Tag Archives: CGI trainwreck

Planet Raptor: Raptor Island 2 (Review)

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Planet Raptor: Raptor Island 2

aka Raptor Island 2

2008
Directed by Gary Jones
Written by Steve Latshaw

Remember that SciFi Channel movie Raptor Island and how it was one of the worst SciFi Channel movies ever, the raptors just stood there and got shoot, and the whole thing was a complete mess? Well, it got a sequel! Don’t you feel your harsh criticisms of the original are now unjustified? Of course not, there is no reason for this sequel to exist. And yet it does. And it is set in space.

Yes, OUTER SPACE!

Well, Critters, Friday the 13th, and Leprechaun did it, so why not Raptor Island? That also gives you the excuse to rip off Aliens wholesale with the excuse it is in the future, thus it is a homage or something. So IN THE FUTURE Raptor will still be eating people, because that is what they do. And SciFi Channel will be airing Shark Attack 46: Megalodon in Space.

Director Gary Jones worked with Sam Raimi on two of the Evil Dead films, and has since become a genre director of his own right. Writer Steve Latshaw has been around for years, previously encounter here in The Curse of the Komodo. Neither of them have much to work with due to the limited budget, and are forced to resort to stock footage and abandoned towns. The film reeks of a small budget, it even has problems with the American flags on the uniforms. Sometimes the American flag has forty stars, and sometimes only 35! It looks like in the future America lost a few states, or they are in a state of quantum flux, probably due to more raptors. Schrödinger’s states.

Captain Mace Carter (Steven Bauer) – tough talking captain of a squad of marines sent to investigate a mysterious SOS on a planet. Steven Bauer played the evil foreign terrorist Azir in the previous film, who died, so this must be his great-great grandson who is now an American. Cultural assimilation for raptor destruction, in space. You have to admire a character named for Mace Windu and John Carter of Mars.
Dr. Anna Rogers (Vanessa Angel) – Her parents were killed in a war, so she became a scientist as well. Makes sense. Probably a distant descendant of the offspring of Mike and Linda Olsen from Raging Sharks, because I believe all SciFi Channel films take place in the same universe. A very terrifying universe.
Sgt. Jacqueline ‘Jack’ Moore (Musetta Vander) – The tough woman marine character you need in all Aliens ripoffs. You know she’s tough because she has a boy’s name. Musetta Vander was in such great films as Mansquito, Wild Wild West, and Mortal Kombat 2.
Dr. Tygon (Ted Raimi) – The leader of the creepy government scientists. You know he is evil because he is named after a hybrid animal, but the opposite of the one bred for their skills in magic. Ted Raimi is Sam Raimi’s brother and is in all of his films, but sometimes you got to pay for that new house, so here we are.
Sgt. Pappy Mathis (Peter Jason) – The old man marine who is tough and old and cool. He’s the most likeable character, so you might as well paint a target on his back. He gets raptor chomped, and then goes all suicide bomber on those space dinos. Peter Jason was also in the original Raptor Island, and used the accolades he got from these two movies to get a role in Transformers 2. He is also seen here in They Live.
Jose (???) – A bald trooper with one eyebrow and lots of old food. I don’t know who played him because the credits didn’t bother to tell anyone. Bad credits!
Alien Dude (Puppet) – He is an alien who looks like a mantis, and his race had the brilliant plan to use raptors as slaves and pets. This was after they had the idea to build and orphanage on a volcano and crash a meteor into their capital building to kill some termites. Not the brightest thinkers, and now all dead. Take that, space bugs!
Puppet Raptors (Puppet) – The Space Raptors come in two breeds – Puppet and CGI. Guess which one doesn’t look terrible? All the shots of the Puppet Raptor are pretty scary, but then he jumps out as a CGI mess and you wonder what they were thinking. Next time, go 100% puppet raptor with a marionette. It will still look better than…
CGI Raptors (CGI) – CGI Raptors look pretty terrible. Half of the time they are purple, but at least they aren’t as brain dead as the previous movie’s raptors, who stood still while being shot and just dropped dead. Now they drop dead whil walking forward. That is how Space Raptors are so spacey. Maybe if you are coked out of your brain to the point where you think you are in space, these effects will look good. Give me the Puppet Raptors!!
Commander Bakewell (Serban Celea) – Captain of the ship USS Santee, he spends most of the film hanging with Science Chief Romanov (Bart Sidles) trying to get in contact with the ground team, only to try to kill them when he does. Makes sense. As expected, Commander Bakewell makes the best brownies ever, but is a mortal enemy of Poppin Fresh!.


