Review: The Killer Shrews

I remember shrews from my younger days. My cat used to bring them in the house. They'd wander around stupidly, passing up open doors and bumping into table legs. Incompetant little critters, they live to be cat food.

Thus there is something comical about the idea that the shrews have grown large, taken up a pack mentality, and beseiged a group of hard partying, chain-smoking scientists in Ray Kellogg's The Killer Shrews. Basically, James Best and his first mate (who, being black, is pegged from the beginning as a killer shrew buscuit) show up on an island populated by two incomprehensible Swedish scientists, a guy who sounds like he wandered in from the industrial film next door, and a hispanic man of uncertain profession. The scientist explains that he has picked a location for his experiments whose isloation and inaccessability to all forms of transit make it ideal for a grade-z monster thriller. These experiments transformed ordinary incompetant shrews into Siberian huskies who wear distressed carpets on their backs. They need to eat three times their body weight every day, and so have munched every living thing on the island except the scientists, who are now holed up in an adobe house with an industrial grade wood fence, twenty cartons of Lucky's, and three thousand cases of Jim Beam. (Instead of doing rodent research, they should have airlifted in some roulette wheels and hookers and called it Cubasphere II.)

So we watch these people smoke and drink while James Best puts the moves on an incomprehisible Swedish woman who is involved (on some unclear level) with the guy who played Festus on "Gunsmoke". Festus, in this story, drinks and smokes a lot, and combines two functions in one figure. He's the Jealous Boyfriend who hates the hero, and he's the Panicky Idiot who complicates things for everyone before he dies stupidly. The husky-shrews ultimately burrow into the house, killing the hispanic fellow of uncertain profession. (We know he's hispanic because, while he speaks better English than much of the cast most of the time, he still says "Senior" and "Si".) The shrews then kill the industrial film guy. (Apparently, in addition to turning into Siberian huskies under carpet, they also somehow became venemous, so that a single scratch from their teeth will kill any secondary character.) They fail however to get the two Swedes, or the hunky James Best, who build armor out of welded-together oil drums and duck walk to the ocean, where Best's boat waits for them. Oh, Festus does die as well, but in a scene so silly and arbitrary it's as if he said to himself, "I was fairly safe up on the roof, but now I think I'll run out into the middle of the shrew-ridden forest so that the movie won't have loose ends." If I cared about his character, I'd have felt cheated; but instead, I only wished his death had come earlier, and more slowly.

Gee, the way I wrote this, I made THE KILLER SHREWS sound like a tough sit. It wasn't. Get some friends together with some hard liquor, turn on this movie, and see if the characters can drink you under the table.