Possibly the worst film I've ever seen

Rating: 1/10 (29 April 2008)

This movie is simply awful. First of all, the premise of nasty creatures being spawned by careless scientific experiments is unoriginal to the point of being funny. Choose a random episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and there is an excellent chance that you will basically see this same movie with much more believable characters and a much less depressing ending.
The second problem is that the characters behave in bizarre ways that simply bear no resemblance to the ways that real people would behave in similar circumstances. Real disasters have a way of bringing out the best in people. Longtime enemies put their differences aside to help perfect strangers. Not so for the comically unrealistic characters in this film. These people seem to -- almost immediately -- lose virtually any connection with reality. Virtually any religious person immediately goes into "kooky cult" mode, concluding that (for example) human sacrifice is the way to appease God. Are we really to believe that most persons of faith would resort to killing children within hours of a disaster like this? Come on.
The "hero" spends most of the film trying to save people, particularly his young son. Given this, it is completely silly to imagine that he would simply take a gun and shoot his son dead as soon as the car stops working on the way out of town. Why is the car any less safe than the store that they started out in? They are clearly on a major road out of town -- there was no reason to think that their situation was truly hopeless. Therefore, there is no reason why they would suddenly agree to commit murder/suicide. This is particularly true in view of the fact that this group of people had been portrayed as rational and clear-headed up to this point.
The film desperately wants to say something about the frailty of human rationality but this theme has been explored countless times in much better ways. In this respect, this film is no better than any of the many 1950's style B-grade science fiction films that it inexplicably tries to emulate. Worse yet, the utterly unrealistic behavior of the characters causes the film to fail miserably to achieve even this goal. As a result, the ending is pointlessly sad. Instead of successfully telling us something about the frailty of human rationality, it simply leaves the viewer wondering why he just paid good money to watch people die.
That brings me to my third (and biggest) objection: I don't know why some filmmakers seem to think that a sad ending is fun to watch or artistic. Yes, I know that bad things happen in real life but I go to movies to ESCAPE the horrors of real life -- not to be reminded of them. A film like this can be a lot of fun if you get to watch the heroes overcoming seemingly impossible odds. It's fun to watch a triumph in the face of what seemed like certain disaster. When the good guys ultimately lose, however, a film like this amounts to nothing more than watching people suffer. That's not fun to watch.