Time to rummage through my B-movies DVD collection and pinch one out, in this case salvaging from one of the huge ass bookcase style holders Orcs!, a 2011 direct to video monster on the loose flick with a fantasy twist of sorts.
This time around it’s not mutated bears, cocained panthers, or landlubbing sharks running amok in a place, it’s the green, Dakka loving green boyz, that threaten to invade modern society starting from a US National Park, so it’s up to the resident Park Ranger, Cal Robertson, and his sidekick, Voluntary Cadet Hobie, to stop them hordes from leaving the park.
Sound like a fun little comedy horror B-movie, the formula it’s more than proven, have monsters invade and have two or more dorkuses left as humanity’s unlikely last stand, the cast being mostly made of people you’ve never heard or seen before it’s an acceptable risk and not damning in itself.
Problem is, it’s more than fair for anyone to come into a movie called “Orcs!” and expect to see… orcs. You don’t get that. Not quite.
You get people dressed up in helmets resembling the ones wore by the orcs in the Lords Of The Rings movies, because you don’t need green make up when cheap suits of armor cover up these supposed orcs. Surprised they didn’t chicken out of using make up when the two rangers finally manage to defeat and remove the helmets and chain mail off an orc to see what it actually is.
Well, there’s a handful of actual orcs, as in, literal handful, barely, which isn’t that surprising considering it’s a low budget flick… but still make the viewer feel cheated, even more when it doesn’t compensate this deficiency by having gallons of gore.
Or nudity for that matter.
As to why they’re there… you’d guess a portal opened or something, but they couldn’t afford the budget for makeup in order to have actors look like orcs, so the orcs were just there for years, maybe more (living deep in the mines, if the prologue is to be trusted) and nobody fuckin noticed.
Again, maybe i wouldn’t even care too much about that if the movie was funny, but even the bad acting irritates more than eliciting some laughs, it comes close but personally i feel like it just misses the mark, it tries, bless its heart, but there’s no energy to the performances, to the jokes, to anything, so at the very, very best it comes off as cute for trying… but it’s just plain dull for the most part, and even the finale, a siege against the orcs fortress, feels like a mish mash of someone recreating scenes from the LOTR films with 50 bucks, Legolas having guns and no experience in shooting these kind of scenes, as i see “orcs” extras jump off an explosion that didn’t even graze them, while the assault itself is a confusing mess to look at, almost like they were doing the “long distance charge” bit from Monty Python And The Holy Grail… by accident. And constantly.
That said, i’m more than ok with it being just 80 minutes, the pacing could be worse, but i’m still glad they didn’t care to inflate the runtime further, since it IS a pretty dull affair to watch, and insipid characters don’t help in making you give a shit about anything going on. Which you won’t.
Plus, while looks aren’t everything, presentation it’s actually worse some of the usual crap that used to get picked up by SyFy and similar networks, it just a smidge above “homegrown cinema territory” as in these people actually look like they rented shooting equipment that’s not consumer grade cheapo stuff, which doesn’t change the “macaroni drawing contest” feeling, in spite of having some money for extras and costumes.
It’s not the worse, i’ve seen plenty worse movies than Orcs!, but it’s telling how the funniest part, in a movie that deliberatly plays up the comedy angle, is one of the orc extras falling in front of the camera in what looks more like a goof than a conscient decision, and even putting aside it being such a overbearingly cheap production (after all, there’s less usage of crappy CG than expected); it’s kind of an achievement to make the idea of park rangers VS orcs such a bore, when it could make for a cheap but entertaining creature feature b-movie.
An easily avoidable exercise in tedium.
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