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Welcome to SYFY movie of the week, the first weekly review on pry0citer! Every week I watch whatever poor movie has been stuck in the 9:00 time slot every Saturday on the syfy channel. Then, after exposing myself to such torture I review it! Like a real movie! And what's our first movie? Mandrake!
Sorry I can't find a poster for it.
Okay so for these reviews I?ll give what impression I got from the commercials for this movie. Now what I got from these commercials is an expedition team goes to retrieve a dagger and run into a monster tree that kills them with it's roots.
well, let's just get to the movie. mandrake is about a group of mercenaries and archeologists who have been sent on an expedition into the jungle to find an ancient knife that belonged to a now destroyed tribe.
So the team heads in finds the dagger in a grave and takes it, awakening the evil MANDRAKE! Anyway the plot is pretty all over the place in the first have, there's too many characters. I know that sounds weird but there are just too many people in this movie. I mean, even the expedition team has too many members who all get separated in like, the first 15 minutes.
There's also a base camp full of supplies run by the company that hired the expedition team, but they die in the first half hour. Anyway turns out that the tribe they believed to be destroyed is still around and running around the jungle, attacking them.
For like the first half of mandrake there's a severe lake of mandrake, the tribes actually kill more people then the mandrake! They attack the base camp, they kidnap members of the expedition team, they sacrifice to the mandrake which is the entirety of the mandrake's appearance for the first half of the movie.
Why does the tribe slaughter them at all? I mean, if they were left alone you could assume whoever survived mandrake could go there and get out of the jungle, why have them die at all?
Anyway half way through the movie it becomes a normal syfy original movie, a group fighting an evil monster, and for all of 15 minutes that stupid tribe doesn't show up to ruin my good fun. they run from the monster, get killed by the monster, and try fruitlessly to kill the monster, just like they should in a syfy movie.
Y'see, syfy movies follow a simple plot line: group awakens evil monster, gets killed by evil monster, acknowledge evil monster's existence, try to kill monster, fail at killing monster, and finally kill monster with magic. Roll credits. It works and I was looking forward to it in this movie. Instead I got a bunch of tribesmen killing people, I didn't even know who the main characters were until half way through it.
Anyway the plot is dragged along till the second half but I won't ruin it for you. Actually the second half of the movie is pretty good. Sure the tribe shows up at some point but it's important to the plot. Actually how they have to end it is pretty interesting, the finale is well done even if the very end is a little predictable.
However, the mandrake itself isn't anything like I thought. I figured the roots were the killers and they would burn the big tree in the middle of the jungle. Instead the mandrake turns out to be a giant tree monster with tentacles that look like roots. Now, at first I tried to find some logic in this, it's not a tree monster just an animal camouflaged as a tree. But the tribe treats as a legendary mosnter, and the dagger is the only way to kill it.
At first I thought this was the straw that broke the camel's back, that this was the thing that was gonna make me say ?this movie is
**** stupid.? but actually I kinda warmed up to the idea of a tree monster, and it does make for a more climactic finale, even if it is a bit of a stupid idea.
Also the CGI in this movie isn't half bad, it doesn't look cheap and though the monster seems a bit out of place at first as it begins to reappear it seems to blend in, showing that it wasn't out of place because of the CGI instead because it was a giant tree monster. Go figure!
So do I recommend it? Well yeah actually. There are worse movies out there, especially worst syfy original movies. The first half is slow and trudgy, but the second half and finale make up for it. The CGI isn't half bad and the acting is pretty good, for the most part.
Well, that's our syfy movie of the week, and a pretty good way to start off this series. Join me next week for the next syfy movie of the week, Vacancy 2! I know it's not a syfy original movie, but the name of the series is just ?syfy movie of the week? not ?syfy ORIGINAL movie of the week.?
and keep an eye out on september 25th for our next syfy original movie, Sharktopus! Sharktopus! Just let that sink in for awhile.
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