Mammoth (2006)

[trekgeezer]

Mammoth (2006) - Vincent Ventresca (Invisible Man) is Frank Abernathy,  an absent minded paleontologist who has been studying a frozen wooly mammoth carcass for the last five years. When one day he bores through the ice and pulls a small blue pulsating object out the mammoth and a strange wave blasts out of the object. The wave travels into space where it is intercepted by a flying saucer which launches a probe toward Earth. We are then treated to the best title credits sequence I have ever seen on a SciFi original movie.

Seems that this wave also shuts down everything but the power grid in the small town of Black Water, Louisiana. Soon the probe comes crashing down into the museum, where something looking like snot jumps out and then into the mammoth thawing it out and reanimating it.  Of course the elderly security guard is the first to get his life force sucked out by the rampaging beast.

During all this Frank has just remembered it's his daughter Jack's (Summer Glau) birthday. She's out watching some bad movies with Grandpa (Tom Skerrit) and boy friend Squirrely (Cole Williams).

Throw in a couple of men in black, a sheriff and a coroner with dark secret,  a teen party, and Mammoth is not bad. Not hilarious, but I have to give it points for trying to be more than it is. Tim Cox, who directed this and Scifi's Larva, might make a decent director if he ever gets to do something with a real budget.


This movie, like the recently released Slither is intended to be a comedy. Ventresca does pretty well as the absent minded scientist, but Glau is pretty pedestrian as the daughter. I think Tom Skerritt could've really done a better job with the UFO nut, B movie loving grandpa if he had been given some material to work with.

The movie does have a couple of pretty funny moments, especially when the sheriff and the coroner show Frank and Agent Powers their little secret. There is also a pretty fun little argument over which movie creature the alien is like.

This will probably be rebroadcast on Thursday April 27 at 8c, if you're not watching something else I recommend it as a pretty good waste of a couple of hours. Remember though, tastes are subjective.

p.s.  (If someone else saw this, answer a question for me. Was the movie that Tom Skerritt and the kids  were watching a real movie or something made for this film. It was western featuring a guy with a lethal boomerang.)

[Andrew]

We caught just a few minutes of this on SciFi last night (I believe).  The CGI mammoth was rampaging through a bunch of parked cars and screaming people.  It looked better than a number of the lower grade CGI monsters that jumped to mind.  Still not the same charm as stop motion for me, but maybe we are getting to the point where even bad movie CGI will be fair.

I'll try to catch the full thing when they rerun it.

[trekgeezer]

I'm sure Foywonder is gonna show up with a more detailed review soon.

[Foywonder]

And presto, I appear!

And the review is mostly spoiler free too!

MAMMOTH REVIEW

[LilCerberus]

I'm probably gonna miss this one (rabbitears), but some of the points mentioned sound kinda like Monster! (1999)(TV) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210180/

It's about a guy who goes back to his hometown to visit his grandfather. In his day, gramps starred in one of those campy '50s sci-fi/horror flicks, which went on to spawn a few sequels. The trouble is, shortly after the second sequel, gramps somehow became saddled with the respnsability of having to kill a real alien monster that always follows the plots of his movies verbatum.

The premise of gramps explaining how to survive & how to find & kill the beast "because that's what happened in the movie" was obviously inspired Wes Craven's Scream series, but I thought it was pretty funny.

[Foywonder]

MONSTER! should have been a great b-movie but aside from the weak storyline they totally blew it by making the monster iftself completely CGI (should have been a guy in a rubber suit given the old b-movie nature of the film) and really, really, really bad CGI at that.

[Just Plain Horse]

I must say, Mammoth was better than I'd expected.... I really liked the first half- up to the point one of the FBI agents got killed. The part where Ventresca tries talking about parenthood with the two agents was pretty amusing to me. Already better than Sabertooth... Although I must confess at being curious how they kept a large block of ice frozen in such a moderate climate with just a few inches of glass... It's kind of a shame there were no "Ice Age" jokes...

[Flangepart]

Nice title sequance ( Very 3rd rock from the sun ), good Bruce the chin take by the hero, and lets face it....it could have been worse! This IS Sci-Fi, after all....the IDIOTS who cancelled TREMORS : THE SERIES! I have not forgotten, you foul cretins!.....watch yer backs!...Bw-hahahaha!.....

[Just Plain Horse]

Flangepart Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Nice title sequance ( Very 3rd rock from the sun
> ), good Bruce the chin take by the hero, and lets
> face it....it could have been worse! This IS
> Sci-Fi, after all....the IDIOTS who cancelled
> TREMORS : THE SERIES! I have not forgotten, you
> foul cretins!.....watch yer
> backs!...Bw-hahahaha!.....

...and Mystery Science Theater, and Saturday Anime....

[LH-C]

Don't forget about when they used to re-run a lot of cool shows!