Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
"Why can’t these SCUM get their own ideas!" That would be a quote I pulled off of the Internets in relation to the latest mockbuster from our friends at The Asylum titled ‘The Terminators’. I gotta say that is a bit harsh and in defense of the people over there who make this stuff, who outside of Pixar actually makes an effort to make anything original nowadays? The majority of the big time Hollywood flicks are either remakes, sequels, reimagining or copies with The Asylum simply cutting out the pretense of originality with their mockbuster approach to filmmaking. I personally have no problem with these guys putting these movies out and I would hope that when a consumer walks into a video store and sees a box cover of ‘The Termnators’ or whatever, that they are savvy enough to realize that this has nothing to do with this summers Christian Bale blockbuster. My problem with these movies, at least of the ones that I’ve seen with the exception of ‘Sunday School Musical’, is that they suck. ‘I Am Omega’ was special in that it only sucked like a regular crappy movie sucks but the rest of them have been on another level of suckiness. ‘Alien vs. Hunter’ was so bad that it almost made me go like Christian Bale and slap my momma. But like those financial commercials say, ‘past performance is not indicative of future earnings’, and with that in mind we approach ‘The Terminators’ with an open mind hoping for a good movie. After settling down and watching ‘The Terminators’ at least I can say it didn’t make me want to slap my momma.
Paul Logan is a TR4. Actually he’s a crapload of TR4’s which are some kind of stock robotic helper in this alternate reality that we are placed in. Something has happened on board the space station that controls the worlds rather healthy supply of TR4’s causing them to become Self Aware I suppose and start murdering up the humans.
Back on earth we meet a small group of folks who witness a bomb go off in Los Angeles, though we have to say this bomb looked more like a bright light bulb than some kind nuclear device. Obviously something isn’t quite right with these fears substantiated by numerous TR4’s walking around shooting people in the head and
ripping out spinal columns. Not cool. This small group of people would be our survivors of this holocaust and are led by local sheriff Reed Carpenter (A. Martinez) who has assumed command to lead this crew to safety. Our other survivors consists the absolutely lovely Chloe (Lauren Walsh) who does an awful lot running in this movie even though it doesn’t look like this is a woman who was designed for speed. We also have cute angry chick Pallas (Sarah Tomko), cute scared girl and doomed minority Laura (Krystle Conner) and ‘WE ALL GONNA DIE GUY’ Bronson (Dustin Harnish). Eventually our crew will stumble upon some cat named Kurt (Jeremy London) who just so happens to posses a super psionic gun that is the only device that can stop the TR4 menace and is the key to saving the world.
Our goal for our heroes is a simple one; hot wire a spaceship, get on board the afore mentioned space station and reprogram these suckers to cease and desist. Simple enough. But alas there are numerous obstacles that must be overcome such as no readily available fuel oxidizers(?), a ship full of armed and angry TR4’s and a little special robotic surprise. It ain’t looking too good for humanity right about now. What we need is a whoring tramp and big ass OFF switch to save the day. That’s what we need. But where in the hell are we going to find those?
I don’t really know where to start with this one. I mean it is awful, there’s really no beating around the bush or avoiding that as it is completely nonsensical and at times criminally dull but I did see some effort here. Director Xavier S. Puslowski guided a movie that had some decent looking space battles, a lot of CGI effects though the majority were somewhat suspect, a lot of old fashioned blood squibs and it couldn’t have been all that easy replicating Paul Logan to be all over the place at the same time. Plus the acting wasn’t all that bad though certain cast members did struggle at times.
But for a movie with this much running and shooting and space battles and angry robots there were times when it was mind numbingly boring. I don’t think that director Puslowski and his editors have quite figured out how to effectively pace a movie yet because there wasn’t any kind of discernible rhythm or beat to this nonsense. There is the usual insanity that one will see in a movie like this such as folks standing around patiently waiting get shot in the head or our crews insistence on shooting at these things even though CGI flashes just bounce of our little angry robots. I loved the scene when the TR4’s blew open the doors with what looked like a small nuke of the command center which created them, yet nobody inside heard that blast and again, stood around patiently accepting bullets to the head and waiting for fists thrust through their chest removing their hearts. Outstanding.
So yes, ‘The Terminators’ is pretty bad. Probably not ‘DaVinci Treasure’ bad but still pretty damn bad. But here’s what I admire about The Asylum and why I will continue to watch their terrible movies and support them because I gotta rent these movies just like you do. As a company they seem to be pretty solid. They use a lot of the same actors from production to production and they also seem to promote from within. If you were a 1st AD on one crap Asylum flick you very well could be the director of their next flick. Man, that’s down right admirable. Now all they need to do is start making decent movies. I’m not quite sure how one goes about doing this since I don’t know jack about filmmaking, and some might rudely comment that neither do they… not me… but some. But once we get a couple of decent flicks in the mix to go along with a solid corporate structure model, we just might have something special here.
