A Life Through Film #045: The Relic
Not every one of these movies is gonna be a classic, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth revisiting
Release Date: 1/10/1997
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
For the second time in this column’s lifespan, we have found ourselves in the early year dump months. The movies we encounter in January of 1997 will be the ones studios have the least amount of confidence in, and are thus sent out to die a financial death. Horror films of questionable scariness and comedies of dubious hilarity thrive in this part of the year. As much as they’re able to, anyway.
Nowadays, I associate this period of time with trying to catch all the major awards show favorites before the Oscars (you can track my panicked attempt to catch every 2024 Best Picture nominee on this very website). But I recognize that I’m not the average moviegoer. There aren’t enough of me for critically acclaimed awards-contenders to top the box office on any given January weekend. After the expensive rush of the holidays, the people that even choose to brave the winter weather and see a movie are more likely to be the ones who are willing to just watch whatever’s there.
As a result, the movies that top the box office during this period (and are thus eligible for my reviews) often do so only by performing well among a smaller audience of film fans, rather than wider, more general audiences. This means that I’ll be analyzing movie trends more so than larger cultural ones for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t make A Life Through Film any less interesting.
For example: Let’s watch a movie where a horrible monster destroys the Field Museum in its insatiable quest for human brains!
The Relic is a scifi-horror film that you’ve probably never heard of. It doesn’t have a particularly star-studded cast, its director, Peter Hyams, isn’t a notable auteur with a massive dedicated fanbase, and the monster at its core hasn’t lived on in the pantheon of great cinematic creatures. It’s not like it was a major cultural touchpoint at the time, either. The Relic has the fourth lowest weekend box office of any 1997 chart topper, meaning it barely qualified to join the truly wild group of films we’ll be looking at over the next few months.
As you watch The Relic, it’s impossible to not notice the bigger, more famous movies that it’s clearly trying to remind its audience of. Its derivative nature is probably why it hasn’t stuck around in cultural memory; why watch the cheap knockoff when you can watch the better movies that inspired it at the click of a button?
Except The Relic is far from cheap. A surprising amount of work and production value went into this movie, from its effects to its setting and even its script, and you can see that in the final product. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s jump back to the origins of this one.
It was the mid ‘90s, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child disliked natural history museums. Preston, in particular, had personal beef, thanks to his time spent working as a PR director for the Natural History Museum. Those greedy curators, and those wretchedly ambitious scientists! Weird gripe, but I guess nothing is exempt from critique. Rather than just avoiding their educational foes when in major cities, the two writers used their frustration at as inspiration for a new book.
Relic, published in 1995, uses a fictionalized version of New York’s museum as the terrifying backdrop of some monstrous technohorror. The plot of both the book and its eventual adaptation go through similar twists and turns, but I’ll quickly summarize: an anthropological trip to Brazil leads to a mutated freak, jacked up on the DNA and hormones of creatures across the animal kingdom, stalking the halls of the American Museum of Natural History. As more and more employees and guests lose their lives to the mysterious monster, the museum refuses to cancel their upcoming gala, leading to the novel’s police protagonists to work with the few scientists interested in seeking the truth in order to prevent scores of more victims at the hands of the killer.
Unlike other adaptations like Sleepers or First Wives Club, Relic wasn’t poached by film studios before its publication. But after a successful release, its film rights were quickly swooped up by Hollywood power producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.
To look at the combined producing credits of these two is to be confronted by a list of some of the most successful and/or acclaimed major motion pictures to be released over the past 40 years. But strangely, their involvement with The Relic ended quickly after it began. Kennedy and Marshall passed the movie along to two other producers at Paramount, Gale Anne Hurd and Sam Mercer. Maybe Kennedy and Marshall knew Relic wouldn’t look right next to prior movies they’d worked on like Raiders of the Lost Ark [4.5/5] or ET [3/5] and cut their losses. The new heads of the project were no slouches though.
Mercer was relatively green as a producer, only having worked on 1995’s Congo before this project. But Hurd is a name you can slap on a trailer. Her big break came in 1984 when she produced The Terminator [4/5], a massive commercial and critical success that also got her cozy enough with director James Cameron that the two got married. From there, she was a part of science fiction projects both by her husband (like Aliens [4.5/5] and Terminator 2 [5/5]) and other directors (like Ron Underwood’s Tremors [3.5/5] in 1990). A divorce from Cameron in the early ‘90s did little to slow her career down, giving Hurd a chance to focus on producing different genres of film. In fact, one of her productions, The Ghost and the Darkness, has already appeared in this column.
