This is a thread dedicated to those annoying films that are made simply to separate you from your precious dollars and to provide you with total crap.
Feel free to warn horror fans of any these nasty films you know of. If you can cut and paste a review of the film with your comment. Or just relay your experiences with these nasty assed films.....This thread is an attempt to help our peers and save them from visual and mental anguish!!! _________________ T.T.F.N.
William Pattison
www.homestead.com/f13bloodbath/enter.html www.outpostvevetta.com
The Truth Isn't Out There, It's Right Here...
Last edited by WilliamPattison on Tue Sep 18, 2007 1:52 am; edited 1 time in total
In an attempt to cheat people looking for Brian DePalma's Black Dahlia Lion's Gate released this low grade horrible film made by Uli Lommel, the leader of the film cult the horror industry knows as The Cult of Uli. It stars the nasty assed -Zgrade actress Elissa Dowling (aka Elissa Downing, aka Elissa Bree, aka Lissa Slasher, who is a failed improv artist named Elissa Bree Englemann...)
I warn you this is a REAL DVD nasty. Avoid like the plague!!!
But if my warning isn't enough, here is a review from Horror Yearbook's own Doctor Royce Clemens:
ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA
Published by Dr. Royce Clemens July 11th, 2007 in MOVIE REVIEWS (ALL), Movie Reviews NEW (2000 & Up) and Dr. Royce Clemens Archives.
ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA
Zero Stars out of 4
Unrated
Directed by Ulli Lommel
Now I know how Judge Judy feels. Public mediation on a petty dispute between two parties who are equally disturbing and obsessive.
The subject is an actress: One Elissa Dowling. Every time Miss Dowling stars in a movie, a cabal of creepy internet window-lickers rises as one to defend her. Inversely, there is ALSO a cabal of creepy internet window-lickers devoted to tearing her down. And thus, an extremely pale and loserly internet flame war erupts every time she is mentioned anywhere, up to and including right here at horroryearbook.
Being that I find both these parties equally despicable and sad, I am impartial by default. Can Elissa Dowling cut the mustard, at least according to a mildly interested third party? More on that to follow. First and foremost I have a movie to review.
You can tell a movie is shatteringly and mind-numbingly bad when Karl Rove and a bunch of chanting, torch-bearing druids accompany its Netflix sleeve to your mailbox. ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA is such a film. Thanks to Mr. Lommel and Lionsgate films, my TV now has gonorrhea from the simple act of displaying it. I am not alone in my assessment, for I have read comments on IMDB and elsewhere not only calling it the worst film ever made, but the worst 15/25/30 minutes they’ve ever seen because they bailed out early.
Only my dedication to my job kept me watching this piece of shit and even THAT was strained near the closing stretches. It’s like seeing a kid puke at Disneyland, and the actual vomit is this weird color mixture of forest green and fuchsia. Not only does one wonder how such a thing could happen, but you’re pretty sure it defies one of God’s fundamental tenets of existence.
Frankly, I’m a little ashamed to live in a world where ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA is even possible.
The story (which proves that an eighty-one minute movie indeed CAN be made off of just four pages of a script) involves some broad in a Catholic Schoolgirl outfit (Dowling, playing a character that writer Lommel neglected to even name) holding auditions for the part of The Black Dahlia. The Black Dahila, for those who haven’t read James Ellroy’s wonderful book or seen Brian DePalma’s unfairly maligned film, is Elizabeth Short, a young lady who was found dismembered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, thus resulting in the largest manhunt in the history of the state of California.
Those who aren’t right for the part are slaughtered just like Short was by the Schoolgirl’s two beefy pet waterheads. And I would like to look up who plays these two, but not only do these characters not have names either, but aren’t given any dialogue.
This scenario repeats with a few actresses, the scenes are intercut with an ongoing police investigation and, um… That’s it. Like I said, there’s only about four pages of script here, but it seems that an eighty minute movie was also made with about sixteen feet of videotape. Trust me, this was ALL fixed in editing. It randomly throws shots of some lady walking through a graveyard and Dowling marching in her bedroom in army fatigues for NO APPARENT REASON WHATSOEVER. It switches from black and white, to color, to black and white again. The shutter slows down and speeds up at the whims of the editors and the film is plagued by such jittery and nonsensical cutting that it make any standard Michael Bay movie look like a Yasujiro Ozu masterpiece.
