Thursday, August 15, 2013

SyFy vs. The Mynd: The Syrens of Tytan

Mega Snake (2007): I'm sure Tibor Takács has hidden a fine monster movie among the hours and hours of folksy, "humorous" Southern stereotypes here. Hell, I often enjoy the dubious local stereotyping in SyFy movies, but in Mega Snake's case, everything that's not related to getting eaten by a humungous snake anyone in the cast does or says grates so painfully I can't enjoy the film as a monster movie; as a comedy, it'd probably be easier to enjoy if it were even the least bit funny. It's a shame, too, for the snake attacks are - typical of the director - very well done, and the film's shot in a slightly comic-bookish colour scheme that's as far from the usual yellow and cobalt blue as a fan of colour in colour films like myself could wish for. I just can't stomach the rest of it, y'all.

Ferocious Planet aka The Other Side (2011): A science experiment goes wrong and sucks a bunch of idiots (among them Joe Flanigan and a cameo-ing yet still second-billed John Rhys-Davies) into a parallel dimension which budget-consciously looks a lot like Earth. There, they have troubles with the usual combination of death-inducing stupidity and the local human-eating wildlife. Not much of interest or surprise happens. On the positive side, there's lots of time to make yourself a cup of tea or three and to meditate on the vagaries of watching a whole load of SyFy movies.

Ghost Town (2009): After a rather decent intro taking place in the old West, Todor Chapkanov's film begins to suffer from the typical problems of bad supernatural slashers - a lack of imagination, an unwillingness to give its supernatural murderers any kind of consistency, boring characters all of whom act like idiots even before they have reasons to panic. Ghost Town also adds some problems all of its own, namely some absolutely horribly used shaky-cam in "exciting" scenes, a sad waste of a perfectly fun Billy Drago, and no sense of narrative progression or dramatic escalation at all (wait, can you add an absence?).

The best I can say about the film is that it's a fitting third film for this trio of mostly crap SyFy movies.

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