As discerning producers, Hurd and Mercer recognized that Relic offered an easy opportunity to capitalize on fans of existing hits. The terror of science gone awry had led to Jurassic Park [3.5/5] becoming the highest grossing film in history when it was released in 1993, and the menace of a terrifying creature stalking the dark and brutally picking people off one by one had turned the Alien franchise into a global phenomenon. The climax of the story, where a small group of disparate characters are trapped inside the museum with the monster, is even reminiscent of the closed settings of the first two Die Hard films.
When I was studying the business of video games in college, I learned a lot of lessons about pitching new titles to potential investors. The best strategy is unashamedly commercial: the money people need to know what existing thing the final product is going to look like. Is your platformer going to be more Mario or Limbo? How about your shooter, is it Halo or Call of Duty? Which of those franchises has made the most money recently? What will players be comfortable enough paying for based on what they already like?
The economy of Hollywood blockbusters works the same way. If Jurassic Park had never stomped its way through the box office, there would be less precedent for audiences turning out for The Relic and more mammoth reptilian monsters that only exist through the arrogance of man. The creative innovations of movies like Alien [5/5] and The Terminator have longer tails culturally, but the immediate aftermaths of these movies are almost always ripoffs at worst, similarity tinged peers at best.
As producers of renown, Mercer and especially Hurd probably didn’t want their names attached to a cheap knockoff of better movies. This Relic adaptation needed high production values to convince audiences to not think about Jurassic Park and Aliens for two hours. What easier way to get those than to film at an actual museum?
Paramount got in contact with the Natural History Museum in New York and offered to pay seven figures for the ability to film The Relic in the building that inspired it. However, not jazzed by the prospect of hosting a violent horror movie inspired by a former employee’s negative opinion of them, the institute declined. They also implied that they didn’t want kids to see the movie and then be afraid to come visit the museum. Honestly, that’s fair; the Natural History Museum is scary enough without a movie monster to worry about. Have you seen those giant stuffed Alaskan grizzly bears? Terrifying!
While the studio searched for a backup museum, director Peter Hyams was brought on board to actually helm The Relic. Hyams is a true journeyman without much in the way of signature style or preferred genre, but his back catalogue of work is nuts.
He wrote, produced, and directed the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact in 1984 before getting into the buddy cop craze the following year with action comedy Running Scared [2.5/5]. After a few years of various action thrillers, he helped bring Jean-Claude Van Damme to the top of the box office in 1994 with Time Cop [2.5/5], then worked with the Muscles from Brussels again in 1995 on Sudden Death. He wasn’t often directing movies that he had also written, but Hyams is notable for acting as his own Director of Photography on every one of his movies after 2010. Cool career!
Finally, the producers found a backdrop for their Relic. The Field Museum in Chicago is maybe just as famous and beloved as its New York counterpart, and contains many of the same visual indicators: grand halls, dinosaur skeletons, dioramas of stuffed wildlife, all of which could build tension and suspense to great effect. This setting would go a long way to adding legitimacy to The Relic, but another element was commissioned to truly elevate it to that next level.
Stan Winston’s effects studio has been prominently featured a couple times so far in this column. Their incredible prosthetics for The Island of Dr. Moreau offered the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal experience while the brilliant practical lion effects they put together for The Ghost and the Darkness elevated a mediocre movie into a decent one. For The Relic, Winston’s crew had to create a whole new monster and figure out a way to bring it to life.
The studio was given full creative freedom to design the Kothoga monster, since the source material had only roughly sketched it as a scaly ape thing. Settling on a monstrous chimera of a spider, lion, and crocodile, Winston’s team built massive versions of the Kothoga that could be used for practical shots of the monster. A human actor would stay within the suit to operate parts of it, while other elements were controlled by a nearby radio operator. Piloting the Kothoga was an exhausting ordeal for the performers within the suit, but despite that and the limited pre-production time of only four months, Winston’s School crafted the feature’s creature on time.
Ready to hit the Field with their beast, the director and producers figured out the cast.
