Steampunk, mutant zombie reaver-like army, and Ron Perlman what more do you need to know?  It was certainly enough for me to add it to my DVR.

Fine. you need more convincing.  How about Malkovich as a kingly ruler guy?

Really, that should be enough.  

...no? Okay.  You're smarter than I am.

Mutant Chronicles is in theatres now (so they claim) but it's also one of those movies that (in my neck of the woods, anyway), HDNet advertises the crap out of for a month or so, letting you know that you can watch it all you want on pay per view, one special evening for free, and then in the theatres.  You end up recording it, just so they'll stop with the 5 minute long advertisements at the end of every Torchwood episode.  I was intrigued enough to grab it, given the whole steampunk/zombie/Malkovich angle (hellboy doesn't do it for me).

The basic plot is familiar to you.  There's an ancient evil buried under the earth that gets accidentally awakened long after almost everyone has stopped believing that it was ever real and it's up to a rag-tag group of misfits to save the planet.  After an hour or so of witty quips and deep-yet-irrelevant character exposition, the planet gets saved, more or less, and we've all learned a very important lesson about brotherhood or violence or faith in a higher power or saving the environment or some such. I won't ruin the ending for you and tell you which one or how much earth is saved.

Everyone involved in the film tries very hard.  Very Hard.  On some level you have to respect that.  The budget is not fabulous, or perhaps it's simply misdirected into mat paintings and miniatures.  Most of the acting is done in tiny little rooms that could be anywhere or against a green screen.  The camera work is gritty, the lighting is dim, and they occasionally switch over to completely muted sepia or black and white with an "artful" splash of color.  They're trying so very hard to distract you from the poor quality of everything about 40% of the time.  The rest of the time, it feels like a Red Dwarf episode.  This would have been excusable, if the writing or the acting rose above the quality of the effects.  It's clear that most everyone involved certainly thinks it does and that they're all very proud of what they're doing, but that's not enough. 

It just doesn't work. None of it.  I didn't spend any money on it and it didn't take up too much valuable space on my DVR, so I was pretty okay with the time I'd lost.  if i had ordered it on PPV or, god forbid, sat through it in a movie theatre, i would have been mighty upset.  

I honestly don't know why this didn't go straight to saturday night on the Sci-Fi channel.

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