You work at The Asylum. SyFy has commissioned another movie, it is a day of the week.
You’re told no sharks, no tornadoes, no dragons, no spiders (giant or normal size) or any combination of these.
No, the monster can’t be made of lava, trapped at the bottom of the sea (being trapped under the sea floor counts) or from another dimension.
The note just says:
“the american president is in danger, after the Air Force One got hit by a tremendous thundestorm just over the The Bermuda Triangle. The _______ is sent in to retrieve the president, but a giant ____ emerges from the deep, potentially posing a threat to America and the world. You are a bad enough dude to save the president.”
Lunch break is just 5 minutes away, so you write in “Navy” and “Squid” because you have some hankering for mediterreanan cuisine. We got a title, a premise, we can (and will) figure out the rest somehow, chow comes first.
I don’t really know how the Asylum works in any kind of detail, but my mind wandered as i tried to present another one of their films, watched in a bout of boredom via Amazon Prime Video, since this isn’t even a mockbuster or sounds like a rip-off of anything else specifically, just another one of their film with a plot so thin you really can properly summarize it in a single paragraph.
For the cast they roped in Linda Hamilton, Jamie Kennedy and John Savage, even the singer Mya, i feel since the movie Battleship did have Rihanna in it…. but then again Battleship came out 2 years prior, and The Asylum already did a mockbuster of that with American Warships, but i guess they couldn’t get any singer to do the Rihanna stand-in then. And that really says it all, doesn’t it?
But don’t worry, acting is intensely bad all around, especially from the better actors that clearly aren’t even half-assing it. I guess because you don’t expect a singer like Mya to be good at acting… and you would be correct, while you can tell the top billed professional actors could act better, but absolutely don’t give a fuck, like Linda Hamilton is shockingly bad here, almost every scene she is in seems she wants to kill on the spot everyone who doesn’t follow orders. XD
In the directing chair is Nick Lyon (i happen to already have covered his Rise Of The Zombies), another one often employed by The Asylum for movies like Hercules Reborn, Isle Of The Dead and Operation Dunkirk. He also directed another TV movie about the Bermuda Triangle, Bermuda Triangle – North Sea, shot in Germany with a german cast. He must really like the subject.
You can guess from the premise (and from the production company) the characters: the army man who doesn’t do thing by the book “but gets results”, the scientist there to be yelled at because he uses scientific terms, the president is… actually surprisingly handy and useful, lieutenent “BOOYAH”, soldier-scientist lady there to do exposition, etc. You can finish the list by yourself.
At the very, very least you don’t have to wait 30 or 40 minutes to see the titular tentacles (which are more like weird abyssal worms but also of alien origin, basically part of a giant biomechanical Starro mothership) attack the soldiers and the soldiers shoot back. Honestly, i don’t get the 1/10 reviews on IMDB, at least i know what’s going on, the direction manages to make up somewhat for a bad script, and i wasn’t aggressively bored by how the narrative unfolded.
Sure, the effects are underbudgeted crap as usual, it’s the usual “marines are AWESOME!” bollocks, there’s a romance that calling underdeveloped would be generous, and the ending seems more at home in videogame (almost like a Resident Evil ending, i guess borrowing back what B-movies lent to the series).
It’s still very bad, but i kinda enjoyed it at times, it’s far less boring that i was dreading,it will kill 90 minutes better than some of the crap i struggled getting even halfway through. Still, i would be crazy if i even gave this 4 stars out 10 or something like that. You can do far, far worse. And better.
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