Transmorphers (2007)

Director: Leigh Scott

Starring: Matthew Wolf, Amy Weber, Shaley Scott, Eliza Swenson, Griff Furst

SYNOPSIS

In the distant future after a long losing battle against an invading force of giant robots, humanity has one last chance to regain the planet.

REVIEW

During the 50s and 60s, it was quite common for B-movie producers to rush to market with copies of upcoming Hollywood productions. Producers such as Roger Corman, who worked quickly and cheaply, sometime found that they could actually beat the major production to screens and siphon off some of the bigger production's market this way. One famous example is Rocketship X-M, which beat its expensive, painstakingly realistic model Destination Moon to screens, leading to lawsuits and many advertisements about which was the "real" movie!

During the 80s and 90s, this tactic fell by the wayside somewhat, as independent production companies such as Cannon fell by the wayside (ironically, partly due to several flop Indiana Jones rip-offs such as Firewalker and King Solomon's Mines) and Hollywood based their movies on expensive effects technology that the independents could not hope to replicate on their budgets.

So, fast forward to the modern day, and enter The Asylum. With digital technology, this direct-to-DVD specialist has found it easy to rush out what have become termed "mockbusters", harking back to the hucksters of old. You can see where they're coming from just by looking at a majority of their titles: Alien vs. Hunter, I Am Omega, Snakes On A Train, even a couple of War Of The Worlds movies since the source is in the public domain.

Here, we get the inevitable cash-in on the first Transformers movie ( a sequel to this was produced to cash in on the sequel to that film). However, it's worth noting that it's really as much of a rip-off of the future war sequences in the Terminator movies as anything made by Michael Bay.

Once you realise this, it's pretty much by-the-numbers stuff. We get a few battle sequences – mostly loaded in the back end of the movie due to the relatively expensive CGI required – surrounding “character” scenes. It's pretty much soap opera stuff, mostly typical of movies like this that have to fill time with dialogue rather than action, and it's pretty blandly directed. It's completely unaffecting, to the point that when one character has the revelation that he's actually a cyborg, it was met by eye rolling and “meh” from me rather than the intended shock.

That said, it's a passable time waster and it's probably the best of the Asylum-produced movie I've seen so far. Given that more than one of their titles has enabled me to get to sleep, that's hardly a recommendation though.

5 / 10