AE Apocalypse Earth

Year of Release: 2013
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.2 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As of late, my inner sci-fi geek has been awakened with a vengeance since I started watching Syfy’s Defiance (if you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to check it out). So, in the spirit of different worlds being invaded by extraterrestrials and technicalities that require physics PhDs in order to follow the plot, I decided I’d give The Asylum’s AE: After Earth a spin. The cover looked interesting, and for me that’s always a good start. Unfortunately, that’s also where all the good things that can be said about this movie come to a grinding halt. It’s a rare example in b-movie making: I thought I’d figured out the lame ending after watching about 15 minutes, only to be fooled later on by AN EVEN LAMER ending! Also, and this is the best part for me, they took soft science to an intergalactic extreme, which I always find tremendously amusing.

Please form a single queue and evacuate the planet in a calm and orderly manner.

Earth is being invaded! Yeah, it’s only one tiny little spaceship with a few missiles attached to it, but we’re still being invaded. Since we’re thrown right into the action at the beginning of the movie we’re not really given any indication as to how long this nano-invasion has been going on for, but suffice to say that mankind has been on the losing end of the war. Somewhere in between the aliens’ arrival and us getting our asses thoroughly kicked, the world’s governments were able to build a series of ark ships to take a portion of humankind and send it off to the relative safety of some far-gone alien world. So, it the face of absolute danger, we do what we do best: we get the hell out of dodge. The arks are fully automated and contain stasis pods made entirely out of the insides of old Game Boys, so all the survivors have to do is lay back, sleep for a couple of decades, and wake up on their new home world.

What are the chances it was a space dildo that wiped out the dinosaurs?

Well, that was the plan at least, until the ark ships got blown out of the air  and had to make an emergency crash landing on an alien world. Now of course you know it’s an alien world because it has a ring system! Clever people over at the Asylum… Anyway, if the crash didn’t sufficiently thin out the remaining number of humans left in the galaxy, the invisible and rather trigger happy natives will certainly take care of the rest. If it weren’t for Lt. Frank Baum the Good Lord only knows what would happen to the few remaining survivors. He manages to lead them all to the relative safety of a palm bush, before asking his robotic assistant TIM to try and figure out where they are and what exactly is going on.

When fungal infections take over…

Thankfully the invisible guys with guns aren’t the only creatures on the planet: our Lt also managed to find a green humanoid lady who switches between a completely alien accent to a thoroughly American one in a heart beat. She explains that the invisible things keep her people, and the crash-landed humans, as test subjects in zoos to be studied. Together, the survivors decide that this planet really isn’t for them, and they need to get back to Earth. Hell, it may have been invaded by malevolent beings from outer space, but it’s still home. It will involve a very un-daring mission of cowardly men, overly Hispanic women, the green lady, a midget Ricky Gervais, and an entire race of albino humanoids to ward off this planet’s strange lifeforms and the invisible hunting things if the group ever has a chance of making it to the spare ship just over the mountain and making a beeline back to Earth.

I don’t usually give away endings, but this one was just too stupid and left me far too enraged to not point it out. So, whilst we are told that it took 5 years for them to escape Earth and make it to this planet, when the group does eventually manage to get off the surface they can’t find out where in the galaxy they are. TIM the robot explains that the evacuation plan was EVEN DUMBER than I originally thought: rather than finding a planet that would be suitable for humans to settle on before they all took off, all of the arks were just sent off in random directions with everyone hoping for the best. 10 years into the flight TIM realised that the chances of finding a suitable planet were nanoscopic (again, shouldn’t we have thought about that BEFORE we left Earth?) and decided that the best option would be to return to Earth. Even if it had been invaded, at least it was habitable. So, the Arks make the 100-year return journey  to Earth, but due to a glitch in the theory of relativity the 100-year flight actually equates to 325 000 years back on Earth. When the Arks crash and the survivors woke up, the invisible thingies were the descendants of the original invaders, whilst lady-in-green and the albino people are the descendants of the humans that didn’t form part of the evacuation fleet. The Earth is now green due to a runaway greenhouse effect, and its ring system is actually the remains of the Moon after the aliens blew it up. Take that NASA! That’s how you soft science the shit out of space travel!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• First rule of planetary evacuations: no weapons in the stasis pods.
• Intergalactic space arks can easily be built with nothing more than a little wood and chicken wire.
• Yo mama jokes are a pan-galactic form of insult.
• If you don’t train your dragon from when it’s a baby, you’ll never teach it not to sleep on your spaceship.
• There is no intergalactic emergency so great that you can’t stop for a moment to bang one of the natives.
• There is no reason to think that English syntax differs in any meaningful way from that of innumerable alien languages.

