LOST COLONY: THE LEGEND OF ROANOKE [NR]
review by Robert Newton
As if the script for this Sci-Fi Channel movie had been unimaginatively lifted directly from a handful of Wikipedia pages, so plods this sleepy, 
hollow historical yarn about what may have happened to the English colony off the coast of North Carolina in 1587. Supposedly, every last man, woman and child disappeared without a trace from the island garrison. These are their stories (with some hokum about soul-sucking Norse spirits thrown in, apparently, to appease the large contingent of sci-fi and horror fans who were flooding Sci-Fi’s offices with cards and letters demanding The Evil Viking Dead).
There’s not much logic or coherence here. The fort set is nice, and so is the Indian village, but they seem to be making up for the lack of solid writing. Writer Rafael Jordan just keeps changing the rules while piling on the contrivances, like the in-touch-with-nature natives and the psychically intuitive pregnant wife, and its a frustrating sleight-of-hand. Fellow B-movie soldier Matt Codd doesn’t quite have the “don’t let ‘em see the monster ’til they absolutely need to see the monster” concept down, and the marauding spooks look too much like Day-Glo haunted house cast-offs.
To his credit, “Highlander” star Adrian Paul makes a solid effort of his role as Ananias Dare, the acting governor of the colony besieged by ee-vil. He pulls off the English accent (as he was born with it), though everyone else is literally all over the map (and I swear I heard a Cockney-Brooklyn-Aussie in there somewhere). The only drama revolves around Dare’s newborn daughter, the object of the horned apparitions’ affections, and even that is lazily played for the obvious connections to Rosemary’s Baby and Poltergeist. At least with historically based dark fantasy like this, though, The Sci-Fi Channel gets to make one less giant lizard/insect/alien invasion movie.•••
*SPECIAL FEATURES: None.
*TRIVIA TIDBIT: In 2007, The Lost Colony of Roanoke DNA Project was founded in order to solve the mystery of the Lost Colonies of Roanoke using historical records, migration patterns, oral histories and DNA patterns.
