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Rated: 5.00/5 | Votes: 2 | Views: 16 |Submitted: 05/29/08

Mammoth Review

By Heather Wixson

Ah, how I generally love to mock the ridiculous movies that air on the Sci-Fi Channel.  However, while viewing Mammoth, I realized that this movie wasn’t all that bad.  In fact, I found it rather entertaining and that completely surprised me.

Mammoth is the campy tale of a small Louisiana town whose local museum has unearthed a perfectly preserved in ice mammoth specimen.  While taking a sample of the mammoth, Dr. Frank Abernathy (TV actor Vincent Ventresca) unwittingly releases a signal that sends a shockwave throughout the solar system, triggering a meteor to hit the museum that awakens the prehistoric creature. Turns out, mammoths frozen for a few hundred thousand years are a bit cranky and the big guy decides to unleash his fury.

I know the story itself sounds a bit silly (and it is), but at the heart of the movie is a story about family relations; Frank’s inability to be there for his daughter Jack (Firefly/Serenity’s Summer Glau) because he’s so overworked, as well as Frank’s inability to find a connection with his father Simon (the always wonderful Tom Skerritt) whose beliefs have always tested Frank’s rational tendencies.

Also entering the story is a pair of “Men in Black-“esque Agents, Powers (Leila Arcieri, who I best remember from the F/X TV show Son of the Beach) and Whitaker (Marcus Lyle Brown, who was recently seen in Premonition and The Great Debaters), who come to the sleepy town on orders from the White House in an effort to contain the mammoth situation so as to not “upset the voters.” Classic camp.

The mammoth effects are pure Sci-Fi Channel cheesiness at their best (or worst depending on your opinion on CGI) but the movie actually works past that and I think the cast’s chemistry really pulls the movie together, and that’s what makes the movie a decent viewing.  Even though the movie is generally pure camp, there are some actual emotional moments so you don’t feel like you are watching just another schlock fest.

Mammoth originally aired on the Sci-Fi Channel back in spring 2006, but its Special Edition DVD was just released in January 2008.  I definitely think it’s worth the rental if you enjoy a campy monster movie and I find myself utterly surprised that I could actually recommend a movie about a frozen mammoth that terrorizes a small town.

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