Dracula 3000

Year of Release: 2004
Genre: Horror / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 2 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Holy sweet mother of God my brain… I’m not much of a vampire fan, my preference has always been with zombies. None of this intelligence nonsense, just eat the damn human and be done with it. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this prejudice, which is why Dracula 3000 is actually quite heart warming: a vampire movie that was clearly made by a horde of mindless zombies. This isn’t so much a movie as it is 86 minutes worth of shots of a storage / boiler room with various morons running around in it. If they were going for a Jason X kind of vibe they missed the mark horribly. I honestly cannot think of a single person I would recommend this movie to. If you are unfortunate enough to come across it expose it to sunlight (or a blowtorch) and wait until it melts.

This man needs an intense moisturiser, stat!

In the year 2950 the spaceship Demeter was just cruising through the universe when it ran into a spot of bother. After picking up some cargo the ship’s crew all became mysteriously ill and the captain began to lose control of the ship as all the guidance systems began to fail and the engines failed to fire. I’m sure the captain’s wife had very similar complaints, but that’s a story for another day. When the ship’s emergency distress signals would no longer go out the Demeter became lost in space for the next 50 years. In the year 3000 Captain Abraham van Helsing and his ship, the Mother III, are also cruising through the universe and just happen to stumble upon the Demeter. Given the size of the universe the fact that you would stumble across anything at all is quite remarkable, but here we are.  Claiming salvage rights on the Demeter van Helsing and his crew board the stricken star liner to see what happened to it and just how much they can make off with.

Casper van Dien is tired of your shit!

Accompanying van Helsing is the most useless crew space ever has or ever will see. Aurora is the token blonde who’s an uncomfortable cross between radical feminist and sex kitten. Mina is the whiny female intern that tries to do stuff but can only accomplish things with the help of men. Our on board professor is a cripple who actually seems to know very little about anything other than whining and hiding under things. Then we have our two stock black characters: the pot head, 187, and the take-no-shit-and-kick-your-puny-white-ass Humvee. Points must be given for their collective intelligence: as soon as they discover the very first rotten corpse tied to a chair with a crucifix in its hand they have this sneaky suspicion that something may have gone wrong on the ship. Van Helsing’s the loose bolt in the fine machine that is the collective intelligence of the crew since he’s not going to let one little rotten corpse and rooms littered with crucifixes frighten him off from collecting a little scrap metal. He’s far too manly for that kind of thing.

Stabbed through the heart, and you’re to blame. You give love a bad name.

So what could have possibly happened to the Demeter? Well, you see, what happened goes a little something like this: while cruising through the galaxy the ship received a transmission from the planet Transylvania in the Carpathian star system. No I’m not making a joke, that’s really where they were. Since none of this set off any alarm bells the Demeter’s captain obviously wasn’t going to question why he was transporting over a dozen coffins through space towards Earth. Turns out that Transylvania is a vampire planet (gasp, shock, horror) and Count Orlock, the head vampire, wants to be taken to Earth for a little snack. Oh, if only now, 50 years later, there coincidentally happened to be the descendant of some of the best vampire hunters in history on board the Demeter! If such a hero were here then perhaps he could save the day and defeat the evil Count? Even if he had to do so while being surrounded by useless professors, whiny women and stereotyped black men. To be fair I didn’t see the ending coming. The flip side of that coin, however, is that the ending is awful and makes you want to throw a brick through the TV. You have all been warned.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Women dream of a life where they can work alongside sweaty men for no pay.
• Lacking a sustainable blood source, vampires transform into beach sand and hibernate.
• Vampires make whooshing noises whenever they move.
• Most intergalactic starships come equipped with a modest speed internet connection.
• Only white people suck other people’s blood.
• Women should be tied up and held captive whenever they offer advice that may save your life.

DRACULA 3000 TRAILER

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Robotropolis

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Sci-Fi / Action / Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.5 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As any of you who follow me on Twitter may know I’ve been suffering from a terrible craving for a cheesy sci-fi movie lately. Many people suggested Galaxy of Terror, but I couldn’t wait for my copy to arrive (I promise to watch it soon). When I came across Robotropolis I was immediately captivated by its cover with an almost toy-like android and decided to take a chance on it. With below average acting, a wafer thin plot and CGI that lies somewhere between The Asylum and SyFy Originals you really can’t go wrong with this movie. Robotropolis is a b-movie at its finest that’s daft enough to be a very enjoyable 80 minutes but not painful enough that you’d want to wash your brain off with bleach afterwards. It also does gooey body parts remarkably well.

With a limited vocabulary program the robots couldn’t provide a very detailed account of events…

You are watching GNN and reporting live from New Town in the south China Sea is star reporter Christiane Nouveau. New Town is a bustling new city on an island owned solely by MegaNational Industries and this is the first time reporters are being allowed in to film and document the amazing technological developments going on here. While New Town has been built up around an enormous oil refinery the main thing the teams of scientists and groups of cheap labour have managed to accomplish is the development of robots to help out with all the different kinds of labour we humans just don’t feel like doing. This can range from manual labour to raising our children. Of course, what can possibly go wrong when we place our safety and future in the mechanical hands of humanoid constructs incapable of experiencing an emotion?

Flayed human flesh: the latest in robot fashion.

