Hey, anyone interested in an okayish mild-horror time filler designed to get everyone involved paid and some time on the SyFy Channel filled? Well, do I have a very middle-of-the-road bit of inoffensive tepid entertainment for you! Because much like the real world of bulk movie production, not everything you haven’t heard of can be joyfully bad or outrageously crazy. A lot of it just does the job it’s supposed to.
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The entire description blurb for this is “They Find a Live Wyvern in small-town Alaska.” It doesn’t explain who “they” are, the l is needlessly capitalised, and my expectations were set accordingly. Then, in the first two minutes, we get a caption telling us the icy landscape is Alaska, and then a CGI wyvern turns up. I can’t think of better expectation management in a creature feature. Continue reading
Apparently, the title of this film was chosen as people kept on mistaking the original 1997 film by writer/director Michael Cooney for the 1998 Michael Keaton film also called Jack Frost. That was a touching romantic comedy, the one we’re interested in is a nonsense story about a killer snowman. Then again, both of the snowmen on the covers look sinister and I haven’t seen either of them so maybe they are as interchangeable as Hallmark movies. Continue reading
It’s another micro-budget genre movie, this time rocking it at a tight $15,000 AUD (I’m not converting that into GBP, because by the time I’ve finished this review the figure will be horribly wrong) gathered by crowdfunding. It stars a gaggle of reasonably talented people, including writer Rita Artmann and writer/director Joe Bauer, and it has a bloody silly title as google keeps going “Did you mean Australians?”. It’s also funnier than Bouncer being drop-kicked by Skippy, and about as polite.
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If you’re worried about this 1999 Louis Morneau directed movie being a low-budget creepy-crawly-horror cash-in for Lou Diamond Phillips, then don’t panic. This is actually a disaster movie, starring Dina Meyer with Lou Diamond Phillips as the bit of totty that the hero wins at the end. It just looks like it’s an attempt to milk the last scrap of Arachnophobia money still on the table because that’s the only way it could sell its radical feminist agenda.
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Films made for the Sci-Fi channel have a reputation for cheapness, dullness, and zeitgeist abuse that is rivaled only by The Asylum mockbusters. It’s not that they’re bad, so much as they always make you think of a better movie that you could be watching. So, when sitting down to watch this film from the renowned Hallmark Channel Christmas romance director Tibor Takács (who also did the well-regarded The Gate back in the 80s), expectations were set to “please don’t suck”. Thankfully, these heady heights were surpassed.
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It’s always a gamble to seek out and watch movies that are on the margins of quality; they could have their middling, C-grade rating because the work doesn’t gel with that wide an audience, or because the makers were trying something new and exciting and just missed the mark. B+ rated movies are a known quantity, it’s most likely that they are going to be good at what they are doing from the offset, and any issues are just going to be personal preference. D- films are just punishment for punishments’ sake, something you watch for pure snark or irony. But the middle ground is when hitting “play” becomes an adventure in its own right; an exciting land where things can go either way…
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Trash or Treasure 