Three Films Make A Post: In the darkest hour, there is a light that shines on every human being...but ONE!

Rottentail (2018): As if anyone needed another example that going for the Instant Cult Movie thing is a very bad idea, here comes director Brian Skiba’s idiotic tale (apparently based on a graphic novel, for which I’ll just take the movie’s word) of a scientist (Corin Nemec at a career low) who turns into a human-rabbit monster thing after an unfortunate incident involving a genetically modified killer rabbit and an experimental fertility treatment. From then on out, it’s shrill acting, unfunny on purpose “funny” lines (because actual jokes are too hard, I can’t help but assume), hideous special effects, direction exclusively consisting of annoying tics, and winking at the camera non-stop, with nothing that suggests the point from where actual cult movies start: the wish to make an actual movie.

Darkman (1990): The film that looks now a bit like Sam Raimi’s weird dry-run for making his Spider-Man movies on the other hand, is an actual cult film, made by people who obviously care about the art of filmmaking even in the film’s strangest moments – perhaps even most then – with grace, style, cleverness and an actual sense of humour. Typical of Raimi at the time, the film’s a rollercoaster with at least one fun/clever/wonderful/crazy idea jumping onto the screen every thirty seconds, but also with enough of a heart and a brain to keep the tale about what amounts to the Phantom of the Opera as a superhero film just barely under control. Watching it for the twentieth time or so, I still had the feeling of seeing a film that just might go completely off the rails any second now, but never does, instead leaving me happily grinning for much of its running time, when not gasping at Liam Neeson’s huge hands (well, or his wondrous ability to play his role just as straight as it can be played) or Larry Drake’s gorgeous mugging.


Thelma (2017): Completely different in style and tone, but also rather wonderful, is Joachim Trier’s meticulous film about the kind of teenage lesbian awakening that includes psychokinetic powers that start with Carrie but end in the freedom of positive and hard-earned wish fulfilment. It’s filmed with a sense of poetry, of terror and at some points of an awe that raises this far above many a film that uses the supernatural as metaphor, and played by Eili Harboe with immense emotional weight and subtlety. All of this puts it far beyond the modernized re-tread of Carrie it at first threatens to be; it also should convince every feeling viewer that its happy end is perfectly deserved and proper for what came before it. Depending on one’s interpretation of what happened before, one might not even want to treat the happy end as one, but the film’s perfectly fine with not only portraying the suffering and crisis of becoming herself of a young woman but also daring to say that things might actually get better for her.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: The Sea Beast (2008)

After a barely visible sea monster drags one of his sailors down to the bottom of the sea during a storm, fisherman Will McKenna (Corin Nemec) and the island community he makes his home in are beset by the monster and its brood. Turns out there are largely humanoid (though the characters say they look like anglerfish for some reason) amphibious, poison-spitting, practically invisible via super-chameleonism fish-frog creatures with prehensile tongues living under the sea. And the way they can jump, you might as well add flying to their grab-bag of superpowers.

The usual assortment of things in this kind of SyFy Channel movie happen, until things are put right again with a big damn explosion.

For the longest time, veteran SyFy director Ziller’s monster movie is a bit too bland for my tastes. I’m all for a film of the sub-genre not doing the whole “monster fighting brings an estranged family back together” thing but The Sea Beast doesn’t replace that set of tropes with anything specific at all, so that we end up with about an hour of characters without character traits doing stuff while from time to time a not terribly exciting monster attack happens. Ziller is a competent enough director to not make this part of the film too boring but actual excitement does live elsewhere.