AE: APOCALYPSE EARTH TRAILER

BUY AE: APOCALYPSE EARTH AT AMAZON.COM

One-Eyed Monster

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Sci-Fi / Comedy / Horror
IMDB Rating: 4.2 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 1 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As strange as this might sound, One-Eyed Monster isn’t the only killer penis movie I’ve seen. A while back I watched a little doozy of a film called Bad Biology, although that one took itself far more seriously than its subject matter warranted. Having seen these two movies I can’t quite decide if the world doesn’t have enough killer penis movies, or if these two mean that we have far too many. I also can’t quite decide whether this movie made me giggle or want to rip my brain out through my nose but, since I’m still here, I’m gonna go with the laughing thing. The main thing with watching this movie is, before you hit play, you’ve gotta understood what you’re in for and not expect anything earth-shattering. I’m feeling rather indifferent to this movie, but I could see it being a lot of fun in a group setting with pizza and beer. Do that and it should be fine.

Soon to graduate from Lady Biggerboobs’ School for the Pornographically Gifted.

It’s California, it’s the middle of a particularly nasty winter, and that can only mean one thing: porn stars are taking to the hills and toasty-warm cabins of the California mountains to perform a number of questionable sexual acts. The entourage is headed up by Ron Jeremy, who will provide continuity between yesteryear’s porn viewer and today’s more contemporary audience, and Veronica Hart, who’s here to coach the new girls on the various tricks of the trade. They feel a little bit out of their league, surrounded by 20-somethings that are more horse hung and who have perkier breasts (thankfully, not all in one person). But that’s the difference between these upstart amateurs of today and the porn stars of the 80s – they’re here to do a job and, no matter what the position, they’re not gonna quit until it gets done!

Getting down to serious work.

To begin with everything’s going absolutely perfectly. The team’s been completely snowed in by a blizzard, there’s no cellphone reception this high up the mountain and they’re only one of two houses on the whole range, but the sex looks like it might be promising so they’re not too fussed. Using skills that I wouldn’t have imagined existed Veronica has managed to convince the director to have her in the movie with Ron and the two get down to business. During a break in the shoot Ron decides that he needs to get some fresh air, where something decidedly strange happens. A shooting star comes out of left field, strikes Ron down, cuts his penis off and then possesses his dismembered member. Things are about to get strange…

The lesser spotted boy-next-door porn star.

With a mind of its own the penis goes on a rampage, trying to find any available orifice that may be used to help it reproduce. Sadly no one informed this alien race that, on Earth, only females produce offspring, much to the startled screams of some members of the male cast. A highly dysfunctional group of people, the cast is initially slow to react to the situation (granted, shouting things like “Angel has a cock down her throat!” probably doesn’t sound overly strange to anyone here). It’ll take their combined wits, an old Vietnam War veteran and a computer database of every female celebrity in the world hooked up to a simulated vagina to try and bring this abomination down. But will it be enough? And what if someone falls in love with the penis? Watch and be truly astounded.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• The Porn Revolution will not be televised.
• If you’ve only done 150 porn movies you’re still just a baby in the industry.
• Elderly mothers will kill their sons if they don’t give them all the details on the latest porn releases.
• Ron Jeremy’s talent is historic and ageless and should never be criticised.
• Porn actresses are really collegial and like to exchange tips on the tricks of the trade.
• With the correct kegal exercises a porn actress can rule the world.
• A tampon is very useful if you ever need to stop some internal hemorrhaging.
• It takes weeks of preparation for a porn star to remember her lines.
• Strangulation is an excellent persuasion technique.
• It’s so hard to find a porn star that’s also a perfect gentleman.

