Mammoth (2006)

In case you ever wondered why movies like "Schindler's List", "Ghandi" or "Saving Private Ryan" are so unendurably horrible, it's because they're so grotesquely unrealistic and absurd! Truly brilliant movies are plausible and terrifyingly authentic … like "Mammoth", for example! This movie has – hands down and without a doubt – the most intelligent and convoluted screenplay ever written and it's a downright disgrace (blasphemy, even) that this landmark of cinema shamefully got overlooked during the Academy Awards Ceremony in 2007. Dig this: a meteor, carrying an alien parasite, crash-lands in a museum of national history and invades the frozen remains of a 600.000 year-old mammoth. The humongous prehistoric elephant promptly awakens and goes for a walk in the nearby woods, disturbing an illegal teenage party, a senior citizen's sex excursion and the already disturbed family life of museum curator Frank Abernathy. He goes after the mammoth, along with his sweet sixteen daughter and her horny boyfriend, a CIA agent with beautiful big boobies, a retarded redneck sheriff and his own B-movie obsessed father (oh Tom Skerritt, whatever happened to your career?). Like I said already, sheer genius filmmaking, complete with profound dialogs, brilliant plot twists and some of the most advanced hi-tech computer engineered special effects ever beheld with human eyes. The alien invader is some kind of body snatcher and literally sucks the life out of his victims' corpses through the mammoth's trunk. Phenomenal performances all around, particularly from the gorgeous Summer Glau, who's in fact a 25-years old but effortlessly depicts a troublesome teenager. In short, this is the type of motion picture Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès envisioned when they invented and developed the medium of cinema! Make sure you don't miss it.

For SyFy Mammoth is actually tolerable. The premise was silly in the first place, and I had low expectations but I watched with an open mind with little else constructive to do. It does have problems though, most typical of SyFy and were admittedly on my part expected. There are definitely worse looking creatures in other movies, but the mammoth does look very fake and un-menacing, and the editing does betray this at times. Think a giant vacuum on legs and you have the mammoth here. The script mostly is lazy, any attempts at humour come across as cheesy and unfunny, while the story suffers from predictability and one too many ridiculous scenes like the mammoth soul-sucking with its trunk and it managing to sneak up behind its victims without them hearing it(either it was a logic lapse, a case of character stupidity or both). The characters are mixed, a couple are surprisingly likable if rather clichéd but others verge on annoying and are not developed enough. On the plus side, it does move quickly and doesn't feel dull unlike other SyFy features. The editing is not too hackneyed, despite moments where it all too obviously betrays the cheapness of the effects, and the scenery and lighting have some atmosphere. The score is quirky and haunting, and I did enjoy some of the references and homages, they were fun to spot and didn't feel like rip-offs. The direction is competent enough and the acting is better than average, especially from Summer Glau and Tom Skerritt. Vincent Ventresca also does his best with little. In conclusion, a reasonably fun movie, cheesy, predictable and ridiculous and the mammoth is not convincing enough, but the acting, the fact that it never bored me, the music and the references and homages were enough to enable me to stick with it. 5/10 Bethany Cox

This uneasy attempt to blend U.F.O.s with paleontology is a mind numbing disaster. Never taking itself seriously, never cute, never funny, never scary, never interesting, never logical, never believable, never making any sense, is the only way to describe this unbelievably BAD movie. Most of the time the mammoth is flashed in darkness, with the computer generated images barely visible. This makes "Manticore" look like an "Academy Award" nominee. If you want to see the "cream of the crap" in Sci-Fi Channel movies, you might check out "Loch Ness Terror". It is "Oscar" material compared to "Mammoth". In summary, this is as bad as it gets. Bad concept, and a truly BAD movie. - MERK

This is an unusual movie in that it tries to integrate campy, innocent humor with a 1950's sci-fi style. If you don't like the type of humor presented, then the movie can be somewhat annoying. The intro is also a bit bizarre (almost confusing), but the movie finally settles into a pretty standard sci-fi "find and destroy" plot.The film is essentially about an alien presence that takes over a mammoth carcass in a museum. A small band of people attempt to stop it from causing destruction to the local city.It's a typical sci-fi plot. There's an attempt to be a bit more complex in the beginning, but it's so confusingly done that it can be more irritating than entertaining. The big problem, however, is the attempt at humor. It's a bit amusing sometimes, but for the most part it's too excessive and makes the movie look amateurish.While I respect the goal of trying make a sci-fi movie a bit differently, sometimes such efforts can end up badly. I recommend passing on this movie.