At some point one of the defenders of this movie might cry out in protest that I’m shitting on a movie that was made so cheaply, to which I must smile and hug myself because I was lucky enough to see STUPID TEENAGERS MUST DIE! before most of the rest of the world. I tell you, STMD! gets better and better every time I see a runny piece of neglectful horror shit like this. Not only is it CHEAPER than ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA, but it was made lovingly and carefully with wonderful actors and a gleefully ironic script.
There is no love or care or wonder or irony involved with ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA. I might understand giving it a pass if it were made as a practice swing by some eager young hot shot, but Ulli Lommel is in his sixties and was fortunate enough to work with Fassbinder on LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH and many others. So unless this is some kind of odd-ball experiment in cinematic Dadaism utilizing “anti-filmmaking,” I can think of no plausible defense. I just prefer to think that Lommel sucks balls as a director.
This flick is so bad that I am gonna do something that I never thought I would do in my natural life. For the first (and probably last) time ever, I am actually going to DEFEND Uwe Boll and Eli Roth. Boll actually received a doctorate in Literature from the University of Cologne, thus enabling him to know more about what’s wrong with his shitty movies than any of US do. So we can step back and at least appreciate the irony. And at least with HOSTEL PART II, I had an emotional investment in how bad it was. I can get neither from ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA, which comes on like a noxious fart, leaves just as quickly and is made by a director who I think sincerely believes that his movie is REALLY GOOD!
And now for the moment of truth. The sixty-four thousand dollar questions. Is Elissa Dowling as bad an actress as her detractors would have us believe? Is she as good as her fans would make her out?
Truth be told, I’m not siding with the angels on this one. I have the utmost assurances that she works hard and is a nice person by her fans, but its hard to take all that into consideration with her blisteringly bad performance here. She’s like cardboard… Loud, shrieky cardboard. This is the first time in my years of going to the movies where the line “SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING C**T!” was robbed of the oomph inherent in its phrasing. And had she let off that grating, annoying, cocktail party villain laugh ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, I could not have been held responsible for my actions.
And yet… It would be churlish of me to count her out just yet. It’s odd that I’m introduced to Dowling in a film dealing with The Black Dahlia, because when I saw Brian DePalma’s THE BLACK DAHLIA last year, I finally let go of my hatred for Josh Hartnett. He has a sorrowful, deep voice and coal-dark eyes tailor made for film noir. He was in his element and, for the first time, I couldn’t knock him. He did well.
What Dowling is tailor made for, at this point, I cannot tell. All I know is that ULLI LOMMEL’S BLACK DAHLIA sure as hell ain’t it.
Zero Stars out of 4
**************************************
and if this isn't enough, here is what your peers on Amazon.com thought of this film.....
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
AVOID LIKE THE PLAUGE!, December 26, 2006
By A. Silver "adret" (Texas) - See all my reviews
This IS the worst movie ever made. This movie is nothing but a trap for people seeking the movie of the same name directed by De Palma. It's actually from some jerk named Ulli Lommel.
I hope he gets sued for copyright infringement.
My girlfriend and I watched the entire thing in fast-forward just to give it a chance. Even in fast-forward, the story was painstakingly slow, thin, transparent, and left the viewer feeling cheated. We will be complaining to Blockbuster for shelving this item. It is not fair to offer this decoy to customers.
Amateur acting, no plot, unprofessional cinematography, and devoid of direction. This film sucked. Its seems like it was written by a white-trash high school dropout. Yes, it truly is *that* bad. Amazon should adapt their rating system to allow for 0, or better yet, negative star ratings.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Ulli Lommel should be SUED for copyright violation!, November 24, 2006
By Deacon Blues "DeaconBlues" (Arizona) - See all my reviews
This movie is HORRIBLE! Bad story line, really really bad acting, the camera work is worse than most home movies (couldn't they get a professional cameraman?)
