Saturday, June 19, 2010

Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010)

I think the most important ingredient to make a fun b-movie is to be fucking serious with what you do, or else it fails and it just get's boring. It's the same thing with other media, if you're gonna do a quickie exploitation-movie, do it like the big guys. No, sorry. Do it even more serious, then you will create cinematic magic. Stonehenge Apocalypse is far from a masterpiece, but the talented director Paul Ziller knows this, but still try to deliver as much as possible for very little money. The story is so far the most absurd, but fun, in the history of the SyFy Channel.

Misha Collins plays fringe scientist and general nuthead ("I never said it's aliens on the moon, I said it's a robot head"), a former boy genius but nowadays running a conspiracy themed radio show and talking to other nutheads. He notices an energy burst at the site of Stonehenge and this leads him to the craziest story ever told: Stonehenge is really an ancient mechanism who's connected to a huge underground Egyptian pyramid in Maine! His friend Leshem (Hill Harper), another more serious scientist has just discovered the pyramid and sets everything in motion with some ancient mumbo jumbo. This trigger every darn pyramids to transform themselves to volcanos and destroying everything for hundred miles around them. The only key to stop this end-of-the-world machine is the world famous The Antikythera Mechanism!!!

So this mixes everything from Stonehenge to pyramides, ancient technology and the mythology of 2012. It's a lot of fun and though the budget was low, there's not one boring second. The dialogue is witty and is performed by a bunch of talented actors who seem to have a lot of fun here. Misha Collins is really good as the hero, and I hope he will show up in more SyFy movies in the future. Most of the effects are cheap CG, but it works better than you would think - probably because of the absurd storyline - and it looks kinda cool when the pyramids transform themselves to violent volcanos. It's a pity more money wasn't spent on the actually disasters, because I would have loved to see some more mayhem.

Stonehenge Apocalypse seems like something that was made up during lunch. A couple of fun ideas tossed together to one story and even if the science is gone with the wind, it's an engaging story. A lot of the script is people sitting behind computer and watching earth grids, TV-footage of disaster areas and some inside quarreling about nuking Stonehenge or not. But we're also getting a crazy sect, some bloody squibs, some action, volano eruptions and Papier-maché Stonehenge zapping tourists to death with death-lasers!

Good, old-fashioned, cheap fun. I love you Paul Ziller. Never stop making movies.

2 comments:

Osvaldo Neto said...

I really like Paul Ziller too! A B-movie director who knows what he's doing. Got a DVD of AVALANCHE ALLEY, one of his Corman/Concorde produced movies, recently. Don't watched it yet, probably on this weekend.

Ninja Dixon said...

I didn't know he worked for Corman, intresting. Right now I'm waiting for Sea Beast (aka Troglodyte), which I heard is quite entertaining.