The B-Movie Shelf

Zombie animals rise up yet again in a new animal preserve, threatening those who work there, and the world! REVIEW: The first Zoombies is one of my personal favorite Asylum movies, right behind Age of Dinosaurs , Triassic World , and 6-Headed Shark Attack , so suffice to say I was pretty excited when Asylum sent me a screener copy of Zoombies 2 to review, which up until about a week ago I didn't even know was coming out. For the most part, this movie is entirely stand alone from the first movie, save for one short scene towards the end that ties it directly in (I won't spoil that scene here, but it was definitely an unexpected and fun one). This movie takes place at a entirely different animal preserve from the first, and deals with poachers that break in to hunt the animals, except one of the poison darts they use isn't poison but the formula discovered in the first movie, unleashing the animal zombie virus upon this place, causing the surviving poache...

When a small plane carrying a group of science students and their professor crash lands in the middle of nowhere, the survivors go to a nearby farmhouse to look for help but soon find themselves besieged by giant mutant spiders. REVIEW: I grew up watching all these 1990s/early 2000s SyFy Channel-level creature feature movies and Arachnia, from 2003, was one I remembered loving a lot when I was younger. Well how times have changed. I decided to revisit this one recently for the first time since high school, since it was on Amazon Prime Video, and boy oh boy , was it a rough viewing.  The acting was atrocious, even by the low bar of standards for these types of movies, and the characters were all annoyingly horrible people - There isn't one single character that was enjoyable to watch here or that you feel you could root for, which just makes it all the more frustrating when it takes forever for the giant mutant killer spiders to start attacking and you have t...

Burt Gummer, dying from Graboid poison, and his son Travis must go to a remote arctic research station in Canada's Nunavut Territory, in order to go up against a new batch of Graboids to save Burt's life. REVIEW: The Tremors franchise is one of my all-time favorite movie franchises, right behind Jurassic Park and Star Wars, and is easily my favorite B-Movie franchise. I reviewed all of the other Tremors movies earlier in the year ( Tremors, Tremors 2: Aftershocks , Tremors 3: Back to Perfection , Tremors 4: The Legend Begins , Tremors 5: Bloodlines , and even the short-lived TV series ), so I figured it was long overdue to finally get a review out of this year's newest sequel, Tremors 6: A Cold Day in Hell. Sadly, this is an entry I honestly have no idea how I feel about it. On the one hand, I loved all the callbacks to previous movies and previous characters - The town of Perfection shows up (albeit, only by showing us one single building that looks far mor...

What is supposed to be a marriage boot camp on a remote island turns into the ultimate test for survival when a 6-headed shark starts attacking the beach. Trapped with minimal weapons they try to fight off the shark, but quickly discover that no one is safe in the water or on land.  REVIEW: 6-Headed Shark Attack is the latest in a series made by The Asylum of multi-headed killer sharks. While I loved the first two movies in this series, 2-Headed Shark Attack and 3-Headed Shark Attack , the previous movie, 5-Headed Shark Attack , I found was a big disappointment. It was very...plain..., the characters were forgettable, and there was nothing interesting about it at all other than the visual aesthetic of the shark having five heads. Luckily this new one, 6-Headed Shark Attack, injects the fun that was missing from the previous movie back into the franchise. This one not only brought back fun, inventive, shark attack and kill scenes but also entertaining characte...

A military vessel on the search for an unidentified submersible finds themselves face to face with a giant shark, forced to use only what they have on board to defend themselves from the monstrous beast. REVIEW: Megalodon is Asylum's latest mockbuster, made to cash in on the success of the big budget theatrical The Meg , as they always so expertly do. This actually isn't the first Megalodon-themed movie that The Asylum has released; They've already got an unrelated series of four movies dealing with the title creature battling various different other giant monsters in each one - Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus , Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus , Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark , and Mega Shark vs Kolossus. The first thing I noticed is that while some of the CGI here is atrociously bad, even by Asylum's very low standards, some of it is also quite impressive. The Megalodon shark itself looking quite good and far better than their design of it used for the Mega Shark ...

A young family finds themselves in the Australian Outback, being hunted by a gigantic bloodthirsty wild pig. REVIEW: Creature Features have always been my favorite type of B-Movie, so I always try to make a point of watching new ones when they come out. Boar is, quite honestly, nothing too special if you watch a lot of these types of movies, as it doesn't really do anything different or unique. However, sometimes I'm not looking for something different, sometimes something familiar is exactly what I need. Plus with all the killer shark, snake, spider, crocodile/alligator movies that make up 90% of the creature feature market, the fact that its a gigantic killer boar is enough of a visual change-up from the norm for me to make me fine with the fact that everything else about it feels so familiar. The Boar itself is almost always done with a practical animatronic as well, which looked fantastic and creepy as hell, even if its movements looked a bit too rob...

