SyFy vs. The Mynd: The Sea Beast (2008)

After a barely visible sea monster drags one of his sailors down to the bottom of the sea during a storm, fisherman Will McKenna (Corin Nemec) and the island community he makes his home in are beset by the monster and its brood. Turns out there are largely humanoid (though the characters say they look like anglerfish for some reason) amphibious, poison-spitting, practically invisible via super-chameleonism fish-frog creatures with prehensile tongues living under the sea. And the way they can jump, you might as well add flying to their grab-bag of superpowers.

The usual assortment of things in this kind of SyFy Channel movie happen, until things are put right again with a big damn explosion.

For the longest time, veteran SyFy director Ziller’s monster movie is a bit too bland for my tastes. I’m all for a film of the sub-genre not doing the whole “monster fighting brings an estranged family back together” thing but The Sea Beast doesn’t replace that set of tropes with anything specific at all, so that we end up with about an hour of characters without character traits doing stuff while from time to time a not terribly exciting monster attack happens. Ziller is a competent enough director to not make this part of the film too boring but actual excitement does live elsewhere.

It is worth it to get through that long slog of mediocre CGI and non-existent writing, though. For while the final half hour of the film leaves plausibility even further behind than the random ensemble of the powers its creatures (who are, by the way, alas not Lovecraftian Deep Ones) demonstrate already do, it does get into some rather fun monster fighting, with CGI creatures – as well as one surprise rubber head – getting dispatched in all manner of silly yet fun ways. There’s a decent pocket version of a siege scenario, some moments that amount to actual tension, and Corin Nemec as well as Miriam McDonald - who is playing his daughter – doing their damndest to work up to mini action hero status. It’s somewhat adorable and definitely fun, and while this isn’t rocking my SyFy Channel Original world, a merry final half hour of fun does turn The Sea Beast into a watchable piece of celluloid/ones and zeroes.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Swarmed (2005)

Oh hey, it's Jaws, but the shark is a swarm of accidentally genetically altered super yellow jackets and the beach festival is a burger cook-off sponsored by a Southern barbecue sauce magnate as played by Tim “Terrific” Thomerson.

No, wait, now I made the film sound rather good, when it is in fact an early example of those SyFy originals that just don't seem to understand which parts of their plots they can treat carelessly, and which they need to treat seriously, leading to a film that is so dumb you might confuse it with a parody of its kind of horror movie, if not for the fact that none of its jokes are funny, and no moment of idiocy paid for with any sort of cleverness.

Swarmed is a film that mostly impresses by how little anyone involved seems to care about their craft, with Miguel Tejada-Flores's script containing not a single thought – either of its own or borrowed from somewhere else -, nor a single fun idea, while slavishly following the usual mechanics of the sub-genre (we can't have anyone watching die of a heart attack when not everything in the movie is completely predictable), while Paul Ziller's - a man who really can do better in the SyFy movie realm - direction never bothers to even try to get a grip on the clichéd, meandering plot. Ziller is certainly not attempting to distract viewers from the idiot plot proceedings by doing anything imaginative or fun, and goes for the sort of competence that is too boring even in the context of lowered expectations I bring to my SyFy movie.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Snakehead Terror (2004)

A few years ago, a lake belonging to a US small town was overrun by snakeheads, who proceeded to eat the local fauna until they (and whatever was left of the other lake life) were destroyed by a particularly effective poison. Now, snakeheads return to the area, but the new animals are curiously large – it’s as if someone (William B. Davis!?) had put growth hormones into the lake - and have developed an appetite for larger prey like bears, dogs, and humans, which is particularly unpleasant in a fish species that does like its land detours.

The situation spells trouble for the local sheriff, Patrick James (Bruce Boxleitner). Things don’t improve with a mayor doing the traditional Mayor of Amity bit, or when James’s stupid annoying teenage daughter (Chelan Simmons) decides to go on a stupid annoying teenage snakehead vengeance boating trip to avenge one of her stupid annoying teenage friends. Well, at least James has help from fishologist Lori Dale (Carol Alt) who even comes with her own fish killing device. Did I mention James is – of course - widowed and Dale single?

