"Metamorphosis" has about 20 minutes of decent work in it, but those minutes are scattered and buried in a 90 minute movie. And it's obvious that those 20 minutes are the sequences the director had in mind when he started this project - the scene where the robot arm injects the serum into the professor's eyeball, the scene where the elevator door opens and a cane falls out, followed by a mutilated cast member, the scene where the little boy hides in the lab from the mutated scientist and tries to reach a key that is just out of his reach, the rough sex/assault flashbacks, etc. And intermittently, these scenes work as well as the film stock and the lighting and the tiny budget will allow.
Also, the protagonist is hypnotically good looking (which makes the initial signs of change on his face more interesting), the actress who plays his girlfriend has some chops, the rival professor gets in some neat Scrooge-ish moments, and the protagonist's two main friends are played effectively. Even the little boy manages to be reasonably unforced and natural - he's not Dakota Fanning or Haley Joe Osment, but he isn't nearly as bad as he could have been.
Still, there are some really bad and really dull sequences here that pretty much smother any interest or excitement the movie is trying to generate (the director has no idea how to frame a car chase or a driving sequence or a sex scene or a lot of other standard cinematic things required to keep a movie out of Sargasso sea boredom). And the monster make up is pretty bad. And they misspell "chromosomal" on the computer read outs. And someone made the fatal mistake of all cheap movie makers and hired one guy with a synthesizer to supply the music soundtrack, and this guys is under the impression that he's scoring the background to a "Starsky and Hutch" episode.
The movie is actually just good enough to make you watch it through to the end, but at the end you'll throw up your hands and say, "Ah, geez, 90 minutes of my life, wasted."
Also, the protagonist is hypnotically good looking (which makes the initial signs of change on his face more interesting), the actress who plays his girlfriend has some chops, the rival professor gets in some neat Scrooge-ish moments, and the protagonist's two main friends are played effectively. Even the little boy manages to be reasonably unforced and natural - he's not Dakota Fanning or Haley Joe Osment, but he isn't nearly as bad as he could have been.
Still, there are some really bad and really dull sequences here that pretty much smother any interest or excitement the movie is trying to generate (the director has no idea how to frame a car chase or a driving sequence or a sex scene or a lot of other standard cinematic things required to keep a movie out of Sargasso sea boredom). And the monster make up is pretty bad. And they misspell "chromosomal" on the computer read outs. And someone made the fatal mistake of all cheap movie makers and hired one guy with a synthesizer to supply the music soundtrack, and this guys is under the impression that he's scoring the background to a "Starsky and Hutch" episode.
The movie is actually just good enough to make you watch it through to the end, but at the end you'll throw up your hands and say, "Ah, geez, 90 minutes of my life, wasted."