The most dangerous type of B movie is the kind that dangles its feet just over the abyss, ready to fall from “Okay, I can handle this,” into the inky black of “Holy crap! My eyes!” The Mutant Chronicles (2008) taunted me for nearly two hours before dropping over that fateful edge.
I was fooled for the first few minutes. “Why did the critics pan this?” I wondered early on, scratching my head at Rotten Tomatoes’ 17 percent rating. It seemed like a sci-fi blitzkrieg of cool: A rich mythology steeped in a World-War-of-the-Future steam punk aesthetic. Mysticism co-existing with space travel, corporate nation-states, and your grandparents’ fashion sense. It’s basically Sky Captain Vs. the Space Zombies, for cryin’ out loud. Right up my alley!
Toss in lead men Thomas Jane and Ron Perlman, mix with a supporting part by John Malkovich (he was only on set for two days), season with the uber-cute Devon Aoki, shake them all into a script by the guy who wrote Event Horizon, and this should at the very least be a underground favorite, right?
That bright-eyed naivete didn’t last long.
Where it succeeds: The opening 20 minutes are an homage to World War I films, set 700 years in the future on the front lines of Eastern Europe. The squalor of the situation, the soldiers’ resignation, the attention to costume, the thunder and fire of war engines, and the violence of gas warfare — these all had me hooked to start. The trench fighting opens an asshole into the earth and mutants come boiling into the fog, prompting Perlman’s neo-paladin to lead a disparate party into the heart of hell armed with guns, grenades and swords.
Where it falls apart: With the exposition dispatched and our heroes descending into a WarHammer 40K version of Dante’s Inferno, the terrible CG effects start to crop up, and the blatant use of shoddy green screened backdrops destroy the illusion. The Mutant Chronicles first gets preachy about the need for “faith,” then kills the serious moments with cheap makeup effects. The mutants have lobster claws, people. I’m not making this up.
Turns out it’s an alien probe (this is disclosed in the opening voice-over) that’s mutating corpses into devilish minions — which is fine, I suppose, until we actually see the Frankenstein machine. At this point, the animation delves into The Asylum levels of bad.
Sign of a weak script #378: Deus Ex Machina saves the day. Have faith! Any prophecy uttered in a movie will come true in the third reel.
With an IMDB rating of just 5.4 out of 10, I can’t in good conscience urge you to run out and find your own copy of The Mutant Chronicles. But if you find yourself some night, bleary-eyed and drunk on whiskey, searching for a dive into a shallow style-over-substance-a-thon, then grab a tub of ice cream, sit alone in the dark and let the electric glow of your monitor wash over you as you stream this bad boy from Netflix.
Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
~ Jason
