Everything one needs to know about ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH can be pretty much summed up just by looking at the film's title. For one thing, they misspelled sabertooth, and since they insist on this particular spelling then that's what I'll use for the duration of this review. Secondly, ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH sounds like the kind of cheesy b-movie title you'd expect from a 1950's/1960's monster movie. And third, the film's original title was NIGHT OF THE SABRETOOTH. I'm fairly certain the title was changed after someone actually watched the movie and astutely noted that everything takes place during daylight hours.

Too say that ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH is a stupid film would be quite the understatement. We are talking about a movie that opens with a security guard getting slaughtered after he enters into a sabretooth tiger pen in pursuit of his pornographic magazine that got swept up by the wind and closes with all the surviving characters breathing a sigh of relief and casually walking away from the place of carnage despite not even being 100% certain they've killed all the sabretooth cats running amok. Suffice it to say, ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH contains enough cheese to put someone lactose intolerant into a coma. Unfortunately, a lot of that cheese is limburger.

Niles is a greedy yet hapless multimillionaire who has invested every penny he has into a combination tropical island resort/wildlife refuge that he's banking on becoming one of the biggest tourist destinations ever. The reason being is that he's managed to bring back to life the long extinct Sabretooth tiger using the same sort of genetic manipulation that was popularized in JURASSIC PARK. No T-Rex's, no velociraptors, no goo-spitting lizards - just sabretooth tigers. Is it just me or does the idea of gawking at tigers with tusks seems like a novel idea whose novelty would quickly wear off? I mean if someone genetically engineered a wooly mammoth it would be a true sensation for awhile but eventually the novelty would wear off and everyone would just look and go, "Oh, it's a hairy elephant with big tusks." Likewise, the novelty of fanged cats would also wear off soon enough. Sabretooth tigers just haven't captured the imagination quite like the dinosaurs have and I rather doubt they'd be nearly the draw that a true life Jurassic Park would be.

Anyway, the greedy yet hapless multimillionaire with everything riding on this tropical resort/sabretooth tiger refuge has invited a bunch of other multimillionaires to the island for the big unveiling with hopes of getting them to become big money investors in the park that he hopes to franchise across the world. It seems the man has the riches to fund prehistoric genetic research but not enough to keep up the overhead costs of a dinky zoo. Go figure.

And then we see the following sign:

Four things go through my mind upon seeing that sign.

1. Is Primal Park really the best name anyone could come up with?
2. Imagine if all this was for real. Wouldn't the advertising executive that came up with "Genetic Miracles Reasonably Priced" be instantly fired for devising such a horrible slogan that makes your Sabretooth cat refuge sound like a discount freak show?
3. Is that line really an in-joke admitting the film's own cheapness?
4. Couldn't that tagline also be a metaphor for pretty much every Sci-Fi Channel original movie these days?

One of the rich sycophants Niles has invited is a long time rival Grant, a man who has always managed to one-up him at least until this day. Grant (I don't think any character in the film was ever given a last name) is played by Robert Carradine as a typical broad caricature of a greedy, egotistical corporate executive. Come to think of it... Carradine plays the role as if his REVENGE OF THE NERDS' Lewis character went on to become a wealthy, self-centered prick. I'm surprised they haven't already made a REVENGE OF THE NERDS sequel where Lewis went on to become an egotistical Bill Gates type reunited with his former fraternity brothers who seek to help him rediscover his old ways of kindly geekdom. Heck, they may have already made it since there's been like six or seven made-for-TV sequels that I never bothered with.

Anyway, Niles and Grant behave around one another like Wall Street weasel versions of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon's GRUMPY OLD MEN characters but minus the comedy. Niles can't wait to show off the place to everyone, especially to show off to Grant, but plans have to be put on hold because an electrical outage allowed one of the sabretooth tigers to get loose and kill more than one person. You keep waiting for the sabretooths to run wild at the party and slaughter all the guest but that must not have been in the budget.

Oh, important safety tip for those out there that might one day find themselves working at a sabretooth tiger wildlife reserve: if you come across the gate to the sabretooth tiger pen open and the security guard is nowhere to be found, please do not just walk in yelling out the guard's name because I assure you nothing good will come from it.

So while the remaining personnel at Primal Park tries to recapture the cat and get things under control, Niles is forced to stall for time leading to childish taunts from that rich goober Grant. The remaining personnel include former Superboy hotty Stacy Haiduk whose career never really took off like some people probably thought it would. I mean a brief stint on SeaQuest DSV is pretty much her career highlight and believe me, the words "SeaQuest DSV" and "career highlight" should never be used in the same sentence. Heck, she isn't even the main security guard/heroine of this film. Nope, she's the hero's horny girlfriend. There's a whole weird subplot about Haiduk's past boyfriends dying and that she might be a black widow. I have no real clue what that minor subplot was supposed to be about other than I guess there wouldn't be anything to her character except the fact that she's a horny security guard dating the hero. As for the hero, I don't remember his name or the character he played other than he was an extremely bland security guard with an oversexed girlfriend and a penitent for chasing after genetically engineered sabretooth cats with little more than a flashlight at times. Oh, and he's clearly seen HALLOWEEN 2 based on how he attempts to dispatch some sabretooths at one point.

