Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
The executives at Fox have had ENOUGH! Apparently after getting wind of The Asylum’s latest mockbuster extravaganza, ‘The Day the Earth Stopped’ they sicked a team of their junior lawyers, who were probably just doing some filing and fetching coffee, to file a ‘Cease and Desist’ order against The Asylum as they were infringing on their big budget mega picture ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ remake. However after seeing Fox’s remake of their 1951 classic I’m thinking they should re-direct these lawyers and sue themselves and leave The Asylum alone. Now don’t get me wrong here because ‘The Day the Earth Stopped’ is absolutely TERRIBLE, but only nine or ten people are going to be subjected to this movie as opposed to the millions upon millions who have seen and will see ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. Can you say ‘Class Action Lawsuit?’
A crapload of Transformer looking robots descend from space into various locations on earth, an event which is so potentially disastrous that it mobilizes around 10 or 12 of the countries best soldiers to take action. These soldiers are led by the oppressive Col Pruitt (Darren Dalton) – I actually don’t remember his rank, or anyone’s rank for that matter, so I will be assigning them rankage as I see fit. Anyway Col Pruitt mobilizes his soldiers to take action as they have word that there are a pair of E.B.E’s floating around. Ummm… that would be Extraterrestrial Biological Entities for the uninitiated out there. Part of this crew would be Capt. Josh Myron (C. Thomas Howell) who is late to the E.B.E. party because his partner had to take the worlds longest pee. I mean my man had to be pissing for like twenty minutes because while their colleagues are out in the wood chasing these naked E.B.E’s, dude was still peeing. However my man’s bladder issues are relevant because since they were late to the party they managed to stumble upon one of the E.B.E’s in the nude and silent woman who will eventually call herself Sky
(Sinead McCafferty). Though this earthly body may be brand new to Sky, she still knows how to walk like a sexy minx with her chest jutting forward and her head thrown back just so allowing her brunette locks to cascade down her bare shoulders. Outstanding.
Anyway they take these aliens back to HQ, the other being some naked dude (Bug Hall) and the aliens aren’t saying anything. That is until Sky starts speaking to Capt. Myron informing him that the earth is going to be destroyed unless he can prove to her that human life has some meaning. So Myron breaks this alien out of lockup, which was amazingly simple because you would think that the security around Earth’s first set of E.BE.’s who are about to destroy the earth would be just a little bit tighter, and off they go scouring Southern California to find the Meaning of Life before sundown. Because at sundown The Transformers start wrecking stuff and / or start making the earth tilt off its axis. The journey for Sky and Captain Myron is a perilous one filled with… uh, peril… as they try to find a reason to let the earth survive in the middle of being carjacked and shot at in Los Angeles. I’m thinking WE ALL GONNA DIE!
Apparently my man C. Tom has so much pull at The Asylum that he has forced them to start letting him direct this stuff, and even though based on this it doesn’t look as if Mr. Howell has blessed with the ‘Directing Gene’, he’s really no worse than any of the other dudes The Asylum has on staff making this stuff. There were a couple of good things in this movie worth mentioning in that some of the special effects were pretty decent looking, particularly the robots, though admittedly they didn’t move much. Also, I think actor Darren Dalton can actually act and Bug Hall who played the naked Alien dude was decent too. However I think that’s going just about wrap it up for the good stuff.
Unfortunately for us the rest of the movie was a poorly written, poorly directed mess which didn’t move nearly fast enough to allow us to skip past these deficiencies, and instead forced us to focus on them. A perfect example of this is when our heroes get carjacked because the carjacker claims that they have the only working vehicle in town, only to see cars driving behind them as they decide to foot it to their destination, which just kind of ruined the whole ‘cinematic magic’ moment, know what I’m saying? There’s a whole bunch of little bothersome elements that keep this thing even from being enjoyably bad, particularly the ‘resolution’ to the whole affair which this so called ‘advanced race’ probably could have figured out before wasting all their planets citizens hard earned tax dollars on sending hundreds of robots and two naked people across the galaxy for virtually no reason.
You know I can halfway see why Fox felt the need to sue The Asylum, because this particular mockbuster was probably closer in theme to the actual released movie than any of the other Asylum mockbusters, but still…why waste the time and effort. Instead of writing ‘Cease and Desist’ briefs they need to see if any of those lawyers can write a screenplay. Quite honestly on the scale of Asylum mockbusters I’ve seen this one falls in the middle of the pack… not as good as ‘I am Omega’ but scads better than ‘Alien vs. Hunter’ and besides I petty much know what I’m getting when I slip one of these tragedies in my DVD player. But ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’? Those cats have no excuse.
