I’ve never seen the British TV program Merlin. That type of
fantasy just isn’t my thing. And even if it were, I would probably go with
something a little more well-regarded. Game of Thrones, perhaps. That’s the
show that everyone and his mother recommends to me. And I have to tell everyone
and his mother that fantasy just isn’t my thing.
Anyway, Merlin is a TV show. And it’s also a mockbuster of
the TV show. This Merlin, like the show’s main character, is a young and
inexperienced wizard. This time, though, there’s no King Arthur. Not yet,
anyway. Instead, we have a half-brother who has a dragon army. It’s pretty
legit for a mockbuster, and much less of a time commitment than, say, a certain
HBO show that has about forty lead characters.
I know it’s been a while since I’ve had a mockbuster come
out, but this one should hit the spot. It’s about dragons!
I am Omega. I am an ultra-cheap ripoff of a Will Smith movie. I am full of grainy visuals and awkward silences. I have a dull thud of an ending. I was reviewed by Evan on Slickster.
Out of all the really famous fairy tales out there, Hansel and Gretel is perhaps the most morbid. Little Mermaid (at least in its original form) is probably the saddest (give or take a Little Match Girl). Sleeping Beauty has some of the creepiest undertones. Beauty and the Beast does, too. But all those stories (again, give or take a Match Girl) could be Disney-fied pretty easily. Take out some of the murder and self-mutilation and eye-gouging, and you have a perfectly nice, family friendly story about princesses being dainty.
Hansel and Gretel, on the other hand, has darkness woven into its very fibers. Try to sanitize it all you want, but the entire story is built around cannibalism, child abandonment, kidnapping, forced labor, and murder. Take out any of those elements and the story doesn't make any sense.
Not surprisingly, the good folks at Asylum have seen the potential for horror and made Hansel and Gretel, a modern-day horror film starring Dee Wallace from E.T. It's grisly and sick, just like the source material. Of course, this being an Asylum film, the movie is actually a rip-off of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, a minor hit that may (but most probably may not) get a sequel.
If you're a horror fan, check out my Slickster Magazine review of the film to see just how many body parts fly toward the camera. Spoiler alert: there's a lot.
So The Atlantic Rim doesn't really exist. The Pacific Rim is a real thing. It's part of geography. But the Atlantic Rim... nope.
When Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim came out, the marketing madmen at Asylum decided to release their similar-in-every-way-except-quality mockbuster Atlantic Rim. The movie makes as much sense as its title, which is one way of saying YEEESH. Don't see this movie.
But you can always read my lovely review of it. I try not to hold anything back. Barring vomit. I held back a bit of vomit as I was writing the review. Acid reflux, you understand.
Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorite Disney films. I think it's hands-down the prettiest movie in their vault. I could get lot in the twisting, angular backgrounds. And the Tchaikovsky music... dang. It's an all-around masterpiece.
The Asylum version, released the same month as Disney's Maleficent, is... let's say... worse. It's fun and campy, but I couldn't see myself getting lost in the awkward CGI. Is it a train wreck? No. But it is a very strange passion project from a B-list action star whom I will not mention in this post. Check out the review. I promise you won't fall asleep.
Alpha House is a low budget frat comedy from The Asylum. It is also reprehensible, a hollow nothing of a movie that smears poop on everyone involved. Check it out.
Here we are. Another week, another mockbuster. This one is a real doozy. Check out my review. I think you can probably tell that this ongoing watch-crap-and-then-write-about-it weekly column is starting to get to me. I'm running out of things to say, honestly. I can barely finish my
My latest film review describes one of the worst cartoons I've ever seen: an ultra-low budget riff on Finding Nemo. If you ever wanted to see boy band member Joey Fatone "poop out [his] intestines" multiple times, then you should watch this film. (He plays a sea cucumber, FYI.)
What does Kid n Play, the 80s blackface comedy Soul Man, wormholes, Jesus, and giant glowing balls have in common?
