The B-Movie Shelf

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long  COMPANY: Suzanne DeLaurentiis Productions RUNTIME: 90 mins FORMAT: Netflix PLOT: Survivors of an airplane crash find themselves within the borders of a government testing area and pursued by mysterious predators. REVIEW: I'll be doing a slew of dinosaur-related movie reviews over the next week in celebration of Asylum finally releasing another dinosaur movie soon. Starting with Area 407, followed in a couple days by The Dinosaur Project, followed a few days after that by Jurassic Attack (Rise of the Dinosaurs as it'll be known when it airs on the SyFy Channel later this month), and then capping it all off with next week's new Asylum release Age of the Dinosaurs. As for my review of Area 407, well I love found-footage flicks. It seems most people hate them, but I really do love them and try to watch each new one as it comes out. All of that can also be said for dinosaur flicks as well, as I've always been a huge dinosaur fanboy f...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Nu Image RUNTIME: 90 mins FORMAT: BluRay PLOT: After a Soviet space station crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, a new species of dangerous venomous spiders is discovered, and soon they start mutating to gigantic proportions and wreak havoc on the city. REVIEW: When Spiders (Spiders 3D for its limited theatrical run) was first announced and we started getting news of it here and there, I was a bit confused as to what kind of movie it was - remake, sequel, or something original? See, back in 2000 and 2001 there were a couple SyFy Channel style B-Movies also titled Spiders and Spiders II: Breeding Grounds. Like this one, they also dealt with genetically-modified mutant killer spiders brought down on something crashing from space, and they too began growing to immense size during the films. I had no idea initially if this was supposed to be a new sequel to that series (with the 3 in 3D being the number of the movie), a remake to the f...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Capital Productions RUNTIME: 97 mins FORMAT: T.V. PLOT: The Helios Project is a high tech facility tasked with storing and converting solar rays into an endless supply of renewable energy. After years of research and millions of dollars, it is now time to test the system out, which inadvertently unleashes a magnetic vortex on an unprepared world. REVIEW: I'm not normally a big fan of the natural disaster type of B-movies. I love the scenes of destruction, but overall I find the movies are nearly identical to one another and pretty interchangeable and thus if you've seen one, you've seen them all. At its core, Metal Tornado is no different. However, it at least attempts to be a bit fresh by having the tornado be made of metal, thus making it even deadlier then a regular tornado. See, in this movie, due to a design flaw in this new potential way of gathering unlimited free energy from passing solar flares, an invisible ...

  As I'm finding myself with very little free time to really keep up with things, the B-Movie Shelf blog has undergone some changes. I'll no longer be covering news items, as I just don't have the free time to keep on top of it, and there are already plenty of better-ran sites out there for such things, so I would like to point you in those directions - sites like the Comitted blog , Dread Central , and the Fans of SyFy Original Movies Facebook Group are all excellent sources of B-Movie news and updates, and normally are the main places I pull my news from anyway. I will still occasionally link to news articles via my Facebook page or Twitter account , but the articles will not be mine, nor will they be to this blog. Just B-Movie related news in general that I find from around the net. Instead, I'll be using this blog to focus solely on B-Movie reviews. Some may be two paragraphs long, while others come out at two pages long - however long it takes for...

REVIEW BY: Michael Banno COMPANY: Moonlighting Films RUNTIME: 105 mins FORMAT: Netflix PLOT: Convicted cop-killer Carl Lucas, aka Frankenstein, is a superstar driver in the brutal prison yard demolition derby known as Death Race, and is only one victory away from winning freedom for himself and his pit crew when the Powers That Be decide to change up the rules, as well as the race location. REVIEW: Death Race: Inferno marks only my second review here, so a lot of you don’t know who I am. My name is Michael Banno and I'm a close friend of Jeffrey Long, the owner of The B-Movie Shelf blog. Many of you have probably read my review for Age of the Hobbits , AKA Clash of the Empires, so we’re not complete strangers. But considering that you do not know me personally, let me make one thing clear: I am a very big fan of the Death Race movies. I went to the theaters to see the first movie opening weekend, and bought the second movie as soon as it was released on BluRay. I know...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: The Asylum RUNTIME: 90 mins FORMAT: Itunes PLOT: A group of complete strangers find themselves isolated by a wealthy madman on his island compound. They are forced into a horrifying gauntlet where they must survive a barrage of ever-deadlier species of shark. REVIEW: Even though I've gone on multiple triads over the last year about how sick I am of shark movies, there's still been some really good ones that came out this year ( 2-Headed Shark Attack and Jersey Shore Shark Attack being chief among them). It was because of that, that I actually wasn't as hesitant about checking out and writing a review of Asylum's Shark Week (also called Shark Assault in parts of the world and on some TV channels) as I perhaps may have been if it had come out earlier in the year. Sadly, I probably would have been more on the money had I stuck to my guns. While it's certainly not the worst movie I've seen this year, it doesn't...