The only reason I even saw this movie, was that my wife rented it for me THINKING this was the OTHER "Black Dahlia" movie recently released. When she brought it home I thought that this was about the murder of Elizabeth Short. I was wrong and I feel that Ulli Lommel is a cheap huckster ripping people off! He has made a film that has NOTHING to do with the real Black Dahlia, he is stealing the title of another movie and should be sued for copyright violation.
Here is another DVD nasty to come from Lion's Gate and The Cult of Uli. This one also features yet another crappy performance by the queen of -Zgrade actresses, Elissa Dowling...this time under her alias Elissa Downing....
I vowed after suffering through Diary of a Cannibal that I would never again ever subject myself to a movie by prolific hack (and calling him a "hack" is putting it mildly) Ulli Lommel. Anyone who ever dares to rag on Uwe Boll should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch any of Lommel's recent output; they'll come away thinking Boll is Robert Altman by comparison. Lommel doesn't just give filmmaking a bad name; he even gives bad filmmaking a bad name.
Yet Lionsgate keeps slapping eye-catching artwork on his no budget, no talent, no script, shot-in-a-week-if-that-long shitfests; and because of that artwork and Lionsgate getting his movies on shelves in all the major chains and because not enough viewers have caught onto this trend, Lommel's cheapie's keep turning a tidy profit. It's too the point now that Lionsgate is having the guy churn a new one out on a monthly basis. It's become quite shameful really.
As I said, after his artsy fartsy Diary of a Cannibal robbed me of 90-minutes of my life I vowed never again. So why am I reviewing Mummy Maniac? Well, it turns out that Lommel didn't actually make this one himself. I don't know if the grind of churning out these worthless non-movies so quickly is catching up to him or if because he just wants to give his friends a taste of that Lionsgate money, but Mummy Maniac was directed by a guy named Max Nikoff, who could probably be described as a protégé of Lommel's after having served as an actor and producer in some of Lommel's past films. Lommel has truly become a cockroach: we can't seem to get rid of him and now he's begun multiplying.
Looking up Nikoff on IMDB, I found myself floored by the bio he submitted to butter himself up. Keep in mind that the guy studied in Moscow to be a rocket designer when you read this actual passage from his own self-submitted bio:
"In his work as a filmmaker Max often applies principles he learned during his engineering study as a rocket engine designer as he believes that art of Motion Picture is an ultimate fusion of creative art and technical ingenuity and skills perhaps as none other form of art it's so precise as rocket engine yet is so sensual as an artist's creation."
The only thing Mummy Maniac has in common with rocketry is that I'd love to blast it into space along with him and Lommel.
Nikoff parrots Lommel's filmmaking style to the point that you'd never know you weren't watching one of Lommel's piece of shit movies if not for actually seeing Nikoff's name listed as the director. Everything you expect from a Lommel production is evident: concept very loosely inspired by an actual murder case, non-story, non-acting, poor improvised dialogue, minimalist sets, excessive use of voiceover and montages, pseudo-artsy fartsy fades and edits, lousy audio quality, and just a general overall sense that either nobody involved on the production side of this movie either had a clue or gave a rat's ass. Or, more likely, they realized what a great scam they're pulling on Lionsgate and decided to not even attempt to give the impression they're trying anymore. Wouldn't shock me in the slightest to find out Lommel was skimming off the top of the money Lionsgate keeps fronting him to keep cranking out this garbage.
What's with the mummy aspect of the movie killer's M.O. besides the movie being loosely based on a real-life New York murder case where the killer wrapped a naked dead woman's head in packing tape in a mummy-like fashion? Well, the movie killer's mom told him stories of 1,001 Nights as a kid and he got so obsessed with the mummy parts of the story that now he's decided he wants to become a mummy when he dies. That's as deep as this film ever gets. This is why he wraps their heads in a mummy-like fashion. Though technically, given what a sloppy job he does wrapping their heads, a better name for the film might have been Darkman Maniac.
