Once again, I watch a monster movie made in what would seem to be a more modern time (albeit, over twenty-five years ago), and what strikes me is how much it still adheres to the half-century-old structures and ideas. Opening with a white researcher experiencing something strange among a mysterious indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest, and then sending something equally mysterious back home in marked crates, is one of the hoariest old cliches in the book—you could easily see a version of this story made in 1957, the details changed but the spirit intact. The details, ultimately, are the things that make something like The Relic feel like a 1997 movie, planting this classical B-movie plot into the violent, flippant world of an R-rated nineties thriller, with a monster that can be portrayed more “realistically” by Stan Winston Studio’s advanced animatronic puppets and a smattering of nineties CGI rather than a guy in a suit.
Based on the definite-article-deficient novel Relic by thriller specialist duo Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (part of a series of novels that the movie severs all connections to), this story is set in a natural history museum, a unique enough setting for a monster story—it’s New York’s American Museum of Natural History in the novel, and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History in the movie, the latter giving Chicago another monster mess to deal with forty years after all the business with the grasshoppers. Apparently the New York museum balked at the movie proposal because they didn’t like how the book portrayed their administration as weaselly scum (and also thought it might scare kids away from visiting)—their loss? And Chicago’s gain? In any case, it gives us enough wide open rooms full of mounted animal displays, creepy ancient artifacts, laboratories, stairwells, and underground tunnels to keep the locations visually interesting.
While the museum is the setting for the majority of the movie, we first introduce our police hero Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) investigating a ship on the docks of Lake Michigan full of dead crewmen, a scene that was seen again later in 1997 in The Lost World. D’Agosta, like most of the characters in the movie, is an archetype supplemented by quirks—a belligerent detective who gets the job done, but is also highly superstitious (telling others to avoid stepping over corpses because it’s bad luck) and complains about his ex-wife getting custody of their dog. On the museum side, we have evolutionary biologist Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller), who is knee-jerk skeptical of anything superstitious, working under her wheelchair-bound mentor Albert Frock (James Whitmore, star of Them!, which brings in a fun monster movie history connection), and officiously museum curator Ann Cuthbert (Linda Hunt.) Green and D’Agosta cross paths when a museum security guard is found decapitated in a washroom, his brain ripped clean out of his skull—she accidentally walks in on it and has a rather appropriate initial reaction. The two sides work separately and together to connect all these killings, with D’Agosta learning that all these corpses are missing their hypothalamus, while Green and Frock slowly discover new details about the shipments sent to the museum by their colleague John Whitney (Lewis Van Bergen), who we saw in the opening sequence.
Incorporating a different monster movie standard to this plot, we also have their investigations stymied by the museum’s big gala event for their new world superstition exhibit, with Cuthbert and the head of museum security (Thomas Ryan) employing the mayor (Robert Lesser) to force D’Agosta to let the party go on despite his conviction that the killer is still on the loose. The lifts from the Jaws playbook are pretty blatant—they even have a red herring suspect, a random unhoused man living in the tunnels beneath the museum shot dead after attacking investigators. The beach, I mean museum, must be open for the Fourth of July, I mean, the gala! I guess that at least shows a different era of monster movie being plundered by the two writing teams behind the script (one of them, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, would later write the modern Planet of the Apes movies as well as the recent Avatar sequel)—something from twenty years before The Relic, rather than just stuff from forty years before.
The dialogue skews towards the casually humorous—there’s a pair of security guards who provide some likeable light commentary on events before both are unceremoniously murdered by the monster—but the tone skews casually cruel. Margo spends most of the movie in competition with her conniving scientist coworker (Chi Muoi Lo) over grant money provided by a wealthy couple, and his over-the-top punishment for being a snivelling jerk is to have his head ripped off. The panic as the gala is spoiled by the monster and the rude way it drops decapitated bodies in the midst of the wealthy revellers leads to a disaster movie stampede where people trample and crush each other while attempting to vacate the museum just before it locks down, followed by a sequence where a string of SWAT officers are ravaged by the monster as they lower themselves in through the skylights. It’s the kind of pointless chaos and gruesome meanness that was en vogue in the nineties.
