Cave Women On Mars (2008)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Saint Euphoria Pictures

Runtime: 73 mins

Format: DVD

Plot: It is the future: 1987. Humanity has finally left the confines of its home world. When the two-man crew of the MARS-1 spaceship lands on the surface of the red planet, they are astonished to find it strangely Earth-like. After deciding to split up and scout around, Lieutenant Elliott stumbles across an amazing discovery -- primitive, matriarchal warrior women! He is promptly taken prisoner by the Martian beauties and led unwillingly across the alien landscape. While his commanding officer, Captain Jackson, searches for his lost comrade, Lieutenant Elliott encounters unimaginable excitement in the form of fierce monsters, exotic vistas, strange magic, and most unexpectedly... true love!

Review: Cave Women on Mars is the third in the currently-eight-movie collection dubbed the Mihmiverse. What is the Mihmiverse, you ask? Well in short, it's a series of micro-budget black and white B-Movies created by Christopher R. Mihm that are made as both parodies and homages to the classic 1950s-era Drive-In B-Movies and thus replicate that style while also poking a bit of fun at it as well. Cave Women on Mars was preceded by The Monster of Phantom Lake in addition to It Came From Another World! and while both of those were pretty damn good for what they are, it's really this third outing that he really finds his groove and manages to knock the ball out of the park and is, in my opinion, the best attempt yet at replicating/parodying that low budget 1950s style.

The main thing that sets this one apart from the previous two is that while those ones took place in the 1950s, this one takes place in the then-Future of 1987 (remember, even though these movies are being made nowadays, the gimmick of all of these is that they are made as if they were filmed and released in the 1950s). Because this is an alternate 1987 then the one we actually got (one as it may have been envisioned back in the 50s), mankind has begun their travel out to the stars and planets of the universe, complete with ridiculously corny spacesuits, totally unrealistic (and cheap-looking!) technology, a completely off-base vision of what Mars 'could be' like, scantily-clad hot warrior babes, and of course one hilariously annoying computer A.I. System, aka the perfect 1950s futuristic sci-fi/fantasy B-Movie adventure!

One of the main leads here is Captain Jackson, who is the shaved-headed son of Professor Jackson from the previous two movies, and in classic campy fashion he's played by the same actor. Josh Craig really gets to shine here as he finally gets to bring something new and different to the table then what he was able to as the overly-annoying Professor Jackson in the other movies. He gets to actually show off some decent acting chops and his portrayal of this character is so widely different (as is his visual look), that if it hadn't been for his very familiar voice, I wouldn't have even caught on that he was the same actor. Now, I know I dogged on his character from the other movies quite a bit in my review for those, but it was still nice to see that actual character again for an aged cameo here (now the Director-in-Charge of Earth's United Space Program – ha!), and it only added to help show the difference in how Josh Craig can easily slip into two totally different characters and make you believe that they're two different characters.

Also joining Captain Jackson in his space crew is only one man, Lieutenant Elliott, played by Mihmiverse newcomer Daniel Sjerven, but like Josh Craig, he has equal screen time (if not more) and he is also a magnificent actor for material such as this, complete with perfect comedic timing that reminded me, on more then one occasion, of B-Movie legend Bruce Campbell in his interactions with the primitive warrior tribeswomen that occupy Mars.

These two new characters are on a classified space mission to Mars, to be the first men to touchdown on the red planet and explore its surface. Again, this is not Mars as we actually know it to be now, but a potential Mars as it may have been envisioned by low budget sci-fi filmmakers of the 50s – which is to say that while some of the planet may be the barren red rocky wasteland we know it as in actuality, quite a lot of it is also covered in thick, dense, jungle and cold, clear lakes. In addition to that, occupying these jungles are some strange alien wildlife and, of course, the titled Cave Women on Mars, which are actually made up of two warring Amazonian tribes, one an evil brutal slave-driving race and the other a kinder, but still pretty violent and threatening race – in both the women are the dominating gender while men are looked down on as the weak members of the race, and even as outright slaves in some cases. Lieutenant Elliott is the first to come across these Tribes, switching hands from the more evil barbaric Tribe to being a prisoner of the opposite Tribe and being led across the dangerous lands to be brought before their High Priestess. Along the way they face a deadly territorial bear-like monster creature, attacks from two pursing hunters of the enemy tribe, a budding and forbidden love between Elliot and one of his captors, and a prophecy fulfilled that could rock the foundations of history for both planets, Earth and Mars alike.

