Sunday, 7 January 2024

VOD: Monster Armageddon a.k.a. 2025 Armageddon (dir: Michael Su, 2022)

"What are you talking about - crappy?  They made Sharknado!"

Madness or genius?  This twenty-years celebration of The Asylum studios is totally self-aware and played ridiculously (and at times hilariously) straight.  The high-concept meta-story sees an Independence Day-style alien invasion that uses the roster of The Asylum's greatest creature-features from the last two decades to decimate humanity.  Inevitably the film cannot deliver fully on this astonishing concept, with all-too-brief appearances of giant sharks, piranha and other mega-creatures and giant robots, and the Greatest Hits approach is undoubtedly fun but undone but often cheap-looking CGI, leaden and wordy dialogue and unremarkable acting, all of which rather sink the ambition of the enterprise which far exceeds the execution here.   Once shape-shifers, mind control and poorly-acted zombies enter the fray, all hope is lost, even with Michael Pare as the President and the occasional presence of a sadly-underused Paul Logan.  The audacity of the way the plot is used as shameless celebration/self-promotion of the studio is admirable, but ultimately the film sadly does not deliver what it promised effectively. 


 

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