Tasmanian Devils

Alex… first, while she's not the biggest girl, apparently the rangers didn't have any clothes that fit Alex properly since she couldn't button her shirt all the way, and her undershirt tank top was so tight that it resulted in constant heaving bosom disease. Another thing, even though she's a summer intern just working on her master's thesis, they gave her a gun. And she will pull this on you in a heartbeat. This is why Australia is awesome.

Anyway, our base jumpers find their dead friend all gutted up and stuff and they know something is wrong. I think it was his missing lower body that tipped them off. One of the rangers, after confirming that Stone is indeed missing the bottom half of his body, then proceeds to tell us one of those long, drawn out protracted stories about something that happened when he was a kid, and while I nodded off a bit while he was talking, I think it had something to do with mutated Tasmanian Devils.

The situation for our rangers and our surviving base jumpers is a dire one. Crazed mutated Tasmanian devils with glowing red mouths are completely off the chain, picking them off one by one. And, according to cave drawings that our quick draw Masters Candidate has deciphered, they aren't going to stop until every single one of them is dead. The good news is that these things can die. Check that. Actually the good news is that Alex's shirt has come off and now she's only sporting that way too tight tank top causing the bosom heaving. The bad news is that while the devils can be killed, they are exceedingly difficult to kill. Kind of. Depending on the situation. Sometimes a simple stick in the face will work where sticks of dynamite don't work at all. Go figure. Regardless, hopefully Alex and whoever might be left can stop these things, because I think they're heading to Vancou… err… Sydney once they are done eating these schlubs, and Australia doesn't need that.

I'm sad as I write this. Not because of 'Tasmanian Devils' which actually brought me some joy, but because Danica McKellar just turned 38. I was a young man when while Winnie was mercilessly teasing Kevin on 'The Wonder Years', which means I'm freaking ancient. That blows for me.

Whining aside, one of the reasons we enjoyed director Zach Lipovsky's 'Tasmanian Devils' is that it gets the basics right. That's saying something for a SyFy Channel original movie. For starters the cast is rock solid. You might be unfamiliar with the majority of these actors, aside from Winnie of course, but if you've spent some quality time north of the border watching the CBC as we have here at the FCU, then they start to look a little more familiar to you. Then there's the pacing, Lipovsky had the good sense, and the skill to keep this nonsense moving forward which meant we were limited in our time to examine how ridiculous the movie actually was or how lame some of the dialog turned out. He wasn't always successful at this, such as a scene where our characters had to relate to each other while stuck in trees… a point where there is no movement and we're focusing on awful dialog… but fortunately these instances were relatively rare.

Now the word is that young Mr. Lipovsky made his name as a VFX guru, and I assume these are real world effects such as gore effects, which were actually pretty jarring in this TV-PG rated movie. It's the Devils themselves which needed a little work. A lotta work. They weren't very scary, mainly because they were painfully CGI. I realize we can't expect 'The Hobbit' style SFX on the shoestring budget our filmmakers are working with, but I have seen other SyFy movies, older SyFy movies… 'Wyvern' comes to mind… which have had better looking monsters. The filmmakers did their best to mask these shortcomings with a lot of off-screen growling and the always cherished 'Monster Vision' but there's only so much you can do when the monster that's wearing the title of your movie looks like ass.

Still, I'd would hold 'Tasmanian Devils' as among the best of what the SyFy channel has given us in the past decade in regards to their originals. 'Mansquito' and 'Frankenfish' are still safe, but 'Tasmanian Devils' was a worthy challenger.