Past Misdeeds: Behemoth (2011)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A US small town situated close to a mountain that was an active volcano ages ago is hit by a series of tremors and rather curious earth activities, while deadly CO2 starts leaking all around the mountain. Strangely, at the same time this mysterious activity starts up, various off-screen natural disasters hit places all around the world.

Retired professor William Walsh (William B. Davis) has found an explanation for the strange phenomena through his extensive study of myth, or rather myths. William thinks what's happening has to do with the true base of various myths shared by cultures all around the world, myths in which a gigantic creature acts out the wrath of the Earth whenever humanity too actively disturbs the natural order; now, says William, the creature is waking up again.

Of course, William is mentally ill (probably schizophrenic, though the film doesn't dare use the word in what I assume is an example of inexplicable US puritanism), and going off his meds, so neither his son Thomas (Ed Walsh), a lumberjack boss, nor his twenty year old daughter who acts like a teenager Grace (Cindy Busby) believe a single word he says. Too bad he's right.

The seismic activities are so peculiar that Thomas's former flame Emily Allington (Pascale Hutton), now a seismologist, returns to her hometown to find an explanation of her own, and convince her Sheriff uncle (Garry Chalk) of the danger of the situation, if need be.

The danger is, of course, even larger than she could have expected. Also as a matter of course, Emily, Thomas, Grace, and a mysterious government agent of the Department of Weird Shit (Ty Olsson) will end up on the mountain exactly when the tentacles really hit the fan, and William's theories are proven quite beyond doubt.

The Internet disagrees with me here, but I truly think W.D. Hogan's Behemoth is a particularly fine example of SyFy Channel movie making. Certainly, it's a film pushing a lot of my buttons with the way it mixes a basic SF horror idea right out of Weird Tales or Astounding in its more horrific moments with the highly localized global disaster movie style SyFy is so very fond of. It's a great mixture, particularly because Hogan (and/or Rachelle S. Howie's script) really does know how to sell the age-old clichés most of the film is built from as natural instead of annoying.

Plus, there's a monster as big as a mountain with tentacles that is first partially revealed in a sequence where its very large eye peers angrily out of a hole in the mountain at our non-teenage teenage co-protagonist and her boyfriend, which is as perfect and resonant an image as one could hope for to find anywhere. Once we get to see the monster completely, it also turns out to be one of the rather more creatively designed SyFy CGI creatures, again fully fitting into the traditions of certain old pulp magazines. The only disappointment when it comes to the monster is the rather lame way our heroes end up getting rid of it, even though this comes with the territory when you as a filmmaker aren't allowed to let it eat the world and surely couldn't afford the pyrotechnics anyhow.

Behemoth, despite being a film deftly made from clichés and well-worn tropes, also has some moments when it's making small steps into directions you don't expect. I was particularly surprised by the film's treatment of William's mental illness (even though it doesn't dare name it - people could infect themselves with it, or something). There's a believability and truthfulness about the way his environment reacts to William's illness and what they believe to be just another expression of it in what must have been a long line of expressions. William's family shows a mixture of sadness, exasperation and plain tiredness that isn't just unexpectedly real for a SyFy monster movie but for movies in general. Even better, the film also allows its mentally ill character the same degree of dignity (one thing many mental illnesses don't exactly leave you much of, while your environment generally does its damndest to take away the rest) it gives its other characters, and even provides him with an opportunity for small-scale heroism without feeling the need to kill him off for reasons of “redemption”.

William B. Davis uses the opportunity to for once not play a bad guy, and provides William (the name-giving fairy was out, sorry) with just the right mixture of obsessiveness, fragility, and a warmth suggesting a complete human being.

In general, Behemoth is pretty good at breaking up its ultra-competent and highly entertaining giant monster/disaster tale with small moments of truth in the character department (not in the moments when everyone just has to act like an idiot for genre conventions, obviously). Apart from everything to do with William, there's - just for example - the telling fact that the Sheriff doesn't take what Emily tells him about a possible catastrophe seriously, despite her being an actual expert, because she's just his niece, and surely she can't know more about anything than he does, which seems to mirror the experience most younger women of my acquaintance have with their own families.


