The B-Movie Shelf

REVIEW BY: Michael Banno COMPANY: The Asylum RUNTIME: 86 mins FORMAT: DVD PLOT: When a village of Hobbits is attacked by dragon riding cannibals, the Hobbit Goben, his father, and sister must get a group of “Giants” to help them rescue their friends and family. REVIEW: The Asylum is known for their mockbusters. So it’s no surprise that their latest has a slight play on Tolkien’s Middle Earth inhabitants, even though that’s not actually the case. Age of the Hobbits (Now known as Clash of the Empires) actually refers to a species of human that was actually discovered and dubbed Hobbits, admittedly initially inspired by the Halflings of Tolkien’s fiction novels. The situation we find ourselves is that Warner Bros. went on to sue The Asylum because of it and has thus forced not only a change of name to Clash of the Empires, but apparently a ban from release, postponing the release from 2012 to 2013, though luckily not before a few original copies under the Age of the...

This is a new section here on the B-Movie Shelf that I hope will be recurring from time to time. This one will be to showcase and bring back into the public eye long-forgotten B-Movies that most likely haven't even had an official release outside of out-of-print VHS tapes. This first entry is a doozy from my childhood, and is a little ditty called Adventures in Dinosaur City: Back in the early to mid 1990's, the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies were all the rage and there were constantly other companies trying to find their own ways to cash in on their success (the excellent animated TV shows Street Sharks and Biker Mice From Mars being chief among them). Of all these, my absolute favorite had to have been Adventures in Dinosaur City, a one-off stand-alone movie that the rest of the world has long-since forgotten, but I still have fond memories of watching and re-watching over and over in my childhood. To the point where even though it's been just about ...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: The Asylum RUNTIME: 86 mins FORMAT: Netflix PLOT: When a colossal tectonic shift causes the sea level to start rising, a microbiologist gathers the DNA of as many species as she can, while the military creates an "ark" in a desperate attempt to preserve life on Earth. REVIEW: 40 Days And Nights is flat-out one of Asylums weakest efforts of the entire year, tied with probably Super Cyclone . It very much feels more like a movie they would have put out in 2010, and if that was this case I probably would have been much more lenient on this as it would have come from an era where their movies weren't much better then this, but this year has been filled with plenty of exceptional Asylum movies that have had above-average effects, acting, and production values, so taking all of that into account this is just a huge step back in all of those departments (with the exception of the Brittany Murphy look-alike Monica Kenna, who al...