VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 16, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The Relic is the only movie that I ever watched in a theater in Hollywood.

More to the point, I watched it at Mann’s Chinese Theater.

And I hated it.

Based on the novel Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, this Peter Hyams (Outland, Sudden Death, Timecop) film has Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) and Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) going up against Kothoga, a Stan Winston-designed monster.

And for some reason, man, I thought this was the dumbest movie I’d ever seen. Maybe I was on a date. Maybe I was trying to impress someone with my wit. But I loudly made fun of it for most of its running time.

I mean, spoiler warning for a movie made in 1997, but the Kothoga is really a museum anthropologist who drank mushroom soup in South America. I don’t know about you, but the entire idea of that is ridiculous and I have no idea to this day how both Siskel and Ebert liked this.

I feel kind of bad still feeling this way. After all, Hyams made the second most important movie ever made in Pittsburgh, one where Van Damme is a French Canadian firefighter who lives in the Southside Slopes and has a rich ex-wife who lives on Mt. Washington and the Penguins owner’s wife thought it would launch her to Hollywood. So young Sam, cracking wise in a legendary theater, is kind of embarrassing. But old Sam would still find a lot of those jokes hilarious and agree that the end of this movie is a mess and it’s an entire film of Sizemore not stepping on a crack so he doesn’t break his mother’s back while a xenomorph-looking mushroom man rips off people’s heads.