Meanwhile, a merry band of typical b-movie college kids have arrived at the resort for a scavenger hunt that will determine whether or not they get accepted into the fraternity/sorority they’re pledging. I’ve never heard of a college fraternity holding a scavenger hunt that requires the contestants to travel to a far off island, unless maybe it's on the campus of the college from PINATA: SURVIVAL ISLAND. This scavenger hunt requires them to find things like the bowl of a cotton candy machine and a conch shell. In order to find such items they do what anyone would do in their situation – they commit a breaking and entering. To be more specific, they trespass into the Primal Park command center and damn near loot the place, including causing the electrical system to go down so that a sabretooth escapes and kills a few unlucky bastards. These characters do have names but the names are not important because they are only identifiable by their archetypes. We have an Asian computer geek, a vacuous blonde, a surly goth chick, a dumb jock, and a token black girl. Every last one of them deserved to die and the fact that all of them didn't both saddens and disgusts me. They weren’t just too stupid too live; they were too annoying too live as well. Like the idiots going to the rave in HOUSE OF THE DEAD, I would accept nothing short of graphic mutilations as their fate. Sure, we got a few of those but the body count should have been higher.

On the plus side, we are treated to some wonderful banter between some of these morons. You gotta love it when dialogue is written by a screenwriter that obviously has no idea how young people (or any people for that matter) talk. Here’s a sample from when the surly goth and the dumb jock get into a brief spat:

A goth’s attitude is supposed to suck? Dammit, I want that printed on a t-shirt and sold at Hot Topics everywhere, ASAP. It’ll be the greatest thing to happen to goth chick apparel since Emily the Strange.

Once the b-movie teenage wastrel all-stars invade the Primal Park, the movie basically plays out like this: sabretooth tigers already loose kill people, get recaptured, then all the sabretooths get loose again, kill more people, and then the people band together to kill them. And let's not forget the Robert Carradine character that is secretly plotting to steal all of Niles' scientific data for genetically engineering sabretooths. That subplot leads to nothing other than seeing Robert Carradine getting decapitated in such a manner that his headless corpse continues to walk around like George Jefferson for a couple seconds. There's even an exceptionally idiotic aside (even by horror movie standards) where the dumb jock picks up a girl and sneaks her into Primal Park's gift shop for a quickie only to see her get disemboweled. Like any true gentlemen, he leaves her there to suffer a horrible death. Fortunately, he'll meet a grisly end later on. Not soon enough if you ask me.

Even the sabretooth tigers are a sight to behold thanks to some of the shoddiest CGI ever produced for a Sci-Fi Channel original movie and that's saying something. Of course, that's also because a lot of the CGI was recycled from the original SABRETOOTH (which this film is a defacto sequel to) in what was surely a cost cutting move. And if you think the CGI looks hokey then take a good look at the sabretooth fetuses in jars. We're told the sabretooths were seven hundred pounds but the computer animators must not have been told this fact since they all appeared to be the size of a big cougar. That is except for the enormous mongoloid sabretooth tiger; a sabretooth for which the genetic engineering process didn't quite take causing its back legs to be useless so it has to crawl around with it front legs like a walrus on its flippers. After seeing this ludicrous but at least imaginative oddity I found myself longing for a big, killer walrus movie. Come on, Sci-Fi Channel; bring it on! WALRUS: TUSKS OF TERROR!

Two other odd facts about the sabretooths: they're bulimic so they vomit up their meals up and move on to the next kill thus explaining why their murderous nature seemed more hack and slash than nature gone amok. I don't know if it's for better or worse but we never actually see any of this regurgitation. It is surprising given the unrepentantly gruesome nature of some of the films' kills. The sabretooths cats also see the world in what I can only best describe as psychedelic orange Jell-o vision.

Topping off the film is the climax in which Niles is killed, not by one of his own creations, but when one of the fangs from the mouth of the sabretooth stature adorning to top of the building falls off and impales him straight through the mouth. I do believe this five second sequence contains what may be the most unconvincing CGI in Sci-Fi Channel history. A fitting topper to such an exceptionally dumb exercise in mediocrity.

The ending leaves things open for a sequel. If they continue along the path of Star Wars-esque titles then the next one will be REVENGE OF THE SABRETOOTH, preferably with half cyborg sabretooth. Or not. But I wouldn't be shocked to hear that a SABRETOOTH VS. RAPTOR ISLAND movie in the works. Meh, they can both remain extinct as far as I'm concerned. Just give me my killer walrus flick. WALRUS: BLUBBER OF DESTRUCTION!

ATTACK OF THE SABRETOOTH was directed by George Miller. No, not the George Miller that directed THE ROAD WARRIOR; this is the George Miller that made THE AVIATOR. No, not that AVIATOR; I'm talking about the one from 1985 that starred the late Christoper Reeve. He also directed the brutally unfunny Corbin Bernsen sperm bank comedy FROZEN ASSETS, the exceptionally dopey Corbin Bernsen disaster thriller TIDAL WAVE: NO ESCAPE, and the dog befriends a dolphin kiddy flick ZEUS & ROXANNE. Now that I think about it, that's what ZEUS & ROXANNE was lacking - multiple decapitations and disembowelment. Preferably of Corbin Bernsen, but that's another axe to grind another day.