Apr

19

The Fallen Ones: Off the Wagon

April 19, 2007 |

I really hadn’t meant to make this blog a sustained attack on the Sci-Fi Channel, though it seems to be starting to evolve in that direction. Besides their occasional great (like Battlestar Galactica) or at least good (The Lost Room) programs,  I think they wind up a sort of dumping ground for things that would have done better to go direct to video– or that did.

Case in point: The Fallen Ones has much to answer for… At least potentially, this seemed to combine a number of interesting B-movie elements:

  • A desert setting, a fallen angel (or demon, or something) and native Americans made me think of The Prophecy (which featured an under-appreciated Christopher Walken as the resentful archangel Gabriel)
  • A giant mummy (a forty-two footer!) recalled… well… The Mummy (and The Mummy)…
  • Anasazi ruins promise a pre-Colombian spin on Stargate…
  • Casper Van Dien, whose Johnny Rico was of course the beating Roughneck heart and seething guts of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, in the role of an Indiana Jones wannabe

But then the background music sounded re-used from some other film, or faked up on a synthesizer… and 70s TV veterans Robert Wagner and Tom Bosley surfaced, with Bosley as a “rabbi” with an ersatz-Yiddish accent that must have come out of a can… to tell us of the Nephilim… and strange thugs in purple Gis start appearing and disappearing… and… it… just started going downhill. And by the time we get to Ammon, Angel of Death, and how he and the other angels fell, and reincarnation, and whatever other crap this thing piled up, I just couldn’t take it any more. (I dozed… then came to myself again to be greeted by the sight of a giant human-powered mechanical mummy thing, stalking the landscape… which apparently wasn’t even the real mummy, though it reminded me of a job I had once.)

Yeah, it’s pretty ripe. Nothing much good to say about it. It’s telling that the film’s producers even left the film’s web site as unfinished business… it looks like they just kinda gave up on it. (And yet, they did make a documentary about the making of the Fallen Ones… as anyone ever actually seen it?)

I think cheap CGI has had a lot to do with this kind of thing being inflicted upon us. Someone thinks that because it can be done under budget, it should be… That mindset has to stop.

I’d pick a cheese to parallel this thing, but… it’s too dull, I can’t bother.

 


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