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...

The giant, man-eating Graboids are back and even deadlier than before, terrorizing the inhabitants of a South African wildlife reserve as they attack from below-and above.  REVIEW: Tremors 5: Bloodlines was the first Tremors movie in 11 years, and it seems like it's quite the divisive entry, but I must say that for me, personally, I love the absolute hell out of this one, right up there alongside the first two movies , though perhaps just a small peg below. The main thing everyone seems to hate is the new remodeled designs of the Graboids and Assblasters, but I'm perfectly fine with them. They have an in-movie reason why they look different, and in the case of the Assblaster I actually think this new design is a huge improvement on the original design from Tremors 3: Back to Perfection and the TV Series , which I thought was a really silly and stupid design. I am disappointed this offshoot of them skips the Shrieker phase though, but the new Assblaster a...

A prequel to Tremors , this movie tells us about how the town of Perfection, Nevada became founded and how they defended it against the original Graboids with the help of Burt Gummer's ancestor, Hiram Gummer. REVIEW: For Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, we go back in time to the wild west days, when Perfection was a small mining community called Rejection, and the first batch of Graboids are born, causing havoc. I love wild west horror movies, especially creature feature ones, and I really think that after the last couple Tremors movies and the TV series , this back-to-basics approach was the best angle for them to take. Just like with the original movie, we have only the initial Graboid form here, and honestly that works just great. Going back to keeping it simple and straight forward, but in a time where heavy artillery was not quite as readily available. Michael Gross returns, but this time he's playing his character's ancestor, a very selfish, lazy, anti-gun ...

Perfection Valley, Nevada is a quaint little town. The inhabitants live peaceful, tranquil lives. Most of the time. Perfection is home to the Graboid, El Blanco. El Blanco is a thirty-foot worm creature who hunts prey by sound. It is an endangered species, so as long as El Blanco is around, Perfection can't be bulldozed by any greedy developers. To protect their home, the people of Perfection must co-exist with El Blanco, dealing with him when necessary, as well as other strange situations and creatures that come their way. REVIEW: Back in 2003, long before Kevin Bacon tried (and failed) to get his own out-of-continuity Tremors TV series off the ground, there was another Tremors: The Series that existed. Picking up right where Tremors 3: Back to Perfection left off and continuing with some open plot threads from that movie, we got the short-lived, 13-episode Tremors: The TV Series, which aired on Syfy before they cancelled it, but not before they aired episodes out...

Burt Gummer returns to his hometown of Perfection, Nevada for the first time in years, but the deadliest Graboid evolution yet forces him to save the town he swore to protect.  REVIEW: After two amazing, perfect, movies , Tremors 3: Back to Perfection came along and ruined the streak. Michael Gross returns yet again, this time as the main focus of the movie (and from this point onwards in the franchise) and he remains the shining point of this movie. There are other returning characters from the first movie as well, as this returns to the original town of Perfection from the first movie, and their original actors return to reprise those roles for the first time in 11 years, but none of them, nor any of the new characters, are acted all that well aside from Gross as Gummer. Hell, everything about this one is just... less . The acting, the directing, the story, the level of threat in the movie, and the embarrassingly-bad special effects - all of it is just......

Natives of a small isolated town defend themselves against strange underground creatures that are killing them one by one. REVIEW: My reviews for Tremors and Tremors 2 are being posted together into one post because, well, what’s there to say about Tremors that hasn’t already been said at this point? It’s pretty much the go-to perfect creature feature B-Movie and it's been covered by thousands of people in thousands of other reviews. Awesome unique creature? Check. Great creature effects? Check. Really fun and well-acted characters? Helll yes , double check. Add to that the perfect mix of serious horror/suspense and light-hearted comedy, and throw in some fun as hell chase and attack scenes. Sure, it might be a bit slow at times in the middle, but the mystery of what’s going on (for a first viewing anyway), mixed with the really fun characters, keeps your attention quite well, despite the slower pace. This entire series is pretty much my all-time favorite ...

There is a new species occupying the ocean: the 5-Headed Shark is all heads and teeth. Shaped like a demented starfish, this monster terrorizes the open ocean before invading the beaches of Puerto Rico, endangering a once peaceful beach-side paradise.  REVIEW: The first two movies in this series, 2-Headed Shark Attack and 3-Headed Shark Attack are among my top favorite Asylum movies. Unfortunately, 5-Headed Shark Attack was a huge step down. The first two movies were each pretty unique and did some good stuff to set themselves out from the hundreds (or close to it) of other SyFy Channel/Asylum shark movies. They were the first to go the multi-headed route, they had pretty good plots, used interesting locations (a small island atoll and a research station in the ocean), and they actually had some decent plot twists and unexpected deaths. This one though doesn't really have any of that, and other than the fact that the shark has multiple heads it's pretty much the...