Woodyanders Radioactive waste from a nearby nuclear power plant that's been illegally dumped in the woods causes the trees in said forest to mutate into lethal man-eating plants. Sounds like a good deal of incredibly silly and kitschy fun, right? Well, it sure ain't remotely amusing or entertaining, thanks to flat (non)direction, a painfully plodding pace, terrible acting from a lame no-name cast, a meandering narrative, cruddy (far from) special effects (the killer tree roots look like dirt-caked garden hoses!), precious little in the way of graphic gore, zero tension or creepy atmosphere, insipid characters, laughable attack scenes, plain cinematography, a drab and uneventful script, and a generic brooding hum'n'shiver synthesizer score. Worst of all, this excruciatingly tedious clinker proves to be way too limp and lifeless to even qualify as enjoyable in a so wretched it's weirdly wondrous sort of way. Only the positively ludicrous solution that the imperiled townspeople come up with for fighting back against the trees manages to achieve a certain jaw-dropping campy hilarity. That aide, this one overall sizes up as one pitifully dull'n'dismal yawner.

Michael_Elliott Contamination .7 (1990) * 1/2 (out of 4) D'Amato was a director with many different genres attached to his name and here he once again steps into the horror field but the end results are less than stellar. In the film, a woman (Mary Sellers) returns home to her small town and sees that nothing much has changed. The only thing going on is a nuclear plant in town that is dumping toxic waste in the woods, which is making the tree roots come to life and start attacking people. If you remember, in THE EVIL DEAD there was a pretty graphic and tense scene where a tree comes to life. If you're expecting that same quality here then you're going to be disappointed because this is a pretty poor film from start to finish with very little to recommend. Also released as THE CRAWLERS (its U.S. title) and TROLL III, this movie really seems lost as to what it's trying to do as it's clearly meant for horror fans but it delivers no scares, no violence, no gore and not even any nudity, at least for the first hour. The movie features your typical bad performances but thankfully most are so bad that you're bound to get several laughs out of them including an old man who is constantly throwing out one or two words at bad times just to say he agrees or disagrees with someone. The film contains just about every bad thing you'd expect from a movie like this and that includes (but is not limited to) the score, the cinematography, the editing and the special effects. The one bit of blood is a scene where a man gets a root through the mouth and then eye. The effect is incredibly bad but at least there was some blood. The final thirty-minutes of this movie is where things finally pick up as the redneck town decides to fight back and try to destroy the roots. There are so many logical issues with what happens but at least the entertainment value picks up as there's just one dumb scene after another. I love the fact that they're dealing with toxic waste yet everyone is just rolling around in it and even letting their children mess around with it. We get some incredibly silly stock footage as well as a helicopter crash using the worst toy I've seen in any movie. The final ten-minutes also feature a lot more root attacks than the previous eighty so that is a good thing. Fans of the genre would be best advised to skip this turkey but fans of bad cinema might want to check it out just for the end. I'm really not sure how much D'Amato director or if Laurenti took most of the shots but TROLL 2 looks rather smart compared to this thing. D'Amato's ex leading lady Laura Gemser did the Costume Design here (which is basically just jeans and t-shirts).

EyeAskance The future of bad movies seemed grim and uncertain during the mass-destruction of the American drive-ins...but with dreck like THE CRAWLERS continuing to pop up, there may be hope for the future of schlock after all. About the film...it involves a small town being threatened by creeping carnivorous tree roots(rubber garden hoses, in all honesty). Take this hopeless premise to further lows by putting it in unsteady hands of monolithic movie-making incompetence. Now, provide a cast of featureless thesps, and give the dire results of these efforts a misleading re-title which implies that it's a follow-up to something which in no possible way could have generated enough enthusiasm to merit such an endeavor. PRESTO! there you have it. Instant bad-movie gold.I own a copy, and you should, too. 3.5/10

Cristian-3 So this is the infamous Troll 3. Would you look at that? Nothing's happening! No trolls anywhere to be seen here! That's only one reason why this film SUCKS!It's not one you can watch alone because part of the fun would come from joking about it with someone else. Watching by yourself is just torture! TOR-CHAR!Maybe this movie should have been called "The Living Dead who Refuse to Rot" because the majority of the "actors" talk like zombies! Like the Sheriff character. Oh my goodness! Here's probably one of the worst actors to ever be in a non-porn movie. And I thought the mother in Troll 2 was bad! But he's not the only one! The boss in the power plant and just about everyone here is terrible!Worst line delivery: "Ok, doctor we'll just evacuate the entire country before you can say Jack Robinson". Actually anything said by the sheriff makes you want to kill him. He's amazing in the sense that every single line he says sounds exactly the same!There are no little creatures here, no trolls, no goblins, no nothing. Whoever renamed this movie to "The Crawlers" and removed the "Troll 3" name shows me there is hope for the world after all. Because this movie HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TROLLS!They must've saved a lot of money by using killer roots instead of creatures.Who finances this kind of c**p and why? I can only think that the targeted audience is that of non-english speaking countries where the people are used to dubbing.I bought this (for $3.75) expecting at least the fun I had with Troll 2 because in spite of that movie's long list of shortcomings it had some very funny elements. None of those elements are present in Troll 3. There is however a hysterical scene where the killer roots kill a man in a suit who's chasing the "hero" with a gun. The guy takes forever and a day to die and he screams pathetically through it all.Troll 2 had a little boy and a monster on the video cover, neither of which were in the movie. Troll 3 has a sexy girl on the "Crawlers" cover who, you've guessed it, is nowhere to be seen in the movie.Troll 3 just plain sucks.