Three Films Make A Post: Don't meddle with the devil.

Saturday Morning Mystery aka Saturday Morning Massacre (2012): This low budget horror comedy by Spencer Parsons posits an edgy version of the Scooby Doo cast with filed-off numbers visiting a supposedly haunted house that does end in a bit of a massacre for them.

This isn’t really my kind of humour: “just imagine the gang having sex while on LSD”, “let’s kill the dog!” just doesn’t do much for me as jokes go, particularly since the movie doesn’t do terribly much with the set-up. To be fair, the gory bits are nicely realized and staged.

Moonfall (2022): This Amazonbuster mixes Roland Emmerich’s main interests as a director: big dumb fun science fiction, big dumb unfun disaster movies, and not giving talented actors much to do. Well, I’m unfair about the third point, for the lead is played by Patrick Wilson, who is just his usual voidal self and is probably not playing below his possibilities there.

Whenever the film stays in the big dumb SF area – with a bit of idiot conspiracy theories and a cameo by Donald Sutherland – and makes a drinking game out of the word “megastructure”, it is actually a lot of brainless fun. Alas, whenever the disaster movie parts turn up, particularly in the otherwise wonderfully bonkers second half of the film, it’s the usual drag of Emmerich disaster types going through the Emmerich disaster movie motions. Though the film gets bonus points for squeezing a completely out of leftfield Fast and Furious CG car chase in.

Sweeney! (1977): Sweeney was a very popular ITV series that turned up the amount of sex and the violence allowed for a British TV show of the time. It was popular enough for two movie spin-offs which dial up the sex a bit and the violence even a lot more when compared with what the producers could just get away with on the TV. This first one, directed by David Wickes, does a version of the Profumo affair – a bit of an evergreen in the UK – but with rather a lot more murders to hush the affair up, and even more loathing for the political class than you’d expect going in.

Everybody is ugly, brutish and not terribly clever, London looks ugly, grimy and unpleasant, and our hero (John Thaw) eventually wins the day with an act of astonishing amorality. So, even if you’re like me and have seen not a single episode of the series, this is probably going to be a whole lot of fun as a nasty little bit of 70s crime/conspiracy cinema.

Past Misdeeds: The Black Hole (2006)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

That most dangerous of all scientific endeavours, Quantum acceleration experiments, as taken on in a certainly highly scientific establishment in St. Louis goes rather wrong, opening a black hole in the fabric of space-time, as these things tend to. The black hole quite impolitely starts eating up the surrounding matter, growing in curious stops and starts in the progress, and threatening to eat up the whole planet rather sooner than later.

Because only one of the three initial scientists of the project, Dr (I assume) Shannon Muir (Kristy Swanson) has survived the film's first five minutes, the military under the surprisingly competent and sane General Stryker (David Selby) calls in former project member Eric Bryce (Judd Nelson), who brings with him the aftershocks of a bad divorce, moon eyes between him and Shannon, ridiculous mad scientist hair, and a chip on his shoulder because he was right all along. As if closing up a black hole weren't problem enough for two more or less sexy scientists, an energy creature has slipped out of the black hole, eating electricity (and people) and feeding the black hole in the process. Shannon and Eric are doing their best to resolve the situation before the increasingly humongous black hole eats all of the landmarks of St. Louis, and eventually find out the creature's - and therefore the black hole's - central weakness, which at least is neither salt nor the power of love this time around.

It's just too bad that their government would really rather resolve the problem in more traditionally American ways, by dropping an H-bomb on their problem and the remaining citizens of St. Louis, despite our heroic experts telling them this would only make matters worse. Consequently our heroes have not just one but two races against time to win. Fortunately, the film provides a bombing mad general to Stryker's sane one, so the latter is free to actually be helpful.

People who are wrong will tell you that Tibor Takács's The Black Hole (produced by Nu Image for our friends at the - then - SciFi Channel) is a stupid piece of nonsense when in truth it's a film that provides a whole lot of fun based on a silly yet clever idea of the kind it's not difficult to imagine to find in an episode of the classic Outer Limits.

