I recently started to watch recent DVD releases District 9 and Where the Wild Things Are, and at the halfway point gave up due to disinterest.  I’m not saying either is bad, just I could not be bothered to sit through them as my mind wandered to distant lands where unicorns roam free and magic bears ride them to the Honeycomb Hideout.

Since the Asylum is kind enough to send Film is Pwn HQ advance copies of their DVDs (thanks, Asylum!), I feel somewhat obliged to screen them and write them up.  I feel it is important to provide this up front disclaimer to my review: Watching the Asylum’s latest release 6 Guns felt like homework before I started watching it.  As the film unfolded, it began to feel a tad bit more like I was the subject of a blind, amateur dentist’s first root canal.

I confess that I actually saw 6 Guns last weekend.  I meant to write a review, but it slipped my mind.  I saw the DVD lying before my TV, and stared blankly at the cover for a while.  You know that feeling when you run into someone who looks familiar and you aren’t sure if you went to high school with them?  I had it just yesterday running into a former co-worker who had lost probably 100 pounds since I’d last seen them.  I had that with this movie.  “Hi, Movie, this may sound strange, but . . . I have to ask: Have I watched you yet?”

6 Guns, is a low-budget homage to ye olde school Clint Eastwood Westerns.  Frankly, 6 Guns may be the most utterly unremarkable and forgettable film I’ve ever seen.

If not for the thoroughly uncomfortable scene where a young mother, Selena, is forced to watch her husband and children murdered before being gang raped by outlaws, this would have slipped my mind completely. 

The story is about Selena, who turns to drink and then vengeance on the outlaws who slaughtered her family and left her for dead.  One logistical problem is that the actress who plays the mother, Sage Mears, looks to be in her early 20s, despite her character having a 10 and 12 year old son and a grizzled old, ex-lawman husband. 

Selena’s chance for revenge comes when the Eastwood-clone Bounty Hunter Frank Allison shows up in town.  Frank’s arrival in town is terrific, as approximately 137 different townsfolk tell him in succession how safe he makes them feel when he’s around.  Still, people keep dying.  Good work, Frank!

Frank takes pity on the widow, teaches her to shoot, and eventually they end up in a big shootout with the bad guys.  The end.

Other than the dreadfully uncomfortable rape scene, the one item worth mentioning is how darn much Van Dyke is in this movie.  It was directed by Dick Van Dyke’s grandson, Shane Van Dyke, who also plays one of the villains. Shane’s brother Carey Van Dyke is one of the other villains.

The heroic bounty hunter is played by Shane’s Dad, Barry Van Dyke, who plays the grizzled anti-hero with all the panache of a singing Chimney Sweep.  Barry VD has the most acting chops and experience of the case, seemingly thanks largely to nepotism.  On imdb.com, Barry Van Dyke’s credits are 90% appearance in Van Dyke Patriarch Dick Van Dyke’s long-running murder mystery series, Diagnosis Murder (alias: “Matlock, M.D.“). 

Bottom line, I did not like 6 Guns at all.  My lack of movie enthusiasm may have contributed plus there’s my disgust at the gratuitous rape scene.  6 Guns isn’t nearly good enough to be taken seriously and it is sadly not bad enough to be awesome (a la the Gold Standard of Asylum Movies, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus).

Skip it, I say! 

. . . Here’s hoping Clash of the Titans this weekend will rejuvenate my movie mojo.

Yes, it’s a bad movie, but please let me explain: I am a Christian and thereby had a vested interest in the movie.  Most Asylum releases I sit back and enjoy the B-movie goodness as “so-bad-it’s-good.”  But this wasn’t just a B-movie, it’s a Christian B-movie!  So, Meteor Apocalypse I had a little emotional investment. 

Why do I care?  To get a perspective, imagine you’re watching a bunch of kids play T-ball.  They are running around aimlessly, falling down arbitrarily, getting distracted by passing clouds, and one is attempting to chew on the baseball rather than throw it back into the infield.  Kinda funny, right?  Not if your kid is the worst of the bunch; then it’s embarrassing. But if your kid is as good as all the other bad kids, it’s okay! (Right? Someone with kids back me up on this!)

You see, when it comes to movies, Christians haven’t been doing too good for ourselves.  You don’t have to dumb down to go from secular books to Christian books.  Call me crazy, but I actually prefer Christian music to popular music.  However, with rare exceptions like Passion of the Christ, the best Christian movies pale in comparison to the worst mainstream motion pictures in every category (acting, production value, script, etc.). 

I’d like to watch Christian movies, but it’s hard.  I turned off the sensation Fireproof (a film made by a church in Georgia for half a million bucks that earned over $30 million just in theaters) after five minutes because I couldn’t take it.  My point is that I love movies and I want Christian movies not to suck, but they simply do not.

I’m not implying that I’d only drink milk from a Christian cow or get my oil changed at a Holy Lube.  But hey, in a country where the vast majority of the population believe in God and seemingly less than 1% of Hollywood believe in anything other than generic Oprah-brand-faith, a Christian on-screen is a pleasant change of pace.  Normally the Christian in the film is the religious nut in the Dirty Dozen, the religious zealot trying to burn people at the stake, or a televangelist trying to take the money from old people.

