Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Aaron (Corey Monteith) is sitting around his security job along with his best buddy Ash (Brandon Jay McLaren) monitoring whatever they are supposed to be monitoring as this looks to be the world’s easiest gig. That is until Aaron spies some janitor dude in the basement of this joint smoking a ciggy amidst a group barrels clearly marked ‘flammable’. Aaron politely asks this cat to put the cigarette out but in defiance this zany janitor dude flicks the cigarette at the surveillance cam, despite the presence of hundreds of barrels clearly marked ‘flammable’ and causes the joint to go up in flames. For whatever reason Aaron feels the need to save this guy, despite the pleas of his frightened African American buddy, that he allow this dude to burn to death, which kind of made sense to me.  Nonetheless Aaron disregards his buddies scaredy pleas and heroically runs to save this cat only to have the place blow up or something which takes away Aaron’s eyesight in this movie ‘Hybrid’.

Now my issues with this scene is that I guess the place blows but the flames only seemed to zap Aaron’s eyeballs, and also the Janitor dude survived. It’s not like Aaron carried him out considering his fried eyeball situation so it seems to me that my man could’ve just left the dude down there and all would still be right with the world. But then we wouldn’t have had the brilliant Dr. Andrea (Justine Bateman), in conjunction with the US Army, finally get a chance to use a human subject for her revolutionary eye transplant technique in which she transplants the eyes of some animal, any animal, to the sockets of another species. In Aaron’s case this animal is a wolf and now his eyesight is restored, sharper than ever, and glow yellow.

So it’s all good right? Well not so fast. The first issue is that there is this troublesome Native American lady named Lydia (Tinsel Korey) who is none too happy with the

White Man using her nations animals as test subjects, then there is the problem of Aaron seeing all this Wolf stock footage through his new eyeballs and feeling all feral and stuff, then there’s the government wanting Dr. Andrea to ignore Aarons stock footage visions and start transplanting wolf eyes in our soldiers.

Now Aaron has busted out of this hospital and with the assistance of the pretty Native American woman he’s running the streets with the dogs, he’s eating raw meat, he’s beating up fat rugby players and he’s being mercilessly pursued by our government who wants their test subject captured… at first alive but after a while they could care less how he comes back… because transplanting wolf eyeballs in humans just isn’t all that ethical and we can’t let that kind of info out for MSNBC and them to find. Though the yellow glowing eyeballs would probably let the average dude know that something just ain’t right with that guy.

The best word to describe ‘Hybrid’ is that it’s ‘weak’. This one of RHI’s man-eater series of Straight to DVD flicks, and I have seen a couple of them with none of the one’s I’ve seen being really good but they at least did have beasts eating men. This one, I think, was trying to be a drama of sorts because it certainly wasn’t a creature feature, and it really wasn’t much of a drama to tell you the truth. A large portion of the movie consisted of Cory Monteith running around with his shirt off and a lot of stock footage of wolves seen through blurry vision with the really odd scene inserted in here and there.

For instance Aaron, feeling particularly lycanthropic one evening advises our Native American hottie that she should leave because he is really feeling the need to rip something apart. She tells him to hold on because she has something in her truck that can help him with that. I’m thinking I can’t wait to see what this ‘something’ could be but when she comes back, as far as I could tell, the only thing she returned with was some lame conversation. I think this did put Aaron to sleep so I guess girlfriend knew what she was doing. This already weak movie also had arguably the world weakest love scene. In addition to being one those ‘now is not the time’ moments considering our wolf-man has a bunch of government assassins hot on his ass, usually when people have sex they take their clothes off, unless of course it’s in broom closets or alleys. But in the comfort one’s home, with the love Indian drums playing, people like to get nekkid. Personally I would’ve left that scene on the cutting room floor. I also dug how the wise old Indian dude asked our hottie when she and the wolf-man were getting married. Mind you we’re watching this cat run through the short bushes half naked with wolves and blood dripping his lips because he’s already killed like three people and he wants to know when they are setting the date. Our hottie replies with ‘I hardly know him’. Oh, so he’s good enough to screw but not good enough to marry? Women! We probably should also mention the score in this flick which was an odd combination of folk music, fake Native American drumming and Hip-Hop so bad Vanilla Ice thought it sucked.

‘Hybrid’ was not putrid enough to be entertainingly bad and it wasn’t near good enough to be normally entertaining. It was weak, substandard Sci-Fi channel style time filler that I really could’ve gone without seeing.

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