To find the answer, you have to click on my latest mockbuster article for Slickster Magazine. Like the movie itself, it's a real mishmash of random weirdness. Don't say I didn't warn you...
There’s something
endearingly blasphemous about a Christian movie whose main characters must
follow an ancient Mayan prophecy to prevent Armageddon. The ancient Mayans, of
course, had no concept of Jesus. In this film’s reality, however, an
archaeologist must return a golden crucifix to a Mayan temple so that he can
stop the End of Days. The plot is like a Mad Libs mash-up of The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. Thankfully, it’s way less
bloody and unpleasant than those Mel Gibson gore-fests.
Our main
characters are: a missionary, an archaeologist, a pregnant woman, a scientist,
and a paramedic. The world is coming to an end, and they are each drawn to a
Mayan temple, where they may or may not be able to save humanity. (Honestly,
after watching the whole movie, I’m still not sure if they succeeded. But I’m
getting ahead of myself.) The film starts 36
hours before doomsday, when a scientist explains why the world is ending: “The
Earth’s rotation is slowing because of a black hole at the center of the solar
system.” Like most Christian films, 2012
has the utmost respect for the scientific community, and its screenwriter
must’ve taken great pains to research this astronomical disaster. Right away, freak
weather events strike down in unlikely places, killing untold millions. Of
course, the audience is meant to infer this information. We see a few events,
but not enough to really show that the world is ending. At one point, a
character announces, “The president just evacuated the entire West Coast.” In a
bigger budget movie, that would be shown. Instead, we have a single line of
dialogue.
Because this is
one of The Asylum’s Christian films, we lose some of the action set pieces in
favor of long conversations about God. One of the film’s main messages—not surprisingly—is
the importance of believing in God. During the climactic birth scene (more on
that later), a character says, “No matter what happens, we have faith.” It’s
kind of a weird message for this movie to make, because the characters are
faced with all sorts of proof that God exists. If the world is ending in a wild
flurry of disasters, if people disappear
in front of your eyes (more on that later), then isn’t it easier to believe in God? I mean, it’s one thing to believe in God
without any proof whatsoever, but this movie (and a lot of Christian movies
with the exact same message) are full of proof. And that sort of contradicts
what they’re going for. Anyway, we do get
a Cliff Notes version of the Rapture in one inexplicable scene where exactly
two (2!) characters magically disappear. One is a random pilot with about two
minutes of screen time, and the other is an old lady. Are these the only two
people in the world worthy of teleporting up to Heaven? According to the movie,
it looks like it. It’s bizarre how the film treats the Rapture like an
afterthought. Perhaps the director was halfway through shooting his Christian
disaster movie and said, “You know what? People are expecting the Rapture.
Let’s give it to them. I’m sure there are a couple side characters we can get
rid of in the second act!” What the quickie
Rapture scene does, unfortunately, is drive home the film’s unintentional
thesis statement: Just give up. For a movie about people struggling to survive,
most of the characters are weirdly resigned to their fate. The missionary wants
to investigate a village full of sick people, but her friend tells her to give
up. A man gets shot, and he bleeds to death because he’s too busy praying to
get medical attention. A paramedic wants to help her mom evacuate her home
before a flood hits, and the mom basically shrugs it off. And finally, when the
Rapture comes, both of the magically disappearing people make speeches that
boil down to: “Eh. It is what it is.” Then they disappear. It’s profoundly
creepy. There’s a difference between accepting the will of God and sitting
around as the world crashes and burns around you.
That said, the
acting isn’t bad (preachy speeches go down a lot better when the actors can
trick you into making them sound like real conversations), and the special
effects are as good as you can hope for in a movie by The Asylum. I’d like to
give a special shout-out to Tiny Juggernaut, the movie’s effects house, for
making a scene of killer hail seem believable. That must’ve been a tough day at work.