As everyone who isn't wrong knows, Takács in his incarnation as direct-to-DVD and direct-to-TV director is pretty excellent at squeezing fun films out of sometimes (okay, most of the time) doubtful scripts and tiny budgets, and his The Black Hole is absolutely no exception. The film is perfectly paced, hitting the disaster movie and semi-monster movie beats at just the right moments, never stopping for too long along the way to let the audience think too much about the (im)probabilities of what's going on.

Sure, if you're the kind of person who can't help but bemoan curious scientific ideas, the bizarre lack of scientific staff in US government during a scientific catastrophe [this was evidently written some time ago], and call them "plot holes", you won't have any fun with this, and even Takács won't be able to distract you from actively avoiding fun, but then, why are you watching a film about a black hole opening up in Missouri in the first place?

For the rest of us, the film at the very least shows a degree of coherence. That is to say, if you accept The Black Hole's sometimes (okay, always) bizarre assumptions about the nature of reality, it proceeds logically enough from them to create a diverting SF pulp movie plot that provides Takács with ample opportunity to show soldiers vaporized, and parts of St. Louis eaten by a black hole. Which, surely, is all we can ever ask of a film called The Black Hole. To make up for a tight budget, Takács shows most of the major destruction through the eyes of shaky TV footage happening on screens with dubious resolutions, a cost-conscious decision that works beautifully - thanks to good timing much better than in other SyFy movies trying the same trick.

Added to the film's entertaining pulp trappings are some rather sarcastic nods in the direction of political crisis management - particularly in a scene of the US president and his aides writing a bathetic speech about the nuclear destruction of St. Louis before the fact intercut with our scientist heroes' attempts to actually do something to save the the city and the world. It's also difficult to miss the fact that the least effectual (and most destructive) ideas to solve all problems come courtesy of "Homeland Security", which can hardly be a coincidence in a US film made after hurricane Katrina.

In the less real world, SyFy experts will be astonished that the catastrophe is only normalizing the relationship between Eric and his ex-wife and daughter, instead of bringing the grown-ups back together as is annoying tradition and stupid rule in these films, nor does Shannon sacrifice herself to protect Eric's family or something of that sort. Why, you might even think the film argues moving on after a divorce is a good thing! I am quite conscious that all I’m getting a clichéd romance instead of the cliché divorce regression here, but then, this isn't something too typical for a SyFy movie. Perhaps Takács made The Black Hole too early in the cycle for the Rule of Un-Divorce to have already been in effect?


Given these achievements and minor surprises of and in The Black Hole, I'll end this with the traditional phrase that could end half of my SyFy Channel Original write-ups: what's not to like!?

In short: Lost in the Pacific (2016)

If this is the way mainstream Chinese cinema wants to break into international markets, nobody in Hollywood needs to lose a second of sleep, unless one is prone to have nightmares from terrible films. Vincent Zhou’s film doubles down on all the problems hounding big budget Chinese mainland cinema – the antiseptic writing, the stiff acting, the technically accomplished but creatively bankrupt look – and makes things worse by adding everything you can do wrong in an international co-production of this sort. So the female lead of a film shot in English goes to the only Chinese actress in the film whose English is truly bad – Zhan Yuqi – because she’s the most popular female cast member in China instead of someone who can actually deliver her lines. The western actors are mostly horrible or miscast to absurdity. Brandon Routh as tough special forces soldier turned cook anyone?

The dialogue – despite one Peter Cameron whom I suspect to be an English native speaker credited as co-writer – often sounds as if it were directly translated from Mandarin, which leads to many a dialogue sequence full of hilarious non-sequiturs and clichés, turning a film that is clearly meant as a serious adventure/SF/disaster movie thing into a comedy of embarrassment for everyone involved.

The plot? Some guff about an airplane Titanic, people acting in the most idiotic ways possible, a bunch of walking clichés, a thousand different plotlines without much of a connection or development, and the horrible threat of a horde of CGI cartoon cats who can be calmed by music, namely a blind guy doing horrible things to the classical canon on his cello. Seriously. It’s the sort of script that makes your typical Michael Bay movie look like Shakespeare in comparison. And no, of course there’s neither suspense nor tension to be found anywhere. There are only pretty people who won’t (even though least some of them could) act, saying the darndest things.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)

Well, one really can’t say Anthony C. Ferrante and his The Asylum brethren aren’t doing their damndest to top the first film here, with triple the sharknados, quadruple the useless cameos, New York replacing Los Angeles, and about ten times about as much stupidity included (which certainly must have taken special effort). The resulting film perhaps doesn’t have ten times the entertainment value, but if you can roll with the over-excited, a few times somewhat smug, stupidity of an opus that starts out with a sharknado induced near-plane crash that gets its “near” pre-fix from the first film’s returning surfer dudes hero’s first act of improbable (even in context of, you know, sharknados and the head of the Statue of Liberty running amuck) heroism, and gets increasingly deranged from there.

