Morlocks

The production values would indicate someone spent some bucks on this film and cast. It's too bad they didn't pre-screen it with someone other than a ninth-grade gamer to check for plot holes big enough to drive a Hummer (and then elevator cab) through.

My biggest problem is with the look and feel, and that falls on the director. Scenes that didn't have to be shot hand-held were, even when a simple tripod would do, and the effect is nauseating; don't show this on a boat, anyone prone to sea sickness will be sent right over the edge by the constant shifting of the frame.

Also to the look and feel: Why does every Sci-Fi/SyFy movie have to look like an X-box 360 game? What happened to the good old days when directors knew how to set up a shot and a scene? If you have to push this hard to engender some sort of excitement, then the plot needs serious assistance.

Don't make the mistake I made. I kept watching and hoping something original or interesting would happen, but this is nothing more than a static version of Half Life, Black Ops, or /insert your favorite video game here\.

The military has constructed a time machine looking to retrieve technology from the future. Instead, they are invaded by vicious creatures called the Morlocks.

It's a Syfy TV movie with a few familiar faces, TV-level CGI, non-descript industrial locations, and a passable connection to the H. G. Wells work. You get what you get. It's a bland B-movie.

Half way thru this thing(I won't even call it a movie)I felt like setting my head on fire and putting it out with a fire axe. Watch this thing at your own peril. Seriously, This thing is just another piece of junk churned out by Syfy. I was hoping that David Hewlett and Robert Picardo would go on to do some better things than this, as I have enjoyed their characters on several series. They must be wanting to buy a new boat or put a new pool in their backyard. As this thing probably took a weekend to shoot, so it was a quick paycheck for them. We need to come up with a generic review we can just cut and paste on all these Syfy movies. That way we wouldn't waste time typing out what everybody already knows.

Monstrous creatures called Morlocks from the future are brought to the present by an American military experiment involving time travel. As soon as I saw "SyFy" on the opening credits my hopes were dashed, having watched so many of their poor quality productions previously. Shot in Europe on the cheap the cast includes European actors playing Americans, but not always convincingly so, in particular the black guy called Tyrell who's natural British accent keeps slipping through his phoney American one. The Morlocks themselves are pretty hideous looking and the movie packs in plenty of blood, gore and violence but sadly the CGI effects, used not just for the creatures and gore but also for buildings and vehicles, are very poor. I was impressed by one shocking scene in which a woman wakes up in a room full of decaying corpses but overall the movie was crap.

I often find SyFy movies to be mostly awful movies, but I keep watching them for the novelty value and also to see whether they are ever going to make a worthwhile movie to match their TV series. Well actually, they did do The Lost Future, I personally found that surprisingly good if imperfect. Morlocks sadly is to me another bad movie of theirs.

Is it their worst? No, Morlocks is nowhere near as unwatchable as Titanic II, Quantum Apocalypse, Battle of Los Angeles, Alien vs. Hunter and 2010: Moby Dick. However it is still not very good. It gets some good points for a good idea and decent turns from Christina Cole and Robert Picardo, though both have shown they can do better with better material.

Production values: Pretty lousy really. Morlocks is not the very worst-looking SyFy movie, that's possibly Titanic II, but there's nothing exceptional in how it looks. It is lit in a rather dull way, complete with haphazard editing. The CGI effects are awful, quite possibly the cheapest and most crude effects I've seen in a while, the Morlocks are horribly rendered and don't look scary at all. I do realise that Morlocks, like all of SyFy's resume, is a low-budget film, but I don't think that excuses a lack of quality in the finished products. Like I've said before, it seemed as though they were going for quantity in alternative to quality.

Music: Nothing special, in fact rather forgettable and obtrusive even at times. Also a lot of it is in a slow tempo/rhythm, giving a furthermore sluggish feel to the film.

Script: To be honest, I wasn't expecting good scripting from SyFy. Even in their few more tolerable efforts, it is one of the weaker assets. It was pretty much what I was anticipating really, cheesy dialogue, a lot of sci-fi babble and technical jargon. In regard to the latter, I got the feeling that even the writers didn't know what they were talking about. The whole "the Morlocks were here" exchange(especially the groan-worthy "because they're American? I don't know" bit) was particularly stupid.

Story: Loosely based on HG Wells' The Time Machine, the idea was really good and had the potential to be so. The execution however was bad, worse than bad more than often. The story is told in a very predictable and pedantic fashion, with none of the Morlocks scenes coming across as thrilling, and the build-ups have a complete lack of suspense. Also those looking for an adaptation of The Time Machine will be disappointed, it bears almost no similarity and is no different to almost everything else SyFy has done, complete with contrived motivations and an anti-climatic ending.

Direction: One word, incompetent. Far too laid back, with a lot of scenes lazily shot and staged in a clumsy and uninspired manner.

Characters: Typical SyFy clichés, the bad guy, heroic officer, beautiful damsel-in-distress and so forth.

Acting: Nothing great. Christina Cole is not great, but also not bad, at least she is more than a pretty face. Robert Picardo deserves better, but has some surprising subtlety in his performance. A decent actor David Hewlett may be, but can somebody give him a more interesting character to play, one that isn't too similar to everything else he's done, and one that enables him to do much less than moaning and whining.

Overall, not the worst I've seen from SyFy, but it really ruined the potential of one of the better ideas they have ever had. 3/10 Bethany Cox