Captain Jackson has a bit less interesting of a subplot as he merely tries to follow their trail and track his missing crew member down, hoping to eventually save him before anything too drastic happens to him. Ultimately he becomes almost an antagonist himself as, once he manages to catch up to everyone and finds that his subordinate has fallen in love with one of the primitive women and wishes to stay, he tries to force him to return to Earth with him, by almost any means necessary.

One of my main complaints of the two previous movies was that the runtime was a bit too long for the kind of project these movies are, especially since the average movie of that era was just barely an hour in most cases. I was thrilled to see that complaint addressed with this one, as it clocks in at an easy-to-sit through one hour and thirteen minutes, coming in at pretty much the perfect length for this kind of subject matter. There is one scene that goes on just a tad bit too long with tons of extra unneeded exposition, but that's only a very very minor quibble in an otherwise perfect movie. Plus seeing as how in the special features there's an alternate version of that scene that goes on for even longer with even more unneeded exposition, I'm rather happy with the version of the scene we got.

The special effects is another area where this movie surpasses the previous two. Yes, I realize bad special effects are part of the whole schtick here and trust me, they're still hilariously cheesy-bad, but considering what we got for the two other movies (a garbage pale on someone's head and a couple bulging eyeballs), what we got here was mind-blowing in comparison. From the rocket ship and spacesuits, to the matte painting/green-screened Martian surface, even to the cloth vs leather wardrobe of the Cave Women tribes and the large furry suit of the monster-bear thing - out of all three of the Mihmiverse movies I've seen so far, the effort that goes into these has never before been so on-display as it is with this entry (not to dog on the other two, of course, as the high level of effort came across in those as well).

As mentioned in my other two reviews, these self-produced DVD discs are stacked right up with tons of excellent bonus content, which is quite surprising seeing as how these are not only micro-budget, largely fan-funded titles, but the overall price for each DVD is so cheap that it blows my mind we get so much with them. For this title, we have two Blooper Reels (one of which is strictly line flubs and people cracking up in the middle of Takes, and the other encompasses everything else), the above-mentioned alternate version of one of the scenes in the movie (which I'm really happy with the decision made there), a featurette on the special effects of the movie, a Photo Gallery of tons of Behind-the-Scenes photos, a selection of various trailers for both this movie as well as other Mihmiverse titles, and of course the full length Audio Commentary by Christopher R. Mihm and lead actors Josh Craig and Daniel Sjerven. While this go-around is missing the usual introduction to the film by Horror Host Dr. Ivan Cryptosis (which I personally am fine without, but I know there are lots of people out there that love that sort of thing) you certainly still get a good amount of bang for your buck with this.

Before popping the disc in, I really didn't think I'd like this one as much, simply because when it comes to 1950s Drive-In B-Movies I'm much more a fan of the monster movies or the horror ones, and not so much the straight-up sci-fi space adventure kinds, but Cave Women on Mars turned out to not only be the most ambitious of the three Mihmiverse movies that I've seen so far but also, by far, my personal favorite in the series yet, making me even more excited now to check out the continuing adventures of Captain Jackson in a couple movies' time.

Seeing as how a lot of the advertising for this guy and his movies come from simple word of mouth from the fans, if you check any of these titles out and enjoy them then be sure to get the word out there on these movies and hopefully we can snag in a few other fans that may not even realize these exist. You can order these on DVD (and even BluRay for the latest couple!) over at his official site which is filled with all sorts of other goodies as well (including a monthly newsletter in addition to a very laid back, yet fun and informative, podcast). Hell, there's even an excellent deal on right now – Buy Three Movies, Get One Free, which seeing as how there's currently eight of these titles, if you do that twice then that is the perfect way to catch up with all of them and in the end save some dough – that's how I did it!

10/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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The 10 Best B-Movies of 2012

At the end of 2011 I did a Best B-Movies of 2011 list and I always intended that to be an annual post I do up around New Years of every year. Suffice to say I totally and completely forgot all about it come the end of 2012, so while this list is a bit late, at least it's better late then never!

Now to be honest, this entire list is pretty much being done on the spot, with no research behind it other then my own memory of what I saw that year, mixed with what I could find in my collection here at home and what reviews I may have done, plus which ones still stick out as having been really good in my memory after all this time, so forgive me if I ended up forgetting some by accident. Also, there is still plenty of movies from last year that I haven't yet seen, so it's possible I've potentially skipped over a few diamonds in the rough due to that as well, since this list is based off what I've actually watched myself. Also, this list is solely based off what has hit home video formats in 2012, so movies that aired on SyFy that year, but never came out on DVD or BluRay, does not count for this. I want this as a list of movies that you could potentially go out and pick up yourself and have easy access to obtaining. Likewise, some of these movies may have aired on TV in 2011, but didn't actually get released on home video formats until 2012, thus I count them as 2012 movies.