With Snakehead Terror, the usually at least dependable Paul Ziller again manages to make a rather entertaining film out of a definitely stupid idea, at least if you’re willing and able to roll with it. If you do, Ziller thanks you with lots of scenes of slow, loud fish hunting people down on land or sneaking up on them like Solid Snake (Solid Fish Filet?), a snakehead as big as a whale, William B. Davis going “I didn’t mean anyone to get hurt”, and knowledge about the real use and effects of electricity.

It may not be much, but it’s enough for a perfectly fine time. Personally, I was also quite happy to find the snakeheads realized as a mixture of CGI and practical effects, with many a scene of people wrestling with oversized fish puppets. Adding to this particular joy are some fun gore effects (at least if you like nibbled off extremities), all presented with a well-developed sense for escalation that is quite typical of most of Ziller’s films (except the three I don’t like).

I think I need to warn my more sensitive readers about the good sheriff’s stupid annoying teenage daughter and friends, though, for even a person steeled by dozens of stupid annoying teenagers in SyFy/Sci Fi Original movies like me did not expect the stupid teenage apocalypse that are Amber and her friends, creatures so vile I can’t imagine anyone will not root for the killer fish trying to eat them.

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SyFy vs. the Mynd: Trycentennyal

Alien Tornado aka Tornado Warning (2012): Aliens decide to start an invasion attempt with (rather beautiful looking) special tornadoes slowly working their way from the boons to the big cities. Some decidedly incompetent men in black attempt to suppress the tornado attacks, and public knowledge of them. Farmer and worst dad ever Judd Walker (Jeff Fahey with frightening hobo facial hair and hair and a baseball cap glued to his head), his future scientist teenage daughter (Stacey Asaro), storm-chasing blogger Gail Curtis (Kari Wuhrer), and a sheriff who couldn't cut in Chicago (Willard E. Pugh) try to get the word out and solve their family crises. Alas, the script by John A. Burkett who also signed responsible for the equally meh Haunted High and Arachnoquake lets them and the audience down rather painfully. Alien Tornado is more boring than it is dumb (not usually a SyFy Channel movie problem - say what you will against the Channel's output, but "boring" is never what these films try to be), and generally lacks in the kind of entertaining cheesiness you'd hope for from something with such a title.

Monsterwolf (2010): Speaking of things that aren't usually SyFy Channel problems, Todor Chapkanov's Monsterwolf suffers from a case of excessive blandness. All the elements for an entertaining SyFy-style monster movie are there and accounted for - the family problems, the salt-of-the-Earth working class people, an evil oil magnate played by Robert Picardo, Louisiana, and a monster(wolf) - but not a single one of them is developed enough to actually become entertaining to watch.

There is a sense of bored professionalism surrounding everything about this that makes it impossible to care, so I won't.

Seeds of Destruction aka The Terror Below (2011): At its core, this is a typical Paul Ziller SyFy movie - much better made than its silly basic idea (giant roots from the Garden of Eden run amok)  suggests, with a real hand for distracting the audience from the fact that its view on a global apocalypse can't be anything other than locally limited, tight pacing, and some fun conspiracy thriller elements. Unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy any of it this time around, for the film's "converting the unbeliever" aspect is just pretty darn offensive to me once it gets as Christian as here, particularly in a film where the whole "Garden of Eden" bit is perfectly unnecessary. If you have the stomach for that sort of thing, this will probably the best film about roots threating the world you'll ever see.

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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.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Iron Invader (2011)

aka Metal Shifters

"Paul Ziller, most dependable of my Knights of the Dependable Table", Mrs SyFy, the president of SyFy said one day while tending to her CGI roses, "I want to see a movie where that Iron Giant from the animated movie kills US small town people, but I can only give you enough of a budget to animate your core CGI monster for three or four scenes. Afterwards, you'll have to make do with a heap of moving scrap metal".

"Your wish is my command, Mrs President", Ziller replied, scrawled down a script on a CGI napkin during the course of about ten minutes spent on the toilet, and started shooting in the oasis of low cost filmmaking we know and love as British Columbia the very next day. Did he somehow hire actual actors? Even somebody who was on a Star Trek show? You bet he did.