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...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: The Asylum RUNTIME: 89 mins FORMAT: Netflix PLOT: When a super cyclone threatens the entire American eastern seaboard, a lone meteorologist and a petroleum engineer must battle the elements to stop the threat. REVIEW: No way to beat around the bush here, Super Cyclone was pretty below-average Asylum fare, so if you're familiar with The Asylum, you already know what to expect - Horrible acting even from previously well-established actors, dreadfully-written and delivered dialog, gigantic plot holes and leaps in logic, quite questionable science, and very low-grade effects (even by this company's very low standards) - but damn , there are some truly FUN cheesy scenes of mass destruction in a way that only Asylum can do. For instance, the hurricane/super cyclone in one scene has sucked up tons of spilled oil from a rig out in the ocean that had been destroyed by it, so there's all these gallons of oil whipping around in...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Full Moon Entertainment RUNTIME: 90 mins FORMAT: Screener PLOT: This time Killjoy is being accused in a court of Hell of not being evil, since he let one of his victims (Sandie from Killjoy 3) get away, and Killjoy must rely on his only chance of proving how evil he really is... get Sandie into Hell as his witness. REVIEW: After watching the first dreadful Killjoy movie, I never would have thought that it would get a sequel , much less three of them. But 12 years later here we are with Killjoy 4 about to be released, and the fine folks at Full Moon have sent an early screener copy my way. Killjoy Goes To Hell actually has what I feel is the most interesting plot of the entire series thus far – Killjoy is on trial in Hell for not being evil enough, due to getting defeated at the end of the previous movie . Alongside that, there's a second plot of Sandy, the lone survivor of that movie, now in a psychiatric ward, unable to s...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Chesler/Perlmutter Productions RUNTIME: 84 mins FORMAT: T.V. PLOT: To save the world, Aladdin must wager everything to get an evil Djinn back into its lamp before it can open a Gateway that will unleash thousands of its kind. REVIEW: With my recent new-found love for classic fairy tales (thanks solely to being addicted to the new ABC show Once Upon A Time), I've been eating up these fairy tale B-Movies this year (Gretl: Witchslayer, Black Forest, Grimm's Snow White , ect), and out of all those classic fairy tales, Aladdin is easily my favorite. So when I heard SyFy was doing their own Aladdin-themed movie titled Aladdin and the Death Lamp, of course I got excited to watch and review it, even though I was also a bit worried, knowing how some of their movies tend to turn out. Right off the bat, Aladdin and the Death Lamp does an excellent job with combining 'fantasy fairy tale' (giant killer beasties, mystical amulets, and...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Full Moon Entertainment RUNTIME: 76 mins FORMAT: DVD PLOT: The demon clown Killjoy is resurrected once again, but this time he is trapped in his own realm. Using a magic mirror, he lures four unsuspecting college students into his realm where he can have his macabre fun. REVIEW: Killjoy 3 (renamed a couple years after-the-fact as Killjoy's Revenge) surprisingly turned out to be much better then the two previous movies , and came across as much more professionally-made. This is more along the lines of what Full Moon is known for (which granted, I suppose isn't saying much, but it's a huge compliment after watching the last two pieces of shit in this series). It's a movie like Killjoy 3 that I can come home from a long hard day at work, crack open a beer, and just put on to veg out to and have a bit of fun with. There's some great, inventive, gory kill scenes, good characterization, actual decent acting, and...