Aside from the
lecturing parts, most of the movie plays like a gleeful mash-up of natural
disasters. People get crushed by rocks, they fall down cracks in the Earth,
they bleed to death in the snow, and (of course) they get jabbed in the heart
by that pesky falling hail. There’s always something happening, and it’s never
quite what you expect.
Much like the rest
of the film, the climax zigs when you expect it to zag. We get a very fast
(less than fifteen seconds) montage of global destruction. (We see the West
Coast flooding, Jerusalem in rubble, and London on fire. No people. Just quick
snapshots of big picture devastation.) And let me repeat, this lasts less than
fifteen seconds. This is a movie with the word “doomsday” in its title, and the
actual destruction of the Earth gets less screen time than a burp.
Instead, the real
climax takes places inside the ruins of a Mayan temple. The archaeologist uses
his golden crucifix to open an Indiana Jones-style secret chamber—a birthing
chamber, actually—where a pregnant Mexican woman will give birth to… Jesus,
perhaps? I was confused. The rest of the main characters show up to fulfill
their God-given assignments. The pregnant lady is there to give birth, the
missionary is there to say a prayer, the paramedic is there is help with the
delivery, and the scientist father is there for… well, it seems like he’s there
for moral support. But good for him. In the end, most
of the world is destroyed (well, the West Coast, London, and Jerusalem are
destroyed, but we’re going to assume that other places are affected, too), and
the Mexican girl gives birth to a glowing baby that the audience never fully
sees. In that way, the Jesus baby is like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction. In one last monologue from
the missionary girl, we learn that “It’s just the beginning.”
And surprisingly,
it was. 2012: Doomsday is the
beginning of a three-part franchise for The Asylum. In the following year, we
got 2012: Supernova and 2012: Ice Age. Neither of them have
anything to do with the Rapture, glowing babies, or Mayans at all. One is a
jokey riff on The Day After Tomorrow
and one is Armageddon for Dummies.
While both those movies have their charms, neither rises to the glorious ridiculousness of
this entry. Then again, if your disaster film has killer hail AND a glowing
baby, that’s a pretty tough act to follow.
***
NOTE: I wrote this article as part of my ongoing mockbusters series for Slickster. Turns out, the topic was a little too religious for their publication. I'm posting it here as a blog exclusive instead.
Welcome to another snippet from my weekly mockbuster articles over at Slickster Magazine. This week, I'm discussing Avengers Grimm, the fairy tale rip-off of Avengers: Age of Ultron. You can check out the full article at Slickster Magazine. In the meantime, here's a little taste, just in case:
Now, this (admittedly stupid) premise could absolutely deliver an entertaining, brainless bit of fluff. All the filmmakers had to do was pick a few recognizable characters, give them powers based on their personae, make them squabble in character-based ways, and have them reluctantly cooperate to take down a villain. You know what? Let’s brainstorm this movie together, shall we? Let’s say we have Snow White, whose special power is… I don’t know, throwing apples at people. She has to work with Cinderella, who can kick ass in those glass shoes. They’re constantly arguing, because… Snow White thinks Cinderella exploits the little mice and vermin that come and help her. They both team up with the Frog Prince, who can now change into a bunch of different animals. He’s the third link in our love triangle, but he’s sarcastic and super-rich, much like a certain man made of iron. We can go on from there, but you get the point. The stuff writes itself.
To see the rest of the article (and learn all about Lou Ferrigno's single greatest acting achievement), go to Slickster.
I'm very excited to announce that I have a new weekly feature in Slickster Magazine. Every Tuesday, I'll post another article about The Asylum, the movie studio that invented the modern "mockbuster." They're the guys behind Transmorphers, Alien vs. Hunter, The Day the Earth Stopped, and plenty more. They release bargain bin versions of Hollywood blockbusters on the same week as the real thing. The movies are hilarious and weird, but also a little charming. Take a look at my premiere article, a goofy, little run-down of 2006's Snakes on a Train.
And in the meantime, let me leave you with my favorite quote from the film:
“She must have all her snakes back, but you can keep the ones that belong... to you!”