The following list won't be in any specific order, as I clearly love all of them for them to even be on the list, so putting them in any kind of ranking order is a bit moot.

 - With how many rants I go on about the overabundance of killer shark movies, it surprises no one more then me that 2012 saw the release of some admittedly really fun and entertaining ones, showing there is indeed still life to the sub-genre, in the right hands. Jersey Shore Shark Attack works equally as good as a fun mindless summer popcorn killer shark B-Movie as it does as just an intelligently-written parody of the hit MTV show Jersey Shore that both fans and haters of the show can enjoy. You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

- Yeah, yeah, I got two shark movies on here, after going on tons of rants about them. So sue me. 2-Headed Shark Attack, released by The Asylum, was the first bit of fresh life breathed into the shark genre that I saw in a long time, upon its release at the very beginning of 2012. I mean, how can you be a fan of B-Movies but say no to a killer shark with TWO heads? You get everything you'd expect out of this movie, plus more, all wrapped up in one hell of a fun package. You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

- The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption is secretly a competition between Ron Perlman and Billy Zane as to who can chew more scenery. Spoiler: Billy Zane does, and then some, earning the movie's entertainment factor just on his own. However it also helps that it's actually a fun fantasy adventure which takes place after the first movie, with an actor that actually resembles The Rock, and includes epic battle scenes that have far larger of a scope then you would expect from a cheapie Direct-to-Video sequel.

 - Having aired on SyFy as a 3 hour mini-series, Neverland is a re-imagined origin story of Peter Pan, Hook, The Lost Boys, and how they all came together in Neverland. Amazingly fun for fans of the Peter Pan tale, though not without some questionable changes to the mythology. Makes up for it though by having Rhys Ifans play the best rendition of Hook I've ever seen, and Bob Hoskins returning to the role of Smee for the first time since 1991's Hook.

- Continuing the Syfy/Asylum team-up tradition of making and airing a zombie movie around Halloween, Rise of the Zombies is every bit as entertaining as 2012: Zombie Apocalypse, and then improves upon it. Great cast line-up, excellent zombie effects work, some unexpected twists, and a hell of a lot of gore. If anything, this movie might push things a bit too far, but it's still very well made considering it's a TV movie. You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

 - The Haunting of Whaley House earns a special place here because I'm normally not a big fan of The Asylum's haunted house/ghost movies as I find they are never as scary or clever as they seem to think they are...but this one scared the god damn bejesus outta me. Good acting, great special effects, some good gore, and genuinely frightening as all hell, this is the first and currently only Asylum-made movie that actually made me sleep with my lights on that night.

- As a big fan of the original Silent Night, Deadly Night it came as a huge shock when I ended up loving the remake, Silent Night. Though apart from a few minor nods, it has nothing at all in common with the original, and I think that's for the better as, and I'm sorry to say this but, I actually prefer this stylish quirky horror remake over the original. Fun inventive death scenes, hilariously campy characters, and a creepy-looking killer Santa, all wrapped up in some Christmas cheer! You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

- As a fan of the entire trilogy, My Super Psycho Sweet 16, Part 3 may not be the best movie in the series, but it's still a really fun entry all the same, and an excellent ending to the trilogy. If you're a fan of either of the first two movies in this MTV-made teen horror movie series, you'll enjoy the final climatic showdown that this movie is, quite a bit. You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

 - Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes is one of the better, more effective, found-footage movies to come out of 2012. Sure, some of the characters are annoying and some of the ad-libbing from the actors doesn't quite work out so great, but it tackles a topic I love, while feeding pretty accurate information to the viewer, in addition to quite a good handful of creepy and atmospheric scenes, with a final shot that is sure to stick with you, leave you scratching your head, and rushing to turn the lights on all at once.

- No surprise that so many Asylum movies make it to this list every year, since they are my favorite of the low budget B-Movie companies, but out of all of them Nazis at the Center of the Earth is my Top Asylum Pick for all of 2012. Zombie Nazis, Secret Breakaway Civilizations under Antarctica, and UFOs - some of my favorite conspiracy theories all under one movie, and then some extras..like a Robo-Hitler. Let that sink in. Ok, so, yeah, enough said on this, I believe! You can read my full previously-posted review of this one here.

