"I think they’re contesting our place in the food chain."
The Emerald Isle, North Carolina. An oil company has a plant on the island that is polluting the land, and for some reason they have komodo eggs. Because of the smell the guy driving the truck with the eggs thinks they are rotten and dumps them along side the road. For some other reason the Connally family has a summer home on the island as well. The komodos thrive and after 19 years they are full grown and having eaten all the food sources on the island they start looking for more.
The Connallys show up one year and go to open up their home. They discover that someone broke in and trashed the place. Their son Patrick (Kevin Zegers) goes off with his dog while the parents straighten up the house. Patrick is out later than he should be and by the time he gets back the komodos have too. They kill and eat his family. Patrick manages to survive but his dog doesn’t. Patrick is left traumatized by the event.
Patrick is now under the care of a therapist, Victoria (Jill Hennessy). He is suffering from PTSD. Not knowing that the komodos are real, Victoria decides that Patrick is blocking something in his memory so she takes him and his aunt Annie (Nina Landis) back to the island to confront his fears. That night the komodos attack the house. Annie is bitten. Then eaten alive. Patrick and Victoria escape the house and take off. They find Martin Gris, the captain of the ferry that brought them to the island. He had been investigating on his own. He’s been bitten and is now infected.
The oil company, aware of the infestation, hires Oates (Billy Burke) and his assistant Denby (Paul Gleeson) to kill all the komodos, and anyone else they may find. They are out canvassing the island when they almost run into Victoria, Patrick, and Gris. Now is when all hell breaks loose.
"Komodos" was released in 1999 and was directed by Michael Lantieri. The dragons are really great. The CGI for them was done by Tippett studio. The Animatronics by John Cox’s Creature Workshop. They were big, scary and vicious. Like a bunch of four legged eating machines. And there were a lot of them. There aren’t that many victims but the komodos did a good job of dispatching those that were available. There was plenty of blood and quite a few dead komodos.
Some people had a problem with the plot. I wasn’t bothered. To me a hoe hum plot is just a way to get to the monsters. There was enough plot to keep me interested and the acting was fine. The action was also good. The budget was 15 million so it wasn’t actually low budget but not one of the big boys either. This is a decent movie for monster fans of any kind and especially those that like big lizards. It ain’t Godzilla but it is a real life dragon.
Komodo dragons or varanus komodoensis. The males can grow to be 170-200 pounds, the females 150-160 pounds. They can grow to be 7 ½ to 9 feet long. They are the largest living lizards in the world, and they are carnivores. Komodo dragons can reproduce through both sexual and asexual reproduction.