For the entire month of April, Cinefessions will be locked into The Asylum, reviewing films released by the famed studio. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday throughout April you will get another review on a film released by The Asylum. April’s podcast will also be devoted to films from The Asylum. Today, Chris finishes up April in The Asylum by visiting one of the first Asylum films he ever came across with Transmorphers.
Title: Transmorphers (2007)
Inspired By: Transformers (2007)
Director: Leigh Scott
Runtime: 86 minutes
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I purposely saved Transmorphers for my final April in the Asylum film. It was the first Asylum film I remember seeing in the Blockbuster I worked at, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how absurd it looked. Then I laughed again at the fact that people rented it, and laughed even harder when they hated it. If this month has shown me anything it’s that The Asylum has an unfair reputation for really bad movies. Yes, they are B-movies, but they can be good on their own merits.
Then I watched Transmorphers, and afterwards, I wasn’t even sure what I had just watched. The film is sort of like The Matrix and Transformers had freaky, unprotected sex, and Transmorpher was the result. Mankind has been forced to live underground due to these giant robots taking over the Earth. So our humans are on a mission to reclaim their world. Pretty basic plot, except at no point in the film does it make any sense. I was constantly confused, and the characters are so poorly written that I’m not even able to look up who played whom because I can’t even remember their names. It’s as if my mind was sucked into a black hole in the hopes of cleansing this film from my memory.
What’s even more shocking is that Leigh Scott directed this, Dragon (reviewed earlier this month) and a ton of other Asylum films. Why? Why would you do this to the world, Asylum? If nothing else, I can say that Transmorphers 2 has a different director, so hopefully that one is better. I’ll never know unless it hits Netflix Instant, and Branden wants to do another Asylum month.
The CGI in this film is the worst I’ve seen in a long time. The computers offer visuals out of an Atari game, and the robots are just metal. I’d say you’d have to see it to believe it, but then you’d be forced to watch this film, and I wouldn’t do that to anyone.
The acting, or the lack thereof, is frightening. The dialogue is terrible, but these actors are just really, really bad. Whenever they gasped or groaned it sounded like the editor dubbed in a bad porno film!
At this point I just want to cleanse my pallet of this bad film. I can see why The Asylum got the bad rap they did back in 2007 because Transmorphers is just god-awful. It sucks that I am ending the month on a sour note, but please be aware that I did enjoy most of The Asylum films I watched this past month, and I’ll no longer pass one off as complete trash until I watch it.
Chris was raised on horror films, which gave him a deep love for the genre, especially its most quirky and offbeat titles (like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2). This love quickly turned into an obsession for cinema in 1997, when he decided he needed to see every major theatrical release. Video games (JRPGs), reading (anything but fantasy), and reality television (Survivor) are just some of his other passions. He’s been with Cinefessions since 2013, and has been writing reviews all over the internet for the past twelve years.
