The B-Movie Shelf

Giant crocodiles go head to head with giant anacondas. The new town Sheriff must find a way to destroy the two species' before they kill the whole town. REVIEW: SyFy's Lake Placid sequel series is one of my favorite Made-for-TV movie franchises. Their Anaconda sequels however, I really don’t like much. Lake Placid vs Anaconda, sadly, falls closer in line with the Anaconda sequels for me than their Lake Placid ones. Lake Placid vs Anaconda is definitely more Lake Placid-centric, with Anaconda ties to it, then an even mix. It even has Yancy Butler returning again from Lake Placid 3 and 4 (this time being upgraded to town Sheriff because nobody else wanted the job after the events of the last several movies - ha!) and Robert Englund is also back again, somehow surviving his death in the previous Lake Placid movie. On the Anaconda characters side, there are no returning characters but we do have the daughter of John Rhys-Davies' character taking his place...

Reba the poacher is back, now an E.P.A. Agent. Black Lake has turned into a crocodile sanctuary, surrounded by an electric fence. When the fence gets left open one night, a high-school field trip bus unknowingly enters the park. It's up to Reba and the new town Sheriff to save the kids from becoming crocodile chow. REVIEW: When it comes to SyFy Channel B-Movies, I'm hard-pressed to find a franchise I enjoy more than the Lake Placid one. The second movie is one of my all-time personal favorite SyFy Originals, and even though the third movie was a big step down from it, it still manages to be a fun time in the end, despite the issues I have with aspects of it. Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (hahahaha, yeah...right...) easily beats both of them in my eyes and remains my personal favorite entry in this series of TV sequels. This one has Yancy Butler returning from the third movie, being the only character at this point to continue on to a future installment...

A game warden moves his family to Lake Placid, twice the site of deadly crocodile attacks. Locals assure him the crocs are gone, but his mischievous young son finds a few baby crocs and begins feeding them. Over a year they grow into very big adults and start attacking the game warden's family and nearby town. REVIEW: Lake Placid 3 picks up a short time after Part 2 (though no mention as to why there's a new Sheriff or what happened to John Schneider's sheriff character from that movie), and has SyFy regular Colin Ferguson playing a relative of Betty White and Cloris Leachman's characters, arriving in town with his wife and young son to clean out the house on the lake that was previously occupied by both older ladies, and to get it on the market to sell. Compared to John Schneider from Part 2, he's pretty generic and boring as a lead, but luckily alongside him in the movie is the far-more entertaining Michael Ironside as the new town Sheriff and the...

Man-eating crocodiles return to the lake, protecting their nest and wreaking havoc on the locals. REVIEW: Unlike SyFy's Anaconda sequels, SyFy's Lake Placid 2 and its following sequels are actually a hell of a lot of fun, and are among my favorite of the SyFy Original Movies. While we do get a mention Betty White's character and the fact that she fed and raised a couple crocodiles, there's not only no other mention of anything from the first movie but the events themselves seem to have been totally forgotten about by the town's residents and have been regulated to being nothing more than mere urban legend (how that could happen in such a short time period makes no sense to me), which definitely annoys me, along with a few piss poor horrible CG shots here and there, but those issues aside, Lake Placid 2 was a blast. Joining Cloris Leachman in this  is Smallville and Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider as the new town Sheriff trying to stop th...

A couple off on a romantic weekend in the mountains are accosted by a biker gang. Alone in the mountains, Brea and John must defend themselves against the gang, who will stop at nothing to protect their secrets. REVIEW: Traffik is both a bit gritty and a bit sleazy at times, which is great for this type of movie, however I feel like it doesn't really go far enough with either aspect for a movie about kidnapping for the purposes of sex trafficking. I'm not sure what the MPAA rating is on this, but it very much feels like a PG-13 movie that's trying to cover R-Rated level material the best it can. If this is indeed R-Rated, then there really is no excuse for not pushing that envelope a little bit more. This movie unfortunately takes quite a long time to really get going. It’s around the halfway point before we get to the actual main plot of the movie, and by the time it really ramps up from there, there's really only about 20 minutes left. There...