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D-War (Review)

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D-War

aka Dragon Wars: D-War

2007
Directed and written by Shim Hyung-rae

D-Wars aka Dragons Wars is the film that was announced years ago and everyone though it was crazy. Writer/director Shim Hyung-rae sounded pretty insane with his talk of an epic Korean movie set in LA with dragons blasting everything, and rumor was this was a giant money pit. But investors were hooked, film was created, and soon a trailer emerged that showed dragons and lizard armies marching around LA while a giant snake thing slithers around. This created instant buzz, but it would be another year before D-War hit theaters. Internet weirdos like myself were salivating at the thought of a big-budgeted extravaganza that would either be incredibly awesome or incredibly terrible. Little did we know that we would be getting both in the same movie! For fifteen glorious minutes D-Wars becomes the best movie ever made. However, those fifteen minutes are stuck in the dead center of some of the crappiest writing, acting, logic, and cinematic efforts of the decade. But that’s a good thing, as it makes this review more interesting.

We got Korean dragons. We got subtitles. We got American second rate actors. Shim Hyung-rae is the man responsible for the remake of the Korean daikaiju film Yonggary which became known as Reptillian. The love for this man of giant lizards trashing cities would seem weird were it not for Japan. Still, the concept for D-Wars sounded pretty far out. It depends heavily on Korean myth as well as some random new things. Yuh Yi Joo, Imoogi, Bochun, Atrox, Buraki, Dawdler, the vocabulary you need to learn for this movie reads like some second rate Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh crap! The amount of plot-related alphabet soup words is above and beyond the norm for a giant monster movie. It is distracting, and leaves the audience confused and angry. I don’t want to be angry when watching a monster movie, I want to see giant lizards f-ing things up!

And boy do things get f-ed up! The level of utter chaos here during the money sequence is beautiful. Shim Hyung-rae manages to take to school a squad of previous genre failures. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla only wishes it had this kind of great monster sequences. For those of you upset over the lack of helicopters vs. dragons the posters for Reign of Fire promised us, despair not, for your cup runneth over in D-Wars! Did you wish that the Gungan army in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was really an army of metal-clad badasses who blow the crap out of innocent villagers? You better start believing in the Blue Fairy because we got there here as well!

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Attack of the Sabretooth (Review)

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Attack of the Sabretooth


2005
Directed by George Miller

SciFi Channel has an addiction. That addiction doesn’t flood its veins with poison, or spend the rent money betting that the Steelers will cover the spread. This addiction is with garbage. The SciFi Channel loves garbage. It probably wants to BE garbage. A few more movies like this and its wish will come true. There is only one thing redeeming about Attack of the Sabretooth: It didn’t kill me. But even then, the movie is a failure, as anything this terrible should be fatal!

This crapfest is another of the long parade of SciFi Channel originals, and a sequel in name only to the film Sabretooth. It’s also a sequel in CGI, as some of the same sabretooth renders are reused. In case you are wondering, we are using the British spelling of sabretooth because the film did, as that helps convey to the reader in text form just how painful the movie was. You so want to complain about the spelling of “sabertooth”, don’t you? Well, TOO BAD!!!! MuHAHAHAHAHA!!! I had no escape from the film thanks to a malfunctioning DVD eject button. In fact, that DVD keeps malfunctioning whenever bad films are playing. The TV refuses to be shut off, I unplug, and things continue to play. There is no escape from the bad films, and now you have no escape from reading the horror that is Attack of the Sabretooth. Hey, you can’t go to another website now! I forbid it! Get in here and read on, find out how the evil businessman is killed by CGI so bad you can create better with MSPaint. Find out how they have a retarded walrus sabretooth screaming around like he just got ripped off by the carpenter and couldn’t eat any clams (yes, an Alice in Wonderland joke.) Behold Robert Carradine’s here-before unknown skill of turning his head into a failed CGI student’s rendering! It’s all here, and more!

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Transformers (Review)

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Transformers


2007
Directed by Michael Bay

Transformers were the pinnacle of 1980’s toys. They had classic characters and endure to this day. Transformers are among the first toys I remember getting for Christmas (of 1984, where I got toys including Megatron) and are toys I still have stored away in the attic. Even my favorite toy line (Battle Beasts) are just a spin-off of Transformers. I saw the original movie in the theaters and cried when Optimus Prime died. So to say I was interested when it was announced there would be a live action film is an understatement to say the least.

However, the interest soon waned when I found out Michael Bay was to be the director. Problems also arose when preview art of the Transformers showed them to be very ugly-looking. I realize this is not the Generation 1 line but a new universe. I don’t expect tape-recorder robots. I do expect writing that matched Beast Wars at the least, not writing that pales in comparison to the original cartoon. A cartoon where and entire episode revolved around a girl falling in love with Powerglide (who subsequently beat her around a bit). How hard can it be to write something that doesn’t suck? All you had to do was just be average and let the robots do the rest. Instead, we have 2 ½ hours (way too long) where robots don’t do much of anything until the last 25 minutes. And also the robots pee. Seriously. It’s a disgrace. Not to Transformers, but to audiences everywhere. The movie thinks the audience is stupid. The army regularly endangers civilians for no reason. There is a plot about hackers. Every piece of modern technology came from a frozen robot. The sun seems to be stuck at the edge of the horizon (or setting every five minutes) giving every shot an orange glow. More Transformers are killed by humans than Transformers. The robot fight sequences are cool, but were needed earlier. The movie is more than meets the eye, more terrible than the eye could ever meet.