Christiane has been absolutely enthralled with the robots up until this point, thanks in no small part to the fact that they know how to mix a decent cocktail. This opinion and perception changes a little, however, when she’s reporting on a little soccer game where one of the players is a robot. At one point, and seemingly unprovoked, the robot decides to shoot one of the players. After that the robot simply walks off, leaving everyone else utterly baffled as to what just happened. Since the only way to differentiate the robots from one another is by the printing on it that designates their job, it’s gonna be very difficult to find that one particular robot in this big city. Before a decent search can get underway reports start to stream in about robots attacking people. The problem here is the fact that the entire security force is comprised of robots as well…

Human heads pop off with remarkable ease.

I would like to raise the point that, despite the failure of the programmers to stop the robots from going on a blood thirsty rampage in the first place, the robots come with a more serious design flaw. These robots are meant to fulfill basic functions in society such as police, medics, construction workers and the like. Why then do all the robots come with built-in guns, drills, saws and flamethrowers? While this does make the killing spree much easier (and juicier) it would appear that the robots are a little over armed in my humble opinion. While trying to escape from the robots Christiane’s also going to try and keep reporting the news so that her boyfriend can earn himself a nice big pay cheque by dominating the 5pm news. After all, being in a relationship means having to make sacrifices. When the robots learn how to throw helicopters around and leave the humans with no way of getting off the island it’s up to Christiane and the two or three surviving tech junkies to devise a plan to bring the robots down and have them permanently decommissioned.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Men are always ready for a little girl-on-robot action.
• Robots are always moving the candy, gum and chips around in shops.
• Billionaires get to where they are by giving in to boyish whims and fancies.
• When the robot says ‘halt’, you best halt.
• The robot revolution will be televised.
• You don’t need functional satellites to beam footage around the world.
• Being hunted down by murderous robots isn’t overly different to visiting a Turkish bathhouse.
• Camera phones have video quality on par with the most sophisticated video cameras.

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2012: Supernova

Year of Release: 2009
Genre: Sci-Fi / Action
IMDB Rating: 2.4 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Oh, The Asylum. There’s not an awful lot of good things that can be said about them but credit must be given to them for almost single-handedly keeping End of the World Month going. 2012: Supernova forms part of their 2012 (loose) trilogy of disaster movies. I’ve already reviewed 2012: Ice Age and, like it’s sibling, this movie is inspired by events in another movie. I’m going to hazard a guess that this one got its idea from Knowing. The whole thing is one giant technical inaccuracy and I spent most of my time looking at the TV absolutely gobsmacked that they thought this kind of storyline was going to hold itself together. But then I reminded myself that it was a movie by The Asylum and suddenly it all made a lot more sense.

Oops!

200 years ago in a far off constellation a star went supernova, destroying its solar system and sending deathly rays out in every direction. This supernova was so destructive, in fact, that its horrendous gamma ray beams are still every bit as destructive 200 years later, and they’re heading right for us. NASA is trying to prepare a crack team of the most ridiculously stereotypical people you can possibly imagine: Kelvin, the no-nonsense all American guy, Dzerzhinsky, the mummified-in-Vodka Russian with a terrible fake Russian accent, and Dr. Kwang Ye, a Chinese female who knows nothing in this world other than how to save the Earth and how to glorify The People’s Republic of China. I’m actually fairly certain that we could get the Asylum arrested for this type of stereotyping; I’m sure the UN would have something to say about it.

You just never know when a giant mole is going to strike.

Before we can save the Earth, however, we need to actually get Kelvin to the damn NASA base where this whole project is being coordinated. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, even more stereotypes appear, this time in the guise of Middle Eastern men with thick accents waving semi-automatic weapons in the air. They don’t seem to have any clue what it is they’re doing because first of all they try to shoot Kelvin and his family and then, when they have them cornered in a warehouse, ask them a number of questions, mainly about why the Americans have been taking nuclear weapons up to the International Space Station. Thankfully other government agents rock up and shoot the bad, bad non-Americans. Kelvin then heads off to the base while his wife and daughter head home to get some things and plan to join up with him later.

This movie is a testament mainly to the fact that women are awful drivers.

So the supernova is on its way, it’s already blown up a remarkably solid Pluto and is now busy jetting its way past and through the moons of Jupiter. What’s the plan? Well, the scientists agree that the Earth’s magnetosphere is not going to be enough to protect us from a direct hit from the supernova (duh, it just blew up Pluto), so what they’re going to do is blow up a few hundred nuclear warheads above the magnetosphere to give the Earth some extra coating and seal all our juices in nice and tight. We’ll deal with the horrifying effects of nuclear fallout across the planet later. Problems arise when the approach of the supernova begins to affect the planet’s weather, triggers earthquakes and randomly makes Mount Vesuvius erupt again. Couple this with the fact that someone’s trying to sabotage the launch to the ISS to detonate the warheads and we’re in for a tepid, adrenaline-lacking race to save mankind from total annihilation.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Nobody really wants to know the identity of the people aiming a machine gun through their car’s window.
• The art of kidnapping someone and taking them alive relies on shooting wildly in random directions.
• Some people view saving mankind from utter annihilation is just another part of the day.
• Wishing for nuclear warheads isn’t going to make them appear.
• An entire NASA launch pad only requires 3 minutes to undergo a complete safety check.
• It’s preferable to destroy the planet slowly than allow it to be destroyed in one cataclysmic blast. 
• You don’t need clouds to have thunder and lightning.
• Timing when something is about to destroy Earth is really just a matter of guesswork until it actually hits us.
• The kindness of strangers will usually end with you taking a lead pipe to the back of their heads.
• Computers just make space shuttle technicians lazy cowards.

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