Morlocks

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight: you want me to travel through a rift in time, find and repair a device you lost and broke, while all the trying to avoid rampaging creatures from the future – that about sum it up?”

It most assuredly does. And even I, in my lofty position as the editor of a micro-niche film blog about exploding helicopters, couldn’t have put it better.

Credit for the above succinct summary of Morlocks’ plot goes to its hero, a certain Dr Radnor (David Hewlett). He’s a top boffin scientist who, much like this viewer, seems to be struggling to make sense of things in this turgid time-travelling saga.

With America’s economy on its knees, a top secret military unit – led by the shady Robert Picardo – has developed a time-travelling device called ‘the latch’. They plan to preserve Uncle Sam’s industrial might by bringing technology back from the future, thus preventing the US from becoming an insignificant and irrelevant bit player in global politics, an impotent shadow of its former glorious self. In other words: Britain.

Unfortunately, the grand plan runs into a hitch when the future turns out not to be the giant Apple Store they’d hoped for, but an apocalyptic wasteland inhabited only by murderous creatures (Morlocks).

Things go from bad to worse when the latch – now missing somewhere in the future – begins to malfunction, threatening the present-day world with obliteration courtesy of a massive time rift that no-one can be bothered to explain. That’s presumably because, by this point, even the writers were exhausted by garbling up so much nonsensical pseudo-science.

David Hewlett, looking as happy
as I did after watching Morlocks

As the one scientist with the cranial capacity to save the day, Radnor is sent into the future with a team of soldiers to fix and retrieve the device. Will he succeed? Or will the world end in…in…an undefined, non-specific way. Oh, the drama!

Sadly, given this is a film about travelling to the future, I was left wishing I could travel back in time: ideally to a point 90 minutes earlier, when I first decided to watch this torpor-inducing piece of tomfoolery.

One never likes to be unkind to made-for-cable fare – with all the limitations on time, budget and talent that the genre inevitably involves – but this was just toss. It was so bad, that even those familiar genre clichés, normally guaranteed to raise a smile, failed to entertain.

Normally, there’s nothing I love more than watching a film’s dead meat, sorry, unfortunate extras (here fatally cast as soldiers sent to the Earth’s apocalyptic future) meet predictable and pointless deaths. Note: Star Trek raised this phenomenon to the level of high-art, with ‘landing parties’ proving deadly for anyone who wasn’t a regular character.

However, in Morlocks the senseless extras carnage all has a routine, by the numbers feel. If you’re going to serve up a cliché then it should be delivered with gusto and brio, not sloppily ladled out with the bored disinterest of a school dinner lady.

Denied such pleasures, my only interest comes from trying to work out whether certain characters have crossed the ‘immunity threshold’ – namely, have they established themselves sufficiently to indicate they’ll make it to the end of the film unscathed. Such pursuits provide about the only glimmers of entertainment amidst the dross. Still at least there is an exploding helicopter to talk about.

Yes, the special effects are this good

At the end of the film, the surviving characters have returned from the future. Unfortunately, a bunch of Morlocks have tagged along and are with causing havoc at the military base.

Two of our remaining heroes jump aboard a helicopter to attempt an escape. Hovering just off the ground, a couple of Morlocks jump onto the tail of the chopper, causing the pilot to lose control.

The helicopter crashes into ground and partially explodes, but fortuitously the cockpit remains intact allowing the two occupants to flee the wreckage and dive inside a nearby tank. With the Morlocks occupied on the wreckage of the chopper, our heroes fire the tank’s cannon destroying the Morlocks and what’s left of the chopper.

Artistic merit

This was an every-expense-spared helicopter explosion rendered in grade Z CGI. Much like the rest of the film, it is distinctly underwhelming.

Exploding helicopter innovation

This helicopter explosion is directly caused by Morlocks (who it turns out are actually genetically mutated humans). That’s definitely a first.

Do passengers survive?

Yes, the two occupants of the helicopter who scramble to safety had long since passed the immunity threshold by this point in the film.

