Organizm

The mother of little Frank Sears is a total whackjob. The year is 1960-something and Ms. Sears is trying to get her little boy to understand something very, very important. So important she carves this info into the palm of his hands, which is something only a whackjob would do, and then walks into her husband's study, blows his head off and then blows her head off for little Frank to witness in all its bloody glory. See what I mean about her? Apparently during the cold war days Mr. and Mrs. Sears helped create an 'Organizm' as it were, and if it were to get loose, Earth would be a 'Living Hell'. Those are the two titles of this movie. We're rolling with 'Organizm' because we're down with the hip-hop spelling of simple words and we don't have a lot of movies that start with the letter 'O' on this site.

Moving forward to present times, Fort Lambert is being shut down under the watch of crippled Capt. Glenn Freeborn (Jason Wiles) and wife, the world's cutest hazmat specialist, Carrie Freeborn (Erica Leehrson). Their C.O. Col Maitland (James McDaniel) wants them to hurry up and do whatever it is they do so he get the hell out of there, as this place is being turned into an Indian Casino, but these losers are trying to do a complete and thorough job which upsets the colonel something fierce.

Then out of the blue Grown Up Frank Sears (Jonathan Schaech) shows up, looking like every bit the whackjob that his mom was. Frank breaks into the facility and tells these people there's trouble in the basement, and under no circumstances should they disturb this trouble in the basement or all is lost. He even knows exactly in the basement this trouble is located, i.e. his carved up palms. So if someone tells you that there's trouble somewhere and you should never, ever mess with it… what are you gonna do? You're gonna mess

with it. It's human nature. And now the Organizm is free. Of course it Frank had never shown up the basement would've been filled with concrete and the Organizm would've been trapped forever… but even Frank recognized he screwed the pooch on that one. Whatever 'screwed the pooch' means.

This here organizm is really bad news. It's like a super weed, only one that eats people and stuff. And Round-Up can't do anything with it. Watching this thing overtake the entire fauna of Arizona, or wherever the hell this movie takes place, is ominous indeed but fortunately our armed forces are on hand to shoot at it. It doesn't work. In fact shooting at it is like Chocolate Ovaltine for this thing. And naturally the next course of action, as it is in any movie featuring U.S. Armed forces, is to nuke it. Which would be like a supercharged Androsteindione injection to the organizm.

All is not lost however as Henry the 2nd gen whackjob and the super cute hazmat soldier run into the wise old Indian dude. Like there's any other kind of Indian dude in movies. One day I want to see an old Indian dude in a movie who is a plum idiot. And if you're worried about Carrie's husband, superfast killer weeds and being crippled is not a good combo. Anyway, the Indian dude recognizes Henry right away. As it turns out Henry's whackjob of a mother was a bit of a whore and his real dad is some Russian scientist that created the organizm. From his DNA. Crazy. Thus if this thing is going to be stopped, which seems unlikely right about now, it's going to be up to Henry to do it. It's complicated and all but be sure to hang around for erotically charged blood slathering that whackjob v2 puts on the Hazmat hunnie. It's awesome.

Our journey to watch every single Sci-Fi Channel original movie ever made soldiers on, with this 'Organizm' being a little better than average. And I mean an average regular movie, not just an average Sci-Fi original movie. Where we come from, that place being Sci-Fi Original Hell, this is a home run. There are a lot of things to like about 'Organizm', directed by one Richard Jeffries who hasn't directed another movie since this one came out five years ago. His crime being, I guess, that he halfway knows what he's doing so there's no point in using him too often to direct these low budget Sci-Fi originals because competency is frowned upon. Unless, of course, he's passed away which we hope is not true. Rant aside, 'Organizm' is a slick, nicely shot piece of work, the narrative is tightly wound with a minimum of superfluous B.S. to take us away from the main plot, this being the super evil weed destroying the world, this focus also keeps the film moving along, and the performances by the prerequisite cast of uncommonly good looking people was solid. And then of course there was highly charged, nude, erotic blood slathering scene which did seem a little out of place.

First of all, Jeffries shoots this scene like it's an episode of 'Red Shoe Diaries', all fuzzy and slo-mo and stuff, and it even has Red Shoe Diary type music. Or Zane. But it's not like it should be all erotic since our starlet's husband died a horrible, violent death just thirty minutes before. But I guess a girl does have to move on. We know the blood slathering was necessary to keep the killer weed off of homegirl, but the presentation just seemed… out of place. But still awesome.

Of course there is the occasional dip in logic here and there, and the armed forces are portrayed as stupider than the stupidest form of stupid, but we accept this in return for a movie that is well crafted and didn't put us to sleep. 'Organizm'… best giant killer weed movie ever made. And it's not the only one either. 'Seeds of Destruction' anybody? This was better than that.