The Apocalypse
Apocalypse starts off with campers watching a shooting star. Well, it’s not just a shooting star, it’s not just a little meteor, it’s the end of the world! Teeny fiery meteors falling from the sky, killing people individually with the smaller ones, and smashing houses with the bigger ones, until finally one large enough to destroy a city vaporizers Monterey.
We are introduced to A park ranger and his estranged wife, who’re trying to get to their daughter and her college friends down in LA. But right now they have got bigger worry… Toxic ash and a landslide near their home, And a tornado near their daughters. Even stranger, people are vanishing.
is just a tornado here and there superimposed on the background. A sinkhole… CG cracks in the street. People huddling in the wreckage, but no real spectacular destruction. Even when L.A. gets flooded by title waves… It’s quick and terrible CGI. Oh, and everyone dies at the end when the big one hits.Dark Image
That’s odd. Justin’s name isn’t anywhere on this thing, but Dark Image (also released as Mirror Image) is listed as one of his films, co directed with frequent collaborator Chris Freeman.
I like the cast – Leslie Easterbrook and even an Eric Roberts cameo lent it a bit of street cred, and the film opens in a nicely eerie black and white. Ferris wheel….girls on swings and a pair of sisters – with one murdered.
Years later, she’s trying to cope with the death of her sister and off on a getaway to help jog here memory about what happened. So is the cop (suspended for tampering with the evidence) that investigated the case, and he’s trying to drag his partner back into it. The captain (Roberts) warns him off but he’s determined.
Meanwhile, the girl is seeing things – maybe her meds are out of synch?Her shrink warns her that if it keeps up, he’ll have to send her back to the institution.That’s not stopping the flashes of bloody hand prints and dead sister in the shower though…..
It’s a good and creepy CGI haunting that pops up sporadically though the film while the cops stalk them, trying to perhaps pin the murder on the sister. The whole haunting has a strange Dante influence – curiously artsy for a film with such frequently flat lighting. Still, it’s the setup for what happens next – and all secrets are revealed when the devil opens her memories.
The thing is, this thing really isn’t sure if it want’s to be a police thriller or a horror movie – and it’s not quite sophisticated enough to balance those two things like a Giallo would. Perhaps with a bit more length and intrigue. I know I’m, the LAST one to say a movie is too short, but at 76 minuets, there’s no time to misdirect and ratchet up tension, or lean into the possession aspect. Freeman and Jones manage a few spectacular images towards the end, and I’m definitely glad I watched it…but there’s not enough repeat value here for me to really consider returning to it. (And I know that for a fact. It’s so forgetable, I accidentally threw it back in my Youtube queue and it took a good ten minuets of trying to figure out if I had seen it before. Fortunately when Eric Roberts shows up – hes always an unforgettable performance!)
Rivers 9
Looking at the credits for Rivers 9, I see C. Thomas Hall, Vinnie Jones and Jamie Kennedy. Bad. The whole poker motif going on under the credits also gets my attention. I enjoy Vegas style stories.
They start together of the crew, locals and disgruntled casino employees, and get ready for the heist. Hire an actor to distract the main guy in a poker game while they steal the casino money.
for. In a world where Ocean’s Eleven exists, I don’t know who’s gonna watch this instead. It’s really not fair to compare it either, they such different kinds of movies, but the film invites a comparison in some of the styles that it tries and fails to emulate as well as the name and general mood of the peace. I think this might’ve been better served in trying to give it its own identity rather than piggybacking on a popular franchise… especially with the more action oriented double-cross showdown at the end. It’s a shame that they went this rout instead of trying to mock buster something they didn’t have any hope of coming close to.Sorority Party Massacre
Look, I really don’t care who the Director is, if you give me a title like Sorority Party Massacre, I’m coming in with certain expectations. A college coed lost in the country near an old car garage is a good start. Scream style phone call from the killer helps too. Gas mask killer with acid is a definite promising start.
Sorority Party Massacre is a Chris Freeman and Justin Jones collaboration. That definitely gives it a different style and polish than some of the other Jones films. The credits are done over a nice collage of bloody gloves and severed limbs. These guys are totally trying to sell us on the hard-core horror aspect. For me, all you had to say was Richard mall and Kevin Sorbo.
