Summer Glau

TV Review: MAMMOTH

STARS: Vincent Ventresca, Tom Skerritt,Summer Glau,Leila Arcieri,Cole Williams,Marcus Lyle Brown

WRITER: Tim Cox, Brook Durham, Sean Keller Story by Don Guarisco

DIRECTOR: Tim Cox

RATING: NR

DISTRIBUTOR: Debuts Saturday, 9:00 pm EST on Sci Fi Channel

MAMMOTH on the Sci-Fi Channel harkens back to the great black and white monster movies of the atomic age in the 1950’s. Think of THEM or THE BLOB or even IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE. Director Tim Cox gives MAMMOTH the same sort of style as those great monster flicks of yesteryear. The plot is bizarre and involves alien life forms, a zombie mammoth, secret "man in black" government agencies, and a sleepy town full of normal people suddenly fleeing for their lives. And surprisingly it works.

Summer Glau from Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY and SERENITY heads up a cast including Tom Skerritt (ALIEN), and Vincent Ventresca (THE INVISIBLE MAN). This cast seems right at home making movies about strange and fantastical situations that couldn’t possibly happen on a day-to-day basis.

The Mammoth itself looks great and thunders along on it’s path of destruction and death with pieces of it’s own body sloughing off and dragging around. It’s such a bizarre visual to see a Mammoth as a source of abject terror, but it works for this movie.

Leila Arcieri (WILD THINGS 2) and Marcus Lyle Brown (BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2) star as the man in black type government agents who know what is going on, and are sent in to dispatch the Mammoth with great haste. These are the typical agents that work for an agency no one knows about, but they have no problem filling in civilians about their existence when it comes down to life and death.

Ventresca plays the anthropologist who was caring for the mammoth when it was encased in ice, and now is the only man on the planet with enough knowledge about the beast to stop it from killing everything and everyone. This is an interesting bumbling departure from some of Ventresca’s more recent roles and he plays the character with charm and intelligence.

Skerritt is Ventresca’s father who is a movie aficionado that owns his own theatre and has conspiracy theories about aliens on his mind. Skerritt is loveable as the grandfather of the piece and pokes fun a bit at his own past in some of his scenes.

Meanwhile, Glau is Ventresca’s sixteen-year-old daughter, which is a bit of an age stretch, but Glau looks so good she can pass as sixteen. She doesn’t get to kick very much ass in this movie as she has in Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY universe, but is a loveable and endearing character just the same. Her boyfriend Squirrel is played by Cole Williams who looks like Peter Pan is at times huggable and other times incredibly strong for his character’s sixteen years of age.

The entire movie is just a fun romp through the film style of yesteryear (including one of the more entertaining title sequences for a Sci Fi Channel movie to date). The score is quirky and comical, and at times the melodrama is so thick onscreen that you would think you are seeing a film from the original 50’s era.