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Stick with the book ... trust me.
Review: A major disaster that should have been left in the glorious print where it was born. The Preston-Child book is a classic horror/thriller and this movie does it no justice.

Possibly ok for a boring night, but that's it. Stick with the book and skip buying this one, unless you're a Preston-Child fanatic and want it to be able to say you have it.

2 STARS FROM SCRAGGY'S TOMB OF HORROR DVD's.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Read the book first
Review: Before you see this movie, you should really do yourself a favor and read the book. "The Relic" is basically the dumbed-down version of "Relic," the novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, an amazing and scary read. For the general moviegoer, The Relic simplifies the story significantly. Missing are two of the most influential characters, Special Agent Pendergast and the journalist, Bill Smithback. Greg Kawakita becomes Greg Lee, and his character is so much simpler in the movie. Mrs. Rickman, Ian Cuthbert, and Dr. Wright are combined into a single character, a female Dr. Cuthbert. Whittelsey becomes Whitney (presumably for the ease of the characters' speech). Also, the fictional museum is moved from New York to Chicago (why, I cannot say).

Basically, the plot is the same: people start turning up dead, horiffically slashed and decapitated, on the eve of the opening of the museum's new Superstition Exhibit. No one believes it's a monster, but of course, it is. Duh. Chaos ensues.

Let me take a moment to talk about the monster. In the novel, the monster, Mbwun, is terrifying. When it is finally seen, it is revealed to be quite manlike... which of course makes sense, given its origins. However, in the movie, the creature (whose name is changed to Kothoga, probably to aid in pronunciation again), while wicked awesome cool, just doesn't fit with the story. It'd be better off in an action movie, not a straight horror. In fact, the scariest parts of the movie occur before the monster is even seen (which is the thing with most of these movies).

Bottom line: as a movie, "The Relic" is quite entertaining. Compared to the novel, it falls short.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A book not meant to be made into a movie
Review: For those who have read the Preston/Child novel, it is truly a masterpiece. It had incredible characterization, fascinating scientific topics, and tremendous suspense. Such a complex story that took over 400 pages to tell is not meant to be made into a movie. Sure, some books are, but this one is not. For those who are looking to watch a quality movie that presents abstract ideas and new concepts, this movie does not present that in the way the book did. For those who read the book and have high hopes of watching the amazing story Preston/Child wrote come to life, don't get your hopes up. There's just no way a movie could do what the book did. Valiant effort, but an impossible task!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Ehh 1.5 stars
Review: The entire premise of the movie was stupid, and the more they tried to explain the creature's origin, the dumber it got. This isn't scary at all, but it is a good time waster. Don't expect to get scared in it though.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Amazing! A Awsome film from a awsome novel.
Review: All I CAN SAY IS WOW. A great adaption and mind blowing film making. Very Scary. A True Classic!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not worth the effort as much as some others in it's genre
Review: The relic, as indeed stated, looks good, and does start out fairly promisingly, but quickly gets bogged down in it's own self-importance. The relic contains some indeed grotesque SFX within it's murky depths, but thrills are rather limited in this movie. The relic is very slow in pace and not much of what goes on in this movie is very interesting. The story sets on a hideous creature that escapes from the rainforests into a new, urban environment- swarming with human-shaped food parcels.
The environment happens to be a new museum where the very shapely Penelope Ann Miller happens to be working- the museum opens with the relic in it's walls and, of course, much murder and mayhem ensues, with various guests getting decapitated, mauled, butchered etc. Interestingly enough for a movie as dull as this, the death count is pretty high, and there are some pretty nasty death sequences. The relic is rather nasty, poorly constructed and for a great deal of this movie it's simply too dark to see much of anything.
For the vast part of the movie, a lot of archaeologist bigwigs are chased round a dark museum by some sort of large ugly creature. We don't see the creature itself until deep into the film, but when it does emerge it looks something like Satan crossed with the present-day Marlon Brando. Lots of people get butchered by the relic, and meanwhile scientists work in the museum's lab to discover what the heck the creature is. It conspires that the creature has 70% human D.N.A-which, looking at it, somehow doesn't seem to make sense. I can't spoil the ending for you, but let's just say it probably won't have you on the edge of your seat.
My advice to any potential buyers of the relic would be to instead spend your money on a much better horror movie- such as Alien, which the relic sort of rips off in parts of the movie, in fact, it seems a total hotchpotch of different horror movies.
Put simply, the relic isn't worth the time and effort of others in it's category, and i would only recommend it to die-hard horror buffs who simply must have it for their collection.


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