A Gala Day

I got a recommendation for The Relic (1997) from a Tor.com article, and they didn't steer me wrong. B-movie creature feature with a little bit of style.

It starts in the Amazonian jungle, where a white man sits and quietly chuckles at the antics of the natives. When they offer him a brew made with weird leaves (bannisteria caapi?), he shrugs and drinks it. Soon, he is freaking out. At the harbor, he begs a ship’s captain to take some cargo off, and when he won’t, he sneaks aboard and starts going through the crates. What he finds...

Cut to Chicago. The ship has arrived (I guess you can sail from South America to Chicago?) and everyone one board has been mysteriously killed - and Chicago detective Tom Sizemore is on the case.

Meanwhile, at the Chicago Field Museum, researcher Penelope Ann Miller is losing her grant, and her job unless she can get the patronage of the Drysdales at the big Gala. Her competition will be semi-comic relief Chi Muoi Lo. They find the crates from South America, one with an ugly statue, the other empty except for some weird leaves used as packing material.

Then a security guard is killed horribly, leaving nothing behind but a half-smoked joint. Could deadly marijuana be the cause? Sizemore shuts down the museum. But the mayor calls to tell him he better have it open in time for the Gala. The director of the museum, Linda Hunt, is of the same mind. So the police start searching the basements.

There are a couple of kids down there playing hooky. So when the police hail bullets down on a suspicious shadow, you fear the worst. But it turns out to be a homeless ex-con sex-offender, and everyone feels like they have their man. Everyone but Tom Sizemore.

As the Gala gets under way, Sizemore and crew continue searching the basements. When one of them is found murdered, he sends someone up to halt the Gala. But he’s too late, one of the policemen guarding the Gala gets killed in front of everyone. There’s a panic, the alarm is tripped, and they are locked in! Sizemore’s plan is to go under the museum, through the sewers, and come up next door. Because if there’s one thing we know about museums, it is that they are wide open to secret passages through sewers.

Of course, when they are all chest deep in water and the monster is sneaking around, they begin to wish they’d stayed upstairs.

All in all, lots of fun. The monster (the “Kothoga”) is kept mostly hidden, and revealed bit by bit, as you want in a creature feature. The museum setting is nice, and Penelope Ann Miller is one of those plucky women scientists who don’t need rescuing. This is just as well, because Sizemore is a bit out of his depth.

Of course, Linda Hunt steals all of her scenes, but that’s just a little something extra.