December Beach Party: Stonados (2013)

The agents of M.O.S.S. (yes, we still kind of exist in our own, half-assed manner) are nothing if not timely - or secret sympathizers of the Southern hemisphere - so December seems just like the right time to get down to the beach and find out what we find there.

There's trouble brewing for the people of Boston, British Columbia. Huge, water-y tornados are hitting the city's coastline, but these aren't your grandpa's tornados. Unless your grandpa's tornados spat more rocks than a disaster movie meteor shower (an early victim is the Plymouth Rock, and I'm not talking about the chicken breed), squashing people left and right. And even then, I suspect the rocks of Grandpa's tornados never exploded as the ones in Stonados like to do because of SCIENCE!

Fortunately for Boston, former volcanologist and storm chaser turned science teacher Joe (Paul Johansson), his former storm chasing buddy turned weekend replacement TV weather forecaster Lee (Sebastian Spence), and Joe's cop sister Maddy (Miranda Frigon) are there to help. Unfortunately, The Authorities represented by the Oceanic Blah-Blah Agency of Tara Laykin (Thea Gill) don't think a series of absurd tornados building over the open see and spitting exploding rocks are anything more than "freak weather", and want to see proof. No idea proof of what, really, but there you have it.

So, before the Government will provide our heroes with the bomb they'll need to blow the bad weather up - a time-honoured SyFy Channel way to get rid of all kinds of bad weather be it Ston- or Shark-nado - there's an ill-fated regatta to save and some sort of sports game (taking place in "the stadium", so the kind of sport is anyone's guess, though I suspect a film this pretend all-American will mean baseball) ending in catastrophe. Of course widower Joe's not quite happy kids need saving, of course Lee and Maddy will finally get around to doing something about their twenty years of affection disguised as bickering, and of course Laykin will die right when she's making her "oh Doctor Joe, you were so right and I'm so sorry" speech.

Obviously, and not surprisingly, there's nothing new going on in SyFy Channel disaster movie land, though Jason Bourque's film goes through the usual motions with enough élan to keep simple-minded folks like me entertained throughout. The film's tone, mostly treating the ridiculous bomb-throwing storm idea it has been cursed with by a marketing department in desperate search of stupid movie titles seriously but not treating it too po-faced either, works pretty well for the material, helping to distinguish it from Sharknado whose very American ideas about getting rid of tornados it shares.

The special effects aren't half bad this time around either, and they are surprisingly numerous too. I suspect it helps that the effects houses working on SyFy's projects have by now made so many films with giant tornadoes in them the people involved probably do tornados (particularly exploding tornados) in their sleep.

On the acting and characterization front this is perfectly decent though I couldn't escape the impression Bourque races through the character bits to get to the next piece of destruction, which, to be perfectly honest, is a bit more interesting than watching another US white core family get together again. I'd rather love to see a film showing one of these core families growing quickly apart again after the chupacabras are dead, the storms are gone, and the ice age prevented, but then I might be a mite cynical about these things.

Stonados earns itself bonus points by including a handful of scenes featuring William B. Davis as Boston's lighthouse keeper, having a chat with his bird, talking on the radio with the film's actual protagonists, and in the end getting crushed by his lighthouse.

So Stonados is a fun enough time at the beach, if you don't mind the exploding rocks.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Doomsday Prophecy (2011)

Mysterious writer of authentically prophetic books Rupert Crane (Matthew Walker) mysteriously calls in proof-reader Eric Fox (A.J. Buckley) to personally fetch the manuscript for his first book in decades. Now, Eric has no connection to the man he knows of, and really finds the whole idea rather bizarre, but when his publishing boss calls, he has to go. And his publishing boss very much wants to keep Crane happy.

Independently, Crane also summons archaeologist Brook Calvin (Jewel Staite), for equally mysterious reasons to do with her expertise regarding Moai heads. Brook doesn't actually want to go, either, but when Crane informs her "New York is next", and the city is in fact hit by a highly destructive earthquake just shortly after the same happened at the Black Sea, curiosity wins out over scepticism. Note to self: earthquakes are generally a good way to convince people of your prophetic powers.

When Eric and - very shortly thereafter - Brook arrive, they find Crane dead. The old man has left a curious rod whose touch induces painful visions in Eric, as well as some camcorder messages. It seems the earthquakes are only just the beginning of the End of the World™, and only Eric and Brook can stop it. As if that wasn't enough pressure, the two have also inherited another of Crane's problems: the government is after the prophetic powers, and while lead agent Garcia (Bruce Ramsay) is really rather more interested in saving the world, too, his boss General Slate (Alan Dale) only wants the rod (to become the master of the post-apocalyptic world, it seems, which only goes to show what too many Italian Mad-Max-alikes will do to a man), and is willing to have everyone between him and his goal killed.

Until now, my look at the joys and horrors of SyFy original movies has concentrated on the Channel's monster movies, but there are of course also a number of more or less absurd disaster movies in its repertoire. In truth, Doomsday Prophecy isn't really so much a disaster movie as a woo-woo-based conspiracy thriller.

Realistically speaking, the End of the World™ isn't really in the budget for a SyFy movie, so director and co-writer Jason Bourque probably aims for a more achievable goal with this approach. It's not that the film doesn't feature any of the promised disasters at all: there a some short, cost-conscious yet pretty effective scenes of destruction (something I think even cheapest CGI effects are actually good at), but those scenes are there to motivate the conspiracy/chase plot, and do not stand at the movie's centre.

This does of course lead to the very low budget movie idea that a series of world-spanning catastrophes (caused by a dark star aligning with the solar system's equator, by the way - stop giggling) can best be solved by characters driving and walking through the countryside of British Columbia, but in a film world where there's a hidden global defence mechanism consisting of Moai heads situated somewhere in British Columbia, that's just logical.

How much enjoyment a given viewer will get out of Doomsday Prophecy will most certainly be based on her tolerance for that sort of bullshit when it is presented as a sub-X-Files conspiracy plot (at least the evil general is a right-winger), and some science so ropey the script could have used a bit more duct tape. I find myself quite at home in this sort of affair, smiling delightedly at the film's earnest presentation of the most hackneyed tropes (you bet there's a knowledgeable Native Canadian played by good old Gordon Tootoosis in his final film role helping our heroes out), and nodding with approval at the rather expert way Bourque manages to give his global catastrophe via British Columbia enough reach to feel mildly exciting.

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