The director had big ideas. Hyams wanted Harrison Ford to play the heroic Detective D’Agosta and Robert DeNiro to play the wise, wheelchair-bound Dr. Frock. I admire the ambition, but come on man. That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, those roles were taken by Tom Sizemore and James Whitmore respectively. Whitmore, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 87, is one of those old school performers that you’ve probably seen in a bunch of stuff but don’t recognize right away. He’d been a working actor since the ‘40s, and had starred in Oklahoma! [4/5], Planet of the Apes [also a 4/5], and everything in between.
The cast of The Relic was rounded out by Oscar winner Linda Hunt as the museum’s curator Ann Cuthbert and Penelope Ann Miller as lead protagonist, evolutionary biologist Margo Green. Miller had played supporting parts in a few earlier hits like Adventures in Babysitting and Kindergarten Cop, but this was her first time starring in a horror movie. She plays the part as a quintessential ‘90s babe. She first appears on-screen wearing a flannel shirt, round glasses, short hair, and lace choker, which I don’t think is proper attire for labwork but certainly got me interested in the character.
So here’s a fun fact I found out about The Relic while poring through the limited research materials for it: this wasn’t even supposed to be a dump month movie. The original release date was some time in 1996, but the post production work on the necessary CG shots of the Kothoga pushed its premiere to January of ‘97. It’s entirely possible that had everything gone according to plan, The Relic would have been competing with hitters like Star Trek: First Contact or 101 Dalmatians. Instead, it was able to act as the first major release of 1997.
I think that ended up being a double-edged sword for the movie.
With weaker competition at the start of the year, The Relic ended up rising to the top of a much smaller pile than it would have faced if it had gone out in the back half of 1996.1 But the movies of January and February have a legitimate stigma against them, even the ones successful enough to be the biggest movie in America. Often, they’re forgotten about by moviegoers by the time the heavy hitters of the summer come rolling in.
This is what happened to The Relic in the long-term. I had never heard of it at all before I sat down to watch it for this column, and I’m not the only one. The movie has less than half the logged viewers on Letterboxd as Ransom, a movie that literally doesn’t exist digitally on the internet. Of the little modern coverage of The Relic I can find, it’s always referred to as a hidden gem, a forgotten artifact of the post-Jurassic Park ‘90s.
All this taught me that I need to reframe my expectations for movies I’ve never heard of. I thought The Relic would be a disaster, but in reality, I actually found it worthy of preservation.
The main premise of the source material survives adaptation despite the script having four credited screenwriters (never a good sign). The monstrous Kothoga terrorizes the Field Museum and its big gala, trapping a small group of characters that must figure out how to survive by either escaping or killing the beast. Some minor changes from book to movie streamline the plot to fit a more reasonable runtime, and this is probably where you’re expecting me to trash the screenplay of this horror movie you’ve never heard of.
I actually found the script for The Relic to be quite fun. The collective filmographies of writers Amy Holden Jones, John Raffo, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver cover a wide swath of genres including horror, comedy, drama, and thriller, all of which end up in this movie. There are some surprisingly funny non-sequitur lines later in The Relic, and it’s capably structured, despite a slightly longer runtime than your typical creature feature.
The weakest part of the narrative is its early pacing issues. After a baffling opening scene in Brazil, we get too many cheap jumpscares of things like unseen cats and inconsiderate coworkers to get us on edge. The movie takes just a little too much time setting up its plot, setting, and characters instead of focusing more on building the tension within the Field Museum.
Though maybe it’s a little generous to say that the plot of The Relic is filled with “characters.” There are plenty of human beings depicted on screen, and some of them even have one or two little personality foibles to get you to chuckle or roll your eyes during the movie’s dialogue scenes. But don’t expect any complicating factors like “depth” or “arcs”. This isn’t a movie about our protagonists bettering themselves or our antagonists getting their comeuppance. The Relic is about a giant monster in a natural history museum wreaking havoc, but unfortunately the first hour of the movie is spent building up to that, so we’re forced to make do with inessential human characters.
This opening stretch of The Relic also reveals its most interesting cinematic quirk: darkness. Hyams’s choice to shroud the movie in dramatic gloom leads to perhaps the most shadowy visual experience I’ve ever had watching a movie. Characters simply walking from one section of their workspace to another find themselves totally engulfed in darkness. Later, that shadow threatens to hide the hulking beast stalking its prey.