HONORABLE MENTION

- One of my top favorite B-Movies of all of last year, Arachnoquake really does deserve a spot on this list. However it only ever aired on TV on the SyFy Channel and Space Channel here in North America and never did get a Region 1/A DVD or BluRay release thus, by my own rules, I can't include it in the actual list. Still, this movie defines the word 'Fun', as it has a group of survivors running through a near-abandoned New Orleans from growing-larger-every-minute killer albino spiders that can shoot fire, all with an air of quirky fun-loving cheese that's in on the joke as
                                          opposed to being the butt of the joke. You can
                                          read my previously-posted review of this one
                                         here.

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Unlucky Charms (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Full Moon Entertainment

Runtime: 67 mins

Format: Screener

Plot: Five girls compete for a chance to model diva Deedee DeVille's fashion line, but they're soon competing for their lives against four mythical beings, led by the mischievous leprechaun, Farr Darrig.

Review: Full Moon, while I grew up watching and loving their more classic B-Movies, it's no secret at all that the current incarnation of the company has turned in, well, just outright shitty stuff, more often then not for the last decade or more. Yes, there have been some nice diamonds in the rough (The first Gingerdead Man, Zombies vs Strippers, the Evil Bong trilogy...hell, even the second Gingerdead Man, while I'm not a big fan of, was still way better then some of the other shit Full Moon has strung out in recent years), but for the most part their movies these days are boring, sad excuses to make low budget porno, or just all around hard to sit through even though they're only about an hour long. At first I was kind of excited to sit down and give a chance to Unlucky Charms and review it, because I always love me some good killer leprechaun action, but then I read what it was actually about and thought to myself that this was, yet again, just another excuse for Full Moon to make another low budget porno in disguise (the dreadful Killer Eye movies, anyone?).

In this latest offering from Full Moon Entertainment, a group of scantily clad lingerie models all meet at a remote mansion in the middle of nowhere, covered in video cameras, in order to partake in a model-themed reality show competition. It's not long before one of them ends up unleashing an ancient leprechaun and his various creepy-looking monster pals, who then go around causing mayhem and mischief. While Unlucky Charms does indeed have some of that soft-core porno stuff that I hate from most of Full Moon's more recent flicks, it's scaled down a lot from what you would expect (it's really only the one scene here), which considering the type of characters that make up the movie and how little they wear during most of it, is pretty impressive. It also helps that the one scene of it leads directly into some of that monster mayhem, so for once it actually, sort of, has a reason to be in the movie.

What I was disappointed with though, is that the monsters weren’t really the evil characters of the movie but were actually nice and were just being controlled by an evil person using strong black magic to bind them. See, I personally hate it when movies do stuff like that, after spending all the lead-up time during the production advertising these magical monsters as being evil, it almost feels like a cop-out when they turn out to be kind and gentle and it's just a regular human that's really the evil person of the movie. Hell, even the cover art for the movie would lead you to believe that the leprechaun and his pals were evil and the antagonists here, but that's simply just another case of misleading cover art. And while I won't reveal which character is behind it all, the movie doesn't really try to hide it either, pretty much revealing the identity around the 20-minute mark of this just-barely-an-hour long movie.

And even though the movie is only an hour long, it actually takes forever to really get moving. Sure, we cut to the magical monsters roaming the house from time to time, but they don't really do a whole lot until the last 10 minutes, which is pretty much on-par with Full Moon's current style of movie-making. It was also disappointing that the death scenes were all bland, boring, and unimaginative. I was hoping for some really good, funny, and inventive death scenes along the likes of the Wishmaster movies or the classic Leprechaun series, but all we get are the monsters shooting magic beams from their hands or eyes and the person vaporizes. That's it.

Unlike most other recent Full Moon movies though, a good portion of the acting here is surprisingly good. Even more surprising when you consider that most everyone is an Unknown (a couple ex-Disney stars grown up that haven’t gone on to do much, a minor character from The Walking Dead, and a handful of Playboy Playmates). Only real big name of note here is Charlie O'Connell (2-Headed Shark Attack, Devil's Prey, Sliders). We here at Watching Full Movie Online Free always love the O'Connell brothers and he does not disappoint, playing a sleazy producer for this model-themed reality game show, looking more to get his dick wet then he is anything else. Him aside, everyone else is actually a lot of fun to watch as well, even though many are not likable in the slightest, the actors ham it up enough that you can't help but find this cast of characters entertaining, be it cat fighting and bitching at one another, teaming up to find missing friends, taking on harsh criticism from the producers, or just standing around and showing off their assets in, well, more-then-revealing 'clothes'. While not a whole lot happens until toward the end, there's still rarely a dull moment thanks to how entertaining these characters are and how well their actors portray that, in the hammiest, cheesiest, campiest ways possible.