Apart from all the fighting against flying sharks (and one lone bonus New York Sewer alligator, though not a flying one), there’s a lot of the sort of cliché New Yorker-dom you expect from this sort of thing, the usual stuff about cab drivers, how awesome New York is supposed to be, and so on. Every second minor character is a cameo by someone from the freakshow by-ways of American popular culture, so expect sightings of mythical creatures like Kurt Angle, Andy Dick and Billy Ray Cyrus while Vivica A. Fox, Ian Ziering and Kari Wuhrer – A-list material all from this perspective - are trying to keep their faces straight.

The real surprise to me here is how watchable and entertaining the whole load of crap stays despite the cameos of people you really don’t want to be reminded of (though I as a European at least get the kick of pointing and laughing at those exotic whacky Americans here), though I’m pretty sure the third Sharknado later this year will be a piling steam of self-satisfied smugness and completely unwatchable. This one though, it’s easy enough to have fun with.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,in short,syfy vs the mynd,anthony c. ferrante,ian ziering,vivica a. fox,kari wuhrer,disaster

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Earth’s Final Hours (2011)

aka Armageddon 2012

Uh-oh! A rude white hole spits dense matter at the Earth, which goes right through the planet, destroys the magnetosphere and stops our favourite planet’s rotation. It looks very much as if it’s time for the end of the world again.

CIA agent John Streich (Robert Knepper) is on the scene when the matter strikes, and soon it’s up to him, scientist Chloe Edwards (Julia Benson), his hacker son Andy (Cameron Bright), and Andy’s best friend Michelle (Julia Maxwell) to save the world with a very secret scientific method developed by one Dr. Rothman (Bruce Davison).

Unfortunately, the actual world-saving method Rothman devised has never been tested or investigated much, because the CIA under Streich’s evil boss Lockman (Michael Kopsa) and his evil boss’s evil boss, the doubly evil Arnett (Roark Critchlow), a) wanted to use it as a weapon (of course) and b) preferred the simpler plan of only saving a small part of the world full of the Important People™. Consequently, Rothman has spent the last fifteen years in a secret CIA prison masked as a mental institution.

Streich and his friends are a “let’s save everyone” kind of gang, though, so soon they are not only involved in a race against time (and some mighty destructive solar storms) to save the world, but also against Lockman’s attempts to only save a very small part of it, and kill everyone getting in the way.

Here I thought I had by now seen all SyFy movies actually worth seeing, and then along comes W.D Hogan’s (him of the execrable Independence Daysaster and the excellent Behemoth) Earth’s Final Hours to prove me wrong. Of course (and do I even need to say this?) the plot is patently ridiculous, the science is preposterous, and the way the film’s world works has nothing whatsoever to do with any part of consensus reality, but then, that’s really not what anyone (except IMDB reviewers and other people with a desperate need to prove their superiority over innocent little films like this) looks for in this kind of film.

What we – or at the very least I – do look for in a SyFy disaster movie is the joy of witnessing yet another silly yet imaginative way of destroying the Earth, and the comfortable and even more silly way the given film will go about saving it. We generally also enter with a degree of hope concerning as much destruction as the budget will provide and perhaps even one or two fun performances.

Final Hours doesn’t disappoint here, for the way the world (doesn’t – spoiler!) ends here is indeed silly yet imaginative, gives reason to much movie science nonsense speak (pleasantly disconnected from any of your established scientific facts), the world is saved in an improbable, cheap yet awesome way that to my great surprise doesn’t involve exploding the white hole or Earth, and the little bit of destruction the sun storms wreak is very fun to look at.

