Time Machine: Rise of the Morlocks

I'm truly surprised by how many bad reviews this movie has gotten. Believe me, I have seen far worse movies than this! TIME MACHINE: RISE OF THE MORLOCKS (aka MORLOCKS) is a very entertaining Sci Fi / Military movie with believable characters and a well scripted story. The main actors David Hewlett, Christina Cole and Daniel Caltagirone brought their characters to life and kept the movie on course from beginning to end.

Though not quite as polished and extravagant as a big budget Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott movie, the acting, special effects, sets and location shots in MORLOCKS were quite impressive. Definitely worth watching . . .

Monstrous creatures called Morlocks from the future are brought to the present by an American military experiment involving time travel. As soon as I saw "SyFy" on the opening credits my hopes were dashed, having watched so many of their poor quality productions previously. Shot in Europe on the cheap the cast includes European actors playing Americans, but not always convincingly so, in particular the black guy called Tyrell who's natural British accent keeps slipping through his phoney American one. The Morlocks themselves are pretty hideous looking and the movie packs in plenty of blood, gore and violence but sadly the CGI effects, used not just for the creatures and gore but also for buildings and vehicles, are very poor. I was impressed by one shocking scene in which a woman wakes up in a room full of decaying corpses but overall the movie was crap.

The military has constructed a time machine looking to retrieve technology from the future. Instead, they are invaded by vicious creatures called the Morlocks.

It's a Syfy TV movie with a few familiar faces, TV-level CGI, non-descript industrial locations, and a passable connection to the H. G. Wells work. You get what you get. It's a bland B-movie.

In what looks like a war setting, an ugly special effects monster attacks and begins to eat a military man. His companions are also attacked, as they escape. After the opening credits, the setting switches to a book tour with David Hewlett (as James Radnor). He's written a book on time travel. Considered an expert on the subject, Mr. Radnor is summoned by the US Army to go on a mission into the future. The ugly special effects monsters are "Morlocks" from the future. They must be stopped. There are also some Marines lost in the future, who should not be left behind. Meanwhile, in the present, Robert Picardo (as Wichita) schemes...

With almost complete disregard for story-telling, this was adapted from H.G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine" (1895). The conflict between military man Robert Picardo (as Wichita) and DNA scientist Jim Fyfe (as Felix Watkins) is a small highlight. There are millions of people who'd love to make low-budget movies, and the Syfy Channel gets away with airing such wretched wastes of resources. Television anthologies from the 1950s and TV Movies of the Week from the 1960s were more consistently enjoyable. This one should have spent less time on special effects and more time letting us know what was happening in the story.

** Morlocks (9/24/11) Matt Codd ~ David Hewlett, Christina Cole, Robert Picardo, Jim Fyfe

What a stinker of a movie. Should know by now anything with ex Stargate/Star trek actors is going to be a dud. Deleted from my PVR immediately after watching so my partner wouldn't get to see it. It's really only worth watching to see the really bad and obvious CGI. It is however a credit to the actors that they perform like professionals and soldier on through a woefully badly written script and criminally bad direction.

Its so flabbergastingly bad that its hard to come up with a decent review but others have said it all before. It could be part of a challenge in an endurance contest

So many great SciFi stories. So many bad SciFi movies