Mummy Maniac is the tale of a serial killing fat ass in a cop uniform whose primary personality trait is staring off into nothingness. He keeps abducting young women, taking them to this bathroom painted black where 85% of the movie is set, lets them plead for their lives or tell him that God will punish him, kills them with a knife or a saw or a power drill, wraps their heads in Ace bandages like a mummy, sometimes pulls up the woman's shirt and fondles their breasts, and then dumps the clothed body on the street. This process repeats seven times in a row and then the movie ends. Seriously. That's it. This process will repeat itself seven times. Seven. Long. Times. If you watch the first ten minutes of this movie then you'll have seen everything there is to see for every ten minutes to follow until the 75-minute movie time limit expires and the miniscule credits crawl across the screen for to pad out another six minutes.
The whole thing seems to have been done with some misguided mentality that they were making a serial killer character study, yet all we ever learn about him is that apparently he's got domineering mommy issues and murdered daddy issues and sexual hang-ups when it comes to getting laid and is obsessed with mummies. Our killer also seems to have audio issues because most of the time you can't even hear what in the hell he's saying.
We don't actually see the kidnappings - just him loading the women into the back of his moving van. This is followed up with often lengthy driving montages while the women in the back weep. Ooh, suspenseful.
You'd also think cutting one's throat or power drilling one's head would generate a good deal of blood - you'd be wrong. Sorry, gorehounds.
All of these horrendously acted murder vignettes are interspersed with shots of the guy's ugly mom, who looks like Miss Balbricker from the Porky's films, looking on in the bathroom mirror. In between murders we're also treated to the killer's pointless therapy sessions and dream-like sequences involving his mom done in the style of a first year film student with delusions of being an expressionist filmmaker. Let's not forget the montages of the city at night and our killer walking down the street or standing atop a roof with binoculars looking for his next victim. Riveting stuff.
Some cheap nudity, even cheaper gore, and a plotless, repetitive serial killer movie with delusions of artistic merit ... This, folks, is torture bore.
The other day I harshly panned an utterly atrocious Army of Darkness rip-off by the Sci-Fi Channel called Harpies with the lowest rating possible: no knives. That one now looks like the work of Sam Raimi when compared to Mummy Maniac. I wish we had a rating even lower than zero knives for movies that aren't just terribly made on every conceivable level, but that really aren't even movies at all. This is not an actual movie. I don't know exactly what to classify this as other than to just call it was it is...
The worst movie I've ever reviewed for **name of site deleted***!
Yes, I'd even rather sit through Not Dead Enough and Curse of Halloween again than watch Mummy Maniac ever again.
I don't blame Lommel anymore or any of his equally untalented sycophants for the movies they're making. The blame now belongs squarely at the feet of Lionsgate for enabling Lommel and company to keep cranking out bullshit wastes of time and space like Mummy Maniac and giving their worthless productions wide distribution. I'm through being nice so I'll just come right out and say it...
This is not only another DVD nasty from The Cult of Uli, it is also an insult to the great H.P. Lovecraft...You suck Uli!!!! And it features another horrid performance by guess who?????
Tomb, The (DVD)
Starring Victoria Ullman, Christian Behm, Micahel Barbour, Elissa Dowling
Hi! Welcome to Hell! Today we will be showing you H.P. Lovecraft's The Tomb which is directed by that master of celluloid, Ulli Lommel. We hope you enjoy your stay in the abyss of eternal damnation and that this film will help in easing the infinite amount of suffering our lord, Satan, has planned for you. Starbucks coffee and coconut covered jelly rolls are available in the Kitchen of Despair.
That, my friends, is exactly what the first level of hell is like. It is a orientation to get you ready for the endless torment that awaits the wicked. Before you are pushed into the pit you sit in a cramped theatre and are shown one of Ulli Lommel's films. There's no popcorn, hand jobs or even screaming babies to distract you from the shit storm that is playing on the screen. You ... are fucked.
How dare Ulli Lommel associate himself with anything Lovecraft created. When one thinks of H.P. it is doubtful that the first thought that would come to mind would be a Saw knock-off, a jumbled plot, and rape. A real effort has to be made in order to frack up a short/basic Lovecraft story on a low budget. It takes a special kind of talent to take the creepy work of that famed writer and turn it into a vile and boring waste of energy.
