Horror Movie Review: Tasmanian Devils (2013)

Tasmanian Devils is another in a long list of low-budget, low-quality horrors that saw its initial release on the SyFy channel.

A group of friends & couples who love base-jumping take a helicopter to a forbidden part of the Tasmanian wilderness. They plan to get in, do their jump & leave. Any issues with authorities can be solved with a wad of notes; at least that’s what they think.

Within the first few minutes this movie quickly establishes that this group are a bunch of selfish idiots that have more money then sense. What makes it even worse is that a few in the group are incredibly inexperienced…so much so that one fails to pull his parachute in time, smashes through the ground & get impaled on a large pointed rock.

It is hilarious. I mean, what are the chances?

Just like what are the chances that he is currently impaled on a rock inside a ritual chamber where his blood drips down & awakens ancient & huge Tasmanian devils?

That was the unluckiest base jump ever even if amazingly; he is still alive at first. The man falls from huge height & gets impaled on a very large pointed rock that goes through his back & up out of his stomach yet he is still alive, alive long enough for him to end up dead at the claws & teeth of these Tasmanian devils.

The rest of the group make their way down to where he landed & check inside the cave. They find his body before coming under attack from the creatures. It’s now a desperate fight for survival with help gained by a couple of park rangers who tracked the group’s movements with the intention of arresting them.

Lets’ start with the acting…unsurprisingly it’s pretty bad. The lack of any convincing emotion just makes it all so unintentionally funny. A person can have a giant rock spike through his body yet he moans as if it’s just an inconvenience while another takes getting eaten as if he just has a really deep itch.

The characters’ motivations from the start are sketchy & it’s so predictable that certain ones would start selling the others out at the first chance they got. However later everyone turns into mini-heroes with final last stands!

No character is particularly likeable or unlikeable as they are so poorly written & acted it’s just impossible to care about anything that happens to them. A shoved in love story makes the two leads even less interesting to watch & from the very moment they meet a heart should have just appeared above their heads as it’s that predictable.

The CGI is fairly awful but nowhere as bad as other SyFy offerings (SnakeHead Swamp), This one has the good sense to keep it’s creatures in the dark mostly & often they just aren’t seen, instead focusing on character facial reactions (not always the better option).

It’s a particularly boring movie, one that really made it difficult to remember just what had actually taken place. The best thing I can say about this movie is that while researching it I learned about the disease that is ravaging the Tasmanian devil population. It’s called devil facial tumour disease & has driven the animals to near extinction, a very sad set of events.