So as we as a family sit down to watch the latest and greatest from the legendary film company known to us all as ‘The Asylum’, I try to educate my eleven-year-old son on how The Asylum generally operates.  It tell the boy that they find a blockbuster soon to be released to theaters and give their movie a similar title, whether it fits or not, and dump it on video shelves.  ‘Snakes on a Train’, ‘The DaVinci Treasure’ or ‘Pirates of Treasure Island’ just to name a few.  This particular evening we are sitting down to watch ‘Transmorphers’ which is obviously aping the title of ‘Transformers’ and after it was all said and done my eleven year old droned on and on about how bad it sucked.  Now the boy would be correct in his assessment to be sure, but what I didn’t have the heart to tell him was that as far as films from The Asylum go, ‘Transmorphers’, though lame, is the best movie I’ve ever seen from this intrepid film company thus far.

Actually more ‘Matrix’ than ‘Transformers’, as if The Asylum gives a damn, ‘Transmorphers’ tells us the story of the aftermath of humans first contact with an alien life form.  We sent them a message of peace, they sent back a response of DEATH!  So these alien robots destroy 90 percent of the human race but for reasons unknown leave the other 10% alone for the next 300 or so years while these remaining humans cower in fear, refusing to fight back and imprisoning anybody who does fight back as they don’t want to get the alien robots panties all in a bunch.  Now it seems the alien robots have tired of the remaining 10% and have elected to get rid of them once and for all.  Being that these are desperate times, it is required that our survivors resort to desperate measures and that means de-thawing (they freeze criminals – ala ‘Demolition Man’) noted freedom fighter Mitchell (Matthew Wolf) who is the only known human to battle the robots and survive, plus he has a big ‘secret’.  Mitchell gathers himself a crew of soldiers who have a plan to catch a ‘live’ robot, and upload a virus to its database, ala ‘Independence Day’ and save the human race.  Some other stuff happens and it does get be a bit confusing at times but it all comes clean in the wash as our heroes cowboy up to save the human race.

‘Transmorphers’, bad as it may be, is yards better than the movie that occupies space in the Garbage Corner now in ‘Super Croc’ but I just can’t keep ‘Super Croc’ in the garbage corner forever.  It’s not required that a movie be worst that ‘Super Croc’ (as if), just be Garbage Corner worthy.  And though it hurts me to do it, into the Garbage Corner you go ‘Transmorphers’ as yet another film by The Aslyum takes up residence in that much hallowed space.  There are some things I admire about ‘Transmorphers’ such as the special effect attempts at robot transformations and the attempts at robot battles.  Some of the robot models actually looked pretty good in spots, but the animation of the robots was terrible.  But at least they tried to rise above the typical lame crap we see from The Asylum, despite their failures.  Unfortunately a few other things we have come to expect from movies erupting from the loins of The Asylum creep up as well such as the a horrid audio dub and mix with the levels of the effects and / or music drowning out character dialog, and though they put a lot of effort into creating the robot effects, the post production team inexplicably left out a lot of more mundane effects like lasers coming out of guns, with actors furiously pulling the trigger of their toys with absolutely nothing coming out, and they also left out matching sound effects as well.

The acting was suspect at best with characters seemingly trying hard to just remember their lines as opposed to emote them, and the pacing of the dialog was slow and filled with gaps which is common on a quickie shoot, leaving the editor little material to cover the directors gaffes.  Actress Amy Webber was in this though and this could have been a good thing.  In my review of the truly putrid Pumpkin Karver, it managed to stay out of the Garbage Corner because Amy Webber was bouncing around in her underwear for a time in that horrible movie.  Ms. Webbers number one talent is the fact that she has about as nice a figure as any woman EVER.  This is not to say that she can’t act, but if she were an actress on par with Cate Blanchette, her acting ability would still pale in comparison to her figure.  But alas director Leigh Scott chose to keep Amy fully dressed in heavy war gear through the whole film and that made us sad.

Though the best of sorry lot up to this point, ‘Transmorphers’ is still a fairly lame effort that probably isn’t worth your time.  And if my son thinks this is bad, next time he acts up I’m tying him to a chair, taping his eyes open and will force him to watch ‘Supercroc’ over and over again.  He doesn't want that.