Kicking things off with the budget, when was the last time this man even made a halfway decent movie with a budget over $5,000? Sometime in the 1980s, perhaps? The returns must be really good on Lommel's films if the studios are willing waste time and money on more of his endeavors. The plan must be to make a movie as cheap and quick as possible just so you can continue to receive a paycheck. Gotta love a man who will cheat not only the system but horror fans as well.
Speaking of cheating ... it looks like this latest Lommel DVD doesn't have his name anywhere on it until you read the fine print on the back. A quick glance at the cover would have many believing this may be a good buy or rental. There's not even a single screen shot on the back, just lots of stylized images that don't really appear in the final product. Lionsgate also looks to be shying away from associating with Ulli since their logo is so tiny and tucked away in a corner unlike previous releases from this director.
So is it as bad as the previous paragraphs make it seem? Oh, yes!
In an attempt to capture fans of the Saw franchise Ulli Lommel has crafted a story that has almost nothing to do with H.P. Lovecraft's The Tomb. Instead of a story about Jervas Dudley and his exploits in a crypt we get a ripoff of Jigsaw complete with distorted voice, references to playing a game and some of the worst audio ever put onto a film.
A man known as the Puppetmaster has abducted many people who have done him wrong in the past and placed them in a warehouse full of death and torment. Each person is either slightly injured or just totally fucked up with massive wounds thanks to the master's large plastic axe; how a person can survive and act normal after having a large axe planted in their skull is beyond me. The victims who can overcome their injuries can attempt to play the Puppetmaster's game in order to live, but only one can be victorious.
After what seems like an hour of nothing but muted voices and dead people in caskets one of the captives does manage to escape and finds a Porsche parked outside. The freshly freed chick then proceeds to drive to a motel room where she is raped. Ah, now that is a story that makes total sense. She bashes the guy over the head with a lamp and the movie is over.
Well, at least Ulli got the Saw rip-off out of the way so now he can focus on the next big thing in horror. One thing he still seems to be obsessed with is rape though. It appears that the last three that I've seen always have at least one scene of a woman being forced to have sex with someone. This may be a bit unhealthy.
What can really be said about this movie? It was just bad. Not only was it shit, but it was cheap shit. After about 81 minutes it is easy to see all of The Tomb's props came from Party City. It is not easy to strike fear into an audience when the bad guy is sitting at a Mac computer with bargain bin Halloween decorations surrounding him. Being a badass does not happen by painting skull faces on dolls.
In short The Tomb is yet another in a long line of horrible movies from Lommel. The lack of a quality cast, script or even camera work show that this man isn't even trying to make entertaining pictures. His main goal is to keep the cash flowing in so he can one day remake his forgotten Boogeyman movie. Get ready Party Warehouse! Ulli is going to clean you out when those fake hands and plastic cauldrons go on sale!
And here is the latest DVD nasty by the Cult of Uli and the real horror of an actress, Elissa Dowling....
I'm not kidding. This film will give your TV gonorrhea!!!!
Borderline Cult
Lions Gate Entertainment // R // $26.98 // August 21, 2007
Review by Nick Lyons | posted August 9, 2007
The Movie:
Razzie award voters take notice- "Borderline Cult" is my pick for the worst film of 2007 and possibly one of the worst films I have ever had the misfortune of viewing.
I don't have to go into depth with the overly simplistic plot. The story follows a trio of serial killers working together to kill women in Juarez, Mexico. Melanie lures the women to their home in the hills, Herbert J. Humbert the third kills the women, and Jean-Louis digs a grave and buries the women. This takes place around eight times in the film. The only other scenes that occur: Two visits to a fortune teller, a video diary for each of the three killers and LONG shots of silent staring. If an award was given for "Best Use of Staring," "Borderline Cult" would be victorious.
