MAMMOTH

Blackwater, a quiet mountain town, becomes the stage of an unusual event on a hot summer afternoon: a meteor suddenly crosses the town's sky and crashes into the Natural History Museum. The city immediately appears shaken, but the inhabitants of Blackwater do not know that the threat is yet to take shape. From inside the meteor, a mysterious form of life emerges that will soon awaken a giant mammoth frozen inside the museum. The prehistoric animal will begin to sow panic and death through the streets of the town, and bringing the situation under control will be the task of Dr. Frank Abernathy. If you thought that beast movies, an over-exploited subgenre now dreadfully worn out, had said everything and more, you were wrong because it is still possible to find some small production that seems to have something to say about it. This could be the case of "Mammoth," an unusual B-movie created for television and written by Tim Cox and Brook Durham. The film, although it follows quite faithfully the schemes set over the years by the animal subgenre, tries to take a different path from the usual one with the hope of being able to offer the viewer (who presumably can no longer stand to see films that always propose the same arguments) something slightly different, something capable of arousing curiosity and thus avoiding the temptation to turn off the TV to dedicate time to something more constructive. In an attempt to succeed in this endeavor, "Mammoth" comes up with the brilliant idea of paying homage, through a beast movie like so many made today, to the old sci-fi glories of the B-movie era that were so popular during the 1950s. At that time (the so-called "atomic age" had just begun), given the constant fears arising from nuclear attacks and harmful effects caused by radiation, the American people vented their fears through cinema; many sci-fi films (often bordering on horror) were made in those years with the aim of materializing the fears of the stars and stripes, bringing in the most bizarre solutions: one often encountered attacks from space, genetic mutations generating huge and evil creatures, apocalyptic situations that threatened human safety and foreshadowed a possible and future extinction of the species. Everything that American cinema professed during the 1950s is more or less reproduced in 2006 by "Mammoth," which, by reproducing the same concepts, not only pays homage to dozens of films that have made the history of genre cinema (thus making the happiness of many enthusiasts in the sector), but also demonstrates that it is not out of time because all those fears that invaded the American minds more than fifty years ago have not absolutely vanished but have only been modified. It is therefore possible to find in "Mammoth" a vast array of what fifty years ago could be considered commonplaces of sci-fi cinema, including the primordial threat that arrived on Earth from space and inside a sort of meteorite (just as happened in "Blob - The Blob," a film that above all served as a muse for this film, according to the authors' rumors) and a huge and "monstrous" creature that begins to gradually devastate the entire community. To further emphasize the inspiration from certain films, frequent references to classics such as the aforementioned "Blob" and also "War of the Worlds" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" are not lacking. Although the basic premises, according to all this, could certainly appeal to any fan of B-movies, it must be said that not everything went exactly as planned due, above all, to a somewhat disappointing and simplistic realization (but more than anything else, this is due to its genesis as a TV movie) and too much importance given to a comedy component that is rather intrusive and at times extremely out of place. Rather effective, although not of the best quality, are the special effects and, that is to say, the realization of the large mammoth. The animal, in fact, is realized through a computer graphic far superior to that which is usually found in the myriad of television productions or for home video distribution only. But if the visual effects, in broad terms, are sufficient, what might raise an eyebrow is a lack of knowledge of the physical structure of the mammoth given that the aesthetics of the animal differ quite a bit from reality (the mammoth in this film has a much more cartoonish structure than real). On the technical side, there is not much to say. The direction, entrusted to the young Tim Cox (expert in television productions, his mediocre "Metamorphosis"), is quite simple even if interesting camera movements are not lacking; while the entire cast turns out, overall, quite convincing with a small mention for Tom Skerritt in the role of the grandfather passionate about Western and sci-fi cinema. In short, "Mammoth" could be framed as a classic missed opportunity. There was excellent material available (excellent at least for fans and nostalgics of a certain type of cinema) that, however, was not well managed and exploited. Although it is superior to the mass of television products that one easily encounters in recent years, it remains a negligible film. Curiosity: The filming of the movie began in a town in Louisiana, but after a short time, the entire staff had to move to Romania, more precisely to Bucharest, due to economic needs.