For me, these kinds of elements and small details often are what make or break a SyFy creature feature; it is of course important (and pretty much unavoidable) to work with and within clichés and tropes when making a low budget genre film for TV, but it's these small things that differentiate a competent movie from one truly worth watching. Behemoth, for its part, clearly belongs to the latter group.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Earth’s Final Hours (2011)

aka Armageddon 2012

Uh-oh! A rude white hole spits dense matter at the Earth, which goes right through the planet, destroys the magnetosphere and stops our favourite planet’s rotation. It looks very much as if it’s time for the end of the world again.

CIA agent John Streich (Robert Knepper) is on the scene when the matter strikes, and soon it’s up to him, scientist Chloe Edwards (Julia Benson), his hacker son Andy (Cameron Bright), and Andy’s best friend Michelle (Julia Maxwell) to save the world with a very secret scientific method developed by one Dr. Rothman (Bruce Davison).

Unfortunately, the actual world-saving method Rothman devised has never been tested or investigated much, because the CIA under Streich’s evil boss Lockman (Michael Kopsa) and his evil boss’s evil boss, the doubly evil Arnett (Roark Critchlow), a) wanted to use it as a weapon (of course) and b) preferred the simpler plan of only saving a small part of the world full of the Important People™. Consequently, Rothman has spent the last fifteen years in a secret CIA prison masked as a mental institution.

Streich and his friends are a “let’s save everyone” kind of gang, though, so soon they are not only involved in a race against time (and some mighty destructive solar storms) to save the world, but also against Lockman’s attempts to only save a very small part of it, and kill everyone getting in the way.

Here I thought I had by now seen all SyFy movies actually worth seeing, and then along comes W.D Hogan’s (him of the execrable Independence Daysaster and the excellent Behemoth) Earth’s Final Hours to prove me wrong. Of course (and do I even need to say this?) the plot is patently ridiculous, the science is preposterous, and the way the film’s world works has nothing whatsoever to do with any part of consensus reality, but then, that’s really not what anyone (except IMDB reviewers and other people with a desperate need to prove their superiority over innocent little films like this) looks for in this kind of film.

What we – or at the very least I – do look for in a SyFy disaster movie is the joy of witnessing yet another silly yet imaginative way of destroying the Earth, and the comfortable and even more silly way the given film will go about saving it. We generally also enter with a degree of hope concerning as much destruction as the budget will provide and perhaps even one or two fun performances.

Final Hours doesn’t disappoint here, for the way the world (doesn’t – spoiler!) ends here is indeed silly yet imaginative, gives reason to much movie science nonsense speak (pleasantly disconnected from any of your established scientific facts), the world is saved in an improbable, cheap yet awesome way that to my great surprise doesn’t involve exploding the white hole or Earth, and the little bit of destruction the sun storms wreak is very fun to look at.

As are Knepper’s, Kopsa’s and Davison’s performances, so the surprisingly well done action sequences Hogan provides are a bit of an overachievement (not that I’m complaining), as is the visual (and plot-logical) cleverness of having the whole thing take place in the brightest of sunlight. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with any of this, so Earth’s Final Hours gets my seal of approval.

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On Exploder Button: SyFy vs. The Mynd: Behemoth (2011)

In my by now extensive studies of SyFy Channel Original (heh) Movies, I have found many horrors and many surprisingly enjoyable things, but there are only a very among these films that do anything interesting on the character level.

While Behemoth isn't any kind of psychological horror, it is one of these chosen few movies that do add some rather interesting aspects to a few of their characters, in this case specifically to the one played by William B. Davis. It also contains a monster right out of our ideals of what Weird Tales was supposed to be about, so my column about the film over at ExB may sound a bit smitten.

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