It is worth it to get through that long slog of mediocre CGI and non-existent writing, though. For while the final half hour of the film leaves plausibility even further behind than the random ensemble of the powers its creatures (who are, by the way, alas not Lovecraftian Deep Ones) demonstrate already do, it does get into some rather fun monster fighting, with CGI creatures – as well as one surprise rubber head – getting dispatched in all manner of silly yet fun ways. There’s a decent pocket version of a siege scenario, some moments that amount to actual tension, and Corin Nemec as well as Miriam McDonald - who is playing his daughter – doing their damndest to work up to mini action hero status. It’s somewhat adorable and definitely fun, and while this isn’t rocking my SyFy Channel Original world, a merry final half hour of fun does turn The Sea Beast into a watchable piece of celluloid/ones and zeroes.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Robocroc (2013)

The set-up of Arthur Sinclair's (whoever he might be) "increasingly robotic crocodile on a highly localized rampage" movie is so bog-standard for a SyFy film I can just skip details like character names, keeping completely in the spirit of a movie that might just as well have done the same.

So, a military satellite crashes over a zoo, and mild-mannered but large crocodile Stella is infected with one of those "behind the enemy lines" weapons without a sensible way to get rid of them once they have slaughtered the enemy - civilians, military, and people who surrender alike. In this particular case, said weapon are nano robots that turn their victim into an indestructible killer machine. The military can't quite cut it fighting the menace, of course (one suspects they are spread rather thin with murdering brown people in various countries across the globe), and the mad scientist who invented the things (played gleefully by Dee Wallace as the only person who was actually awake during the shoot of the film) is secretly helping the robocroc. So the fight against the metallic menace falls to zoo keeper Corin Nemec and "the new biologist" Lisa McAllister. The latter, alas, is a girl, and therefore not allowed to do anything of interest. There's also some stuff about Nemec's scrawny teenage son being menaced by the croc, so Nemec has a bit of motivation for his heroism, and the film an opportunity to show us another one of those mysterious American "spring break" rituals.

Theoretically, all this could make for a rather fun monster movie; in practice, though, Robocroc feels like a film made on auto-pilot. The script, as the whole film, is mostly boring, with no fun ideas except one scene where (the) robocroc picks a helicopter out of the air, which I have seen done better before (and first) in Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, and even lacking the energy to get up to the usual SyFy "estranged family gets back together" shenanigans.

If you're hoping for any kind of imaginative flourishes, jokes funny or unfunny, or even the smallest sign of life behind the camera, Robocroc will disappoint you, or rather, will lifelessly look at you and perfunctorily mumble "boo", or at most try to distract you with the least interesting romance I have seen in a SyFy movie (which actually might be an achievement, now that I think about it).

If I sound bored and a bit disappointed by Robocroc's lack of visible effort, that's exactly what I am.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: S.S. Doomtrooper (2006)

France after the Allied landing in Normandy during the Second World War. Special ops specialist Captain Malloy (Corin Nemec) is charged to with destroying a secret Nazi lab in an old castle behind enemy lines where nuclear experiments for the enhancement of soldiers are taking place.

His last mission has decimated Malloy's usual squad, so he puts together the ever popular gang of misfits, freshly picked out of military jail for their helpful talents like sniping, impersonation, hitting people in the face, and being called "Parker Lewis" in a film starring Corin Nemec not as Parker Lewis. The only non-con of the team besides Malloy is demolition expert Digger (Harry Van Gorkum) but he makes up for this lack by being all crazy about demolition - and "comically" deaf until the script forgets it.

Soon after parachuting into their mission area, the team meets the problem that will stand between them and the lab even more than several squad of German soldiers: the first super soldier mad scientist Professor Ullman (Ben Cross) has created with the ever popular mix of nuclear magic and genetic magic. Think the Hulk with a railgun, an electrocuting touch and no interest in discerning between his side and the enemy. Even teaming up with the resistance cell of Marriette Martinet (Marian Filali) might not bring our heroes enough firepower to kill the thing without a clever, near-suicidal plan.

I am, and have always been, an easy mark. Include occult Nazi shenanigans or mad Nazi science in your pulp adventure movie, and you'll really have to work for my disapproval.

David Flores's S.S. Doomtrooper (curiously, the super soldier thing really was in the S.S. before he got hulked up) prefers to work for my approval, and hits many of the marks its kind of film is supposed to hit. So Germans usually speak English with bad German accents amongst themselves, unless they babble half or completely nonsensical German sentences probably constructed with the exclusive help of an English to German dictionary, or just mix up the two. This is indeed a film that seems to think (or at least likes to pretend it thinks) "Give me your Papiere!" is a German sentence. In other words, it has exactly the kind of portrayal of Nazis one hopes for in a pulp oriented movie, which is quite the opposite of the portrayal I hope for in a film going for a more serious tone (I am more often disappointed in the latter cases).

