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Gryphon syfy
InMovie Reviews, Ugly

Gryphon (Review)

January 29, 2007By

Gryphon

aka Attack of the Gryphon

2007
Directed by Andrew Prowse

SciFi Channel strikes again with another monster movie where CG runs amok and kills people, this time medieval people, and again their effort is less than stellar. At least it wasn’t painful. Parts of the film seem to be borrowed from many popular movies: the villain is Emperor Palpatine’s lame nephew, certain elements are directly culled from Lord of the Rings, and even parts reminding one of Braveheart are onscreen. The movie follows SciFi Channel’s Type A monster movie, where there is only one monster (or a small group) who is invincible.

The heroine is named Princess Amelia, which is also the name of the actress who played the princess in Dragon, another movie that Gryphon resembles. It’s low budget, has a single word title that is the monster, has a Princess Amelia (even if not by name), has a witch wife of the King who sees the future, and has bad CGI. It’s spooky how much Gryphon reminded me of Dragon. Princess Amelia actress Amber Benson played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as I have only seen one episode of that show I have no idea who she is. The hero is Prince Seth, played by Jonathan LaPaglia, from The District, another show I didn’t really watch (but I saw several episodes of it, I just don’t remember him, either.) Where is Coach? He should be playing one of the kings.

Gryphon syfy
InMovie News

Upcoming SciFi Channel Crap

January 11, 2007By

Upcoming on SciFi Channel:

Grendel
Beowulf’s legendary battle with the monster Grendel comes to life in this hard-hitting new adaptation. Chris Bruno (The Dead Zone) stars as Beowulf, Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire) plays the harried King Hrothgar, and Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation) co-stars as Queen Wealhtheow.
IMDB
Saturday, Jan. 13, at 9/8C

Gryphon
Two warring countries are united when faced with a common enemy, a mythical flying beast called the Gryphon. Amber Benson (Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) stars with Sarah Douglas (Ursa in Superman II) and Jonathan LaPaglia (TV’s The District) in this action-packed fantasy-adventure.
IMDB
Saturday, Jan. 27, at 9/8C
Hey, that’s great they are ripping off part of the plot of Dragon Storm. Originally called Attack of the Gryphon, this directed by Andrew Prowse. Andrew is also directing a film called Tyrannosaurus Azteca, written by David Kemper (of Farscape fame) which lead me to this article:

David Kemper has multipic deal with Sci Fi Channel and new show in the wings.

David Kemper is back in a big way.

The creator of Sci Fi Channel’s Farscape–which ran four seasons on the network and was its highest-rated show at the time–has a deal with the network to create five new TV movies. Kemper also has a new series that is drawing interest from cable channels.

Kemper’s first two films from the deal are the horror films Heat Stroke and Tyrannosaurus Azteca. They will air sometime next year, most likely in the network’s Saturday Movie slot.

The new series in development by Kemper is being described as a postapocalyptic action series in the vein of Xena, The Warrior Princess. The series is based on a comic book.

Rigel Entertainment is coproducing the TV movies and producing the new series. Rigel president David Macaione says that three cable nets are interested in the new show, but he would not specify which three.

Sci Fi Channel has had even greater ratings success since Farscape, with Battlestar Galactica and Eureka each pulling in good numbers.

Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud
Feuding backwoods clans clash when a boy from one family falls for a girl from the other — and summons a vengeful demon to slay her kin. Lance Henriksen (Aliens, the original Pumpkinhhead film) makes a cameo in this action-packed tale of a tragic romance. Amy Manson and Bradley Taylor star.
IMDB
Saturday Feb. 10 at 9/8C
Sequel they filmed at the same time they made the earlier Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes, both having Lance Henriksenreprise his role from the original film.

Fire Serpent
A veteran firefighter tries to convince a young fireman and a government agent that the blaze they are fighting is really a fire creature spawned by the sun. Nicholas Brendon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Sandrine Holt (24) and Robert Beltran (Star Trek: Voyager) star.
IMDB
Saturday February 24 at 9/8C
This is the winner in my book. Originally called Alien Fire. Any movie about aliens from the SUN invading Earth has to be good!