As are Knepper’s, Kopsa’s and Davison’s performances, so the surprisingly well done action sequences Hogan provides are a bit of an overachievement (not that I’m complaining), as is the visual (and plot-logical) cleverness of having the whole thing take place in the brightest of sunlight. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with any of this, so Earth’s Final Hours gets my seal of approval.

Technorati-Markierungen: american tv,canadian movies,in short,syfy vs the mynd,disaster,sf,w.d. hogan,robert knepper,julia benson,michael kopsa,bruce davison

December Beach Party: Stonados (2013)

The agents of M.O.S.S. (yes, we still kind of exist in our own, half-assed manner) are nothing if not timely - or secret sympathizers of the Southern hemisphere - so December seems just like the right time to get down to the beach and find out what we find there.

There's trouble brewing for the people of Boston, British Columbia. Huge, water-y tornados are hitting the city's coastline, but these aren't your grandpa's tornados. Unless your grandpa's tornados spat more rocks than a disaster movie meteor shower (an early victim is the Plymouth Rock, and I'm not talking about the chicken breed), squashing people left and right. And even then, I suspect the rocks of Grandpa's tornados never exploded as the ones in Stonados like to do because of SCIENCE!

Fortunately for Boston, former volcanologist and storm chaser turned science teacher Joe (Paul Johansson), his former storm chasing buddy turned weekend replacement TV weather forecaster Lee (Sebastian Spence), and Joe's cop sister Maddy (Miranda Frigon) are there to help. Unfortunately, The Authorities represented by the Oceanic Blah-Blah Agency of Tara Laykin (Thea Gill) don't think a series of absurd tornados building over the open see and spitting exploding rocks are anything more than "freak weather", and want to see proof. No idea proof of what, really, but there you have it.

So, before the Government will provide our heroes with the bomb they'll need to blow the bad weather up - a time-honoured SyFy Channel way to get rid of all kinds of bad weather be it Ston- or Shark-nado - there's an ill-fated regatta to save and some sort of sports game (taking place in "the stadium", so the kind of sport is anyone's guess, though I suspect a film this pretend all-American will mean baseball) ending in catastrophe. Of course widower Joe's not quite happy kids need saving, of course Lee and Maddy will finally get around to doing something about their twenty years of affection disguised as bickering, and of course Laykin will die right when she's making her "oh Doctor Joe, you were so right and I'm so sorry" speech.

Obviously, and not surprisingly, there's nothing new going on in SyFy Channel disaster movie land, though Jason Bourque's film goes through the usual motions with enough élan to keep simple-minded folks like me entertained throughout. The film's tone, mostly treating the ridiculous bomb-throwing storm idea it has been cursed with by a marketing department in desperate search of stupid movie titles seriously but not treating it too po-faced either, works pretty well for the material, helping to distinguish it from Sharknado whose very American ideas about getting rid of tornados it shares.

The special effects aren't half bad this time around either, and they are surprisingly numerous too. I suspect it helps that the effects houses working on SyFy's projects have by now made so many films with giant tornadoes in them the people involved probably do tornados (particularly exploding tornados) in their sleep.

On the acting and characterization front this is perfectly decent though I couldn't escape the impression Bourque races through the character bits to get to the next piece of destruction, which, to be perfectly honest, is a bit more interesting than watching another US white core family get together again. I'd rather love to see a film showing one of these core families growing quickly apart again after the chupacabras are dead, the storms are gone, and the ice age prevented, but then I might be a mite cynical about these things.

Stonados earns itself bonus points by including a handful of scenes featuring William B. Davis as Boston's lighthouse keeper, having a chat with his bird, talking on the radio with the film's actual protagonists, and in the end getting crushed by his lighthouse.

So Stonados is a fun enough time at the beach, if you don't mind the exploding rocks.

