The Fallen Ones

It is a movie which is good enough to watch if there is nothing else and you like the genre. Maybe it is not meant for grownups to watch, but merely for the younger SF-lovers. Most of the scenes have been seen in other movies. The jokes are a little repetitive and there are some questions about the motives of the characters. The positive part is that the violence is not so obvious and taken with a sense of humor. The special effects are OK, but not up to date. Sometimes the scenes are so fast that you need to stop your DVD player to be able to appreciate the scene. Not a movie which you would like to see a second time. All in all a very predictable movie.

What a piece of junk this movie was. The premise was okay, but even in the beginning with crappy effects to blend in a giant with normal sized people (even the effects in Hercules was better) I knew this would be bad. But the really awful part of the movie is the dialogs. It's completely incoherent, silly and stupid. I felt like it had been written by some 9th grader in creative class and gotten a D-. I want to slap Casper van Diem and the other actors for following this movie through.

I've had my share of cheesy and bad movies (I love the tremors series), but this... I do not recommend it at all. It's silly and the totally flabbergastingly bad dialogs will make you cringe.

When archaeologist Matt Fletcher (Casper Van Dien of Starship Troopers) finds a mummified giant from the biblical age, he bites off more than he can chew as he & his crew are soon beset by both cult members who worship this thing as well as the giant's father, a fallen angel who hopes to resurrect him. Now it's up to Matt, Angela & Rabbi Schmidtt (Tom Bosley??!!?) to stop both factions and their evil plans.

This was one of the better Sci-fi Originals films that I've seen and I found that it moved at a brisk pace (for the most part, there are some lulls in action here and there) The film is heavily cheesy, but thats kind of part of it's charm. All the actors work well for the type of film that it is. Especially the always entertaining B-movie mainstay Irwin Keyes as a member of the cult.

My Grade: C

I saw not so fabulous rating on IMDb, but I went to see it anyway, because I am a big fan of Bible related material. First thing that bothered me was a little too much Indiana Jones wannabe movie, but it also looked like Casper Van Dien didn't see those Jones movies through (but he should). I believe he tried his best, but script just stunk. Music tried to be kinda Jones style too. Great work, but for such movie it seemed like too much work, like the video part did't deserve all that great music. Robert Wagner gave his best acting skills, he did a good job, but somehow the script was bringing everything down. "Jokes" are old school, somewhere 20 years old; they brought only cynic smile to my face. There are some really bad camera angels, SFX looks like homemade and unrealistic. Kevin VanHook had probably a good idea on the story (in my opinion, but I love such stories), but things just didn't work out in the end. Maybe he should put it on a paper when it was still fresh in his head. When I (in first minutes) saw that movie was going to be one of those 'low budget movies', I hoped that I will at least 'hear' a good story, but sometimes movies just disappoint.

I generally avoid anything this guy is in. He is the new Lorenzo LLamas as far as acting and the quality of the films he appears in goes. He was not completely laughable in this picture however, which is high praise compared to my estimation of his other work. Hopefully he will continue to get better. I haven't checked, but I get the feeling that he started out in soap operas and never really graduated beyond that level. He tends to do a lot of intense looks and pauses that generally mean the actor is searching for the next line.

This was better than average for a VanDien vehicle. If there is nothing else in the video store you haven't seen and you've seen all of the movies you like more than once, this would not be the worst choice for a rental. Let me stop before all of this praise seems maudlin.