What's even more curious than this quite obviously true story my imaginary five year old nephew told me in secret is that Iron Invader is a perfectly okay little movie, with a handful of somewhat exciting scenes in its first half (as long as the Iron Invader is still whole), culminating in many moments of precious idiocy once the core cast hunkers down in a bar surrounded by dangerous, animated pieces of small metal that want to play zombie apocalypse with them; Ziller still directs that part of the film as if it were serious SF horror, but, you know what, animated pieces of metal don't really look very threating, particularly once the cast learns their might can be conquered by spraying them with alcohol.

And yes, Iron Invader's climactic fight really does consist of actors trying very hard not to laugh killing the monster of the week with bottles of alcohol. It's quite the thing, really, unless you had hopes of, oh, I don't know, giant metal monster action.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010)

Poking around in a hidden ancient site somewhere in Maine by archaeologist Joseph Leshem (Hill Harper) activates some curious mechanisms in Stonehenge that begin sucking large amounts of electromagnetic energy out of the planet's "energy grid" and fry a few tourists. The British government at once quarantines the area and sends in a team of scientists led by Dr. Trousdale (Peter Wingfield) and Dr. Kaycee Leeds (Torri Higginson) to investigate the phenomenon.

When former genius astrophysicist and now crackpot radio show host Jacob Glaser (Misha Collins) hears about the situation - which is of course kept hidden from the public - he at once jets over to England to do a bit of investigating of his own.

The Stonehenge situation further deteriorates when the rather chipper stones activate other ancient sites all around the globe that start a series of volcanic eruptions killing millions. Jacob soon becomes convinced Stonehenge is the core of a global terraforming mechanism (which makes no sense given the age of the sites compared to that of the planet, but hey, if nobody mentions it, we don't have to think about it…), and even theorizes an artefact kept in an archaeological collection in the US might just be the only way to stop the annihilation of the whole of humanity. It's just too bad that nobody except Kaycee takes the word of a guy who once rambled about the robot head NASA found on the moon seriously, so Jacob's attempt to save the world becomes rather more difficult.

Then there's the little fact that Joseph - who just happens to be an old friend of Jacob's, as proven by him calling Jacob "my friend" at least once per sentence - might just be the leader of a doomsday cult who started the Apocalypse on purpose to cleanse the Earth etc and so on. Heroism sure isn't simple.

Stonehenge Apocalypse, Paul Ziller's epic of apocalyptic bullshit doesn't start very well. There's way too much not very interesting woo-woo talk about energy lines and how horrible mean it is of people to doubt the words of a man who is convinced NASA found a robot head on the moon and the US government covered it up (the film's running gag is that everyone remembers him talking of aliens on the moon, not of a robot head - humour!). At the same time, the early film spends too little time with silly wonders like its rotating Stonehenge.

Fortunately, once the film's first half or so has passed, Ziller goes to the serious business of squeezing every bit of fun nonsense out of the plot's improbable basic set-up, and suddenly it's all ancient terraforming device, exploding pyramids and a cult out to destroy mankind to purify the Earth whose main site just happens to be situated in the good old US of A, while the plotting becomes increasingly pulpy on top of its stupidity. This of course means that what starts out as a pretty lame showing becomes an increasingly fun piece of pulp entertainment (unless you can't overlook Stonehenge Apocalypse's nonsense science, but then, you'll hopefully avoid movies with titles like "Stonehenge Apocalypse" as a matter of course).

Once the film gets going, Ziller demonstrates how much pulp doomsday thriller nonsense you can put up on screen on a SyFy budget. It's more than I'd have expected, I gotta say. Not to spoil the film's ending, but this is a movie that climaxes with its hero racing against a countdown back to Stonehenge before it can activate the final cataclysm that'll destroy the world, while also racing against an h-bomb being dropped on the place, while also having to fight off an insane double agent cultist. There isn't anything I could or would want to say against that.

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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.