We, the audience, already know that a monster is at work very early, because we saw its claw during the attack on the security guard—and we even have a conception of what it is, as we repeatedly go back to shots of a statue of the monstrous Kothoga, a demon-god worshipped by the tribe from the opening of the movie. The statue came in one of the crates sent by Whitney, with the other filled with nothing but leaves—but Green’s subsequent analysis of the leaves reveals that they contain a parasitic fungus that not only flows with the same hormones one might find in the human hypothalamus, but also a virus containing the DNA of multiple animal species. When a beetle munches on some of the infected leaves, it mutates into a much larger and aggressive version of itself, which gives Green all the proof she needs that this real-life version of Kothoga is another creature transformed in this manner, and in desperate need for those hormones to survive—without a supply of the leaves, it goes for the next most convenient source. Frock theorizes that the indigenous tribe discovered the properties of these leaves and used them as a tool of war, transforming an animal into the chimeric Kothoga and deploying it against their enemies, then letting it starve to death—he also thinks it proves his “Callisto Effect” theory, the idea that there are random spurts of evolution that create one-off monstrosities. It’s all a lot of nonsensical science, but it’s supposed to teach Margo that superstition can be based in scientific fact even if it’s described in more mythical terms—an undercurrent I’ve seen in older movies like Valley of Gwangi.
The standards for monster movie designs had skewed in favour of creatures bulkier and saurian by this point in the nineties, likely inspired by a certain other movie with effects by Stan Winston, and so the Kothoga is a mostly reptilian-looking hybrid with mammalian musculature and a pair of arthropod mandibles that also bring to mind Winston’s visuals for the Predator. Those subtly mashed-together aspects of different animals reflect the chimeric concept, but the movie also gives us one moment of the thing walking up a wall to make use of the repeated references to its gecko DNA (which animal DNA gives it the ability to teleport to different parts of the museum depending on the scene is not given.) It’s quite clear that setting the movie in either a museum or in a series of tunnels gave director Peter Hyams—a stalwart genre film director whose filmography is all over the place in every sense—the opportunity to keep everything either low-lit or bathed in shadow, so even after the gradual ramp-up to the monster reveal, it’s still not fully visible. There is a benefit to this, as it allows them to swap between the giant puppet version of the monster and the CGI version somewhat seamlessly, and it even hides the dated quality of the computer effects for most of the movie—except at the end, where the monster is set ablaze and we get a good whiff of dreary mid-nineties CGI.
The movie tries to halfheartedly mislead the audience into not putting together the very obvious twist by having the characters assume that the Kothoga stalking the museum is a mutant animal—but in the final act, the computer that can identify the DNA and hormones found in the leaves and fungus can also inexplicably identify specific human DNA as well, and we learn that our monster is, in fact, John Whitney, transformed after ingesting the leaves himself. One of the more interesting ideas this movie suggests is that the monster is a sort of addict, exposed to a foreign substance and in constant need of a steady supply, its underground lair strewn with the evidence of its bender (i.e. more headless bodies.) Just about the only way this really manifests in the portrayal of the monster, though, is in its asthmatic wheezing, a sign that we’re supposed to see this thing as at least a little pathetic. A brief moment near the end of the movie implies that Whitney-as-Kothoga may have even retained a memory of Margo, although this comes and goes very quickly.
Whatever themes or trends I can detect in The Relic are ultimately rather thin, possibly unintentional, but they’re still there. The distrust of self-centred authority figures is a classic, of course, while the monster-as-junkie-addicted-to-brain-hormones is a bit more unique—and gives the whole thing the feeling of a horrific accident. While there’s a bit of “science intruding on things man was not meant to know” in here, there’s not a sense of man creating a monster, but rather stumbling into one—unlike in something like Leviathan, the mutating agent is not a product of human manipulation, although some humans are shown to use it to their advantage. Simply discovering the fungus’ existence leads to unimaginable horror, without a real ulterior motive behind it. While I started this post out by noting the similarities to the tropes of fifties horror movies, the one thing I think differentiates this is an even more fatalistic view of the universe.
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