And it's not just the human characters either. The monster group is just as interesting to watch, be it the horny one-eyed cyclops, the withering old witch, her creepy-faced little scream-loving pet thing, or the gentle-hearted leprechaun himself, they all hate being forced to kill these people and long for the days of ancient history when their magic was used solely for good, by people who understood how to use it properly. There was actually a surprisingly high amount of genuine emotion portrayed by the movie in it's opening and closing bookend scenes dealing with that, and it's an attention to mature subtext that I don't know if I've ever seen Full Moon pull off before, or even attempt to. In lesser hands those scenes would have failed, but Nathan Phillips as the leprechaun character not only shines, he is outright phenomenal in the role, owning every scene he is in and totally deserving of being an A-list actor, in far better movies then B-Movies such as this or Wolf Creek.

With Full Moon next making a Gingerdead Man vs Evil Bong movie (hopefully it can redeem the Gingerdead Man franchise after that terrible third movie), I can easily see them down the line making a Killjoy vs Unlucky Charms movie. Just think about it: One is pure evil and the other on the side of good, both have magical powers and both have their own team of fellow monstrous misfits. Seeing as how Killjoy started off terrible but each movie got better and better and even better still as they went along, and this movie was actually pretty decent itself, a crossover movie between the two should work out to be Full Moon's best effort to date, if it keeps following that path. 

Maybe though there should be an Unlucky Charms 2 first, just to better establish these fun characters, because if there's one thing this movie did, it was make me want to spend more time with this little leprechaun and his friends. 

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Rise of the Zombies (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: The Asylum

Runtime: 90 mins

Format: BluRay

Plot: A group of survivors hide on Alcatraz Island to escape from the rising zombie hordes. When their refuge is overrun, and upon hearing that a scientist hiding in the middle of the city may have discovered a cure, they leave the island to seek him out.

Review: A couple years ago the SyFy Channel and Asylum got together for a co-produced project for Halloween called 2012: Zombie Apocalypse. I ended up enjoying that one quite a bit, even though I felt it got really repetitive, had no plot to speak of, and the zombie actors were pretty terrible. Well it seems Syfy and Asylum joining together for a zombie flick is becoming an annual Halloween tradition as they did it again last year with the just-as-bland titled Rise of the Zombies.

Luckily, the saying 'Practice Makes Perfect' rings true here. While the movie itself may not be perfect, it's certainly a nice improvement over an already decently-entertaining previous movie. For starters, the zombie actors were a lot better this time, never once taking me out of the movie and making me go 'Wow, that person is trying way too hard to act like a zombie' like what happened multiple times during 2012: Zombie Apocalypse. It also helped quite a bit that the make-up and prosthetics looks much better this time around; A lot more realistic and less like, well, make-up – plus they also threw in some really unique and chilling zombie designs for the occasional one, to keep things fresh. Actually, there is one scene with a zombie that has a very contorted body that was just genuinly creepy to look at. I don't think there's a single zombie movie that has had even one scene that creeped me out in the last decade (with the exception of the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake), but the scene in this movie with that contorted zombie managed to do just that.

Actually the effects all around were heavily improved this time, and not just the make-up effects. CGI zombie head shots as well as an awesome car crash near the beginning were both improved over the CGI from the previous year's flick, and this one even had some pretty entertaining, albeit gruesome, practical zombie kills. Hell, within the first two minutes of the movie you see a zombie get its head smashed right in with a giant wrench and beat to a pulpy mess, and all throughout the movie you get super gory shots of zombie hordes ripping people apart and feasting on their intestines and other inside organs – and all of this in a made-for-TV movie! In all honesty, in terms of violence and gore, this movie is right up there with AMC's The Walking Dead, including an extremely disturbing and uncomfortable hard-to-sit through baby delivery and what follows directly after. This is weird to say about a TV movie, but there were points in the movie where it almost felt like they were taking things a bit too far in order to make things as disturbing and depressing as possible, and I actually could have done with a tad less of some of that. The baby scene I just mentioned is actually a prime example of that, as I felt it was done in a bit of bad taste and seemed to only be included purely for shock value and to see how far they can go with some things.