The fun doesn't stop there folks. The directing by Ulli Lommel and the editing by XGin makes me yearn for crummy student films and Uwe Boll productions. I didn't think it was humanely possible, but Borderline's cuts are quicker and more frequent than any Michael Bay flick. Your head is guaranteed to spin as the whirlwind of cuts assault your eyes non-stop until the final frame. As for Lommel's directing, I have to wonder who on Earth finances his films. His direction has no style. He doesn't elicit any emotion with the characters or any scene for that matter. He recycles everything in a repetitive cycle. You are basically watching an eight minute film drug out to a tediously long 81 minutes. And yet Lummel continues to make films to this day. To quote "South Park"- "It does not make sense!"
The DVD
Video:
The widescreen 1.78:1 format is as repugnant as the movie itself. The color scheme was overly bright and murky. I realize viewers were meant to see Mexico as it is, but that's no excuse for the Bootleg esque quality. The video was also so jumpy and grainy that it came to the point where I began to feel dizzy and ill. Have the Pepto handy dare you watch.
Sound: The 2.0 Stereo Audio track will drive you nuts. The dialogue comes off as a whisper half the time as the music score and sound of buzzing flies (don't ask) blare through the speakers at full force. I was tempted to press the mute button because the fly noises played for at least half of the film. Were the filmmakers intentionally trying to drive viewers to the mental ward?
Extras: It figures that one of the worst films would contain extras to cause further suffering. The disk includes a trailer gallery for other Lionsgate films, a "Borderline Cult" trailer, five minutes of bonus footage, a stills gallery and an audio commentary with Nola Roeper, Christian Behm, and Ulli Lommel. The commentary is ridiculously amusing. It's fun to hear the director defend and analyze his one dimensional characters. Most of the time, out of boredom or nothing to say, the three talk about random topics such as how they loved "300." It just goes to show how simplistic and trashy this movie is when the creative team can't even talk about their own film. The most disturbing fact revealed in the commentary, however, is the fact that Roeper and Lommel said they made 7 films in 7 months. I can only hope I don't review another Lommel disk ever again.
Final Thoughts:
A mere SKIP IT rating is too generous. If given the option, I would rate "Borderline Cult" as a film so nauseating and eye gougingly bad that you will want to take a shower immediately following the ending. This is the type of film that would loop for eternity in hell. For the love of cinema, avoid this film. _________________ T.T.F.N.
William Pattison
www.homestead.com/f13bloodbath/enter.html www.outpostvevetta.com
The Truth Isn't Out There, It's Right Here...
Different studio, different director, but still nasty assed choice in actresses. Yes, director Leigh Scott actually hired Elissa Dowling for his nasty assed Sci Fi film....and I do mean nasty assed!!!!
Oh, by the way, this film has only been out a month and yet I recently went to FYE and saw that they had this film already priced down from $24.99 to $6.99...That is very telling.....
Transmorphers
by David Cornelius
"Less than meets the eye."
When the movie’s called “Transmorphers,” you know only those nutty folks over at Asylum Entertainment could be responsible. And so they are: although writer/director Leigh Scott has repeatedly stated publicly that “Transmorphers” began as a totally-not-a-rip-off sci-fi epic with the totally-not-generic title “Robot Wars” (!) and was slapped with the knock-off title later, the whole thing still reeks from top to bottom with that beautiful sort of ridiculousness that only Asylum, makers of “The Da Vinci Treasure” and “Snakes on a Train,” could provide.
The movie is a dopey little amalgam of everything from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Starship Troopers” to “24” to the “Matrix” sequels to, yes, “Transformers,” and not a single damn frame of it makes any sense. Which, of course, is how we like our Asylum films. While the studio has managed to churn out the occasional wonderful surprise (their take on “War of the Worlds” remains a stunningly strong work), the majority of their product is awful to the point of insanity - these blockbuster rip-offs would be embarrassing if they weren’t so damn silly, winking at us all the way, wondering how they’re getting away with it all.
Alas, of all the nonsense going on here, too much of it is just plain boring. Scott’s film is an enormously ambitious one for such a small outfit, and he bites off more than he can chew. To cover the obvious budgetary holes, most of the story’s post-apocalyptic adventure concerns people standing around in small rooms while they yell at each other, which is strictly snoozeville. When we finally move the action outside, we’re given a collection of underlit sequences in which the heroes shoot at monsters left offscreen.
