Another Saturday night, another monster, another SyFy original movie.  The last one was the simply titled Killer Mountain and while  I’d like to say that the bland title doesn’t do the movie justice, this one is just as vanilla as the title suggests.  It didn’t stink as much as Age of the Dragons, but I don’t think it surpassed Ice Road Terror either.  Of course, the redeeming quality this one had was the same as IRT…..ex-BSG cast members.

You’ve heard the story before told a thousand different ways: A mythical city offering riches as well as eternal life.  Who doesn’t want that right?  Of course this mythical city is hidden in the depths of a mountain and protected (??) by scary monsters who eat anything that crosses their paths.

To get a little more in-depth here, the owner of a medical research company spends oodles of dough to send an expedition team up the mountain in search of the mythical city of Shambala.  After communication with the team is lost, he hires a second team to search for them.  Apparently he’s got some terminal disease, although I don’t think it ever says what it is, and his only hope is the eternal life that Shambala offers.  Too bad that eternal life juice is the blood of these nasty leech-y type things.  Anyway, the second team makes their way up the mountain only to find that the first team (well, all except one) have been picked off by these lizard-dragon-monster things…..we’ll call them Li-gons…although I think they were called drucks or something like that.  I like Li-gons better.  It’s never made clear just why they reside there however.  Are they protecting Shambala?  Is it just a coincidence?  I’m not sure, but the first team didn’t have good luck with them and neither did the second.  Throw in some frightened locals, a team member with ulterior motives, and the typical evil military group who wreaks havoc at base camp and you’ve got yourself a movie.

The cast did what they could with what they were given.  Obviously I was biased due to the BSG factor, and the fact that I just really like Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol from BSG).  I knew he was in this and that was the draw for me, but I got a bonus when I saw that Paul Campbell (Billy from BSG) was in it as well.  Although I’m used to him being the all around fresh-faced nice guy, because that’s what Billy was.  In this he played Tyler, the son of the rich guy and he was a bit of a tool.  The rest of the cast was pretty nondescript.

While production wise this movie was a bit better than the other SyFy movies I’ve written about, the CGI was still cringe-inducing.  The budget just isn’t there and this in one area where it shows big time.  The creatures were so ridiculous it was almost laughable.  But I didn’t really laugh, I was left more with a “meh” feeling.

These movies, at least in my opinion, are a means to celebrate the type of movies that are so bad they’re good.  They shouldn’t take themselves seriously, and should play in a tongue-in-cheek style.  Killer Mountain was bad but it wasn’t good-bad, nor was it bad-bad.  It just….was.  Actually now that I think about it, the color palette of the movie sort of fits.  It was just kind of gray with nothing to make it really colorful.  In acting, action or story.

There was one redeeming part at the end that came in the form of one word spoken by Aaron Douglas.  His character actually says: “Let’s get the frak outta here.”  What I really really want to know is this: was it ad libbed….or was it actually in the script?  I can appreciate sneaking a frak in here or there (ehem…..) and always get a kick out of hearing it someplace other than BSG.  So for that alone, Killer Mountain gets kudos.

I think I’m going to have to start judging these movies by how many sittings it took to get through them.  This one only took two and that was mainly because I didn’t have the time necessary to sit through the whole thing at once.  That being said, I probably could have made it in one sitting.  Unlike Doomsday Prophecy.  That one took me three sittings.

Check out the trailer for Killer Mountain below just so you can see what you missed.  Also check out the trailer for this Saturday’s movie, Jabberwock.  Oh and that one also has a former BSG’er in it.  You know I had to mention it.

About the author

Tracy Ladd has written 534 articles on this blog.

Tracy has been writing about film since her days on the her high school newspaper. Even though she took a decade or two off to explore other things, she's back to doing what she loves. She also bakes, can knit a pretty nifty scarf and makes lightsaber sounds with her knitting needles. Or chopsticks. Especially with the lightsaber chopsticks. Follow her on Twitter: @ReelGoddess

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Everything Else, Homage to Fromage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.