In terms of plot, parts of this movie isn't far off from The Walking Dead either. Much like with the current season of that show that was airing during the time of this movie's release, Rise of the Zombies has our main band of survivors holed up in an abandoned prison for a portion of the movie, though they do end up having to leave and head out into the nearby city in order to locate a specific scientist’s lab where they know he had been working on a vaccine, so they can get his notes and research from before he had died. It certainly doesn't have any great in-depth thinking man's kind of plot or subtext to it like what you would get in an early Romero zombie movie, but if you're just looking for a nice SyFy Channel B-Movie to watch some weekend night with a couple beer, and you're in the mood for some gory zombie mayhem, this one comes highly recommended by me. Plus this kind of plot paved the way for a variety of fun settings for some of the zombie action to take place in, settings like both inside and outside of the prison, through abandoned city streets and small neighborhoods, inside rather large and luxurious-looking homes, a secret underground government facility, and (just like the previous movie) a shipyard and dock. Actually, if I had any major complaints with the plot it would be that it kind of devolves into just following the steps of the previous movie a bit too much during the ending, with the survivors having to reach the docks of the city in order to wait for a boat that will arrive to bring them to a zombie-free paradise, and of course the docks are not as 'clear of zombies' as they are supposed to be. Sadly this movie didn't have anything as interesting or unique as zombie tigers for their version of that scene, so not only was it just a repeat scene with different actors, but it also (for the first time this movie) wasn't done as well either.

Something else that, while better then the previous movie, also wasn't very good, was the acting - but that usually comes part and parcel with these kinds of movies, so that should always be expected here anyway. I was actually surprised however by how many recognizable faces were actually in this. Going in, I already knew about long-time actress Mariel Hemingway, Levar Burton from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Danny Trejo in his second SyFy Channel movie of 2012 (the first being Haunted High, aka Ghostquake, back in August 2012), but I had no idea beforehand that Ethan Suplee (My Name is Earl, countless Kevin Smith movies), French Stewart (Stargate, 3rd Rock From The Sun), and Chad Lindberg (The Fast and the Furious, Ash from Supernatural) were all in this as well, in addition to some regular Asylum faces like Heather Hemmens (3 Musketeers, Hellcats) Madonna Magee (11/11/11), and Andy Clemence (3 Musketeers, 11/11/11, Air Collision). With so many great names, it's actually a pretty big disappointment that the acting on display wasn't better then it was, but I suppose everyone is allowed an off day every now and then.

All in all though, this was a highly enjoyable low budget zombie flick from the folks at SyFy and the folks at Asylum. Not perfect, because the acting was below what you would expect from this roster of actors, plus I probably could have done without quite so much of the totally unforgiving disturbing stuff that seemed only added in so they could see how far they could push the envelope and get away with it, but at the end of the day this turned out to be one of Asylum's better efforts and I was impressed more often then I was let down.

While I haven't done so yet, I imagine that Rise of the Zombies would make a great double-feature some rainy weekend night with 2012: Zombie Apocalypse, although watching both  back-to-back may give you the feeling of deju vu in some parts toward the end. Still, I think it'd be a fun experiment to see how well they mesh together, although you would almost have to put this one second just because it's the far superior film and I always like to end things off on a high note.

9/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

 

 

 

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The Planet (2006)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Stirton Productions

Runtime: 69 mins

Format: Screener

Plot: In the far future, a group of shipwrecked mercenaries must struggle for survival on an uncharted alien world; A world where death is only the beginning...

Review: MTI Home Video recently sent me a whole bunch of screeners for some of the backlog of movies they've distributed over here in Canada and the U.S over the years, and the first of those that I wanted to check out was the ultra low-budget sci-fi/horror from 2006, simply-titled The Planet.

Now right out of the gate, I have to dock some points for such an unimaginative bland title like The Planet. It does nothing to help tell you what the movie is about, or even what genre it is. I personally can't stand boring bland basic titles like that (movies with similarly-bland and overused titles like any form and variation of The Possession or The Possessed are top offenders as well). Anything more would have been better, something like Death Planet, Planet of the Dead, Planet Trap, The Planet of Lost Souls, just anything more then simply The Planet would have sufficed and done a better job with informing the viewer what to expect from this movie. Please MTI Home Video, feel free to use any of those suggestions upon potential future re-releases!

