cientist Catherine Vicily (Angel) is about to show off her latest project to her backer, Anthony Brick (Rhys-Davies). Both Catherine and Anthony are certain that the creature she's cooked up in her lab, a growing prehistoric sabretooth tiger, will make them rich and famous.
When the pair realize the truck that's shipping the tiger up to Anthony's mountain cabin is overdue, they go looking for it. They quickly discover that the truck has crashed and the tiger has escaped into the mountains. They are both afraid of the bad publicity a deadly sabretooth tiger on the loose might cause and realize that if they can just capture the beast they can salvage the situation.
They finally decide to call in big-game hunter Thatcher (Keith) to help them find the tiger. However, Catherine insists that they lie to him about the sabretooth, fearing exposure. They tell him they are hunting an African lion, and he reluctantly agrees to help them. He and Catherine have a past, and when both she and Anthony insist on going along, he becomes more than a little suspicious.
They quickly pick up the cat's trail, which leads to a mountain cabin and its half-eaten occupant. Thatcher tells Catherine to call the police, but she throws the phone away and tells him it's been lost. Knowing they'll lose the trail of the man-eater, Thatcher agrees to press on.
But there are surprises waiting for him as he discovers the true nature of the beast, and for a group of nubile young campers who look a whole lot like dinner to a sabretooth tiger. If they can manage to survive, camping will never be the same again.
Logic is the first casualty
Sabretooth, a SCI FI Channel original movie, could be called a Jaws ripoff in the mountains. It has young and tasty campers who might as well be wearing signs that says "Eat Me," an unscrupulous scientist, a genetically engineered science project run amok and the one man who might stop it. All that's missing is a government conspiracy.
While this seems like a recipe for yet another really bad movie about a genetically engineered creature, Sabretooth does have David Keith and John Rhys-Davies to provide some acting chops, some likeable characters, plenty of intense moments and some quality kills.
Of course, many of the horror-movie standards apply in Sabretooth. Having sex is a big no-no, supposedly smart characters do stupid things, logic is thrown out the window, and the sabretooth can magically eat more than 50 times its body weight in a day. But horror movies aren't about having a plot with logic or smart characters.
What Sabretooth does well is hire some good actors to play the roles and keep the action moving along nicely so the audience doesn't have time to think about how silly it all is. Sure, there could be some humor thrown in, and the sabretooth could have been bigger and more realistic in the close-up shots, but that's being picky. It's another Saturday night and another genetically engineered hungry science project. But a good C+ movie can be a thing of joy, if not forever, at least for the night.
