SYNOPSICS
The Untold (2002) is a English movie. Jonas Quastel has directed this movie. Lance Henriksen,Andrea Roth,Russell Ferrier,Philip Granger are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2002. The Untold (2002) is considered one of the best Action,Adventure,Horror,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
Based on actual accounts, The Untold is the story of Harlan Knowles, billionaire and President of Bio-Comp Industries who heads up a team of experts in a quest to locate a company plane that disappeared over the remote forests of the Pacific Northwest. Knowles is obsessed with finding the plane and rescuing his daughter, who was one of its passengers. The assembled team includes local guide Clayton Tyne, renowned wilderness expert and author Winston Burg and the beautiful Marla Lawson. Soon, the team begins to suspect that Knowles' main objective is actually to recover the prototype of a DNA testing machine called the Huxley Project, which his company has spent years and millions of dollars developing. After finding the plane and its crew torn to shreds, the group tries to piece together clues about what could be responsible for the carnage. With the help of the Huxley prototype they discover they are facing a menace whose very existence is one of the world's greatest mysteries and ...
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The Untold (2002) Reviews
If Ed Wood ripped off The Blair Witch Project and Predator
A plane carrying employees of a large biotech firm--including the CEO's daughter--goes down in thick forest in the Pacific Northwest. When the search and rescue mission is called off, the CEO, Harlan Knowles (Lance Henriksen), puts together a small ragtag group to execute their own search and rescue mission. But just what is Knowles searching for and trying to rescue, and just what is following and watching them in the woods? Oy, what a mess this film was! It was a shame, because for one, it stars Lance Henriksen, who is one of my favorite modern genre actors, and two, it could have easily been a decent film. It suffers from two major flaws, and they're probably both writer/director Jonas Quastel's fault--this film (which I'll be calling by its aka of Sasquatch) has just about the worst editing I've ever seen next to Alone in the Dark (2005), and Quastel's constant advice for the cast appears to have been, "Okay, let's try that again, but this time I want everyone to talk on top of each other, improvise non-sequiturs and generally try to be as annoying as possible". The potential was there. Despite the rip-off aspects (any material related to the plane crash was obviously trying to crib The Blair Witch Project (1999) and any material related to the titular monster was cribbing Predator (1987)), Ed Wood-like exposition and ridiculous dialogue, the plot had promise and potential for subtler and far less saccharine subtexts. The monster costume, once we actually get to see it, was more than sufficient for my tastes. The mixture of character types trudging through the woods could have been great if Quastel and fellow writer Chris Lanning would have turned down the stereotype notch from 11 to at least 5 and spent more time exploring their relationships. The monster's "lair" had some nice production design, specifically the corpse decorations ala a more primitive Jeepers Creepers (2001). If it had been edited well, there were some scenes with decent dialogue that could have easily been effective. But the most frightening thing about Sasquatch is the number of missteps made: For some reason, Quastel thinks it's a good idea to chop up dialogue scenes that occur within minutes of each other in real time so that instead we see a few lines of scene A, then a few lines of scene B, then back to A, back to B, and so on. For some reason, he thinks it's a good idea to use frequently use black screens in between snippets of dialogue, whether we need the idea of an unspecified amount of time passing between irrelevant comments or whether the irrelevant comments seem to be occurring one after the other in time anyway. For some reason, he doesn't care whether scenes were shot during the morning, afternoon, middle of the night, etc. He just cuts to them at random. For that matter, the scenes we're shown appear to be selected at random. Important events either never or barely appear, and we're stuck with far too many pointless scenes. For some reason, he left a scene about cave art in the film when it either needs more exposition to justify getting there, or it needs to just be cut out, because it's not that important (the monster's intelligence and "humanity" could have easily been shown in another way). For some reason, there is a whole character--Mary Mancini--left in the script even though she's superfluous. For some reason we suddenly go to a extremely soft-core porno scene, even though the motif is never repeated again. For some reason, characters keep calling Harlan Knowles "Mr. H", like they're stereotypes of Asian domestics. For some reason, Quastel insists on using the "Blurry Cam" and "Distorto-Cam" for the monster attack scenes, even though the costume doesn't look that bad, and it would have been much more effective to put in some fog, a subtle filter, or anything else other than bad cinematography. I could go on, but you get the idea. I really wanted to like this film better than I didI'm a Henriksen fan, I'm intrigued by the subject, I loved the setting, I love hiking and this is basically a hiking film on one level--but I just couldn't. Every time I thought it was "going to be better from this point until the end", Quastel made some other awful move. In the end, my score was a 3 out of 10.