Is this all intended to build tension? Or is it simply dedication to maintaining a consistent cinematic language from beginning to end? I’d call the effect “nearly impressive.” It surely looks better on a high definition Blu Ray or projected onto a theater’s screen. But on my monitor, the low visual fidelity mixing with the lack of light often made the movie go from moody to muddy real fast.
Still, there are worse places to film boring scenes of characters failing to realize they’re in mortal peril. The Field Museum adds so much production value to The Relic, elevating it from shlock to shockingly good looking. The grand halls and high ceilings of the exhibitions and entrance contrast well with the eerie darkness of other subsections. It becomes surprisingly easy to believe that a horrifying creature could stalk the institution's halls, especially with the exaggerated darkness that Hyam was already using.
Once the Kothoga actually shows up, the movie explodes into a gory good time. Due to a hunger for hormones, the monster’s strategy is entirely focused on decapitation of its prey before it digs the hypothalamus out and tosses the rest of the skull aside for horrified characters to find later. I believe Winston’s school also did the practical gore effects in this movie, purely based on the fact that they look extremely sick. Slimy brains, decapitated heads frozen in a state of terminal terror, and even an occasional medieval impalement all spice up the Kothoga’s wrath.
The effect isn’t the most grisly gore of all time, and it’s more played for fun shock than mortal terror, but it warrants a content warning regardless. If you can’t handle any movie gore at all, The Relic probably won’t be for you.
The Kothoga’s presence in the Field builds a slow simmer of fear throughout the second act, as the characters try to catch what they think is a vicious maniac and investigate the mysterious shipment from Brazil that secretly holds the key to the deaths in the museum. It’s in this section before the movie truly devolves into chaos that it’s easiest to notice that none of the performances, maybe bar Whitmore’s, are all that strong. Moments of normal human conversation about murder investigations, interoffice politics, and light flirting fall flat, almost as though the actors can’t wait for the next monster scene either.
Much of The Relic is built on genre clichés, from the pacing of its scare scenes to its characters. It’s a derivative work nearly all the way through, to mixed results. There are better movies you can watch where a hardboiled detective takes on a terrifying monster, and there are plenty of classics of genre filmmaking that build tension in more original ways.
The one element of The Relic that stands out as somewhat unique is its focus on science. Miller’s character and her colleagues take a lot of time to try to analyze the Kothoga’s DNA to try and figure out what they’re dealing with, rather than just running away in terror. It’s clearly inspired by Jurassic Park, but as a reflection of the movie’s theme of the intersection of science and superstition, it’s both distinct and well-executed.
The final hour of The Relic is by far the movie’s best part. The dialogue starts getting campier (the mayor simultaneously forces D’Agosta to shut down the investigation and brags that his wife’s cleavage won him the election), and the film builds towards a Jaws-esque moment of schadenfreude where the corrupt elites who insisted that the big gala go on as planned (despite the horrific murders) reap their terrifying reward in the shape of the Kothoga.
Literally the second the thought crossed my mind that I’d like to see what the monster looks like now, please, Hyams and the screenplay finally give us a full gander at what Winston has wrought. The practical suit looks incredible, a flawless execution of an impressive design. The mighty size of the Kothoga makes the scenes that frame it as the perfect ambush predator a bit silly, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief for a cool reveal like this.
From this point onward, The Relic kicks into high gear as it transitions from a haunted house movie to something resembling The Poseidon Adventure. Our cast is separated and trapped in a killbox that used to just be the Field Museum; one party attempts to fight the monster, the other tries its best to flee. This narrative structure is hardly unique, but it does put The Relic in conversation as an early entry in the Disaster Movie resurgence of late ‘90s, following the massive success of Twister and Independence Day the previous summer.
The second hour of The Relic doesn’t fix the major problems of the first half, but it does put them in a narrative context that makes them easier to swallow. The poor characterization means it’s more fun than tragic when certain characters face their doom. The questionable performances by the bulk of the cast add a campy charm to their panic and terror. The biggest winner of this effect is the dark cinematography; where once it felt unnecessary, it is now Hyams’s greatest tool in building frightful suspense.
As our characters plunge the depths of the flooded tunnels beneath the Field Museum, we get many point-of-view shots of the narrow beam of a flashlight dragging across the total shadows around them. Each revelation of what lies in the dim is a thrilling conflict of relief that there’s nothing there and terror of what the next second will illuminate.
