For October, I intend to follow what many other film
fans/bloggers/podcasters have done and watch 31 films for all 31 days of the
month to celebrate Halloween, writing short reviews of them as soon as possible
after the viewings. Realising the lack of experience I have to partake in
attempting this, I decided to ‘train’ for it, starting with a review of a film
that I wrote the draft of the morning after viewing it. I hope you the reader
enjoy it.
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Attempting to review this was a
doomed affair during the middle of the film itself, but it feels I need to
write this review for a sense of completion.
Faced against Loki (a pale
skinned, anaemic Richard Grieco) and his plan to kill the Tree of Life and
start Ragnarok, the young deer-caught-in-the-headlights god Thor (Cody Deal),
with the assistance and ignored guide of Jarnsaxa (Patricia Velasquez), has to find
a mythic hammer of immortality and prevent Loki from acquiring it. Add into
this professional wrestler Kevin Nash as Odin, unexpected use of an uzi by a
Norse God and CGI dog demons and maybe, just maybe, this film from the Asylum
group with no connections to the Marvel film could have been amusing or
entertaining.
If there are readers who do love
this film, good for you, but for me the experience of watching Almighty Thor proved my gripes with
genre cinema, especially the z-movie, as it currently exists in 2012. First of
all, just like the videogame adaptation DOA:
Dead Or Alive (2006), one is promise with an entire film’s worth of Kevin
Nash, only for him to be written out of the rest of the film and causing me to
curse the gods. The rest of the film consists of Thor and Jarnsaxa running
around woodland or a city either trying to escape from the pale skinned Loki or
Thor trying to attack him and, until he learns some combat skill, getting his
head kicked in.
That even Odin’s mighty fortress
is crude CGI could have not been a detriment but it helps create a film that is
painful rather than amusing to sit through, leading directly to the issues I
briefly mentioned in the introduction. For me, as a genre film fan who will
watch the good and bad non-judgmentally until their finishes, there was a
moment from the 2000s onwards where even the terrible z-movie lost sliver of
quality to them, to the point that with a few exceptions like this I refuse to
watch most of them made after 2000. Digital cameras in one major reason,
paradoxically allowing people to make films impossible to fund through studios
but destroying any quality to many low budget movies that are churned out; even
on video, with awful looking exceptions, most films from before 2000 had a
technical quality that did not remind one of cheap home video. The other issue
is that, as the technology became more available, CGI took over from practical
effects in most films. This is not
necessarily a bad thing, but in cases like this it is usually used without any
sense of artistry and makes the film even more cheap and soulless.
Almighty Thor could have been incredible, CGI and all, but a lot of
these intentional ‘so bad its good’ films merely come off as lackadaisical and
tedious rather than entertaining, especially compared to those that are good
films or, by accident, incredible in its ridiculousness. As a Batman and Robin (1997) fan, knowing it’s
a disaster on every level except the gaudy neon scenery, something like this
doesn’t hold a candle, and having started this year to go through the films of
Troma, who at times also tried to make ‘intentionally bad’ films, these forced
attempts at hilarity almost always fail miserably. Unless it is a Batman and Robin or other such
examples, the only other way I feel you can reach this type of enjoyment is if
the film is sincerely trying to be a good movie, and through its success,
manages to be entertaining, intentionally ridiculous or/and bizarre in what it
presents on screen regardless of any flaws it may have. Sadly I cannot enjoy
something clearly churned out without any creative passion, and it doesn’t help
that it makes the same mistakes –dull scenes of plot expedition instead of it
being weaved into the CGI action scenes, half-hearted attempts at drama etc. –
that many of us have put up with in countless genre films. I could laugh at
moments in this, especially Thor’s complete lack of intelligence which causes
him to be punked by Loki countless times , but I ended up falling back into my
beanbag and making pained noises, an action that only happens when a film is
really bad. I wanted to love the film, warts and all, but its mentality is that
of being intentionally incompetent and believing it can coast by with it and it
is an unlikable attitude. I cannot laugh at films with snark; even if I do
laugh at something like Batman and Robin
and such films, there is always a sincere love of its existence, something
that is the opposite of the attitude that I feel was behind making this film.
All I felt with this was the wish to have alcohol in arms reach and to delete
it off the TV recorder immediately after the credits ended.
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