Don’t let the box art fool you; Reptilicus is about as scary as an old socket puppet. A lengthy serpent with tiny legs and arms, it features a prominent wings on its back which it never uses to fly. Reptilicus is sort of a prehistoric dinosaur penguin. Because he can’t fly, and his arms and legs wouldn’t support an infant, he can only move by slithering along on the ground like a snake, and can only effectively destroy anything by bashing its head into things. Can you imagine how much that would hurt? I don’t care how hard your skin is; smacking your cranium into a well-stocked Danish department store is bound to leave a lump. Reptilicus also has green slime spit which has the properties of acid, but this too only makes him look like a boob since the effect on screen is akin to putting a piece of cardboard on top of the film. The beast never seems to be intentionally spitting at people, it’s more like he’s eaten a bad Danish burrito and now he’s paying the price.

Reptilicus is awoken after a drill cuts through his frozen tail on an excavation dig. The severed tail is taken by driller Svend Viltorft (Bent Mejding) to Professor Otto Martens (Asbjørn Andersen) who puts the thing into a large freezer. When an electrical mishap thaws out the tail and it begins to heal and grow, Prof. Martens throws caution and the value of human life into the wind and chooses to allow nature to take its deadly, wrathful course rather than refreeze the thing so it can’t hurt people. Eventually (about forty-five minutes into the flick if you want to skip to “the good stuff”), Reptilicus breaks free of Prof. Martens’ lab and begins his pathetic path of marginal, easily repairable destruction.

In order to quell this lackadaisical bloodbath, American General Mark Grayson (played, like everyone else in this movie, by a European, one Carl Ottosen), is illogically given command of the entire Danish army to go after Reptilicus with disturbing zeal. Since Pink was able to convince Denmark that REPTILICUS was going to be a surefire sci-fi classic - and don’t ask me how - he was given the entire army at his disposal, so there is tons of footage of real soldiers with real weapons shooting real bullets, all put into service for the sake of destroying this poor helpless creature. They blow the thing up, they shoot it full of holes, they light the thing on fire for goodness’ sake. But poor, poor Reptilicus simply refuses to die.