Positives

Sorry, I just can’t think of one.

Negatives

As films about time travel are written by Hollywood hacks and not quantum physicists, there’s usually an irresolvable paradox lurking somewhere in the plot: Morlocks is no exception.

Here the insoluble question is: why bother to save the present, when the future’s totally buggered? Inevitably, no-one stops to consider this.

Interesting fact

Morlocks is a very loose adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which begs an interesting question: if Wells had possessed the power of time-travel and seen what a mangled dog’s breakfast someone would make of his novel, would he still have written it?

Review by: Jafo

Mega Shark Vs Crocosaurus

Hollywood used to call them creature features. Over the years that label has encompassed everything from prestigious big budget spectacles like Jurassic Park, to the noble rubber-suited tradition of B movies like Creature From The Black Lagoon. Sadly, it has also been used to describe films like Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus (2010) – a work that appears to have been conceived, written and executed during a prolonged shrug. 

The plot, such as it is, introduces us to shark expert (Jaleel White) and big game hunter (Gary Stretch), who are recruited to a crack military unit led by some guy off Star Trek Voyager (Robert Picardo). Their mission: deal with two enormous prehistoric monsters that have suddenly turned up and begun murdering everything in sight.

No explanation is offered for the existence of either the mega shark or the crocosaurus. They are not awakened, cloned, discovered or unleashed. They simply arrive, fully formed, aggressively homicidal, and immediately committed to the destruction of the United States Navy. 

Budgetary constraints are everywhere in evidence. The monsters are glimpsed only briefly, usually at night, underwater, or from a great distance. Any prolonged exposure would have required money not at the filmmakers’ disposal and would also have risked drawing attention to CGI that looks like it was rendered in MS Paint. 

The same thriftiness extends to the sets. One all purpose control room is used interchangeably as the nerve centre of an aircraft carrier, two submarines and a nuclear power station. Presumably it also served as the actors dressing room and the crews canteen when required.

Eventually, we reach the climax off the coast of Hawaii, where both monsters are dispatched in some kind of underwater volcanic explosion. Precisely what happens here is difficult to say, as by this point the film is making only the most cursory effort to retain the viewer’s interest.

Still, there was at least one moment that commanded our full attention: the exploding helicopter. This occurs when the crocosaurus is rampaging through Florida. A television news crew in a helicopter drifts perilously close. The chopper is clipped by the beast’s tail, spins wildly, disappears behind a building… and then, obliging, explodes.

Artistic merit

In a grudging way, you must admire the chutzpah of letting the helicopter vanish behind a building before exploding. It’s one of cinema’s oldest tricks for avoiding expensive effects work, and its completely unapologetic deployment here can’t help but raise a smile.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The first known helicopter destroyed by a crocosaurus. Although there is surprising history of helicopters being destroyed by Crocodylus of different sorts: see Robocroc (2013) and Crocodile 2: Death Swamp (2002) for other examples. 

Positives

No one can fault America’s ability to respond decisively to a crisis. A plan is hastily devised to stop the crocosaurus by deliberately overloading a nuclear power station to create a massive radioactive inferno. 

A US destroyer captain phones the power station and asks them to overload their circuits. The man in charge doesn’t question who’s calling, whether they’re authorised, or whether the catastrophic consequences have been thought through.

Perhaps people ring him up with similar requests all the time.

Negatives

In an apparent effort to avoid an adult certification, the shark and crocosaurus kills are disappointingly free of gore. 

Favourite quote

“No, no, no. They have to stop shooting at the shark. It’s got a nuclear submarine inside her. She’s a nuclear bomb now!”

Interesting fact

The film was directed by Christopher Ray, who has made a career out of this sort of schlock, including Almighty Thor, Two Headed Shark and Zombie Apocalypse.

He’s clearly a frame off the old celluloid strip, though, as his father is Fred Olen Ray — the man responsible for Hollywood Chainsaw Massacre, The Brain Leeches and Alien Dead.