ONE-EYED MONSTER TRAILER

BUY ONE-EYED MONSTER AT AMAZON.COM

Metal Shifters

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

First off I just want to put it out there that this movie is far more awesome if you watch it under its original title, Iron Invader. Metal Shifters might create the illusion that it’s a spin-off of something like Ice Road Truckers. Like the other Syfy movies I’ve watched lately (see here, here and here) this movie was quite fun, but you have to be in a specific mood to watch it. I’m not quite sure what it is but when a movie has a giant, lurking creature stalking a small town it somehow puts itself in a little niche that isn’t quite as accessible as aliens invading the planet through a tornado. Nevertheless, should you be in the mood to spend 80-odd minutes watching an averagely CGIed metal monster stalking a little town with a complimentary side of fateful lovers, then you could do far worse than this little gem.

Searching for inspiration for the movie’s script.

Welcome to the town of Redeemer, a quaint little place where you can raise a family. Well, you can raise the family if you aren’t most of the townsfolk who’ve had their homes foreclosed and are now poverty-stricken and presumably living in a box under a highway bridge somewhere. Those that remain in the town are good, hard-working, salt of the earth kind of people. Brothers Jake and Ethan are carpenters of some sort and they work on restoring all of the town’s historic buildings to their former grandeur. Given that they’re flat broke how they do this is somewhat of a mystery, but who can really say how things in small towns work? Everything’s going swimmingly well for the two until Amanda, Jake’s high school sweet heart who he’s never gotten over, rolls back into town after a messy divorce. Oh yeah, and a Russian satellite falls out of the sky and crashes in a farmer’s field.

You be Iron Invader’s friend?

Never ones to miss an opportunity to make a quick buck Jake and Ethan take the satellite to the local junk yard to sell as scrap. Since it seems to be made out of mostly chicken wire and a few old colanders it’s perhaps not surprising that the thing fell out of orbit, but the guys manage to get $800 for it anyway. Earl, the owner of said junk yard and the only man dumb enough to buy a thing like that, is busy with a little project: since it’s the town’s centenary he’s decided to take some of the trash lying around and turn it into a giant golem statue. Whilst the sentiment is beautiful the statue itself is ugly as hell and, a while after he buys the satellite, it’s also crawling with an alien bacteria that feeds on metal and can propel its host. Guess where it decided to set up shop?

Alien bacteria-infested iron statues that go bump in the night.

And the monster’s off and he’s running down the streets and he’s killing people all of the place but can he make it and kill everyone before they realise what’s going on? For such a large, clunky and noisy monster people are really slow to cotton on to what’s happening around them. This may, in part, be due to the fact that anyone the monster touches dies a quick and agonising death, but I still think that if it’s stomping around and bigger than your house you would probably notice it. As often happens in these situations the first people to spot the monster are the young folk, and no one’s really ready to believe them that Earl’s statue has come to life and is running around killing people. It’s up to Jake and biology teacher Amanda to figure out how this bacteria works, what it wants, if it can be negotiated with over a cup of tea and re-runs of Oprah or, if not, how they should best go about killing the damn thing.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• There’s always someone prepared to buy a broken Russian satellite.
• No town really needs a sheriff when you have a drunk old guy with a shotgun running around.
• The Russian alphabet can be classed as ‘strange and mysterious symbols’.
• Daughters make excellent alien bait.
• Old pick up trucks are an iron invader’s natural predator.
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an alien bacteria in possession of an iron golem body must be in want of a blood-rich host.