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Vampire Vixens from Venus (Review)

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Vampire Vixens from Venus


1995
Directed, Produced, and Written by Ted A. Bohus

Vampire Vixens from Venus (not to be confused with Vampire Vixens is the story about seductive alien women who come to Earth to steal brain juices from excited men. After running across it in a random movie rental nine years ago in college, I had been searching for it for years, and thanks to some luck I ran across a copy. Most memorable after all that time was the CGI was literally the worst I had ever seen in a film and may have been one of the first movies with a CGI character. The alien women have their alternate alien modes, which gives us a few instances of alien monsters killing men as well. Topping all of that is the movie’s bumbling cop hero character, who just happens to be British for no real good reason! It all adds up to a bizarre ride for what is essentially a skin flick, but is memorable enough due to the factors that make it so weird.

The film has some crude humor, but for the most part is just silly and doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously, which is a boon for these sci-fi sex movies. Some of the jokes are groan-inducing, while random silly things such as a guy in the town always dressed like Elvis are just fun (especially since the Elvis guy looks like an 80-pound weakling.) The creature effects here appear to have the same general style as other Ted A. Bohus films such as Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor or Nightbeast, but I haven’t seen any of them so I can’t compare further.

Arylai (J.J. North) – Leader of the Vampire Vixens from Venus, helps guide the team on their mission to steal excited male brain chemicals. Blonde actress, but an orange alien, and the only member of the team who seems all there upstairs. Shot by a Space Cop. J.J. North is a B-Movie actress probably best known for Bikini Hotel, Hybrid, or Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold, but hasn’t been in films since 2000. Her real name is Janey Jaye North. No joke here, just saying.
Shirley (Theresa Lynn) – The dumb member of the Vampire Vixens team, but kudos to the moviemakers for not making her the stereotypical blonde. Instead, she’s full redhead (though her alien self is lime green.) Shot by a Space Cop. Never having achieved much in the B-movie roles she was cast in (except maybe Orgasm Woman in Howard Stern’s Private Parts), she seems to have disappeared from the entertainment industry around 1999.
Omay (Leslie Glass) – The third member of the Vampire Vixens from Venus, the sultry brunette who can’t always get her holoprojector working. Her alien form is a deep red. Shot by a Space Cop. A former Penthouse Pet turned adult actress, Leslie Glass sadly died of cancer in 2000.
Detective Oakenshield (Leon Head) – The inexplicably British detective of the local police force, who is not only head detective but head klutz. Solves most of the case due to his British brilliance. Leon Head seems to have never worked again, except in the Chinese film So Close??? Somehow I think they made a mistake, but I’ll check it out next time I watch the film.
Shampay (Michelle Bauer) – Another Penthouse Pet, but Michelle Bauer is a B-movie queen. Over 100 films, and still going strong. Here she is the not-so-secret fourth member of the Vampire Vixens from Venus. Eaten by a Space Cop.
Jack Meov (John Knox) – The new partner to Detective Oakenshield is in fact an undercover member of the Intergalactic Patrol. But don’t tell anyone, as that is the secret ending of the film. Whoops! Shot by Oakenshield.


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Transmorphers (Review)

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Transmorphers


2007
Directed and Written by Leigh Scott

Transmorphers! Morph than meets the eye! Wait a minute, that’s the theme to Transformers, not Transmophers, another in the long line of “mock”busters from The Asylum. We previously encountered them in the first Dragon Slayers team-up with FantasyFilmscapes.com in the movie Dragon, which was mysteriously named similar to Eragon. In addition to having elements similar to Transformers, Transmorphers borrows from several famous science fiction movies, the most obvious will be The Terminator and The Matrix. We’ll point out the rest as the references happen. Before we can get to the plot, first we must address the disk. Simply put, the Transmorphers DVD shipped with an incomplete movie. Large swaths of the film are out of sound sync, and many effects are incomplete. Guns shoot silently or no lasers exit the end. CGI at times is embarrassingly bad. In fact, the film is so bad that The Asylum went back and completed the film and fixed the sound problems, and any new DVDs are supposed to have the completed film. Well, I’m not about to track down another copy of the film to play Russian roulette to see if I got a corrected version. Transmorphers was filmed under the title Robot Wars, but everyone working on it pretty much knew it was going to get a new title that would sound familiar to a certain big budget film coming out.

Ignoring those major flaws, how is the film? Actually, it is pretty entertaining. Giving the budget constraints and time spent on the film, it was amazing what was produced. Writer/Director Leigh Scott gives a few tidbits of information from his interview on YourVideoStoreShelf.com about production for The Asylum and why he won’t be working for them anymore. Scott is known for creating a large bulk of The Asylum’s mockbusters and for going on message boards and arguing with irate watchers of his films. As for now, humanity is driven underground thanks to an invasion of alien robots.

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