Super Bowl is a place captain dressing down a maverick comp… Lethal weapon style. Sorbo is making the most of his cameo, but it may actually distract little bit from the cop was going to be one of my main characters. Ron Jeremy is a cop in this department too… Inexplicably. Anyhow, Sorbo is sending our detective out to check on his sorority daughter, to make sure she’s OK in this backwater town of Grizzly Cove. Richard Moll will take him on his boat. The thing is, Moll’s boat is the only way to get to this island. And he doesn’t remember seeing the sheriffs daughter. Neither did the local cops… They use us as an excuse though, to introduce us to the girls that did arrive…. Not only does it serve to get familiar with the arc types will be watching die, but it’s also a good opportunity to throw some gratuitous cheesecake at the 
screen.
Cop’s daughter never showed up to this… an event that brings girls from different sororities together to compete for a grant. It’s a little vague what the grant is for… But that’s fine. It’s really just an excuse to line up a bunch of bikini-clad victims.
Someone is sleeping in the stables. Also, one of the sorority girls has just been sent to clean the stables. Guess who gets killed next ?
With an hour runtime left, it’s time for the cop to start his investigation in earnest. There’s still plenty of hot codes to investigate, even if the Chiefs daughter is dead. The head of the competition seems kind of sketchy and I miss congeniality way, and so does the mentally challenged groundskeeper.
There’s actually a lot more law and order/CSI detective work going on here and I would’ve anticipated. I almost feel that down. Really, with a title like sorority party massacre, you’re expecting nudity, and gory kills. Our second act is almost entirely the detective’s show. Like, I’m kind of glad that we got those long intros to each of these girls at the beginning… Because I feel like I’ve barely seen them since then. And where is the cool killer I saw the beginning of the movie??? It’s literally 
been an hour since I’ve seen it! (yeah…sadly, he’s not coming back)
Quantum Apocalypse
With my previous experiment with Jones and Apocalypse fare, I feel like this is going to be painful. An asteroid is heading to earth in a very syfy looking monitoring center. Suddenly the comet shifts it’s path. The screens go blank and alarms blare as the satellite connection is lost.
HOW MANY ASTEROIDS ARE YOU GOING TO TOSS TO EARTH JUSTIN? HOW MANY?
This thing is so Asylum and TV movie and SyFy that it hurts. Disaster movie, melodrama…dogey CGI…The dollar store is too good for this thing! In fact, acording to IMDB, The title “Quantum Apocalypse” was the result of a joke: Writer Leigh Scott had an e-mail conversation with Dread Central reviewer Scott “The Foywonder” Foy (a frequent harsh critic of Sci-Fi Channel Original Films) about the Channel rejecting the previous title “Judgment Day”. Foy remarked the reason that the title was rejected was that it didn’t have a colon like many other Sci-Fi Channel films (such as “Caved In: Prehistoric Terror” and “Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep”) and jokingly suggested the title “Judgment Day: Quantum Apocalypse”. Scott liked the title “Quantum Apocalypse” and asked for permission to suggest it to the Sci-Fi Channel which approved it.
In addition to a CGI Aurora Borialis in the sky, it’s going to mes with cell phones and radio waves – and we may be looking at something else to create an extinction event. But the weird part is something is out there changing these things course – something that looks a lot like the vortex from Transmorphers….. and in a few days it’ll be in position to affect the Earth.
We cut back and froth fro the government bunker to the Mayor of the city of Parish and his family -Wife, the typical teenage boy, the cute little girl and the Mayor’s rain man autistic adult brother. It’s a charming group and honestly I’m actually more interested in their story than the asteroids. Still, while the Mayor’s wife complains about the phones being down and the son is trying to make time with his girlfriend, a couple of quirky scientists arrive at the bunker to try and figure out how to stop this outer space anomaly from destroying the world. What they really should be doing though, is talking to the autistic character. He’s brilliant and has this thing cold figured out.Big props to Rhett Giles by the way, for taking a character that could EASILY have been a stereotype or a parody and giving him some real heart. This character, Terry, is the single most interesting and compelling character in the movie. 
While the punk rock scientists are throwing in the towel and calling it the end, Terry is watching the skies with his telescope. Birds darken the skies (I swear, I feel like we’re back to Biblical epic again….) Terry has a plan and he buying parts to assemble a machine. Hopefully it’s a good plan, because Russia and China want to nuke the vortex. (and yet, I’m equally involved in the son trying to work up the nerve to kiss his girlfriend).
Terry convinces his brother Ben to drive him to Houston because he’s got the answer on how to save the planet…but is it too late? The vortex is here and it’s brought tsunami with it.