METAL SHIFTERS TRAILER

BUY METAL SHIFTERS AT AMAZON.COM

Weasels Rip My Flesh

Year of Release: 1979
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.3 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

OK people, pack it up and head on home. Nobody needs me anymore, the journey to watch the world’s most awful horror movie has officially come to an end with Weasels Rip My Flesh. Just joking, I’m not going anywhere, although I am considering revamping the blog. My main idea includes redoing the Levels of Awful as ‘Surprise!’, ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’ and ‘Weasels Rip My Flesh‘. Anyone remember my review for Monsturd? Weasels Rip My Flesh would shit all over that movie. It’s quite spectacular in its mind-melting awfulness; friends of the “director” in the roles, papier-mâché monsters and black bags being used as the surface of Venus. To make sure you really get value for money all of this is crammed into little more than an hour’s worth of film. If you’re feeling like you have nothing left to live for and want to go out with your brain violently squeezing itself out of your ear in a desperate bid to escape then this is the perfect way to end it all.

That poor granny-haired boy…

Mankind has finally mastered the art of space travel and extended our reach beyond the stars. Well, not really, but we’ve managed to make our way to Venus. Turns out the planet is made up largely of black bin bags and isn’t nearly as hot as we thought it was so landing a spaceship there is easier than parallel parking on a slow traffic day. Thrown into all of these amazing discoveries is the fact that our sister planet is home to life; blue, slimely, squishy life but life none the less. Using the latest in giant hair clip technology the brave astronauts of this cardboard spaceship  collect samples of Venereal life to bring back home for further study. Sadly the homeward trip for these brave, brave men is marred by the fact that the spaceship suddenly veers hopelessly out of control and crashes in a swamp where two young boys just happen to be playing.

Oh my God, what a horrifying mutant weasel!

The saying ‘boys will be boys’ is never more applicable than when two young boys on the cusp of puberty come across a package marked “DANGER: RADIOACTIVE CONTENTS” written in white board marker. The number of things that can be done with radioactive Venereal life is virtually limitless as you can well imagine but, when one of the boys is bitten by a rabid weasel, the toxic slime becomes the perfect vehicle for revenge. They pour the now luminous mustard yellow goo into the weasel’s burrow and the strangely doll-like creature mutants into a horrendous monster in a matter of seconds. Now the size of a car the monster weasel makes a quick snack of the two boys before heading out of the swamp on a rampaging trail of terror.

Some of the most amazing costuming in a movie ever.

Somewhere in amongst the ensuing confusion that involves random road-side researchers, horrendous moustaches and weasel arms that can move around on their own 8 months fly by and the swamp becomes a scene of unsolved mass murders. We catch up with the movie to follow what I hazard as a guess to be two policemen trying to find out what’s going on in the swamp. In between chain-smoking a few cigars, being overbearingly Italian-American and some wooden dialogue thrown in for good measure the two cops are taken hostage by a scientist that looks strikingly like Nintendo’s Mario (were Mario to be homeless with an alcohol problem). This scientist has discovered that the mutant weasel is the key to amazing regenerative medicine but, since the weasel has rabies, he needs human blood to purify his new serum. The cops now need to find a way to escape from the scientist’s evil clutches without becoming a little snack for the giant weasel.

I would just like to reiterate, if you feel like life is actually worth living, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! You may not feel the same way by the time the closing credits roll round.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• A woman’s hair clip is perfect for collecting samples of alien life on Venus.
• NASA has absolutely no way of knowing if one of their spacecraft has made it back to Earth safely or not.
• NASA containment technology is no match for a 10-year-old with a stick.
• It’s very easy to not notice a car-sized weasel running across the road.
• A messy kitchen is definite proof of a torn off arm dragging itself around the house.
• It’s easy to confuse a stagnant swamp for an ocean.
• Mutant weasels can either destroy the world, cure every disease or unlock the secret to immortality.
• You can use a lit cigar to burn through metal chains.
• Contrary to popular belief having your arm ripped off will not result in massive blood loss.

