Casual Predation: Frankenfish (2004)
My dear readers, while home ownership is an adventure that I recommend all adults try at least once, I admit there are times when being the person principally responsible for maintenance and repairs can be a bit of a strain on the old bean. Until recently, our basement, with its semi-sentient fungi and its singularly musical piping has often been a source of joy and, dare I say, pride. However, an abundance of water has recently made the place a little less homey. Ordinarily, contacting a maintenance professional would have sorted the whole thing but the rising water level has revealed a small whirlpool in the center of a room where no drainage outlet can be found. This on its own might not have been an insurmountable difficulty but the little vortex also happens to groan like an empty stomach whenever anyone gets near it and the handful of plumbers who managed to emerge from the basement tell me that they find it a bit off-putting.
While identifying a frankenfish in the wild can be difficult, an expert can always spot the distinctive features
Medical examiner Rivers (Tory Kittles) knows a thing or two about treacherous waters himself. After an unidentifiable creature leads a fisherman in the Alabama bayou area to his mortal end, Sam is asked to sort of look into the thing and see if he can make any sense of it. Sam is perfectly comfortable in these environs as he is a former a resident of the area and even attended the same high school as Eliza (K.D. Aubret), a young lady who finds herself mixed up in all this scientific investigation business. Eliza was rather infatuated with Sam during their primary education, and even pleaded with her mother, as so many girls that age do, to cast a love spell upon him so that his mystically driven devotion would be hers.
Of course, Eliza’s mother knows that a girl of that age is not quite mature enough to make decisions about who might be a suitable candidate for occult enslavement. But now that she is an adult, Eliza’s mother decides to finally fulfill her teenaged request. Unfortunately, this blooming non-consensual romance is interrupted by a swarm of decidedly deadly ichthyological specimens. These fish bear some resemblance to snakeheads but with notable modifications to their size, ferocity and ability to breathe out of water. It seems this particular batch has been genetically fiddled with to turn them into more enticing subjects for hunting expeditions. While this is all sorts of good news for people with a penchant for blood spots, it is a less riveting development for medical examiners or those who live adjacent to the bayou.
Even the smallest of frankenfish prove to be quite the little nippers
While I certainly attempt to approach every critical endeavor with empathy and an open mind, I must confess, my judicious readers, that I am not much of a “sporting man,” as it were. I find the systematic eradication of our interspecial cohabitants to be distasteful at the very least and I find myself positively faint at the very mention of an old fashioned fox hunt. All this is to say, while it is not a pastime I enjoy myself, I do find the hunting philosophy expounded by this particular piece of cinema to be more admirable than most. As one of the film’s more flamboyant personalities proclaims, “there’s no thrill to compare with hunting something that can hunt you back.” This attitude seems to be more firmly rooted in the spirit of fairness than any other comparable credo. Director Mark A.Z. Dippé’s Frankenfish posits that if humanity continues to engage in casual predation, the only ethical way forward is to genetically engineer murderous monstrosities whose enhancements really seem to even things out a bit. Short of providing deer and geese with small arms, I cannot imagine a more practical or moral solution.
Frankenfish runs 84 minutes and rated R for violence, gore, language, sexual content and some drug use.