Technorati-Markierungen: december beach party,american movies,american tv,reviews,jason bourque,paul johansson,sebastian spence,miranda frigon,william b. davis,disaster

Universal Van Damme: Derailed (2002)

Secret - so secret we never even learn what organization he's working for - agent Jacques Kristoff (Jean-Claude Van Damme, obviously) has a very bad day in front of him. Not enough that his people take him off his birthday vacation to help the thief Galina Konstantin (Laura Harring, totally Eastern European) escape from Slovakia carrying some very secret loot she's selling to his people, a thing sure to anger his wife (Susan Gibney) and kids (Jessica Bowman and authentic Van Damme son Kristopher Van Varenberg) who think he's some sort of business person. No, additionally, the train Jacques and Galina escape on after Jacques explodes some cars is hijacked by international evildoer Mason Cole (Tomas Arana) and his goons, Jacques's family makes a surprise visit on the train and now thinks he's having an affair with Galina, and the very secret loot turns out to be an upgraded variation of small pocks that of course is set free when Jacques starts playing Die Hard on a Train, infecting everybody on board.

Fortunately, Jacques can shoot, knows That Kick, drives motorcycles on roofs of moving trains, and is totally honourable too.

Bob Misiorowski's Derailed, produced by Van Damme's own company in cooperation with the usual suspects (I really need to get around to computing the percentage of Van Damme films involving Boaz Davidson in some capacity), is how I imagine most people not as involved in actually watching these films imagine all Van Damme movies are: cheap, dumb, and full of the sort of ridiculous action movie cheese that either leaves you giggling happily or rolling your eyes a lot (I prefer the former). Van Damme rides a motorcycle on the roof of a moving train for gods sake, and when one of his henchmen tells Cole he fell off doing this, Cole's reaction does not contain words to the effect of "wait, he drove what where?"!

Because doing Die Hard on a Train alone would be a bit too boring (one can't fall behind the achievements of Steven "The Whale" Seagal, after all), somebody involved in the production had the brilliant idea to add disaster movie clichés to the action movie clichés in a gesture I can't help but find quite daring. Not surprisingly, Derailed's interpretation of the disaster movie genre is even more low-rent than that of the action movie (or is it the Die-Hard-alike?), so don't go and expect the one-note characters to be played by Hollywood stars past their prime, or George Kennedy (a man perpetually past his prime). On the other hand, the mild melodramatic contortions the film goes through with small pocks and train engines on fire do result in a complete lack of slack in the film. When Van Damme isn't kicking people in the face, there's guaranteed to be some sort of train problem, a Texan losing his shit over the small pocks outbreak, Van Damme's doctor wife doing heroic disaster movie doctor stuff, or something else to distract a viewer from the horrible emptiness of the universe and the cold glare of the stars.

Given this, you really can't say the film isn't working hard for its money (there are also unconvincing CGI and miniature effects to admire). Sure, it's dumb, sure, it spits on your notions of logic and gravity, but it's also lacking boring attempts at self-irony, and contains lots of scenes of Van Damme doing Van Damme things; though if you're coming for nearly nude Van Damme or ass-shots of our hero, you'll probably leave rather disappointed.

Be that as it may (and heterosexual me has seen JCVD nearly nude so often, I'm starting to get confused when he keeps his pants on), I know, it's only a cheap Die Hard rip-off with disaster movie elements, but I like it.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,jean-claude van damme,bob misiorowski,laura harring,susan gibney,tomas arana,action,disaster

On Exploder Button: SyFy vs. The Mynd: The Black Hole (2006)

"Conan, what is best in life?"

"Watching a movie directed by Tibor Takács in which a black hole threatens St. Louis and a horrifyingly haired Judd Nelson and an underused Kristy Swanson are trying to save the world!"

Do what Conan did and click on through to my column about The Black Hole (not the Disney one) on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,syfy vs the mynd,tibor takács,kristy swanson,judd nelson,david selby,sf,disaster,other places

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Blast Vegas (2013)

aka Destruction: Las Vegas

Some really old teenagers are visiting Las Vegas to commit that most confounding of American religious rituals, "spring breaking". Because this is a movie, a party of male jocks has brought the supposed intellectual Nelson (Frankie Muniz) with them, while an independent party of female jockettes has brought just as supposedly intellectual Olive (Maggie Castle). Obviously, romance for Nelson and Olive is in the air.

Alas, before the couple can go on their first date, Nelson's jocks steal the sword of Tutmosis III out of the foyer of a casino where it is guarded by exactly one guard, and no additional security measures (and let's not even ask why the hell it is in a casino at all), and fuck around with it. Said around-fuckery awakens the sword's magical powers, and before you can say "abracadabra", a snake-headed magical sandstorm is blasting Vegas and is not going to stop until the city surrenders to Tutmosis III.

