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Two thousand years ago, an evil sorcerer conjured up the ultimate warrior to rid the world of infidels and those who would not bow to the king of Babylon. The beasts are called the sacred twins—two winged creatures that have an insatiable appetite for blood. The locals call them manticore, and someone has turned them loose on the inhabitants of modern-day Iraq.
Sergeant Baxter (Robert Beltran), along with a group of soldiers, is sent to a small city in Iraq to find a missing reporter named Ashley (Chase Masterson) and her cameraman who haven’t been heard from for several days. The reporter is pushy and disrespectful, and she’s looking for weapons of mass destruction, which she believes are out there somewhere—but what she stumbles across is a living, breathing WMD that can’t be killed in the usual manner. If she can live through the incident, she’ll have a career-making story to write.
Penned down with a ruthless killer outside and another one inside, the soldiers fight for their lives against something that’s much worse than Iraqi insurgents.
For me, there are three things that can make a horror movie good: an intriguing plot, likable characters, and decent acting. Manticore has all three. It’s pure horror entertainment, but the terror aspects are balanced with characterization—so you get to know just enough about the soldiers to make you care whether they live or die without it slowing down the action. The one-liners are surprisingly funny and clever. And the setting will give you a glimpse of what soldiers’ lives are like while serving in the desert.
The creatures are straight out of mythical fairy tales, but they’re completely plausible within the realms of the supernatural. They aren’t just dropped into the plot to employ cheap horror thrills. And, considering the movie’s limited budget, the creatures look pretty realistic for something that doesn’t exist.
Manticore is exhilarating, engaging, and a bit gory, putting it at the top of my list as one of the best horror B-movies on the market.
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