Gryphon syfy

InMovie Reviews, Ugly

Caved In: Prehistoric Terror (Review)

January 5, 2007By

Caved In: Prehistoric Terror


2006
Starring
Christopher Atkins as John Palmer
Colm Meaney as Vincent
Angela Featherstone as Samantha Palmer
Monica Birladeanu as Sophie
David Palffy as Marcel
Chelan Simmons as Emily Palmer
Stevie Mitchell as Miles Palmer
Directed by Richard Pepin

On the next Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Chief Miles O’Brien fights giant rhinoceros beetles! Well, that would still be better than that stupid baseball episode. Instead, we get another average SciFi Channel movie. Unlike some of their other movies, this one is not so terrible you want to gouge out your eyes and ears to become blind and deaf to the world. Now, that doesn’t make this movie any good. It is just as far from good as it is from bad in many places. In fact, at some points it’s laughable, and several of the characters are never in any danger at all, as the movie is incapable of doing anything inventive like kill off a member of the main family. The problem with the predictability is the film becomes uninteresting. While not committing the ultimate SciFi Channel sin of being boring, it is not anything you’d sit around and catch the second running of. Watch, rinse, forget. Not many films are brave enough to specialize an obscure beetle, but I bet the writer saw a special on the Discovery Channel that mentioned that rhinoceros beetles are proportionally the strongest animals on the planet. Some gears started to crank, electricity began to flow, the light bulb started to flicker…Bingo: make them huge! That also somehow makes them prehistoric, and meat eaters. Since real rhinoceros beetles only eat fruit and rotting wood, they are only dangerous to Jack Pumpkinhead from The Marvelous Land of Oz. He is nowhere to be found, though it would have made the film that much cooler. Instead of that weird fun, we have to put up with the Palmers. Not the Palmers from 24, but these are some professional outdoors adventure guides who show rich people around in the outside while overcoming the troubles of modern families like homework and teenage girls hogging the bathroom.

Caved In: Prehistoric Terror follows the Type B SciFi Channel monster movie formula: Large Swarms of similar creatures with a Giant Queen terrorize a group (similar films: Pterodactyl and Snakehead Terror.) Type A SciFi Channel monster movie formula: A singular or small group (4 or less) of monsters terrorize a group(similar films: Frankenfish and Manticore.) Type C SciFi Channel monster movie formula: A swarm of monsters with no queen terrorize a group (similar films: Komodo vs. Cobra and Curse of the Komodo.) Now that we’ve outlined the basic three plots, we can jump into the film itself, starting with the characters.

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon
InMovie Reviews, Ugly

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (Review)

October 30, 2006By

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon


2002
Starring
John Barrowman as Ben Carpenter
Jenny McShane as Cataline Stone
Ryan Cutrona as Chuck Rampart
George Stanchev as Esai
Harry Anichkin (Harry Aneachkin) as Jeff Tolley
Bashar Rahal as Luis Ruiz

“I’m really wired. What do you say, I take you home and eat your pussy?”

With that immortal dialogue, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon became the greatest movie of the Shark Attack franchise. Which is a little like being the fastest snail or the damnest, dirtiest ape. Taking Jaws and super-sizing it, we get a movie that combines two of the standard plotlines for SciFi Channel films: shark attacks and giant prehistoric monsters running amok. This film may be specially tailored for the SciFi Channel, but anywhere else, it leaves a thick, crusty residue behind. The ludicrous plot dares to copy the Jaws story from a universe where Steven Spielberg was replaced by a shaved chimp. Even a shaved chimp couldn’t be low enough to write the final half hour of this alleged film, that could have only been accomplished by a tub of wet cement. The finally where characters leap into the water into the mouth of the giant shark stretches believability for even a SciFi Channel movie. I’m there when prehistoric rhinoceros beetles live underground for centuries with no food. I’m there when cloned sabretooths are bulimic and shaped like walruses. I’m there when Komodos fight Cobras for thirty seconds of a two hour movie. But I can’t follow the logic of the characters at the end of this film.

Megalodon was the biggest shark that ever lived, estimated to get up to 16 meters (53 feet) in length. They are long dead, despite what a few lone nuts would have you believe. They are a perfect villain for a monster movie, but even the biggest screw-ups can ruin a perfect concept. The best part of Shark Attack 3 is enjoying the ride as the plane flies apart all around you, leaving you in perilous danger for your sanity as the movie slams into the Earth at 186,200 miles per second. Only those who are strong can escape without the scarring, both mentally and physically (you will try to gouge out eyes, slit wrists, and stick forks in sockets.) The reward is a large patch on the B-Movie Watcher’s Uniform, a symbol to be worn with pride. Joining the ranks of Troll 2, Cyber Seduction, Turkish Star Wars, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and dozens of other All Star films. Are you man enough to accept the challenge? Or will we be sending the Megalodon to go eat you, in a fury of terrible CGI?

In the meantime, enjoy the terrible animated gifs the encapsulate the abomination of video data files that stands before you, ready for the attack.

