Transmorphers: Fall of Man

If you are unfamiliar with Asylum then welcome to the world of the C film. As you can imagine its a step down from B films and if you happened to think that there couldn't possibly be anything worse than B films, Well you were wrong. It will all become painfully clear after you watch one of these films. Its important to note that Asylum don't create their own material at least not in the sense that most studios do. Asylum basically make rip off's of popular Hollywood films and try and capitalize on that popularity by releasing the film very close to the Hollywood films release date. Most of the press refers to them as "Mockbusters". For example Transmorphers is, as you can imagine, based off of the Transformer movies and both of the Transmorpher films came out right around the same time as their Hollywood counterparts. Just look up a complete list of Asylum films and you should easily be able to figure out which Hollywood film each Asylum title is based off of. Asylum films are low budget and are released straight to video.

As for this film, it is a sequel to the first transmorphers and in all honesty is equally as bad as the original was. It stars Bruce Boxleitner,who has done a number of Asylum films, and his performance is as bad as one would expect from these types of films. Its almost as if Bruce knows this film is going to be terrible so he doesn't even bother trying to give a worthy performance. He is there for the paycheck. As bad as the acting is it is trumped by the absolutely horrid special effects and this is something that really boggles my mind as we have now gotten to the point where high quality special effects can be done on a 2000-3000 dollar computer. I am betting I could do better special effects on the Mac I am using right now.

The bottom line is I have seen a bunch of Asylum films, more out of curiosity than for entertainment value and each time I watch one of these films I am left absolutely speechless. The one question that I ask every single time is how does this studio stay in business. I understand that these are low budget films thus they don't need to make a lot of money to break even or even to make a profit however I am absolutely shocked that there are people out there that are willing to continually buy these films. You know the famous saying, "fool me one shame on you, fool me twice shame on me", well that has never been more true than in regards to supporting this company by buying their films. I can see some people getting duped once after all I am betting some people actually mistake them for their Hollywood counterparts however to go back and buy another and another is just absolutely mind boggling. This is in all honesty the very bottom rung for motion picture entertainment. Even Uwe Boll's movies are like Oscar winning films compared to these films and his films are rated some of the worst movies ever to be made.

Save your time and money and pass on anything that has the Asylum logo on it. I guarantee you will wish you had by the time credits start rolling, that is if you can even make it that far.

I know what to expect from Asylum - dreadful nonsense that trades off current cinematic trends. But with this one, I almost dared to hope that they might have put some effort in.

The first 30 minutes or so are almost acceptable - the build-up is slow and disjointed, but most of the over-acting is kept to a minimum, and some of the effects actually look as though somebody actually tried to produce something worthy. Some effects sequences are actually fairly effective - though many others are awful.

Unfortunately, whatever small amount of promise may have existed early on, it all falls apart after 30 minutes, with really poor dialogue, laughable acting, lame plotting, and some terrible visual effects.

It does have some unintentional comedy value, as you might expect - much of the dialogue is staggeringly bad. At one point, a woman tells our heroes that she investigates "unexplained events of the terrestrial nature". That is a direct quote.

One minor character asks her how aliens differ from extraterrestrials - quite why anybody would ask such a stupid question is unexplained, but her answer is absolutely mind-boggling. She explains that extraterrestrials attack like a friend, whereas aliens attack like enemies. I challenge anyone to find a more stupid piece of dialogue in any science fiction movie of the past ten years. It's hard to imagine anything more utterly devoid of meaning or sense.

It's a shame, because if this film shows anything, it's that Asylum probably have the resources to produce some decent films if they wanted to. But first, they would need to employ someone who has good ideas, and is capable of translating them into a movie that follows the long-established conventions of storytelling. This film throws out the rulebook in favour of cobbling together events and characters in seemingly random order. They also need talented script writers, or at least skilled script editors.

In summary, I could live with the constraints of a poor budget, if it told a good story. Many great sci-fi stories have been told on a very limited budget - but this really is useless, and I suspect the reason is that very few people at Asylum could care less what anybody thinks, as long as they make a few dollars profit on each tiresome knock-off.

One plus point - it's better than the first Transmorphers film.

I didn't think it would be possible, but this movie is actually worse than Transformers 2! This is not a parody of the Transformers movies or other action movies as the title may lead you to believe. It's actually (as far as I can tell) a serious attempt at creating an action/adventure in which humans come under attack by transforming robotic creatures and must fight back!

Basically they took many of the essential elements that make up the Transformers franchise and repackaged them into their own movie. This has the benefit of removing Michael Bay from the equation, but is done at the expense of hiring convincing actors and high budget special effects. Unfortunately, the script is just as poorly written as that for Transformers 2!

Now there are some out there who actually enjoy low-budget B-movies with cheesy special effects and poor acting. Sadly, the special effects were actually done on a high enough level where despite being slightly cheesy they're actually not that disappointing. Also, despite some of the acting being poor it's not bad enough to be entertaining for that reason and although the story is full of holes they're just not presented in a way where it might be easy for you to amuse yourself with them.

Overall a bad movie, but even if you're in the mood for a "bad" movie I suspect you'll still be disappointed by Transmorphers Fall of Man!

After watching the first half of this tedious flick I am convinced that there should be a new class of distribution worse than DTV (Direct To Video) I propose the new designation should be DTDB (Direct To Dollar Bin). This movie definitely belongs there. As others have noted the special effects are worse than atrocious. They could have used an etch-a-sketch and gotten better results. I can only assume that Bruce Boxleitner owed someone a large favor to have appeared in this production.

This production is so bad, it even falls below the standards for the Sci-Fi Channel made for TV stuff. The only way this could have been worse is if it was animated, and the cels were drawn using crayons.

The basic story concept, as you can imagine from the title, is basically the same as "Transformers", a far better movie than this could ever hope to be.

If you wish to see how movies should NOT be made then rent this. With luck you'll find it in the dollar bin and expense will be minimal. The best use for this CD would be as a target at a rifle range.

I could not believe one of the "Transformers" movies had ended up so quickly on TV, not to mention on the no-budget Sci-Fi Channel. Then it began to dawn on me, especially when Shia LaBoeuf failed to appear and Bruce Boxleitner did: I was actually watching a ripoff of the big-budget movie, and an Asylum flick to boot. Horrible! It's men versus killer robots, except it's mostly men (and a woman or two) standing around, talking about killer robots. And the robots that do turn up are just plain silly looking. I wanted to claw my eyes out. But I did the next best thing and turned the damned thing off. I hope you will do the same.,