So in that capacity Meteor Apocalypse is nice.  It’s still bad, don’t get me wrong, but I have to compare it to all the other Asylum/SyFy Channel Original movies I’ve seen, not to the latest Stephen Spielberg picture.  Meteor Apocalypse is, after all, a low-budget film about meteors that cause a apocalypse. 

Meteor Apocalypse has all the Asylum trademarks: A recognizable actor who doesn’t get a lot of work these days (Joe Lando, who came to fame in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and Claudia Christian, of Babylon 5 “fame”); you’ve got oodles of low-budget effects (meteors crash to Earth repeatedly causing much digital mayhem); and plenty of cast members who look like they’re moonlighting from their day jobs as office temps.

The basic plot is that when the meteors start hitting, the water supply is contaminated causing as much havoc as the deadly, digital rocks from space.  Hero Joe Lando is separated from his wife and daughter, who are taken into quarantine.  The rest of the movie is Lando’s exploits trying to track down his family and survive in post-catastrophe America. 

The plot and dialogue aren’t aggressively preachy.   Lando’s character isn’t the typical Christian but someone married to a good Christian woman who holds Bible studies and pesters him to come to church.  There are several good Christian people thrown in the mix, prayers are said, and some Christianese is spoken (“kingdom moment,” etc.).  I was a tad bit shocked when one benevolent woman who takes our heroes into her church for sanctuary gets blown up real good when a meteor strikes said church. 

If you hold up Meteor Apocalypse, it is just as good as any film of its ilk (sci-fi without finance). 

Here’s the quote they can throw on the back of the DVD cover: Meteor Apocalypse is s a tolerable, fairly watchable, very low-budget, disaster movie in the tradition of 2012: Supernova.

The official release date is Tuesday, February 23rd — thanks for the early copy, Asylum!

Don’t forget our iRiff for the film . . .

Princess of Mars is based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is allegedly the inspiration for James Cameron’s Avatar.  In fact, right on the front cover of the DVD it says, “THE CLASSIC STORY THAT INSPIRED JAMES CAMERON’S AVATAR.”  The back cover of Princess of Mars boasts in a quote without a source: “HEART-POUNDING CREATURE ACTION OF STARSHIP TROOPERS AND THE EPIC ADVENTURE OF LORD OF THE RINGS!”  I hate to call anyone or any DVD cover a liar, but how can you trust someone who tells you that Starship Troopers contained “heart-pounding creature action”? Liar!

Avatar and Princess of Mars do both feature protagonists who are strangers in a strange land that fall in love with a scantily clad alien, but that is the plot to 94.2% of movies these days.  Of course, James Cameron spends more money on a single sneeze than the entire budget of the Asylum’s Princess of Mars.

The plot of Princess of Mars is as follows: John Carter (Antonio Sabato Jr.) is a modern day U.S. Marine stationed in the Middle East.  Carter is critically injured in combat and as this brave American hero fights to survive, his commanders send him to Mars.  I’m not kidding.  He’s transported via some experimental technology that will recreate him on Mars, though not the Mars.  Carter is told: “We are sending you to Mars.  Not the Mars that you think.  This is Mars 2-16.  A small planet in the orbit Alpha Centauri.”  The Viet Nam vets thought THEY had it bad.

According to the source of all wisdom and knowledge, the novel Princess of Mars featured a Civil War veteran in mystically transported to the actual Mars when attacked by Indians. This makes remarkably more sense than the film, which apparently believes they cannot use the actual planet Mars because we are now relatively certain that there is no life on Mars (I will say “relatively certain” until convinced that the Sham Wow Guy is indeed an Earthling). So the filmmakers assume that their audience will not accept civilization on Mars in a film titled “Princess of Mars,” but they will embrace the concept that the U.S. Military will send an injured soldier to another planet called Mars (without his consent). Really, no explanation for a veteran’s appearance on another planet than that.

On *cough* “Mars”, Carter finds himself in a power struggle between the be-tusked aliens who look like cast-offs from Star Trek: Voyager and the human-like aliens.  On this planet known as Mars, which I remind you is of no relationship to the planet Mars, Carter has super strength and the ability to leap tall mountains in about two or three bounds.  Presumably forgetting that he can jump half a mile at will, Carter becomes captive to the Elephant Men remarkably quickly.

Carter and works his way up in the Elephant society, earning his place as a warrior when he helps fend off cheap digital spiders.  In reward, the Elephant people feed Carter a worm that somehow translates the languages of the peoples, sort of a Universal Translator Worm for Plot Convenience.  I kid you not. 

Some of the other great culture clash moments include Carter receiving water in the form of sweat rung out from a towel kept underneath the Elephants cloths and fed via pudding being coughed up from a giant slug.  Yum!

Despite fitting right in with the herd, Carters feels loyalty to the humans and their allegedly “hot” Princess of Mars.

