Transmorphers (Review)

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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Dragon (Review)

Dragon


2006
Starring
Amelia Jackson-Gray as Princess Alora Vanir
Eliza Swenson as Freja
Matthew Wolf as Sir Cador Bain
Jon-Paul Gates as Lord Artemir
Rachel Haines as Naga
Jessica Bork as Damara
Jeff Denton as Gareth Morholt
Jason DeParis as Sogomo
Directed by Leigh Scott

The Asylum is a movie production company that was known for low budget horror films, some of which were surprisingly good quality. All of that changed in the past two years or so, as Asylum slowly started producing “mockbusters”, which are movies that are amazingly similar to popular movies, even so far as having similar titles. Examples include Halloween Night, Da Vinci Treasure, When a Killer Calls, H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, and the immortal Snakes on a Train. They’ve struck again, and as the movie Eragon premiered at the box office, the DVD shelves of your local video store filled up with Dragon. Dragon seems like it would be a natural lock of just having Eragon‘s plot (which is just Star Wars, which is just Hidden Fortress, which is just 9000 other stories throughout history) but instead they mainly target Lord of the Rings for the beginning and end, and the middle reminds one of Dungeons & Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God. Overall, the film not only misses its mark, but its mark doesn’t even seem to exist. Instead, we get fantasy name soup, dirty guys wandering around the forest, “Dark Elves”, and Playstation dragons.

To help slay Dragon, TarsTarkas.NET and FantasyFilmscapes.com are teaming up. It’s not an easy task, with many pitfalls, traps, and beasts of yore along the way. Okay, not really beasts so much as bad actors and shameful special effects. That’s something even a +2 Mace can’t help you with, even if you use it to smash the DVD into a million pieces, your brain is still traumatized and the repercussions will haunt you for the rest of your days. The introduction is co-written between Tars Tarkas and Iain Norman, and after that we’ll be alternating every 15 minutes, because too much exposure can cause headaches, vomiting, and even blindness. Once the darkness returns to take us, the reigns get passed on and a recovery period can begin. In the end, this Dragon will be dead, never to harm us villagers again. Join knights in armor Tars Tarkas and Iain Norman on our quest! Slay today.

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