BUY WEASELS RIP MY FLESH AT AMAZON.COM

AVH: Alien VS. Hunter

Year of Release: 2007
Genre:  Action / Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 1.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Critiquing a rip-off movie made by The Asylum is a little bit like picking on the village idiot but I would like to start off by saying that there was some method to my madness. Not being a fan of either the Alien or Predator franchises I never took the time to watch either of the Alien VS Predator movies, so my logic behind watching Alien VS Hunter was that I could go into it with a clear mind and not be constantly comparing it to movies that had access to a budget and real actors. Sadly this decision was misguided as I sat, constantly confused, for 85 minutes desperately trying to figure out what was going on.

We start off on a very yellow morning (everything in this movie is tinted yellow for reasons unknown) with Lee Custler, a journalist, out jogging in the middle of a deserted highway. Lee is so engrossed with his jogging that he doesn’t notice a comet burning through the atmosphere and crashing into a nearby hill. Sheriff Joel Armstrong, however, has seen the comet and picks up Lee by bribing him with doughnuts so that the two of them can go and investigate the crash. After driving in the complete opposite direction to the crash site but somehow landing up at it anyway they realise that the meteor isn’t a meteor at all but rather the remains of an alien spaceship. Said alien quickly emerges from the spacecraft and ‘eats’ the sheriff (i.e. wiggles its head over his chest while fake blood oozes from his pocket). Sometime when all of this is happening a girl named Tammy, whose mother is missing, finds Lee and the two run off to go look for help.

When Aliens, Predators and spiders interbreed

Help, sadly, is hard to find in a town with a population of 11 people. At a little café / police station we are introduced to Hilary, Javier, Figgus and Marcy who, unsurprisingly, do not believe that giant spider-aliens are running around in the woods. Being from a small town and not having much else to do they decide to go off with Lee and Tammy anyway to look for the survivors of a car crash that Lee and Tammy saw when the alien attacked. The group finds a man named Garrison who survived the crash but Marcy lands up being killed because the alien can climb trees and what follows is a ridiculously long run through the woods as the survivors attempt to find anyone else who might be able to help them.

A forgotten Mortal Kombat character with a gun

Now somewhere along the line, and he really just appears out of nowhere, we are introduced to the second main character in our movie’s title: the Hunter. To anyone who’s played Mortal Kombat the hunter really just looks like a rejected form of Raiden with a red jar on his face and a big gun. For unknown reasons once again the hunter and the alien are out to get one another while our little gang, now joined by a normal hunter named Valentine and his daughter Freckles, constantly manage to get in their way. To be fair they can’t really run away all that well because the sets are too small to allow for it and all that really happens is they run in circles while the cameraman tries to get different angle shots to create the illusion of a bigger set.

The rest of the movie is mainly made up of the survivors either running (slowly, EVER SO SLOWLY) through the woods, the sewers, the water pipes, the hunter’s spaceship, the alien’s spaceship (it may be one ship, I’m not sure), several failed attempts at sub-plots that have nothing to do with the movie and dialogue that is in no way cohesive. The effects are terrible, the actors can’t act, an escaped chimp from a USA government lab could have written a better script and the attempt at a twist in the ending will make you want to throw yourself and your TV out the window. For all these reasons I have decided to place Alien VS Hunter in the ‘Requires Post-Film Lobotomy’ level of awful. In fact, having seen this mind-numbing piece of cheese, I’m not sure if Arachnia or even Terror Toons deserve such a rating.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED:

• An iPod’s volume can be turned up high enough to block out the sound of a comet crashing into the Earth.
• Contrary to accepted scientific theory comets do not send up dust or shock waves when they hit the Earth.
• Aliens can change their size at will. Common sizes range from human-size to tree-size.
• Aliens have honeycomb vision.
• Extraterrestrial laser guns make ‘pew pew’ noises when shooting.
• The actual shots and the sounds from the shots on extraterrestrial laser guns are not in sync with one another.
• Alien claws can slice through human flesh but can’t cut through rope nets.
• Small-town hunters have an animal-like fear of military personnel that are properly equipped to handle an alien invasion.
• Black women become fearful of a journalist’s writing abilities during an alien invasion.

AVH: Alien VS Hunter Trailer