Sunday, October 23, 2016

Reviews #10 - Transmorphers (2007)

Plot

Humanity has been taken over by a race of alien robots and a group of underground fighters look for a way to defeat them once and for all.

Review

When you watch an Asylum movie, you need to look at it with different eyes. You cannot expect the same quality as you would in an A class Hollywood movie. The acting will be much worse, the special effects garbage and the plot and dialogue written by a 10-year-old. In Transmorphers, they try to go with the post apocalyptic dark world. Truth be told, it just looks like they are filming under an overpass. They purposefully keep everything dark and rainy so that you can’t tell what is happening.  But that is just the beginning of the lack of budget showing through. The characters are supposed to be soldiers but their “uniforms” just consist of a grey shirt and a leather jacket. The sets are for the most part just hallways or offices in a concrete building. At one point they try to create a bar area but they just threw a fly net over an section and called it a day.

The acting is truly hard to stomach. The actors seem to confuse acting serious and acting bored. Almost everyone looks like they are about to fall asleep at any moment. If they are not acting bored, they are over the top. There was only one actor, Matthew Wolf who played the leader of the group Warren, who seemed to have taken some kind of an acting class. The rest looked like newbies hired off the street. Apparently one of the main actresses, Amy Weber, had done some work with the WWE on the Divas Search in 2004, I’ll have to find out more about that. They throw in all kinds of subplots about a revolution some people once started, a lesbian couple, androids, etc. It’s a staple of the Asylum to just throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks.

Let us not kid ourselves, the reason anyone came to watch this was for the robot fighting. The robot CGI was of course low quality. It looked like something you would see in a commercial in the late 90s. By Asylum standards though, it was not that bad. At least they had steady shots of the robots moving, transforming and there was a fair amount of animation for the moving parts. It would have been a good semester projects for someone starting animation school. The real problem is that, at no time, do you ever feel that the actors and the CGI are in the same area. One thing that bothered me was the inconsistency of how tough the robots were. At some points, they go down in one shot. At other time they will shoot at one for minutes and do no damage.

It may seem like I am going easy on this movie, but truth is I have seen much worse, unwatchable trash. This one is not that bad and if you are able to rate is along the Asylum scale you will find elements to appreciate.

Worst Scene

            At one point, one of the women goes to her sleeping quarters and finds that one of the pilots has taken over her bed, figuring that she will not return from the battle she is going to.  A couple of other women show up and a girl fight erupts, all over the top part of a bunk bed. The fight has some very bad slow motion parts and the punches are some of the softest, non realistic looking punches I’ve ever seen.

Lawsuit Potential?

This movie manages to offend not one, but two sci-fi franchises. Its title is an obvious rip-off of Transformers, but it’s plot is more in line with the future scenes from the Terminator franchise. The story though is different enough that it can say it’s not copying Terminator (although it definitely is) but the title is blatantly trying to get some of that Transformers money. This movie was released in 2007, the same year the first Transformers movie came out in theaters, not a coincidence in any way. There does not seem to have been a lawsuit directed towards this movie however, they got away scot free with this one.


Score: 4.5/10 

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