The only part of the second half that is straight up worse than the first is the movie’s increased reliance on CG. When we only get dark glances of the Kothoga, The Relic is happy to just use closeups of the practical suit. Upon the full unveiling of the monster though, questionable computer graphics are used to depict its violent hunger for human brain stems. Most of the time, the dark visual palette of the movie saves the day by obscuring the CG Kothoga in shadow, and it’s not all bad. There’s a surprisingly excellent extended shot of the creature chasing a nameless character from the background into the foreground before using its chompers to remove that pesky head.
Unfortunately, certain explosive parts of the climax look hilariously bad due to unflattering brightness. By this point in the film I had bought in on the campy fun of The Relic, but the visuals of the final confrontation between Penelope Ann Miller and the Kothoga are meant to impress, not draw laughs. Instead, they’re almost so bad they’re amazing, in a retro kind of way.
The end result is less terrifying than Alien but maybe just a bit more fun. The Relic is hardly as impressive or thought provoking as Jurassic Park but does go a bit crazier with the carnage it depicts. As a disaster movie, the film fails to convey the larger implications of failing to stop its central terror like future entries in this column that more intentionally attempt to ride the trend. But as an accidental early guest at the subgenre party, it’s more than adept at depicting the pandemonium of society breaking down under the pressure of mortal terror, thanks to production values that certainly punch well above the movie’s weight.
Maybe The Relic caught me on a good day, but I had a lot of fun with it. It’s hardly a perfect movie; if I’m being honest, it’s quite bad in some parts. But I have a personal fondness for creature features and over-the-top practical gore effects from this time period, so I think personal bias is carrying this review to a recommendation. It’s dumb fun, and filled with elements that will likely turn many viewers off, but if you find yourself in the mood for a goofy good time with more decapitations than you’ve seen in any other movie, check this one out on a random Sunday afternoon. Maybe fold some laundry or something with the first half on in the background though.
I’m a little disheartened by the weak 34% that The Relic has on Rotten Tomatoes, but not too surprised. Some critics went into the movie with the wrong expectations. Emanuel Levy over at Variety dug the mystery that was set up in the first half but found the second hour to be derivative and uninspired, despite an unprecedented number of heads flying off at that point. Meanwhile, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel both enjoyed the film, with each critic recommending it on the basis of its impressive technical accomplishments and fun thrills. Maybe it was their Chicago bias shining through (like last week’s film), but I’m glad they were able to engage with The Relic on its own terms.
The movie launched to basically no genre competition. If you were a horror fan in early 1997, your options were this or the month-old Scream [3.5/5]. Most people just stayed home. The Relic was able to top the box office for a single week by pulling in just over $9 million. It slid down the charts from there, exiting the top 10 a month later and vanishing from theaters entirely in early May. Despite a strong debut and no competition early on, The Relic ended up being a bomb, grossing only $34 million on a $45 million budget.
Anecdotally, it seems like most fans of this movie found it on VHS in the years after its theatrical release, a reminder that the long term landscape for movies used to be a lot brighter than it is now. The Relic hasn’t received a retrospective reinterpretation of its quality or a freak boom in viewership thanks to TikTok, but it has its fans out there if you look. I guess you could count me as one as well.
The Relic is not a perfect movie, but it is entertaining, and a good snapshot of certain trends around the time of its release. The people going to the movies in 1997 were interested in thrillers that explored scientific themes, monster movies that blew minds with their great effects, and disaster films that showed humans on the brink. This movie isn’t the best at being any of those, but it’s decently adequate at them across the board. Being derivative enough to capitalize on its moment earned The Relic a single weekend as the biggest movie in America, but it also doomed the film to obscurity before that year’s Memorial Day.
I don’t think The Relic is worth enshrining in museums as a cultural curio of the late ‘90s, but if you’re a horror or scifi fan and have missed it, seek it out if you’re in the mood for a bloody good time.
Rating: 3/5
Next Week’s Movie: Aw man, do we have to? Despite the silliness of the film itself, the column’s gonna be a sad one. We’re tragically completing the Chris Farley story with the review of Beverly Hills Ninja.
See you then!
-Will
Basically the only movie from that period that The Relic would have beaten if it had released then and retained its same box office gross would have been Moreau