Reviews

As Georgia Lass once said, "interest begets expectation, and expectation begets disappointment, so the key to avoiding disappointment is to avoid interest. A equals B equals C equals A, or… whatever." And boy, should I have listened.

So I watched SyFy's (sic!) Tin Man and Alice and thought, "well, those were {more than} a bit good, so this might also be alright..."

WRONG. This... thing, for I dread to call it a film, is god (lower case 'g') bloody awful. It could've tried passing itself as a {bad} horror movie, it certainly had the body count for it (I can almost see some Whedon fan-boy (devoid, naturally, of anything resembling talent or imagination) writing this while drooling profusely), except it didn't. I'm not saying that EVERY movie should have blood and guts galore, but holy hell, THIS movie could've sure used some.

Which brings me to the characters. No, sorry, the only reason why anyone might care for a few seconds about any of them is "hey, look, it's deputy Andy" or "hey, well that's the rev from Haven." (Yes, I know that this was before Haven). Speaking of the rev, he may have looked okay on Haven (but that's down to not having enough screen-time to really make himself look inept and having guys like Eric Balfour to compete with (my grandma could do a better job and she's been in the ground for nearly twenty years now)), but he's absolutely bland.

And one final note to the writers: BACK-STORY. If you decide you want a werewolf that suddenly learns to wolf-out at will it might be useful to EXPLAIN just how that happened without resorting to motivational speeches seemingly written by a three year-old.. If you have dead parents/grandfather use them somehow to move the plot. If you have someone who can write... oh, never me mind, you don't.

But I digress, this was, after all, probably thought of by an airhead who was reading Pelevin while sitting on the bog. Ugh.

P.S. It's only suitable this thing was followed by Skinwalkers, a perfect night of the living brain-dead so to speak.

The concept behind this is great: an executed convict that is somehow alive, an eerie town, a weird angel figure and a dog that keeps digging some place. Unfortunately, it all goes wrong.

I'll start with the ending. Forget the cheese, I just love the range of emotions of the wife. "Oh, sure honey you've decided to do something stupid and criminal again, leaving me to raise our kid alone, but I'm not mad at you. Nor am I particularly shocked to see you turning up at my door." Oh well, she is blonde...

Which swiftly takes us to the organization responsible for all this mess. Sure, they're running a place full of folk who got done for murder one... But fences? OK, forget the fences, how about a password for the old PC? I mean it's only secret files you're holding there, c'mon.

There's more, but I think I'm just bound to throw up if I go on, so I'll just add that around the middle you do get the feeling that the explanation is going to be somehow mundane, and boy you're not in for a surprise.

6, on the account of the concept.

My first attempt at watching this ended in 8 minutes, roughly after the TV report scene, which I couldn't handle. It went approximately like this:

Reporter 1: Hmm, there's a pyramid in our skies. Reporter 2: I think it's aliens. *awkward silence* Reporter 1: In other news...

A few days later I watched it to the end, and it wasn't as horrible as I've imagined, but there are serious problems with this. About half of the plot can be easily discarded. And the other half should be expanded to explain the background story or something.

What use are the detective, the eugenics people, and the monsters which are disposed of momentarily by Horus? More amusing was the monopoly scene. "We're all powerful "Gods", who have lived for aeons, and of all the games in the multiverse we happen to play monopoly." Monopoly? Monopoly?! Even Erich von Dainiken looks coherent, compared to that.

The other half is terribly lacking. What did our protagonist do to get himself cryo-frozen? Why was there no big event when he was released at the end? He had those pesky followers, remember? What happened to normal humans? What's the deal with the masked guy? How did the blue-haired girl appear? What's with her eyesight? Etcetera, etcetera.

Visually it's OK, more or less, if you disregard the Egyptian Gods looking like walking turds with rotweiller heads.