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When a meteor smashes into a Pleistocene museum, the fury
of a partially frozen, 40,000 year old mammoth is unleashed
on a small country town. Under orders to contain the threat
that the mammoth possesses at all costs, Special Agents Powers
and Whitaker are given 17 hours to kill the mammoth or the
entire town will be decimated. They recruit local palaeontologist,
Dr. Frank Abernathy, to help them hunt the creature down before
its rampage of death and destruction gets to the outside world.
With the clock ticking and the body count rising, the only
chance Dr. Abernathy has of saving his daughter and B-movie
fanatic father is to help the agents destroy his life's work...
Mammoth
is
a made for TV movie that was originally commissioned for the
Sci-Fi Channel. The budget is pretty low and, sadly, this
shows on the screen.
The
first 20 minutes set this up as a light-hearted family comedy,
but then, once the Mammoth comes to life (I assume I'm spoiling
nothing here for those who haven't seen it) everything starts
to fall apart. While the CGI effects of the monster are pretty
lame that's just the start of the film's problems.
The
worst thing though is that this movie can't seem to make up
it's mind which genre it's supposed to be in. Is it a horror,
family entertainment or a slapstick comedy? There are huge
elements of all three, but it's impossible to slot this film
into all three categories. If the deaths had been cut, then
this could have easily fitted into a more family entertainment
movie. And if the producers were aiming at the horror market,
then they failed because the slapstick comedy is way too childish
to appeal to horror fans. Take a family Disney movie and a
monster horror film, and the resulting film would not be too
far from Mammoth.
The
dialogue in the script is also pretty lame in places. And
did we really need such a long and boring talky section in
the morgue, to be followed by another long and even duller
talky sequence set in a diner? A good editor would have stripped
out all the unnecessary dialogue to leave a much tighter sequence.
Extras
include the trailer; Acting in Mammoth (7 min interviews
with some of the cast); and Mammoth Visual Effects
(3 mins look at the visual effects. Basically this is a rerun
of all the effects used in the movie - some finished some
half complete). One interesting aspect of the Acting in
Mammoth featurette is the fact that it includes a deleted
scene from the movie, which explains how the living hand was
created in the first place.
At
the end of the day, Mammoth is a pretty poor offering.
There are a few too many gruesome scenes to make it a family
movie; it's too twee for horror enthusiasts to warm to; and
the CGI effects are so poor that you can't help laughing as
the monster runs amok. Mammoth is a huge disappointment.
Darren
Rea
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