"In the tradition of Starship Troopers" says the DVD cover, when what it really should say is "We copied our stupid-looking monster off of one of the bug aliens from Starship Troopers and now that's the flick's only selling point."

Only a few minutes into the insipidly-titled Scorpius Gigantus I knew the thing looked and smelled like a "Sci-Fi Channel Premiere." I'm not sure if the flick actually played on the network, but it's certainly awful enough to make the cut. It had a bunch of thinly-veiled Russian accents, the always-goofy Jeff Fahey in the lead role, and some of the flimsiest CGI work I've ever seen. Sci-Fi Channel stuff all the way.

But while most of the Z-grade genre-schlock delivers at least some small semblance of a plot, Scorpius Moronius just gives us a setting, a bunch of generic characters, and a stupid-looking mutant scorpion. There really is NO story to speak of, aside from "here's how we created the big monster" and "let's wander through this warehouse for 81 minutes."

Fahey plays the gung-ho miltiary leader in charge of a rapidly-dwindling collection of dumb-ass commandos. Prop your eyelids open with toothpicks and you'll notice a few scientist characters and (I think) a few terrorists, but all of the humans in Scorpius Gigantus exist solely to get eaten by the titular beastie. Once all the painfully wretched banter has subsided and the monster has eaten his fill, a few random characters finally fight back, and then the credits roll.

Hell, I'm a fan of low-end horror/action crapcinema, but sheesh. Give me something to work with here. Forget that the plotless mess is just one of a thousand "creature run amok" scenarios and that the actors give performances as if they're reading off of a giant soggy cue card... When the flick's not pitifully amusing, it's aggressively amateurish and seriously boring. Why you'd choose to watch the 4,224th lame-ass version of Alien over the real deal is simply beyond me.

The DVD

Video: A flat and rather unpleasant full-frame transfer -- which again makes me think the flick played on TV first.

Audio: A tinny 5.1 track, with optional subtitles in English or Spanish.

Extras: Nope.

Final Thoughts

Even to the most curious gorehounds, the ones who scan the deepest corners of Netflix for some monster movie guilty pleasure-dom, I say simply this: Skip It