Of course, Nelson and Olive are separated early on, and Nelson begins to discover his inner hero, waltzing through various dangers to get to Olive. Fortunately, our young hero has befriended lounge singer and martini expert Sal Rowinski (Barry Bostwick) who acts the native guide for him and his friends; particularly Sal's intimate knowledge of Las Vegas's underground tunnel systems is of immense help.

Once the lovers are reunited by the hand of Bostwick, Olive - who just happens to be a student of ancient history - can exposit how to stop the sandstorm by surrendering to a guy who has been dead for quite some time and is surprisingly (perhaps disappointingly) enough not around as some kind of undead mummy. The act of surrendering is rather complicated and involves a scavenger hunt. Obviously.

Among the more peculiar phenomena in my cult movie watching of the past few years was the realization that the rather clever horror comedy Some Guy Who Kills People had the same director as Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus, a film that is many things but certainly not clever.

That very same Jack Perez is also responsible for our SyFy weird disaster movie of the day. As the other two movies by Perez I mentioned, it's a gain a comedy, but it heavily comes down on the camp and idiocy side of Mega Shark rather than the complexities of Some Guy. That's not exactly unexpected in a film produced for SyFy yet it does - surprisingly enough - not mean I didn't enjoy Blast Vegas quite a bit. In fact, Perez (working on a script by Joe D'Ambrosia and Tom Teves who were involved in the localisation of Blood+, it seems, which, dear IMDB, isn't the same as writing the show, how dubious an achievement that may have been anyhow) does some funny work wallowing in the absurdity of the plot and the absurdity of Las Vegas itself, throws in the handful of disaster set pieces his budget allows, and make me pretty happy with it.

It's only in a comedy where a guy looking like Frankie Muniz would be allowed to play the heroic lead (or rather the lead discovering his inner hero), which is a bit of a shame, really, not because I think Muniz would be any good in a dramatic role (I might be wrong, of course), but because I'd love the movies who do the "everyone can be a hero if he just tries" talk to do the appropriate walk. Speaking of heroics, I would have wished the film had given Maggie Castle one or two opportunities more to be heroic herself instead of needing quite as much saving. Despite what mainstream movies like to think, we aren't in the 50s anymore, so it would be nice if at least the supposedly ideologically more mobile low budget world could accept that. Of course, "male nerd discovers inner hero to rescue female nerd" is still a more involving and interesting narrative than "Buff Buffington, star, discovers inner hero".

Blast Vegas gets extra amusement points for a very funny performance by Barry Bostwick, who not only gets all the best lines but also the most open shirts and the most opportunities to walk around with a martini in his hand, as well as an equally funny cameo by John Landis and Joe Dante who do a variation of the good old Tarantino gangster talk shtick.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,reviews,disaster,fantasy,jack perez,frankie muniz,barry bostwick,maggie castle

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Sharknado (2013)

A historically bad hurricane hits the coast of California, bringing flooding, tornados and very hungry sharks in the process. Damn you, climate change! As you know, Jim, sharks like nothing more than moving into the streets and swimming pools of Beverly Hills. Nothing, that is, but flying around in a tornado to eat people.

Like all problems in the life of the USA, this too, can be solved by judicious use of explosions, an old-fashioned yet effective approach far superior to torture and hunting people around the world for committing journalism. But before the sharksplosion can happen, our designated hero, middle-aged surfer dude, bar owner and divorcee Fin (Ian Ziering), his side kick, Tasmanian surfer dude Baz (Jason Simmons), and shark-hating waitress Nova (Cassie Scerbo) have to take care of personal business, namely reaching Fin's ex-wife April (Tara Reid), and their kids Claudia (Aubrey Peeples) and Matt (Chuck Hittinger), saving people from the sharksmenace wherever they go. Will they do it in time? Who will be eaten first? (The alcoholic played by John Heard I didn't even mention). Will there ever be a SyFy movie with divorced people who don't get back together - or at least grow close again - thanks to alien invasions, the sasquatch, or flying sharks?

