I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

SCIENCE FICTION DISGUISED AS HORROR







Hidden 3D (2011) Italy-Canada

Saying this movie is in 3D is just warning you that the most you will get is thinking that you're getting bugs in your hair, that's about it. I'll explain that, but you'll wish I didn't. Why they call this mess horror and not sci-fi I dunno, maybe 'cause sci-fi is kind of getting reduced to things about aliens or animals that have morphed with other animals like Dinocroc (or if you're really lucky Supershark vs. Dinocroc) and 2-Headed Shark Attack.

This piece of dreck is about fireflies. Or a type of bug anyway. The actual one they kept showing seems to be a cross between a bee, a large dragonfly and, uh, whatever they felt would look good in 3D for the rest. A woman named Dr. Carter is performing experiments with the venom or whatever of this particular nasty bug, determining that it might be used for people's addictions. 

Now the really retarded part (No, really!). Instead of just curing them, she thinks the venom takes those addictions and turns them into physical form, which can then be removed by surgery. Ooookay. But no, they have to duh it down even further by claiming that these physical forms of the addictions are beginning to form life signs of their own. In short, bug juice turns your naughty inclinations into a baby. Ooooooh brother. She has a young son (not an addiction I'm assuming) who lives with her though he wishes he didn't.

Skip ahead skip ahead the way these things always do. Mom and son Brian have been estranged for years. When she dies, he doesn't even go to the funeral. But being her son he still inherits what she calls The Sanctuary, the place he lived and hated which was where she conducted her experiments. He was told the building had burned to the ground. So we get our group of people we really don't care about together to take a tour of the property. To his surprise, the place is a huge, former monastery that could be worth a chunk of money.

But they find a bug. A BIG bug. I don't care how many times they called it a firefly, it wasn't. But it was big enough I suppose to make their 3D effects, uh, effective. It certainly didn't make this movie interesting. In fact it was a major snore. The mother had created a machine called Ventris. I looked that word up and other than being a crater on the moon, it was mostly names for different people. No help there. But as they look through the place they find more and more creepy stuff, showing that Brian's mother also performed surgical experiments as well as her addiction treatments. Bad, bad little piggy.

And to get our group to start dying one by one - apparently the 'children' of these experiments have been living, growing and reproducing there - nasty little things that look like nice kids with Cthulu-type faces that rip into Brian's friends. I think they stole most of their warped face ideas from Grave Encounters. But the gore is mostly missing, there's a bit of blood but not much else. Including any kind of action unless you like 3D movies that spend most of their time lurking in dark tunnels. Hope you enjoyed paying extra for the glasses.

Finally they discover that the 'agent' whose been giving them the tour is actually the main patient who brought forth the first 'child' in the doctor's experiments. She has been having more children, cannibal children, but needs to 'feed' them, hence Brian and his friends. Oh, and when they're in a corner, the little brats can explode into a cloud of fireflies. Just to warn you - not of a scare, but of a major DUH that happens several times in the movie.

 In the end, Brian and his girlfriend, the smart one (there's always one) make it out of the Sanctuary and we think all the bad guys are gone. Except for one final fly buzzing in your grill at the end. DUH.