I’m sitting at home minding my own business, preparing myself to watch this movie ‘The Fallen Ones’, when there’s a knock on my door. It’s a group of my friends, and upon hearing that I’m on a personal, mindless, self-destructive, soul sucking quest to watch every Sci-Fi original movie ever made, they feel it’s time for and Intervention. I LOVE interventions. Especially when those doing the intervening are drunks, potheads, womanizers and kleptos. So after a few laughs and some heavy drinking, that intervention became a distant memory and along with these friends I was able to watch ‘The Fallen Ones’. They weren’t ready, they weren’t prepared, and while they don’t understand why I do what I do, because I don’t understand why I do what I do, but now they understand that this is work that needs to be done. In tears, shaken to their souls by what they have seen, they promised never to bother me again. ‘The Fallen Ones’ will do that to you.

Back in the day God was upset with us, so He flooded the planet. He was particularly upset with his fallen angels, such as the demon Ammon (Navid Negahban) who were going around knocking up human women and creating giant Nephilim bastard children. Ammon, getting the 411 that the flood was coming, had his favorite son Aramis (Robert Allen Mukes) euthanized and dissected and buried deep in the ground with some of the hottest slave girls you will ever want to see, because Ammon knew in a few millennia Casper Van Dien would show up and dig up his child who will then stomp the Earth to death. A little research has revealed these slave girls have day jobs as professional porn stars. This led to more research which we will not talk about.

Sure enough, some 5000 years later, we meet swinging archeologist Matt Fletcher (Van Dien) who has found this giant deep in the dirt. While this seems like an epic find to you and me, not so much for these guys who apparently find mummified giants buried in New Mexico like every day. The main concern, at least for Matt’s boss Mr. Morton (Robert Wagner), is whether or not this find is going to slow down his super awesome vacation resort project. Just so you know, Mr. Morton isn’t an evil developer, which is a rarity in these types of movies, just a nice guy who wants to build a hotel over a mummified giant. Also showing up is the short skirted dirt engineer Miss Angela (Kristin Miller) who will clash with Matt, but we all know it’s just a precursor to love.

Ever since they found the giant mummy, strange things started happening, like freaks in purple bathrobes looking like steroided Hare Krishnas attacking people. Then Ammon shows back up, note that he hung out with his boy Lucifer to avoid the flood, and he has a plan. Sacrifice some people, resurrect his mummified son, and knock the bottom out of Miss Angela. Apparently Angela is a direct resurrection of some woman he used to sex up back in the B.C., and once he knocks her up with his demon seed, the Earth is finished. We know this because of a nice little bit of exposition Ammon delivered to Rabbi Schmidt (the late Tom Bosley), who had the misfortune, at least for him personally, of figuring out Ammon’s plan, but it was good for us because the demon spilled the beans about everything to this guy.

Clearly Matt and Mr. Morton can’t allow this thing to happen because it seems that Ammon has bastard giant Nephilim kids all over the planet. Not to mention his wacky followers and their weird contraptions. How can one man stop another man who cannot die? Uh… explosives? Thank you very much.

He doesn’t know this, but I’m actually only a couple of degrees removed from the writer / director of the ‘Fallen Ones’, Kevin Van Hook. I’m a friend of his friend Arvell Jones. Or Arvell is a friend of a friend of his or something. Either way, that makes us friends and I don’t trash the movies of my friends. Thus you would think that would leave us with little to talk about, but not so fast my friends! Mr. Van Hook was able to coax some pretty good performances out of his eclectic cast of actors, particularly Tom Bosley and his totally stereotypical, but completely charming take on an old, wise Yiddish dude. Casper seemed somewhat engaged this time around and Navid Negabhan made for a smooth bad guy, though his character sure didn’t know how to close the deal with the ladies. My man had this chick all scantily clad, tied down, ready to go and Ammon kept talking about the things he was about to do her, but always got side tracked doing other stuff like shouting off silly incantations or beating up Casper Van Dien. A little focus might be in order considering he’s been waiting 5,000 years to tap that so he can destroy the world.

Not unexpectedly, considering the budget, the special effects were a little hokey, particularly the giant Mummy Marionette driven by the legendary Irwin Keyes. Don’t quite know what purpose that served in the grand scheme of things. The narrative was a little inconsistent on occasion, not that this matters all that much in a movie like this I guess, and Robert Wagner seemed far more excited about selling Light Relief Therapy to old people on those infomercials than being in this movie.

Still, ‘The Fallen Ones’ in the lexicon of Sci-Fi Original Movies isn’t all that bad really. Plus it was made by a close personal friend of mine, even though we’ve never met. And I don’t trash the movies of my friends.