‘Creature’ Has Strong Links to the Past

A creature with a shark’s face and bloodthirsty temperament, the product of genetic engineering gone awry, has slipped from these waters and is swimming toward the United States. If sighted, approach with extreme caution. It is bred to eat up as many TV viewers as possible during May sweeps, and it may have you in its jaws before you realize that it’s pretty much toothless.

Like the beast of its title, “Peter Benchley’s Creature”--a two-part miniseries Sunday and Monday on ABC--is an experiment pushed too far: a breeding of “Jaws” with “Jurassic Park” with “The Island of Dr. Moreau” with “Godzilla” with “Creature From the Black Lagoon” with . . . well, just about every other creature feature you can think of. (It also has a government-conspiracy angle right out of “The X-Files,” which it will need, since it is going up against the Fox show’s much-anticipated season finale.)

Though “Creature” delivers some wild, loopy thrills (especially in the first, more tautly constructed installment), it can’t sustain itself for four hours. Soon, we begin picking apart its weird science and scoffing at its insistence on batting around such phrases as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

Based on “Jaws” author Benchley’s 1994 novel “White Shark,” the movie unfolds in the Caribbean, where the more dangerous sharks turn out to be those who have invaded these azure waters to conduct genetic experiments for the U.S. Navy. In 1972, a top-secret team seeks to engineer a perfect killing machine, to be released in the rice paddies of Vietnam. The team successfully breeds sharks (for their killer instinct) with dolphins (for their intelligence) with a certain, shall we say, wild-card creature. The mutant, of course, escapes.

Twenty-five years later, marine biologist Simon Chase (Craig T. Nelson) is studying the area’s sharks--seeking a cancer cure--when the waters begin turning red with the blood of sport-fishing operators and cliff divers. As the locals vow to hunt his precious sharks, Chase--joined by his assistant, Tall Man (Cress Williams); marine biologist ex-wife, Amanda (Kim Cattrall); and 15-year-old son, Max (Matthew Carey)--sets out to discover what’s really out there, eyeing the islanders as its own, private sushi sampler.

Rockne S. O’Bannon’s script glances across such issues as humankind’s seeming inability to live in harmony with either its own or other species. But mostly, the point--under Stuart Gillard’s direction--is to speed from one cheap thrill to the next.

* “Peter Benchley’s Creature” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for viewers younger than 14, with scenes of intense violence).