These intentional avoidances of anything remotely resembling special effects turns out to be a good idea: once the evil robots appear, they’re crudely animated blocks of nothing impressive (even lousy effects can be saved by intriguing design work). Later, we see the “transmorph” in question, as some of the robots turn into cannons and planes, or something, which results in yawns of “that’s it?” As for the finale requiring a massive supply of effects, well, the less said about that, the better.
Of course, questionable effects will always be forgiven if the tone is right. Consider the recent sci-fi cheapie “Planetfall.” Many of that film’s homemade effects are cheerfully excused by the sheer amount of unbridled joy and glee pumped into the project. With “Transmorphers,” there’s no joy to be found, no glee in making a movie on one’s own terms. Everyone here looks flat-out bored by the whole mess. And how can you have fun with something like that?
Worse still is the shoddy post-production that left almost every scene with an auditory hiccup. Thanks to some production error (no doubt caused by the frenzied rush to get this on video store shelves on time - Asylum often runs a concept-to-final product turnaround time that would make Roger Corman blush), dialogue left and right is always a good half-second out of sync. This only underlines the very cheapness of the whole thing.
Oh, but the story. Yes, the story. A prologue informs us that in 2009, we found life on a planet twenty million light years away. Five years later, they showed up at our door, taking over the joint. (At first I had hoped the horribly faulty science involved in this was a clever joke, a tip of the hat to classic sci-fi blunders. Turns out I was wrong. This movie’s just that dunderheaded.)
So now it’s years later, and humans are struggling to survive in hidden underground cities, where the costumes and the sets and the camera angles are all on loan from “Battlestar Galactica.” For reasons either too stupid to detail here to too sloppy to be understood in the first place, a former soldier is taken out of cryo-freezie-something and returned to action, while a bunch of lesbian pilots get into cat fights, while the nerdy scientist guy hatches a plan to give the robots a computer virus.
Seriously.
Scott has spent so much time on message boards lately screaming about how his film was never intended to be a “Transformers” copy that he seems to have already forgotten that his film is also a rip-off of twenty other movies. There’s nothing here that’s fresh at all, be it plot points stolen from other movies to dialogue taken straight from some cliché generator. (“What if they don’t make it?” …long, serious pause… “They’ll make it.”) None of this hackneyed and/or borrowed material is competent in any form.
So, yeah, even for an Asylum movie, “Transmorphers” is woefully trite and unimaginative. Even the most dedicated Bad Movie fans will have difficulty slogging through this one. _________________ T.T.F.N.
William Pattison
www.homestead.com/f13bloodbath/enter.html www.outpostvevetta.com
The Truth Isn't Out There, It's Right Here...
Has anyone else seen Uli Lommel's "The Raven?" I rented it because it looked like a promising, interesting contemporary take on Poe. While the film does have some endearingly bizarre moments and a couple of decent performances, on the whole, it's absolutely dreadful. My friend and I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculous Don King hairdos of two of the characters. Their hair sucked the pathos out of their violent deaths.
On the whole, it was chock full of poor acting, poor writing, and unimpressive cinematography and direction. I give it a D+.
Has anyone else seen Uli Lommel's "The Raven?" I rented it because it looked like a promising, interesting contemporary take on Poe. While the film does have some endearingly bizarre moments and a couple of decent performances, on the whole, it's absolutely dreadful. My friend and I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculous Don King hairdos of two of the characters. Their hair sucked the pathos out of their violent deaths.
On the whole, it was chock full of poor acting, poor writing, and unimpressive cinematography and direction. I give it a D+.
Yep, unfortunately I paid $26.00 for that piece of crap. At the time I was friends with one of The Cult of Uli, Elissa Dowling. I bought that one and Black Dahlia, because Elissa said these two films were the two out at the time that she had the most fun playing in. Guess what? In The Raven she is only on screen at the most about 30 seconds. She is the dead body in the nest. For me this is her greatest performance, since she is laying stiff as a board and her mouth is shut...But still this film sucks royally... _________________ T.T.F.N.
William Pattison
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