At the end of the day, this thing gets real points for some good characters. The town’s first family really humanizes the global threat, boiling down a big picture disaster into something more manageable and effective. And that’s really the thing. If this movie has a real flaw, it’s at the beginning – it’s all the stuff at the space center. It’s all weak – the characters and the look. It’s kind of like when you’re looking at something forced perspective – you mind knows somethings wrong, but you can’t quite reconcile it. That’s what all this space center stuff looks like. cramped with Jone’s signature flat lighting doing nothing for them. (we could also drop ALL the stuff with the president too. he’s never convincing in the role and it does nothing to move the film along). Some moody atmosphere and warmer filters would go a long 
way there. But it’s also the lack of connection with the government characters – ESPECIALLY the scientists. Quirky girl and straightman have no chemistry. Interestingly, neither did Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith in Independence Day, but we invested in those characters long before they teamed up because we spent time with them individually. Even more importantly, we spent time with them BEFORE the crisis. Outside of it. Give me a couple scenes with these two individually before the skies darken, and I think the bunker scenes get much better.
Perhaps it seems like I’m being overly hard on this film. Perhaps I give off the impression of a hateful troll, pecking away on a basement computer covered in cheeto dust. But the thing is, if I hated this thing, I’d just say “Pass” and move along. I’d just forget it. What frustrates me here is I see the potential for a GOOD movie here – even with these same budgetary and time limitations. This is arguably Jones’s best work and it has the ability to stand up with any summer blockbuster in terms of story and emotion. Why do I think this? Because the movie changed my mind while I was watching it. A little past halfway through I went from “Awful syfy film, pass” to “Actually good movie – provided you can turn off your brain on the ridiculous overworked premise and get past the flat bunker scenes” It’s still a recommend, despite the Playstation one CGI and goofy premise, because it really does stick the landing and gives us a clever ending that would feel equally at home in a good episode of Doctor Who.
This is one of those I’d love a redo of – reediting and fixing the bad parts, because despite some subpar element,s the good character bits and over all story still manage to shine through.
Invasion of the Pod People
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take Invasion of the Pod People seriously when it stars someone named Jessica Bork. That’s the sound the Swedish chef makes!
something (a quick check in the trivia section of IMDB reveals it’s EXACTLY that!). Of course, it’s an evil plant, and it walks away to go hatch a duplicate of the person that’s given to… then has to murder you.
People around her just seem to start getting weird… And one bunch of her friends invite her for a girls night out and get her drunk, Things get a little suspicious when they pull out our weird evil plant. Maybe some make out action will distract her?
heir escape. Is there? There’s no way of telling who’s in person or not… How can they possibly stop it?Transmorphers
compelling. I’m only 13 minutes in, and I feel like I shouldn’t be this invested!
They managed to grab a bot and discover that while they had always assumed the machines were created by an alien race… They were wrong. The machines are the alien race. Opening it up, there’s a mixture of technology and organic tissue… Surprisingly well realized. Now it’s a race against time to get the modifications made before the rest of the robot army comes down around them… but even if that fails, there’s a back up… And at twist waiting for us all.Transmorphers for a surprise recommend! Asylum is happy to pimp out the license for this thing, so you’ll find it on multiple streaming platforms, even on some of the legit movie channels on YouTube. But I’m gonna tell you right now, if I run across this at record exchange your half price books, I’m going to plunk down a couple dollars to get myself a copy of the physical media. I’m that impressed.
The Apocalypse
Apocalypse starts off with campers watching a shooting star. Well, it’s not just a shooting star, it’s not just a little meteor, it’s the end of the world! Teeny fiery meteors falling from the sky, killing people individually with the smaller ones, and smashing houses with the bigger ones, until finally one large enough to destroy a city vaporizers Monterey.
We are introduced to A park ranger and his estranged wife, who’re trying to get to their daughter and her college friends down in LA. But right now they have got bigger worry… Toxic ash and a landslide near their home, And a tornado near their daughters. Even stranger, people are vanishing.
is just a tornado here and there superimposed on the background. A sinkhole… CG cracks in the street. People huddling in the wreckage, but no real spectacular destruction. Even when L.A. gets flooded by title waves… It’s quick and terrible CGI. Oh, and everyone dies at the end when the big one hits.Intro to Justin Jones
Justin Jones is a solid Asylum alum from way back. He was there when they made thier first Mockbuster – 2005’s War of the Worlds as first assistant director.
that I’ve seen over the years, such as ;But before we get ahead of ourselves, I’d like to look at some of his early stuff where he’d be assistant director (alongside much of the cast that would appear in his first two films) on on of the most company defining films the Asylum would ever put out. Meet me back here in a week or two and we’ll ease our way into Jones’ career with…. Transmorphers.
Argo City Comics 