Director: Leigh Scott
Starring: Matthew Wolf, Amy Weber, Shaley Scott, Eliza Swenson, Griff Furst
Netflix Predicted Score: 1.1 stars
It seemed only fitting to kick this feature off with a film from the vast crap catalogue of Asylum Films. In case you aren't aware of Asylum's general brand of tomfoolery, this is the studio that makes its mint off of “mockbusters,” otherwise known as direct-to-video hackery that uses titles just similar enough to actual blockbuster films to maybe be confusing enough to uninformed film goers perusing a DVD aisle. Between The 18-Year-Old Virgin, 2012: Doomsday, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, and H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, I've always found these guys' chutzpah pretty impressive, if not so much the films themselves.
But to start things off, it seemed only appropriate to bring out the big guns straight away. I am of course talking about Asylum's coup de grâce, its piece de resistance, the standard by which all other mockbusters are set. Of course, I'm talking about Transmorphers.
The military-minded government (which is made up exclusively of ruggedly handsome men and young-ish, eye-makeup oppressed women) has a new plan for taking out the robot threat, but in order to do it, they have to send the best man they've got. That best man, in a bit of Demolition Man-ripping, happens to be the cryo-prison incarcerated Warren Mitchell (Wolf). This vagabond rebel has to lead a team on a suicide mission to save humanity, and look dashing all the while.
How Does All of That Go? I'm not entirely sure, as I'm still reeling for the obscenely terrible special effects and bafflingly long sequences of people standing around in darkened future rooms that look lifted from Battlestar Galactica's yard sale. At some point a futzy and stuttery scientist vaguely tries to explain their master plan, which involves more or less the same plot from the Star Trek: TNG episode “I Borg,” where they will infect one of the robots with some kind of shut-down command, send him back to the mainframe, and make all the other robots shut down. I think that happened? I can't really tell. The movie unleashes so many bizarre sub-plots about revolutionary politics, clashes between military and science guilds, and a batshit crazy love triangle between Mitchell, his former wife, and her new...wife (who just happens to be the lead general in this whole endeavor) that I could never properly keep track of who was going where to shoot what and why and if any of it ever worked. I guess it did. Probably.
Most Baffling Story Element? The movie's inexplicable, accidental gender politics. The lesbian marriage between Mitchell's ex-wife and the general isn't especially weird by itself (though it does feel sort of out-of-place and mildly exploitative), but things get weirder when you realize everyone refers to the general as “sir,” and I think even a “Mr.” surname gets tossed out there a couple of times as well. As I was watching it I was trying to ascertain if Scott was trying to make some kind of commentary on gender equality and the casual nature of homosexual relationships in the future—then I did a little reading and discovered that the role of the general was originally written for a man, and apparently Scott couldn't be bothered to change any of the male-focused dialogue before shooting. Awesome.
Watch the clip below for some solidly awkward examples of all this, not to mention several examples of the utterly crippled level of acting found throughout the movie.
Most Hilarious Plot Twist? That Mitchell is, in fact, a machine himself, developed by the human government to be a super soldier. But, you see, they designed him too perfectly. They gave him...feelings.
How's the Acting? You saw the clip, right? Shockingly, Matthew Wolf actually isn't an abysmal actor, and he occasionally gives a little bit of what one might call a “performance” here as Mitchell, but he's surrounded by people who know how to enunciate and give endlessly steely looks, and not much else. Shaley Scott is particularly special as the ace pilot and bitch-on-wings Xandria Lux. Her performance reminded me most of a hissy professional wrestling manager, with incredible amounts of faux-toughness permeating every...single...word...and exuding the kind of menacing aura that only a white high school girl who thinks she's in a gang could possibly manifest. Eliza Swenson's bug-eyed performance as the general is, sadly, overshadowed by the tightness with which her hair is tied back, which kind of makes her already overlarge head look a little bit like Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen...sans any special effects.
How's Them Special Effects? Couldn't be worse if they'd tried...and they most certainly did not try. No one should ever expect much from a direct-to-video sci-fi movie, especially one produced by Asylum, but holy shit are these giant robots stupid looking. They look like they just stepped out of the CD-i version of Rise of the Robots, and it's blatantly apparent that Scott never figured out a way to make the footage of real people shooting stupid fake guns line up with the CG robots. Fake-as-hell plasma shots go flinging every which way, and from no particular source in most cases. And the big, honking shot of the giant boss robot at the end, which was clearly supposed to be the banner special effects shot of the movie, is so darkly lit and ineptly shot that the whole time I felt like I was staring at a big, tan, metal blob. Just watch the video below, and you'll see what kind of quality we're generally dealing with here.
What Kind of Terrible is This Movie? Mostly, it's laughably terrible. Every time the hastily-cobbled-together guns and cheesy-ass robots come out to play, it's a riotously awful experience to behold. And I never quite got tired of all the shitty, stilted dialogue and actors trying to out-tough one another with absurd aplomb. I did tire of the movie's cheaply bleak aesthetic and preponderance with scenes of people talking to each other about the merits and dangers of war, but thankfully this one leans a little heavier toward its risible shittiness, rather than its boring shittiness. So...there's that.
Tomorrow: The Karate Dog
