Haunted High aka Ghost Quake (2012): Now this is more up (or rather down) to the usual SyFy Channel standards. Some lame ghosts with a love for stupid one-liners even late period Freddie Krueger would be ashamed of haunt a US high school, killing various "funny" stereotypes in gory yet lame ways. Danny Trejo is in this thing too, spending most of the film's running time attempting to break down a closet door. Did I mention how lame this thing is?
Bigfoot (2012): I'm in the process of developing a Theory of SyFy Channel Movies. Right now, I am very much convinced that there's a simple rule to measure the quality of a given SyFy production: the more "humour" a film contains, the more it sucks. Consequently, this thing directed by actor Bruce Davison that's carting out various past their prime celebrities and then making horribly unfunny jokes non-stop while a giant bigfoot pops in from time to time to kill people in "hilarious" ways to remind us that the film's supposed to be a monster movie, is as bad as they get. In fact, I'd call the film Lovecraftian: at least it is practically too terrible to comprehend. Or maybe it's just a film based on a bad (I'm being nice here) script, with unfunny jokes, bad acting, bad direction, and no visible attempt to respect its audience by including anything that's not utterly dreadful. Seriously, Bigfoot is barely a movie, the sort of thing whose odour of lazy "irony" and shitty indifference towards the art of entertainment makes your typical backyard no budget film look good because those filmmakers are at least trying. Clearly, nobody involved in Bigfoot gives a crap.
Boogeyman (2012): Fortunately, we don't have to end this SyFy triple threat on quite as sour and cranky a note, which comes as a bit of a surprise since this one was directed by Jeffery Scott Lando, the same man responsible for Haunted High. This one's a perfectly decent monster movie with a simple and cool looking monster, no ropey effects, two decent leads in Eddie McClintock and Amy Bailey and humour only in form of the horrible jokes McClintock's character loves to make and nobody around him finds funny.
There's even a bit of thematic work done about siblings taking responsibility for each other's sins that is rooted in the backstory of the monster of the week, which is more than a lot of SyFy films have. Of course, said backstory is a bit too mythical to fit the very simple "big guy goes round and slaughters people" style of our monster very well, but I do appreciate David Reed's script is trying to give its monster some importance beyond its killing habits.
Plus, the film's just decent at being what it is.
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