Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
Saying that they make some pretty awful movies over there at The Asylum is certainly stating the obvious since the powers behind these movies seem to revel in this fact themselves, if you’ve ever spent any time at their website. Still, their 2007 mockbuster ‘Transmorphers’ was bad even by Asylum standards. Not ‘Alien Vs. Hunter’ bad, but still one of their worst. Nonetheless with the release of Michael Bay’s multi billion dollar spectacle of nonsense ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ we would’ve been hugely disappointed if The Asylum didn’t release their own multi-hundred dollar sequel to the gawdawful ‘Transmorphers’. Well disappointment, you will have to wait another day because as if on cue we have a prequel of sorts to the ‘Transmorphers’ with ‘Transmorphers: Fall of Man’. Yes, it is terrible. But it is scads better than its ‘original’.
Our film starts with a cutie riding down the street in her convertible Nissan Z, in some out of the way California town, when she is murdered by her cell phone. Not cool. This is quickly followed up by some cat murdered up by the GPS in his Nissan Pathfinder. Looks like somebody got cozy with a local Nissan dealer. Say hello to shell shocked war vet Jake van Ryeberg (Shane Van Dyke) who now works as a shell shocked satellite repair man. Jake get’s a call that his ex-girlfriend Madison (Alana DiMaria) is getting some bad TV reception and Jake runs out to fix it only to see the satellite dish turn into a D.R.K.M. or something. They gave me the actual acronym in this movie but I fergit what it was so we’re going to call it a D.R.K.M. or a Deadly Robot Killing Machine.
Apparently there’s an invasion on the way which leads to Jake and Madison hooking up with Madison’s uncle Sheriff Hadley (Bruce Boxleitner) who find themselves being attacked by the previously mentioned Pathfinder. While this is a fairly bad situation, the good thing is that we have crack alien scientist Dr. Jo Summers (Jennifer Rubin) in our crew who apparently knows a thing about transmorphing aliens, plus Jake is like the greatest remote control army robot controller on the planet earth. What any of this has to do with giant robots from space stomping folks I couldn’t tell you but there you go.
Regardless it is up to our heroes to stop the evil Pathfinder robot from setting off the signal that will bring the rest of his robot friends to earth to end the reign of man. Considering that didn’t work it’s up to our heroes to stop the evil robots from terraforming our planet and ending the reign of man.
Yes my friends it’s almost like you get two short movies, bridged by a fake sex scene, into one long movie. Thumbs up to Shane Van Dyke who is the flicks credited screenwriter and cleverly slipped in a sex scene with his voluptuous co-star Alana DiMaria. Slickness! But as far as the movie ‘Transmorphers: Fall of Man’ is concerned it is oddly… competent. This isn’t to say the movie is any good because it way to slow moving and dull for me to say that this is a good movie but there were times were it elevated itself to just being a normal crappy movie, which is something its predecessor never managed to achieve.
For instance the acting in the movie wasn’t always bad, highlighted by having The Scarecrow in the film for a little while and Mr. Boxleitner always brings an air of legitimacy to whatever role he shows up in. I wish I could say the same for veteran actress Jennifer Rubin who apparently came out of retirement for this. Just saw Ms. Rubin, an absolute stunner in her day, in a revisit of ‘Screamers’ and we were looking forward to her glorious direct to DVD return but apparently during her time off Ms. Rubin has forgotten how to work with terrible dialog, unlike Mr. Boxleitner who can pull this stuff off fairly easily. The rest of the cast was on par for the course for this type of movie but hats off to Londale Theus who was surprisingly effective and even had a touch of that ever elusive screen presence as the cities Pork N’ Bean cooking mayor.
The special effects also were better than expected. Not great by any stretch but some of the explosions and fire effects were pretty good and the integration of the suspect looking robots weren’t all that bad either. There was even a scene actual inspired originality involving a pacemaker which was pretty cool.
But unfortunately the bottom line is that the movie is pretty damn dull and has way too many slow spots. I actually nodded off a couple of times and had to back track to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I didn’t. I’m thinking if somehow director Scott Wheeler could’ve had his cast talk less… way less… and stuck in a few more unnecessary fake sex scenes and possibly some more transmorphing, because there really wasn’t a lot of transmorphing in the ‘Transmorphers’, this might’ve actually graduated from a bad Asylum movie to just a regular bad movie. Almost there. Not quite, but almost there.