S.S. Doomtrooper further worms its way into my heart with Ben Cross's ridiculous mad scientist who is (of course!) the kind of guy having no problem at all with his creation killing indiscriminately, because further experiments will make that problem disappear, though it's not important anyway. Seriously, building a super soldier who kills whatever moves including Nazis is only the right and proper way to win the war for the Nazi cause.

Flores uses the CGI super soldier comparatively sparely - which is probably for the better when his heroes can't win a direct fight with it - and instead goes through all the pulp war movie clichés he can find, which are, more or less, all of them. So you get the coward who finds his courage when he is needed most, the tank kidnapping, the daring and misguided attempt to sneak into a German munitions depot by pretending to be Germans (inspired German speaking all around, there), the sniper who can't out-snipe death and the explosives expert who seems to be impervious to explosions. All of this and more is presented with enough charm and verve to be pretty damn entertaining, with muddy Bulgaria in form of some excellently ruined buildings, autumnal woods and grey slabs valiantly standing in for France. The landscape shots are not exactly beautiful to look at, but they gets the job done, and provide the film with at least a bit of visual variety. I don't think S.S. Doomtrooper would have had it quite as easy winning my heart if it had only taken place in the usual empty warehouses.

Now, I may very well be the only person on the Internet who likes S.S. Doomtrooper unironically (or at all), but this only goes to show that too many people just hate fun.

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SyFy vs The Mynd: Epysode 3

Dragon Wasps (2012): In theory, I should come down hard on a movie whose depiction of the Central American population is quite as ooga booga, whose female lead (Dominika Juillet playing a "scientist") seems to read all of her lines off a teleprompter, making Corin Nemec look like a charismatic actor in the process, and which knows even less about the science of insects than myself. But then, this is also a movie about giant, fire-breathing wasps, containing lines of eternal dialogue like "Many insects are repelled by the smell of their dead. This bug may be our best defence", repeatedly letting its heroine call something "nature's napalm", finding its protagonists going into the final battle hopped up on coca (to repel the wasps, obviously), and really being rather good fun in its stupidity for most of its running time. So I think I'll just let it slide and call Joe Knee's Dragon Wasps the kind of film that is bound to have an average user rating of 3 point something on the IMDB while actually being pretty darn entertaining.

Arachnoquake (2012): If you have dreamt about a movie whose every character is a prime example of odious comic relief, then you'll pretty much hit the jackpot with this one. As nearly all consciously humorous SyFy movies I've encountered, Arachnoquake (blind, tongued, fire-breathing, on-water-walking albino spiders attack New Orleans would have been a bit too long a title, I suppose) suffers from not being funny for a single second, and spending not a single thought on suspense or actually making a film that's entertaining beyond being the butt of a joke.

I still find films saying "look how dumb I am, isn't it funny!!!" while adding mean-spirited frat boy-style humour quite the opposite of funny. It doesn't help Arachnoquake film seems to giggle at each of its own jokes, which never works at all.

But hey, at least aging actors like Edward Furlong and Tracey Gold get some food and medication on their tables through Arachnoquake's existence, so there's something to be said for the film.

Mothman (2010): And then there are movies like this, a perfectly serviceable version of a neo-slasher movie with Jewel Staite being as much star power as it can afford (with a plot hook borrowed from I Know What You Did Last Summer, of all films) that replaces the usual killer with the Mothman, adds a bit of mythical mumbo-jumbo, and stirs. Yet still, despite two or three truly atmospheric scenes and a pretty entertaining ending that puts out all the stops a movie of this budget and production style can put out, Mothman's a bit of a disappointment to me, for it takes one of the weirdest pieces of modern myth and turns it into another serial-killing monster. It's not so much the lack of originality that irritates me (this is a SyFy Channel movie after all), but the lack of imagination Sheldon Wilson's film shows, even though it is entertaining enough.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Mansquito (2005)

