A very brief movie review, of the 2006 horror flick Mammoth. Cheap horror flicks are a guilty pleasure for me, and the woolly mammoth is a major totem animal for me, so of course I watched it (on the Syfy Channel yesterday). From Wikipedia:
Mammoth is a 2006 action comedy horror directed by Tim Cox and produced by Plinyminor in association with the Sci Fi Channel starring Vincent Ventresca, Summer Glau, Leila Arcieri and Tom Skerritt. The film was nominated for a 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects.
The plot in brief: a frozen woolly mammoth in a natural history museum in Blackwater LA is reaniminated by an alien lifeform that crashes into the museum. The creature then runs amok, until it is eventually deanimated again by liquid nitrogen.
The script is creaky, and the mammoth’s rampaging takes up far too much of the film, though the special effects are indeed well done, and there are moments of humor. The actors, especially the veteran Skerritt (from tv’s Picket Fences, among other productions) and Ventresca (from tv’s The Invisible Man, among other things), do their best with the script, but there’s only so much they can do.
Still, if you want to savor a really malevolent mammoth, this is the film for you.
(A mammoth as far south as Louisiana would not have been a woolly mammoth, but probably a Columbian mammoth, which wasn’t very woolly at all.)
Today: Piranhaconda, which promises to be a stinker of a hybrid-creature horror flick. And coming soon: Sharktopus. Monster portmanteaus rule.
July 2, 2012 at 1:55 am |
Um…
Have you seen Trollhunter?
July 2, 2012 at 2:48 pm |
No, I haven’t, and I suspect it won’t come up on Syfy, since it’s in Norwegian. Sounds satisfactorily strange.
July 2, 2012 at 10:36 am |
If there are enough monster portmanteaus to justify their own term, I suggest portmonsteau.
July 2, 2012 at 2:48 pm |
Lovely.
July 4, 2012 at 8:01 pm
I suggest mammothinema for movies on mammoths.
[AMZ: another cute suggestion.]
July 17, 2012 at 7:47 am |
[…] unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus). Then there are those that appear to be meant to be useful, but are awkward and unlikely to […]
January 9, 2013 at 9:47 am |
[…] unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus). Then there are those that appear to be meant to be useful, but are awkward and unlikely to […]
September 26, 2013 at 5:23 am |
[…] person; portmonsteau, a monster portmanteau word, e.g. Sharktopus, Dinocroc, first suggested here; and cinelect, the idiosyncratic language used in a film (from a chat with James Callan and Ben […]