Komodo vs. Cobra
InMovie Reviews, Ugly

Komodo vs. Cobra (Review)

June 1, 2006By

Komodo vs. Cobra


2005
Starring
Michelle Borth as Susan Richardson
Jerri Manthey as Sandra Crescent
Glori-Anne Gilbert as Darla
Ryan McTavish as Jerry
Ted Monte as Ted
Chris Neville as Lerner
Michael Paré as Mike
Jay Richardson as Dr. Richardson
Renee Talbert as Carrie
Delpano Wills as Marsden
Directed by Jim Wynorski

Komodo vs. Cobra!!! KvC!! Giant komodo vs. a giant cobra. This should be a winner! In the name of Boa vs. Python, another fun SciFi Channel monster vs monster film. But what should easily be a winner can often become a chore as cheapness conspires to clutch a loser of a film from the jaws of winningness. What else do you expect when your director is Jim Wynorski and it doesn’t involve naked chicks? Having nothing to do with either Curse of the Komodo or King Cobra, despite Wynorski’s work on CotK, this film tries to set itself in an independent universe. That’s the excuse, then, for making this film 95% identical to CotK. Many of the same major scene reenact themselves, many of the same sets are reused, and at least four actors and the director/writer are the same. This is akin to just taking the CotK film and adding a King Cobra wandering around digitally added to the background in a few scenes and calling it a new movie. Oh, our title characters fight, all right. At the very end of the movie, for about two minutes. That’s it. Despite them saying repeatedly that there are many giant cobras and giant komodo, we don’t even get a hint that they fight each other except one small scene in the flashbacks where they hiss a lot. This isn’t like Naked Lunch, where no one ate a lunch while naked, this is SciFi Channel, we want a damn monster fight. And this movie which promises a monster fight in it’s title is determined to deny us what we so desperately desire. In the end, all it does is tick you off. Really tick you off. Freaking tick you off. Tick you of like a MoFo! GARRRRRRRGGGGHHH!!!

The movie opens promising enough. Three people are running through the jungle of a tropical isle. It’s Dr. Richardson, his daughter Susan, and a third man we’ll call Orson Welles, because he was The Third Man. Their running is useless, because they are cut off by Johnny Komodo. Johnny Komodo looks a little different from CotK, he’s got a more dinosaur-shaped head. He’s just as immune to bullets, as none of the ones fired seem to have any effect on him. Johnny Komodo shows that the Jim Wynorski watched Jurassic Park, as komodo can now not see you unless you move, like the T-Rex. Orson Welles runs off, which attracts Johnny Komodo and he chomps down on Orson Welles. Dr. Richardson and Susan escape then and set up shop by a lake, looking around for a bit, until Johnny Cobra emerges from the lake, and has Dr. Richardson chops for dinner. Now Susan is all alone…

Cerberus
InMovie Reviews, Ugly

Cerberus (Review)

February 20, 2006By

Cerberus


2005
Starring
Greg Evigan as Marcus Cutter
Garret Sato as Kul Jae Sung
Sebastian Spence as Jake Adams
Emmanuelle Vaugier as Dr. Samantha Gaines
Gelu Nitu as Radu
Directed by John Terlesky

Sci-Fi Channel is the never ending fountain of original films where a monster runs around and terrorizes people until it’s done away with by the few remaining main characters left, barring a “shock ending” that happens around a third of the time. So many creatures have stomped, crashed, slithered, and slimed their way across Sci-Fi’s airwaves, that they are starting to run low on things to make run around. They’ve already made pretty much every snake possible attack at some point, sharks attack more often on one hour of Sci-Fi channel than in a year of real life, dinosaurs run around like Jurassic Park opened on everyone’s street corner, and now it’s time to run into mythology. First there was Manticore, and now Cerberus. Cerberus comes directly to us from Cinetel Films, who is bringing us such future winners as Komodo vs. King Cobra and Caved In: Prehistoric Terror, Directed by the wonderful John Terlesky, whose upcoming film Alien Fire, where aliens emerge from the sun and attack earth, must surely be a future classic, especially with Robert Beltran, Sandrine Holt, and Nicholas Brendon in the cast. Beltrane was last fighting Manticores, Sandrine Bugs, and Brendon nothing that showed up here (get cracking, Brendon!) Enough about the future of this motley crew, it’s time for the present, and that present is Cerberus, a three-headed dog who was the guardian of Hades, and now should just be put to sleep. I’m dog-gone tired of unimaginative films in this genre where they take a halfway decent idea then skimp out on the gore. (Yes, expect many more lame dog puns!) Cerberus attacks people=good idea. Some guy running around with a magic sword, and Cerberus wanders in every once in a while to kill a random person or two, but less than the main villain! It’s lame! Make with the Monster Death! Not shooting, or swording, but dog-chomping! Cerberus should have made kibbles out of the entire cast! Hopefully, those future projects can bring us what we crave, high death counts from monsters eating people! (Well, Caved In won’t…)


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