aka Mosquito Man

A viral epidemic carried by mosquitoes is plaguing the USA, but scientist Dr Jennifer Allen (Musetta Vander) has a beautiful plan built on releasing mosquitoes immunized through drugs and radiation against the virus into the wilds to save lives. Unfortunately, Allen's approach to science is just a bit too careful for her boss Dr Michaels (Jay Benedict), and he decides to haul in multiple murderer Ray Erikson (Matt Jordon) as human guinea pig.

Of course, Erikson uses this as an opportunity to escape. That attempt ends in a catastrophe: the killer becomes exposed to quite a bit of mosquito-immunizing goo and radiation, and quite quickly begins to turn into…a Mansquito.

His ensuing bloodsucking spree is investigated by Lt. Randall (Corin Nemec), who also just happens to be Allen's boyfriend. Apart from the increasingly aggressive Mansquito, other problems come up soon enough. Allen herself was exposed to some of the science goo too, but in her case, it was little enough to induce a very slow transformation rather reminiscent of Cronenberg's The Fly, if The Fly had been more like a classic creature feature, and quite a bit more silly.

Allen's slow transformation does of course incur Mansquito's romantic interest, so he begins hanging around Allen, popping away to suck somebody's blood now and again, until she will turn into a girlsquito. Once the transformation is finished, romance should ensue unobstructed. Hopefully, someone will blow the nasty bug up before that can happen.

I hate being the guy throwing around words like "perfect" when describing another SyFy monster movie, but it's impossible for me to watch a film as well put together and often downright exhilarating in its willingness to push all the right buttons of a creature feature crossed with The Fly as Tibor Takács' Mansquito and not get excited.

In fact, a lot of my experience of watching Mansquito (winner of the prize of best-titled movie of 2005) is coloured by me giggling like a loon. That's not because Mansquito is silly (which it sure is, if you still need to ask), or cheesy (which it just as sure is), or not exactly coming done on the side of believable science (which it absolutely does not), but because Takács knows all this about his movie and still directs it with total conviction. Even though everyone involved clearly knows about the silliness of the whole affair, there's no visible attempt to distance themselves from the film; even when irony and humour occur, they do so in an organic, not a distancing manner. It's a lovely thing to behold if you're tired of films unwilling to take themselves seriously (I'd argue films about silly nonsense like mansquitoes particularly need to take themselves seriously), or in love with undermining themselves for a cheap gag.

Of course, earnestness alone does not make a creature feature remarkable or even worth watching; a film needs other virtues to win my heart at least. Takács fortunately delivers the good stuff here: Mansquito is excellently paced with a real sense of escalation to it, and - like it should be - with nary a boring minute. I think the Allen-transformation angle helps a lot with the last one, because it makes what can become scenes of character-based boredom in films of this sub-genre interesting. The film goes through all the standard scenes of creature features about lovelorn monsters (unless you need a bathing scene - white bathing suits are just not a mosquito thing) without them ever feeling generic or bland.

Atypically for a Sci-Fi Original (we are after all very early in that particular cycle, and this may or may not be the first of these films where the channel actually involved itself in the production instead of just buying a finished film), Mansquito's monster is made via the magic of suitmation, with a few CGI enhancements, particularly once Manny has grown his wings, and while nobody will confuse it with a real living creature (don't pretend you don't know the Government has an army of mansquitoes waiting in the wings), there's a mass and a reality to it cheap CGI effects generally just can't achieve. Plus, the suit can more regularly be in the same shot as the actors, which enables more interesting camera work.

There's a sense of personality in every shot that is difficult to describe on a more analytical level than saying you'll either feel it and love the movie (and Takács) for it, or you won't and will bemoan it as generic. It's a part of the film's feel I find difficult to pin down, the kind of thing that turns a movie into something special for me yet that might not be there for anyone else, though I doubt people who enjoy creature features at all will be immune to Mansquito's charms.

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