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SyFy vs. the Mynd: Ghost Storm (2011)

I have generally been rather negative around here about the quality of the TV movies the US SyFy Channel churns out, but if there's one thing I've learned in my years as admirer of movies other people would poke their eyes out not to watch, it's that you can't judge the output of a whole line of cheap movies by the half dozen unwatchable turds you've encountered. In fact, there's always the chance those movies you hated so much will be an outlier, and movies about swamp sharks and chupacabras attacking the Alamo will turn out to be hidden gems. The only way to find out is to dive in, which I will do in this new irregular series on The Horror!?. 

A small island community off what horror movie rules lead me to assume to be the coast of New England hits the PK jackpot when a lightning strikes the monument to the victims of a cult mass suicide of a hundred years ago. The ghosts of the cult members turn into a storm of ghostly and malevolent energy that likes to turn its living victims to dust. The storm also loves to play games with electronic devices, because ghosts are electricity, or something. Despite local sheriff Hal Miller's (Carlos Bernard) attempts to call in help from the mainland, the islanders will have to fight the supernatural threat off on their own, that is, when they don't begin to panic and fight among themselves.

Fortunately, Hal, his meteorologist ex-wife Ashley (Crystal Allen) and their teenage daughter Daisy (Cindy Busbay) are - with some assistance by roaming paranormal investigator Greg Goropolis (Aaron Douglas) - quite good at fighting ghost storms with the power of absurd science and duct tape.

Ghost Storm, a film directed and written by Paul Ziller who has threatened the world in cost-conscious ways in many a film for the SyFy Channel, is pretty much a perfect film in the old low budget movie tradition, at least if you have a sense of fun, can accept dubious science when it's presented right (and really, if you can't, why are you watching movies like this?), and are willing to accept that a small TV movie like Ghost Storm won't look like a Michael Bay production (and seriously, if you want films to look like that, why are you watching movies at all?).

If that sounds like your style, just let me count the ways in which Ghost Storm will thank you for it in practical bullet point form:

• Carlos Bernard isn't just pretty good at this sort of thing, but is also allowed to play a horror disaster movie small town sheriff (that's a real term, right?) who actually seems competent. He calls for help as soon as he sees he's outclassed, and when help can't come, most of his actions make sense for a guy in his position and nearly non-existent resources. It's nice to root for the male lead in a movie like this for a change instead of just tolerating him.
• Cindy Busby as the Millers' teenage daughter is perfectly un-annoying, does some simple yet effective girl detective work, and isn't just in the movie to be rescued by her parents, because she can actually take care of herself rather well. Plus, in this film's idea of positive family values, all members of a family are able and allowed to rescue each other.
• The film starts out swinging, with the first ghost storm victim suffering his fate during the first five minutes, and things really not letting up afterwards. There's also a nice sense of escalation to the proceedings, at least as far as the budget allows.
• Ziller is experienced enough in this sort of thing to know very well what his budget allows and what it doesn't allow him to do, and limits his film to the things it actually can achieve well, with neither moments where he oversteps the film's possibilities, nor moments of the The Asylum school of "It's a bad movie, so we don't have to make an effort". In the same vein, Ziller's script uses clichés (and a few parts of John Carpenter's original The Fog) but never becomes a cliché itself.
• There's also no pseudo-ironic comic relief here. Ghost Storm takes its silly basic idea and runs with it and its pseudo-science with a perfectly straight face, which is the kind of facial expression I want from my low budget horror films unless their humour is exceptionally clever.
• The CG effects are - unlike what I often think and write about these films - perfectly fine, which probably goes to show that there should be more cheap movies with CGI that doesn't try to imitate something corporeal. Fog tentacles and fake storms is where it's at.
• For a film about a supernatural threat, Ghost Storm shows little faith in supernatural solutions. Instead, a combination of (surprisingly un-annoying) scrappy human spirit, made-up practical movie science, and duct tape wins the day. The film's belief in duct tape is particularly strong.

All this, ladies and gentlemen are clear signs of a low budget movie going out of its way to be as entertaining as it can be. I for one, I'm happy with this Ghost Storm.

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