Monday, April 19, 2010

Black Swarm

SciFi Channel movies have a reputation for being kind of terrible. I'd never sat through an entire one before but I'd seen clips of them on The Soup and they all look like movies about one "name" actor (in this case Robert Englund. ... Surprise!) and a bunch of unknowns battling mutant CGI versions of common animals.
And that's exactly what this one was, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. Either I'm very patient or I picked a good one.
I just wish they'd named the movie ZomBees! (with the exclamation point as part of the title). Black Swarm sounds too much like it's trying to be ominous.
You see, a swarm of mutant wasps is going around stinging people and taking over their bodies, making them wasp-filled zombies. Meanwhile, a sheriff moves back to her hometown so she can have soap opera dramas with her ex-boyfriend/ex-brother in law. The sheriff's daughter makes friends with the weird scientist who lives next door to her babysitter. Gee, I wonder if he knows anything about the killer wasps?
Also, the government is involved. 'Cause we didn't have enough plots.
Other than the soap opera drama between the main character and her ex-everything, I liked Black Swarm. It was fun. A little too much talk and a little too little action, but still fun.
And some of the situations follow a logic that only exists in made for TV movies, but that just pushed the movie into the realm of Unintentionally Hilarious. For example:
Daughter and Babysitter have gone missing. So Sheriff does the only logical thing and sneaks into Scientist's lab, where she threatens to blow his head off because she assumes he knows where Daughter is.
Wait, what?
First of all, she doesn't have a warrant, so she can't just go barging in uninvited wherever she pleases. Second of all, why does she suspect him? Nobody knows that Daughter had been talking to Scientist at all, so basically Sheriff suspects him of being guilty by reason of living next door.
And about two minutes later Daughter shows up (also just running into the lab uninvited) and two minutes after that Sheiff trusts Scientist to take her daughter to safety while she and her Ex-Everything to try to stop the wasps. So at least there were no hard feelings. It's like those unfounded those threats against his life never happened.
It doesn't make any sense and it cracked me right up.
If all SciFi Channel movies are like this, I should watch them more often.
P.S. The little girl in this movie got paid to do almost nothing but talk to, hug and run around holding hands with Robert Englund. How do I get a job like that?!

End of line.
-Sally

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Heh heh--ZomBees!
proffy