As for the movie itself though, it has quite the very low budget, almost home video quality about it. If you've seen movies like Recon 2020, and its sequels Recon 2022 and Recon 2023, then you kind of know what to expect from The Planet, but with even less special effects then those movies. We get a pretty decent opening space battle between a cargo ship being piloted by Mercenaries transporting a captured terrorist/cult leader and their pursuers trying to get the terrorist leader back, and the special Effects for this portion of the movie are pretty much what you would expect from a 1990s Wing Commander game, which is to say really not good at all, however that's somewhat excusable if you know beforehand going into this that it will be a micro-budget affair. Once they crash on the mysterious uncharted and supposedly-uninhabited desert planet though, we get the occasional brief special effect shot of viciously-attacking near-indivisible alien energy beings that, while a simple effect, actually look pretty impressive, especially when they're gliding through the air like fast-moving killer ghosts. That's all we get in terms of special effects here, but I'm fine with that as I'm always saying that a low budget movie needs to know its limitations and work within those limits, and apart from the opening space battle that was pretty brutal to sit through, this movie does that quite well.

The acting is one of the areas where, surprisingly, this movie truly shines. Normally with micro-budget flicks like this the actors are beyond terrible and are mostly made up of the director's own personal friends. I'm not sure what the case was with where he got them for this movie, but whatever that case is, it works quite well because everyone here turned in pretty great performances, and far better then what you would expect. Unfortunately, the downside here is that the cast is a bit too big for its own good, as most of the characters are written as pretty one-note characters with little to no distinctive personalities and were so similar to one another that I kept forgetting who was who and most everyone kind of just ran together for me. Sure, there's the main character tough-as-balls muscular leader of the mercenaries, his trustworthy level-headed second-in-command, and the unit's old-and-wise personal medic, but then everyone else (which is a good seven or eight characters) are essentially identical to one another with no unique attributes to distinguish one from another. There's even one moment where one of their ranks is revealed to be a traitor and had purposely set up most of the events of this movie to play out the way they do, yet the impact of the reveal was totally lost on me because I was just sitting there asking myself “Ok, so who exactly IS this guy and what role has he had in the movie up till now?” because I honestly didn't know him from any of the other handful of secondary characters. If they had focused on a much smaller cast of characters, I think this issue could have been avoided all together.

And it shocks me even more that the writing of the characters were so piss-poor, because the writing in every other area of the script was actually really damn good. Sure, the movie's plot itself is pretty basic – that being a group of military-style space mercenaries crashing on a desert planet and have to find a way to send for help or get off of it, which is also at first meant to be void of life but they soon find out it's inhabited by savage lifeforms and half-buried ancient temples and statues – it's a plot we've seen some variation of countless times before in movies like Pitch Black and Starship Troopers 3: Marauder to name just a couple that instantly came to mind, but it's the extra unexpected world-building where the writing really shines. This may be nothing more then a very short (more on that in a bit) micro budget home movie style of flick, but the extra world-building really made it feel like this was just one small side-step in a much greater story, set within a fully-realized and thought-out universe, that even greater and bigger stories are happening in but we're just not around to see them. This is a fictional future that I wouldn't mind returning to from time to time to see further adventures and other stories told from other point of views and characters, however I know that's asking for way too much here.

The movie does, however, include many of the usual technical problems that micro-budget movies tend to have – some audio issues pop up here and there where there's some background static while characters are talking or sometimes the sound effects are louder then the dialogue, making it hard to pick out what people are saying at times, a few shots linger for just a tad bit too long and a few scenes probably could have been tightened up a bit and shortened, there's an overly-dramatic and overbearing music soundtrack present during some portions, it has some of the above-mentioned annoyingly 1990s videogame-style CGI effects in some parts, and piss-poor character development. Luckily though it doesn't have these issues quite as often or on such a high level as most of these kinds of movies do, but they are still present and pop up from time to time.

At just an hour and nine minutes (about an hour if you cut off the opening and closing credits), The Planet takes what I like to call the Full Moon Approach – it has a short runtime, moves at a brisk pace, and is over pretty quickly, so even if the movie may not be the best, at the very least it doesn't take much of a time commitment for you to check it out and decide for yourself. I mean, that's essentially just one episode of Masters of Horror (a show that was treated criminally unfair by its TV channel. Hell, I don't think Season 2 ever even got a proper DVD release). While I don't normally like movies of this much of a low budget (you're essentially paying for something that's the quality of an online fanfilm), The Planet was better then the average micro-budget flick by having some good acting, fun creature scenes, and excellent world-building. Plus, seeing as how the runtime is so damn short, I really can't complain much anyway.

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Killer Mountain (2011)

REVIEW BY: Bobby Lepire

Company: Oracle Post

Runtime: 88 mins

Format: DVD

Plot: A rescue team is sent to find a missing expedition, which set out to recreate a 1954 lost mission on a forbidden mountain, only to cross paths with a ravenous creature, which is protecting something special.