As regular readers of this blog (I'm so very, very sorry for everything, guys) will know, I generally loathe The Asylum and their approach to low budget knock-off genre cinema that unerringly leads them to making crappy movies that think winking at an audience and telling them how bad they are is irony, or films where the worst actor imaginable plays Sherlock Holmes in a way which makes Ianto from Torchwood look charismatic beside him, or films that don't realize that Robo-Hitler, gang rape, and forced abortion don't belong in the same movie, or films that are just plain boring because nobody involved had any ideas on how to fill the time between the two scenes that'll play good in trailers. In a surprising turn of events, The Asylum's Sharknado, as made by them for our old shameless friend, the SyFy Channel, and directed by Anthony C. Ferrante avoids all of these pitfalls.

In fact, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the movie is Ferrante's effective approach to the film's tone. It is obvious that everyone involved knows how utterly idiotic and clichéd (not to speak of making a mockery of science, logic, and possibly the American Way) the film's plot is, but instead of just pointing and laughing at itself, it plays much of what's going on in it straight, timing jokes so that they are actually funny, and pretending that a lot of the included absurdity (personal favourite: Ziering getting eaten by a shark, cutting himself free from the inside with a chainsaw, and also rescuing Scerbo, who had been swallowed by said shark while falling out of a helicopter, in the process) is really very earnest stuff; which is exactly why it becomes as funny as it is awesome. Turns out I get what a joke is even when the film isn't telling me.

Sharknado further endears itself to me by slowly escalating its silliness, starting off with comparatively mild stupidity like a ferris wheel rolling around to crush people and sharks swimming the streets, and slowly working itself up to the really idiotic/awesome stuff like people killing sharknados with explosions and cutting flying sharks out of the air with chainsaws. All the while, there's also some hoary disaster movie character stuff going on that never acknowledges the absurdity of the surrounding action for a second. It's truly beautiful in its conscious unconsciousness.

Plus, last but not least, Tara Reid has so little dialogue she doesn't even have enough space to invoke the depths of her lack of acting skill.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,reviews,anthony c. ferrante,ian ziering,cassie scerbo,jaason simmons,disaster,horror

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Ba'al - The Storm God (2008)

Technically, archaeologist Lee (Jeremy London) and ancient Sumerian translator Carol (Stefanie von Pfetten) are sent by their museum to check what the heck elderly archaeologist and Lee's former mentor Doctor Stanford (Scott Hylands) is doing at his dig in the (muddiest, warmest part of) the arctic circle. However, they soon find themselves involved in Stanford's hunt for four Sumerian amulets hidden all around the world (those Sumerians really travelled far) that are supposed to awaken the storm god Ba'al.

Unfortunately, even the excavation - or what the obsessed Stanford calls an excavation - of the first amulet is already enough to produce a supernaturally nasty storm - with a face - that ravages whichever part of the planet it touches. Further amulets will probably make the thing strong enough to destroy the Earth, or something. It takes quite some time until our heroes realize that Stanford is a raving lunatic, the kind of guy willing to risk destroying the world, rob his own museum and blame Lee for it, and rant whenever possible if it gives him a chance to cure the cancer he's dying from. Once they get it, it's time for a race around a world whose every country looks surprisingly like British Columbia.

Apart from Lee's and Carol's efforts, the storm squad of the US military and rogue meteorologist Doctor Pena (Lexa Doig) are also rather interested in the whole affair, what with super storms destroying the planet and all; there may be h-bombs in Baal's future.

Needless to say, the script for Paul Ziller's Ba'al is of glorious stupidity, mixing half-digested bits of archaeological lore, cultures that have fuck all to do with each other, ley lines, bad meteorology, illogical character motivation and all kinds of weird crap into a cocktail of sheer implausibility.

Also needless to say, the resulting film is highly entertaining in its overwhelming drive to be a low rent pseudo-archaeological adventure movie taking place all around the world while visibly never leaving Canada, and a low rent disaster movie at the same time, providing its audience with double the silly pseudo science, random chases, and a storm with glowing red eyes. Like nearly all films directed (and co-written) by Ziller, Ba'al is exceedingly well paced, which is to say, barely stops for a one minute breather before the next stupidly awesome thing happens, and always goes out of its way to provide as much thrills (in the classic and in the Bollywood sense of the term) as its budget can provide.

