Main cast: Justin Zhao (Qin Yu), Jacinda Li (Feng Li), Li Zixiong, Luo Sang Qun Pei, Yang Kaidi, Qiu Shijian, Jiang Yanxi, Chen Guiben, and Amro (Jason)
Director: Felix Wu

Don’t be fooled by the exciting, eye-catching poster art of Deep Sea Mutant Snake. That lady in that poster gets unceremoniously killed within the first 10 minutes or so of the movie as one of the disposable extras in the obligatory “Evil corporation experiments on monsters and they all get loose and kill everyone, yay!” prologue sequence.

Indeed. the Cass Corporation does some weird things that are not properly explained—and it’s most likely that the people behind this thing don’t expect anyone to care—and then the snakes break loose and some super-sized ones, including the gigantic snake that graces the poster, kill everyone.

These people all die because, for some reason, they only have guns to deal with the huge army of hissing test subjects. Don’t these people have bombs? Oh yes, I forgot for a moment that this is China. Wuhan, anyone?

Hilariously, there are two women here that wear short skirts and what not that do some slow motion shooting sequence with pistols that have apparently unlimited bullets, somehow managing to hit CGI snakes with accuracy, until a big snake shows up and the two quickly die in an embarrassing show of helplessness that is a complete 180 from their pew-pew-pew montage.

Anyway, the “real” fun begins later on when a bunch of people with irrelevant subplots end up on a ship that is somehow attacked by these snakes and the usual stupidity ensues.

This movie is made in China, and yes, it’s one of those countless monster snake movies that seem to pop out of that country like turd from a hippo stricken with diarrhea. I can only wonder at all the snake monster movies—I suppose maybe snake CGI is easier and cheaper to churn out, as one doesn’t have to animate limbs and what not.

Also, because this movie is made in China, expect generous degrees of borrowing from established movies such as, in this case, very noticeably Deep Rising. Unfortunately, this one then also plops in the usual dire, played out tropes that plague Chinese monster movies and make so many of these movies a chore to sit through.

There is the usual useless child character that serves as an anchor and a burden for all the adults. Here, the young lady playing that child is horrendous. She behaves like she really doesn’t want to be there, and more likely that her parents must have dragged her to the film set and told her that if she didn’t act and give mommy and daddy some paycheck, they’d beat the crap out of her and then bury her in the backyard, before mommy and daddy get busy to make a valuable son.

This young lady speaks her line in a horrible monotone devoid of fear or terror, and while everyone around her is fleeing from CGI crap, she walks around the set in languid, lost slowness. I don’t know whether to laugh at this or cringe. Why this lady? Is there no halfway better child actor out there, or is this poor subpar young lady some daughter of a CCP top dog and no one dares to turn down her father’s request to put her in a movie?

Meanwhile, the lady journalist character is as expected a useless baggage good only for screaming and becoming a liability to everyone around her. There will be the old man that will end up making the valiant sacrifice so that the rest will last 10 seconds more in the movie, the hero’s good friend that exists just to die for the hero to get away from the penultimate sticky situation, the selfish jerk that only wants to save himself, useless women that waste their precious scant screen time being dumb and screechy, and the rest that line up to do pointless sacrifices just so that the hero and the heroine can get to the end game.

Oh yes, the hero. Qin Yu is easy on the eyes, but that character is so insufferably lawful stupid that he’s the kind to make a big show of how guilt-ridden he is over not being able to save people from situations that he can’t do anything about. He also insists on running back to “save” obviously dead people, while at the same time happily let others die to save himself when the plot demands another “noble sacrifice” from the disposable extras.

Seriously, this movie is already so, so stupid in every possible way, so naturally, the people behind this thing also have to serve up some hilariously bad CGI.

Now, when it comes to monster movies, whether it’s from China or America, it’s sort of given that the humans in these movies magically lose peripheral vision, hearing, bearing, and even smell whenever these monsters are around. How else can all those huge-ass five story high monsters can somehow sneak behind a bunch of people and nobody will notice anything until the poor fellow at the back (usually the fat or the old dude) gets chomped up?

Here, however, the characters plunge straight into dementia territory around bad CGI.

Characters hit or shoot at empty spaces because the people doing the CGI somehow put the snakes into the wrong places in that particular scene. The lady on the poster art already makes her body ramrod straight with her arms tight at each side of her body, screaming at the top of her voice… a few minutes before the CGI snake even pops into the scene to coil around her body. People trip and fall over things that are not there because the CGI people are likely having worked 14 hours a day in the grand tradition of Chinese productivity.

Really, I can go on and on, but I think you people will get the drift.

Deep Sea Mutant Snake is a horrifically inept movie, yes, but still, there is a dubious saving grace. Yes, it is so, so, so incompetent that it becomes a fun kind of unintentional comedy. So many scenes are comedy gold because they are terribly shot and CGI’ed, especially when enjoyed with liberal libations.

So yes, I’d say watch this for the train wreck comedy. People that want to watch something more coherent and better put together may want to quickly move past this and look elsewhere.