A harmless game of Truth or Dare among friends turns deadly when something supernatural begins to punish those who tell a lie or refuse the dare.  REVIEW: I quite honestly don't have really anything to say on Truth or Dare, the latest teen-aimed horror flick by Blumhouse. This truly is one stupid ass, silly, laughable movie. But god damnit I had fun. It’s nothing I’d recommend to a serious horror fan above the age of 14, and it’s filled to the brim with laughably bad moments, but it held my attention for the entire runtime, and it actually used some legitimately interesting ideas at times, including some moments that will remind any horror fan worth a damn of the Final Destination movies, which is always a fun time for me.  If action movies can have a sub-classification of ‘silly mindless popcorn summer movie’, this is exactly what the horror version of that would be. Despite its rampant stupidity, I enjoyed myself, so sue me.  6/10 rooms in the ...

Just a few really quick, really short, thoughts on some B-Movies I’ve watched lately that I never did reviews for, for one reason or another (lack of time, not in the mood to do one, don’t have much to say, etc). A frustrated, angst-ridden teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to evoke a witch to kill her mother.  REVIEW: I loved the way Pyewacket was filmed, The acting was superb, and while the story is a massive slowburn, it’s an interesting story all the same, with a couple genuinely creepy moments. However, it’s a bit too much of a slowburn and it never really gets crazy enough in the end to make up for it. IN addition I got issues with some parts of the story. 5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward   The story about a group of youths who can't face the thought of growing up because anyone who does becomes a rampaging zombie.  REVIEW: Don't Grow Up, also known as Alone in some parts of t...

When Rumpelstiltskin teams up with a new villain to try to take over Earth once and for all, The Avengers Grimm must track him down through time and realms in order to defeat him. REVIEW: Asylum's recent Avengers: Infinity War mockbuster, Avengers Grimm: Time Wars, finally 100% confirms that, despite the continuity issues in Sinister Squad , that movie is in fact a direct continuation of the first Avengers Grimm , as this movie not only directly references it, but also has Alice and Mad Hatter returning from that movie to team up with Snow White and the other Super Princesses from Avengers Grimm to take on Rumpelstiltskin yet again, along with a new villain, the ruthless Queen of Atlantis. Rumple is, yet again for the third time, played by someone different, Eric Feltes, and he plays him as almost the perfect combination of how Casper Van Dien played him in Avengers Grimm and Johnny Rey Diaz played him in Sinister Squad. Not quite as well as either of  them m...

When a supernatural cult threatens Earth, Alice must assemble a team of fairy tale villains to face the literal forces of Death. REVIEW: Sinister Squad is not only The Asylum's 2016 mockbuster of Suicide Squad, it's also a spin-off of their earlier movie Avengers Grimm .  At least, I think it is. It uses the same idea of classic fairy tale characters operating in our world and even throws in a few mentions of things from that movie, such as the Magic Mirror shard, and it does have a couple returning characters from that movie such as Rumpelstiltskin and The Wolf, however they are played by different actors and have completely different personalities than they had in Avengers Grimm, so even after two watches of Sinister Squad, I'm still unclear as to if this is supposed to be a proper spin-off or just an unrelated movie made by the same people using the same concept. In some ways it seems to go the extra mile to add in little details of continuity between t...

When Rumpelstiltskin destroys the Magic Mirror and escapes to the modern world, the four princesses of "Once Upon a Time"- Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Rapunzel - are sucked through the portal too. Well-trained and endowed with magical powers, the four women must fight Rumpelstiltskin and his army of thralls before he enslaves everyone on Earth. REVIEW: Avengers Grimm is The Asylum's Avengers mockbuster from 2015, which is about fairy tale characters Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Red Riding Hood (who all have their own unique super 'Princess Powers', with the exception of Red Riding Hood, but just like with Hawkeye she's great with a bow and arrow) jumping through Snow White's magic mirror into our world to help Snow White battle Rumpelstiltskin in our world, before he takes over both their world and ours, with the help of a shard of the magic mirror. This type of movie is when Asylum is at their best, IMO. Su...