Review: For some reason, it seems like lots of B-Movies open with pointless prologues, and 2011's Killer Mountain from the SyFy Channel is no different, and unfortunately things don’t much improve from there. Opening in 1954 Bhutan, a mountain expedition gets caught in a terrible snowstorm. One dumbass decides to go out into the storm, despite resistance from the others. We are not given any information about their expedition or how long they’ve been trekking, so Charles Wetherby, the aforementioned idiot, leaving in a terrible storm makes no sense to us as viewers. He then gets eaten by the creature of the movie, which is a sort of bug/worm/spider/wyvren thing. The CGI here, as throughout, is so bad that it’s astonishing that the SFX people, the director, the producers, and everyone else in-between saw them and said they were good to go. The other mountaineers then die of exposure and frostbite.

Cut to present, where the rest of the narrative takes place. The plot, when looked at objectively, is actually pretty fun - a rescue team is sent to save an expedition along that same 1954 path, with a secret mission. The creature is protecting what the expedition wants to find, and everyone is now in grave danger. Unfortunately, the greatest premise can still turn out awful if poorly executed. Here, the execution is amateurish at best, and entirely inept most of the time. For starters, most of the sets look and feel like artificial environments instead of authentic locations; I know the Millenium Falcon and Death Star aren’t real things, but the Star Wars movies made them feel real, and that is missing here. Early on, when we meet the leader of our rescue mission, Ward Donovan (Aaron Douglas from Battlestar Galactica fame), the forested area he’s teaching kids to climb in looks plastic and rubbery and not at all like any forest I have ever stepped into. When he almost falls, there’s a tree stump in the foreground that has a fresh coat of varnish on it. How did this get past everyone? How was this given the go-ahead? However, the least believable set is an ancient temple found atop the mountain. This thing looks like the set designer and laborers half finished it and walked away. It’s one thing to make something seem old, decrepit, and abandoned. It’s something else entirely to not even be able to finish the set, to make it look as such. The whole movie feels rushed and cheap, and it’s most obvious in the unconvincing sets.

The only thing worse than the set design is the CGI. While the practical snow effects look good (really, how hard is it to screw up snow?), all of the CGI is beyond terrible. The creature, while having a unique design and color palette meant to disguise it amongst the rocks, looks horrendous. It never has any weight, nor does it ever seem to occupy the same place as whatever it’s interacting with. When it nudges a crashed helicopter pilot to make sure he’s dead, it looks so unrealistic and unbelievable that it is actually painful. When it’s hiding on a cliff edge, it sticks out like a sore thumb. I am dumbfounded that the CGI is this bad when the movie is only two years old.

Director Sheldon Wilson also keeps things bland with a boring color scheme. Everything is white, grey, or black. It’s as if the cinematographer was a color blind narcoleptic. The few action scenes fail to generate any real tension or excitement, and all of these things lead to the greatest sin any B-Movie can commit: being ungodly boring. Boy, oh boy, is this movie dull. Thanks to the bland, unimaginative direction, a script written by people that must have never heard proper human speech before, and the worst CGI I have ever seen in a SyFy Channel movie, Killer Mountain fails to get the audience to invest in anything that's going on within it. With a plethora of pointless and frustrating subplots, the script is padded out like hell, and at less than an hour and a half, that is unacceptable. Had the film just stuck with the mysterious treasure plot, there could have been something interesting there, but there’s a million subplots: the “pretending to be a relief organization” plot, the “rescue mission” plot, the “ramifications of the 1954” prologue, and the “terrorists looking for the treasure” as well. Too much is going on, and none of it is engaging. It doesn’t help that, as stated above, the script never sounds believable or gets beyond the same tired old cliches and stereotypes.

Within this void of suckage though, there’s a sole silver lining. Excluding all the actors in the prologue, the acting across the board is excellent, with Aaron Douglas being the absolute best. He brings a lot of gravitas to an underwritten, uninspired role. As Kate Donovan, Emmanuelle Vaugier exudes confidence and can hold her own easily. Paul Campbell as the stereotypical jerk comes off as appropriately jerky and fun; You never totally hate him. Andrew Arlie as backer for the expedition brings a believable level of frustration and secrecy to the role. The rest of the cast do very well as well, and even if this were a higher budgeted, big theatrical release the acting here would be impressive, and far better than the movie deserves. It’s depressing though, because of how inept and dumb all the other choices here are. The good and striking acting is let down by everything else in the movie.

For a DTV movie, Killer Mountain has great acting, but it’s all for naught as at every possible turn ineptitude, stupidity, and boredom rear their ugly heads. On paper, this probably sounded great, but bland direction and terrible CGI hamper all the fun.

2/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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