Reviewed By: John BeutlerI have to admit, good or bad, this reviewer is a sucker for 'nature strikes back' flicks, especially the mutation-themed ones...even going as far back as the '50's nuclear age, when ol' mad scientist Leo J. Carroll, was over a barrel, when "Tarantula" took to the hills. Giant bugs...giant animals...even giant people...sometimes borne of atomic radiation...often wrought from a mad scientist's radical experimentation...occasionally originating from the outer reaches of space...the odd times, abruptly awoken from prehistoric sleep...and in the past few decades, the dreaded scourge of genetic mutation.
The basic story-lines themselves, a dime-a-dozen, and almost negligible...virtually writing themselves...the situations, given the variant 'tweeking', here and there, are often not that far removed from each other...put a number of characters in a desperate situation...a good guy, a bad guy, and a damsel in distress, amongst others...throw in the prerequisite slimy 'creature', which proceeds to dispatch the minor-league characters, one by one...cue the sappy, albeit responsive-to-the-situation melodrama...muscle up enough gumption from the survivors, in an effort to destroy the creature, as resourcefully as possible...and BAM!! Creature is destroyed, the typically arrogant bad guy dies, in the process...hero and damsel embrace, and all is well. An interchangeable scenario, seen often enough to become cliche, at this point...but like every other film of it's type, the real meat of the 'nature strikes back' flick, is the creature, or creatures...and how it is/they are creatively and realistically rendered. It is in THIS...what is supposed to be the anticipated payoff of the film, that 2012's derivative and ho-hum moderately entertaining, high-octane, rapid-fire sci-fi actioner, "Dragon Wasps", lets the viewer down...