Awful!
This was the worst creature horror i have ever seen, the story is banal and far from thrilling, the acting apart from henriksen (who looks really p***ed off to be in this movie) is abysmal, the worst thing about this movie is the directing: The movie fades to black at almost every single opportunity was really anoying after a while. The Plastic screen over the camera showing the monster's point of view is irritating rather than innovative. Henriksen Fans should stick to watching re-runs of 'Millenium' rather than this utter crap. Rating 0/10
Another reason I hate Bigfoot movies.
Developing movies that are based on actual events involving cryptozoology or the supernatural has always been a challenge for directors and screenwriters. You have to mainly reconcile reported testimonies, conflicting info sources, and Hollywood creativity to produce something the audience can get into. Unfortunately, for SASQUATCH, none of these things seem to take place. The movie starts out in typical film noir when a research team crash lands somewhere in the Cascades via airplane. From there the research team disappears, and despite attempts from law enforcement officials and local rescue parties they remain missing for some time. While one of the passengers is walking, infra-red-like images are splashed on the screen (a la Predator) which subtly hint that the legendary Sasquatch is the cause of the passengers' fates. Cue Harlan Knowles (Henriksen), CEO of BioComp Industries and father of one of the crash victims. Knowles puts together his own search & rescue team with the explicit mission of finding his daughter and the rest of the research crew, along with the invaluable technology lost during the crash. After Knowles' tailor-made rescue team is put together, the entire movie traverses down the path of uncolorful characters, dizzying cinematography, and a totally unoriginal plot line. I literally had to keep myself from falling asleep during this movie as it attempted to frighten me out of my wits. The only member of the cast that held his own was Henriksen, which doesn't make up for the lack of depth presented in all of the other characters. The over-done sound effects were annoying as well; basically, I didn't know if I was watching a movie about Bigfoot or grizzly bears. Neither was the plot line all that great. It was too underdeveloped as the viewer is mainly subjected to typical fright music found in anything similar of the genre. Obviously you didn't have to be a genius to figure out who would be pulling off all their clothes by the middle of the movie, or who'd be the first unlucky soul to get mauled by Mr. Sasquatch. As far as good points, there are none, and therefore I gave this movie a 2 out of 10.
Poor Lance Henriksen
Lance used to get quality support work from James Cameron. Heck, he even had his own tv show (Millenium) for a coupl'a seasons. Why is he doing this? Couldn't he find some better way to pay his bills? I love a good low-budget movie. Some of them you can laugh at simply due to their ludicrous premise, their textbook stereotyped characters, or often times because the actors are related to the director/producers. But, this movie has no redeeming value. I didn't laugh. I didn't cry. I only had this sick feeling in my stomach. That feeling was quickly identified as pity. At one point, Lance Henriksen was an A-list support actor. He's been in Terminator (he was going to BE terminator before Arnold showed up), Aliens, AliensIII, classic B-movie Pumpkinhead, among so many others! I wanted to send him money after this. Maybe we should start a support Lance fund or something. Then again, for making this thing...maybe not.
Badly written and directed
Look, I'm not one who automatically looks down on low-budget genre movies. In fact, I watch them all the time. But there's little positive I can say about this movie. The cinematography is okay, the locations look nice, and... well, that's all for the positive. Now the negative. Hoo boy. It mainly boils down to a terrible script and aggressively annoying directing. First, the script. To put it bluntly, almost NOTHING of real consequence happens up until near the end. Most of the movie just consists of the characters wandering around, sensing something is out there, and blurting out various theories. What's surprising is that even though there is a lot of nothing, often when there is some important explanation it it left unfinished (probably more due to the editing, which is unbelievably inept at times). Sometimes whole sequences are missing. In fact, these and other lapses suggest the shoot had problems and the production wasn't able to shoot everything that was planned. And the directing... well, as others have said, there is the annoying fade-to-black that seems to happen every four minutes, the images being manipulated by unfocusing and other techniques that make you utter confused as to what's happening, badly chosen camera angles, no sense of tension, no feeling of struggle, etc. etc. I could go on, but you get the idea. A number of people have claimed that no movie involving Sasquatch has been any good. While I can't claim to have seen every such movie, this movie certainly adds considerable fuel to the argument. If you want to see a low budget movie about people stranded in the wilderness who are attacked by hairy creatures, I strongly recommend you instead watch the vastly entertaining "Dog Soldiers".