One of the central dramas is that the humans are attempting to attend to the facility that keeps the planet’s air pure, known as the “Royal Pumping Station.”  In fact, Traci Lords, the former adult film star playing the titular Princess of Mars spends much of the film desperately attempting to reach to the “Royal Pumping Station.”  This is a PG-rated site, so I shall comment no further.

Carter tries to convince his Elephant friend to let the Princess go to the Royal Pumping Station to save the planet, but the Elephant Man does not believe that there is a machine purifying the air.  Elephant Man rebuffs the request by saying, and I quote, “The Princess may believe her words are truthful, but they are LIES!”

The plot is really not the point.  Princess of Mars is camp science fiction at its finest, a guilty pleasure all the way.  Antonio Sabato Jr. spends most the movie wearing a diaper.  Traci Lords spends the entire film attempting not to smile for fear of her wrinkles showing while clad in Princess Leia-style slave girl attire from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. . . .

. . . .  . .  Sorry, my mind wandered there for a minute.

To summarize, Princess of Mars is a great Asylum movie. Lots of fun, lots of laughs. Plus, it is about 70 minutes shorter than Avatar, so it’s got that going for it.

Check out the Asulum website for some sample pics.

Film is Pwn got our pre-release DVD in the mail Saturday (thank you, Asylum!) and this is a return to fun/bad greatness after the most recent releases, Sex-Pot and Megafault, which fell in the unwatchable and uninteresting categories, respectively.

What’s 2012: Supernova got?  It’s got the Earth about to be incinerated by a supernova, in the year 2012.  Brian Krause (don’t worry if you don’t know who he is, apparently his career high was being the dude on Charmed)  is the hard-nosed, American scientist working with the quirky Russian scientist and the attractive Chinese scientist to stop the impending doomsday by exploding some nuclear devices in the atmosphere, or something like that.  There’s also a saboteur and assassins and whatnot, along with a protracted subplot with Brian Krause’s wife and daughter fleeing toward (or was it from?) something (or is it something?) in the desert.

But no one comes to Asylum movies for the plots, this has got everything you’d want and more: Cheap special effects, cheesy performances, recycled special effects (including re-using shots from various Asylum films as in the space station from the Terminators), and laughs aplenty.  There’s digital lightning under clear skies, assassins firing an Uzi from one car to the next while directly beside each other and not a single bullet striking the car, and about three separate times cars are forced off-road in the desert for various reasons.

If you liked Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, 2012: Supernova is one for you.  The Asylum is back, baby!

–Daniel J. Roos

Perhaps my expectations were set too high (i.e., too low) but MegaFault wasn’t that entertaining.  Sure there are some trademark, so-cheap-it’s-funny special effects, some terrible acting, and a handful of recognizable names in the cast (woe to you Brittany Murphy, Bruce Davison, and Eriq La Salle), but this one just wasn’t fun.  Maybe I’ve seen too may of these, maybe it’s the fact that MegaFault is a disaster movie and I I’ve never met a disaster movie I liked, or maybe this one just wasn’t special.

Brittany “Man oh man my career tanked quick, huh?” Murphy is the star, who is announced as the new Director of FEMA the day a huge earthquake shakes the United States.  Naturally, the quake is the work of the titular “MegaFault” which runs throughout the United States like a giant zipper waiting to be pulled.

Sure, on the bright side, there are a handful of scenes that induce a hearty chuckle, as when Murphy’s husband (Justin Harley) tries to disconnect an oil tank from a truck, whose driver inexplicably declares that if they stop the tank will blow up.  Or when Brittany Murphy frantically bellows “put me down” after being rescued from a suicide mission, longing to die unnecessarily in an attempt to save the planet despite the fact she’s got a husband and (darn cute) daughter to live for.

But overall there’s oodles of characters driving and running away from cracks in the Earth, which was enough to give me flashbacks to The Day After Tomorrow.  I freely confess that I got pretty bored while watching the movie and spent much of the time surfing the world wide interweb on my laptop, with one eye on the screen.  I’m pretty sure the salvation of the human race is found in blowing up even more crap, but I can’t be sure.

And that is the harshest criticism I think I can level: I find SyFy Channel Originals in their bold, cheap ineptness and even more greatly enjoy 90% of the Asylum’s low-budget, fun/bad fare, but MegaFault couldn’t keep me interested enough to watch people running from cheap, computer generated earthquakes, avalanches, and fire.  It’s a sad day indeed.

On the plus side, two upcoming Asylum projects look particularly promising: In December there’s Princess of Mars, which is being positioned as the Asylum’s answer to James Cameron’s big-budget Christmas movie Avatar, and then in January the Asylum is offering its own version of Sherlock Holmes (with two big budget, big name Holmes pictures coming down the pike, one with Robert Downey, Jr. the other with *shudder* Will Farrell).  The brief description on the Asylum’s website promises of their Sherlock Holmes: “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective faces the ultimate challenge when enormous monsters attack London.” Come on, people, THAT is money!

–Daniel J. Roos