Ba'al may be stupid (and I'm hopeful everyone involved realizes that) but it sure as hell isn't letting itself get away with wasting time on winking at its audience, or being ashamed of its nature as contemporary pulp entertainment - that's after all time better spent on having Doig mumble outrageous stuff about super storms fed by the Van Allen Belt or have London and von Pfetten solve utterly idiotic "archaeological riddles".

I'm always astonished by the tenaciousness with which the better SyFy (in particular the ones directed by Ziller) movies actively work at being as fun as they can be, when really, they could get away with just putting any old crap on screen, something the bad SyFy movies of course do (I'm looking at you, Arachnoquake). That's probably not the spirit of art, but surely the spirit of the kind of low budget filmmaking that does care about its audience.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,in short,disaster,fantasy,paul ziller,jeremy london,stefanie von pfetten,scott hylands,lexa doig

Icy May (& SyFy vs The Mynd): Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon (2008)

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. This time around, I take a look at yet another SyFy movie. To my defence: it was the closest Yeti movie I hadn't watched.

A US college football team is on its way to Japan for some sort of big college football match (don't say the script doesn't start on improbable sounding excuses early). Alas, a digital storm - those are really bad for digital planes, let me tell you - hits at a bad moment, and their plane crashes high in the Himalayas. You know, the part of the Himalayas that's too high for helicopters to work but that's full of pretty Canadian looking trees quite above the actual tree line. This, as we have already learned from a pre-credit sequence, is also the part of the Himalayas where Yetis live.

However, before our heroes - star quarterback Peyton (Marc Menard), training assistant or whatever Sarah (Carly Pope), mandatory jerk Ravin (Adam O'Byrne) and assorted hangers-on - will encounter the hairy menace, they'll have to cope with their own inadequacies as plane crash survivors, namely a total inability to keep fires of a decent size going even though their plane crash site is right next to a whole lot of trees, their crap hunting skills (only one rabbit dies during their stay; and they're actually hunting for the elusive Himalayan squirrel), and the fact that jerk face Ravin is already talking cannibalism when we're just halfway into the movie and before he has even eaten the chocolate he's hidden away; I blame Alive for the latter.

So, even without the irritable and always hungry Yetis, survival chances for what goes as "our heroes" are pretty slim.

On the positive side, there's a rescue operation under way. However, because there's just no room for minor actors when the principals are already bad enough, said operation consists of two people (Ona Grauer and Peter DeLuise) hiking through the area, which isn't exactly the sort of thing I'd hope for from my rescue operations.

So yeah, as you may have already surmised reading the above, Yeti is one of those SyFy movies where nobody bothered to apply even those parts of simple logic to the script that wouldn't have cost them a penny, a problem that hits the film particularly hard during its first half when our protagonists are mostly occupied with a not very clever child's idea of survival. It's one thing to have people act incompetent in dangerous situations - a football team isn't after all where you'd look for survival specialists - but it's quite another to pretend that they're making any kind of effort when clearly they don't. In this regard, it also isn't exactly helpful that the film - directed by the usually at least decent Paul Ziller - never manages to sell the dangerous circumstances the characters supposedly find themselves in as more dangerous than a camping trip in British Columbia. All this - and the not exactly great acting - makes it quite difficult to take the characters' plight in any way seriously, even when one is willing, as I generally am, to make certain allowances for low budget affairs like this. Discussions on the "don't eat my dead brother" level don't exactly help there.

Consequently, Yeti is at its best - or at least its most entertaining - whenever it doesn't attempt to be a low budget version of Alive and wallows in its other identity as a low budget Yeti movie, the sort of thing where a character uses a ripped off arm as a splint, Yetis (by the way mostly realized via suitmation that's just as problematic as the more SyFy-typical CGI) jump like rascally rabbits, and the best way to get rid of them is the old concrete shoe trick. That part of the movie is really rather entertaining, particularly since Ziller does know how to film silly monster action quite well.

Yeti is even willing to teach its audience something new about its titular monster, namely, that all a Yeti truly wants is to abduct a cute human girl to cuddle up to at night (Mrs Yeti seems okay with it). Also, Yetis snore.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,horror,icy may,syfy vs the mynd,paul ziller,marc menard,carly pope,ona grauer,peter deluise