Reviewed By: Adam Beck

Release Date: June 26th, 2007

Directed by: Leigh Scott

Released by: The Asylum Home Entertainment

1.5 out of 5 skulls

The movie is called ‘Transmorphers’, and by looking at the cover to the left you should be able to get some sort of idea as to what this movie is about. The best way I can describe it though is if you took James Cameron’s ‘The Terminator’, mixed it with ‘The Transformers’ and had absolutely no budget to actually pull it off.

The film opens in the year 2009, where scientists discover alien life forms on a distant planet. With the scientists attempting to make peaceful contact, the aliens respond with an all out assault on planet earth. These transformer-like robots wipe out 90% of the worlds population, thus forcing the survivors to travel underground where they form an army of resistance fighters. Fast forward several hundred years into the future, the Transmorphers are advancing closer and closer to the humans, which results in them having to go above ground once again to fight for their survival..

After a failed attempt of combating the Transmorphers, General Van Ryberg (Eliza Swenson) decides to call upon their two best resistance fighters, Mitchell (Matthew Wolf) and Itchy (Griff Furst) who have been cryogenically frozen for the last 5 years as punishment for treason. Once their team is assembled, they travel to the surface where they are forced to carry out a seemingly impossible mission of stopping the Transmorphers, once and for all.

Let me first start off by saying that some of the acting in this movie was surprisingly very good. I thought Matthew Wolf did a great job as the lead role and a lot of the supporting cast members were also pretty good. I also thought that the set designs in this movie were top notch…especially considering the budget they had to work with. But with that being said, the rest of the movie was completely horrible.

I understand that this is a low budget film, but it seriously had some of the worst CGI that I’ve ever seen in my life, courtesy of “Synapse FX”. The Transmorpher robots looked like something you’d see in a fucking video game or cartoon and the fake looking CGI completely took me out of the story all together. Whenever a robot would get blown up, they would just instantly disappear for some reason. Also 90% of the time when the human’s would shoot at the robots, there were no explosive discharges coming from their gun barrels…this made it look like a bunch of grown ups, running around with toy guns, pretending to shoot people. To say the least, all of the battle scenes in this movie looked completely ridiculous.

Besides the extremely bad special effects, this film also has extremely bad audio as well. On the back of the DVD case it tells you that the film’s audio is in dolby digital 5.1 surround sound…but what it fails to tell you is that the shit is completely out of sync for the most part. About 16 minutes in, you begin noticing that the audio is no longer in sync with the actors mouth movements…sort of like watching a fucking Bruce Lee movie. In certain spots there is about a 2 second delay between the actors mouths moving and the spoken audio, and sometimes there is just no audio at all even though people are clearly talking. When the humans are fighting with the Transmorphers there are many times where there are no sound effects going on at all, even though people are firing guns and robots are exploding on screen. After doing some research, I found out from the director (Leigh Scott) that the production company knew about the screwed up audio tracks but decided to distribute the DVD’s anyway. And to make matters worse…not only is the film’s audio track screwed up, but the “directors commentary” track doesn’t work at all. If you go into the “special features” and try to access the commentary track, your entire DVD will freeze on the menu screen. The only way to possibly fix this is by hitting the eject button on your DVD player. After hitting the eject button, I also recommend throwing the fucking DVD in the garbage, because it’s a piece of shit and not worth wasting 82 minutes of your life watching it.

Special features on The Asylum disc include:
Filmmakers’ Commentary with Director Leigh Scott (Note: doesn’t work)
5.1 Surround Sound
The Making of Transmorphers
The Method Behind the Morph (documentary)
Outtakes

Not Recommended

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 3:47 am and is filed under HORROR DVD reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.