Mandrake – review

Director: Tripp Reed

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

First things first, this is a Syfy film and so you can gauge the quality on that fact. I watched it primarily because I thought it might fall into the realm of vampiric plants and it does, kind of, it is arguably a vampiric landscape but… And there is a but… we might see some death by plant but there is little indication of blood drinking. The dialogue does steer us that way though.

It starts with a woman running through the jungle. After a while she backtracks carefully, to hide her retreat by stepping backwards onto her footprints and then peels off to the side. She is being hunted by two somethings and they appear to be monstrous – later they are revealed to be Yambarri (the indigenous tribe) warriors in elaborate helmets etc. Despite her ruse she is caught.

the team

A group of travellers arrive at a small Latin American airport, they have been paid to help locate treasure in the jungle and so one, Lin (Wayne Pére), is an archaeologist and another, Carla (Jon Mack, Drakul), an anthropologist (and linguist). The third is a soldier for hire, McCall (Max Martini), and it is he that the border guard are not happy about until their contact, Santiago (Nick Gomez, Vampire Riderz & Vampires Suck), greases the wheels. The area they are heading in to is contested ground between government and rebels but the rebel leader has given an undertaking to be out of the area for a couple of days.

the dagger

They don’t head to basecamp, rather they are sent orders to go straight to the area where the artifact they are looking for is meant to be. That artifact is a conquistador’s dagger that the businessman who has bankrolled the expedition, Harry Vargas (Benito Martinez), covets as it belonged to an ancestor. They reach the area and find an indigenous graveyard and find the one tomb mispositioned (laying North/South rather than East/West. It has glyphs on the stonework but Lin doesn’t wait for Carla to translate and opens the tomb. Inside is the remains of the conquistador and the dagger buried in the position of the heart.

stabbed by vine

Removing the dagger causes something like a seismic shock to hit the area, Lin ends up strung up in a trap and Yambarri warriors attack them. The group gets split up and McCall is dismissive of reports of the jungle attacking the others – until he sees it himself. So, what’s happened? The story as it comes out is the Yambarri were invaded by the conquistadors and so their shamans summoned something to save them. This appears to be the jungle brought to life in the form of a kind of plant/animal hybrid. Having said that it also appears that the jungle itself attacks the invaders. However the creature was a killing machine attacking invaders and Yambarri alike and so they created a totem using the hilt of the conquistador’s knife attached to a Yambarri blade and, by stabbing the invader in the heart, they made the beast dormant. Removing the blade awakens it… so kind of a stake equivalent but using sympathetic magic (stabbing a sacrifice rather than the creature itself).

sacrifice

This doesn’t quite add up as the woman from the beginning was part of a team sent in first (that our guys didn’t know about). The team are dead and she was held – and then sacrificed to the creature (though, again it might be more to the jungle itself) once it was awakened but the inference was they sacrificed outsiders anyway. The sacrifice sees them tied to a sacrificial stone, the shaman (J. LaRose) summoning the creature and vines cocooning the victim who is subsequently ripped in half by the vines.

J. LaRose as the shaman

What we do not see is blood drinking, however we get reference to it. The shaman, when telling the backstory, translated by Carla, suggested the creature was summoned to drink the blood of the invaders. The warning glyphs mention this too but say that the jungle feeds on the blood of invaders. The team, at one point, use fire, which it doesn’t like but it doesn’t kill it (and as an avatar of the jungle, if that’s what it is, then it wouldn’t) – ultimately, they must find a way to make it dormant again. A couple of points, reminiscent of vampiric plant film Ruins had the area devoid of animal and bird noise and a person stabbed by a vine subsequently having vines moving below the skin.

the creature

It isn’t a great film, the creature cgi looks poor for a start, and it has some awful moments – such as Carla attending to a leg wound (where the vine has stabbed into a character) whilst saying she knows about field dressings and then applying a tourniquet below the wound rather than above. We also get a moment where a camp worker hears something in the undergrowth (that sounded like Keyop from Battle of the Planets) and is grabbed and dragged off. Was it the Yambarri or the jungle itself? The film doesn’t say. Incidentally the film didn’t seem to mention the (not indigenous) mandrake of the title, so I’m not sure why the film has the title it does. However, as a Syfy flick it is about right. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK