Screenhead

Remember how, when I wrote about The Haunting of Winchester House, how GREAT I thought it was that The Asylum was finally getting out of the mockbuster trend and no longer Asylumizing movies?

Sadly, that’s all gone as The Asylum releases 2012 Supernova, which is pretty much taking on 2012.  The only problem is that, of course, The Asylum doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the cash required to make those kind of special effects.

The plot, though, is actually pretty interesting–two hundred years ago, a star exploded and launched an enormous wave of radiation.  Sadly, two hundred years ago was apparently during the War of 1812, because it’s about to hit in much-popularized 2012.  So now a group of scientists is out to launch a whole load of nukes into the upper atmosphere so they can augment the Earth’s natural anti-radiation shielding.

I’ll admit, though, that The Asylum clearly does the best it can with what it has to work with.  What baffles me, though, is that they try to take on this monster projects with the most minimalist budgets you can imagine.  It’s like trying to eat a Ho-Ho the size of a Buick, and doing it with a knife and fork.

The result, however, of trying to load a bunch of AA batteries in a space designed for a Diehard is that the whole thing has this vaguely repetitive feel in which a simulated disaster happens, then we react to that disaster, then another one happens, and so on and so forth without much in the way of an overarching plotline to hold it all together.

There will be plenty of thrills here–watching people try to escape from things blowing up and whatnot–but are these thrills going to be enough to hold the overall picture together?  Well, that’s your call, in the end.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile,  isn’t so impressed and thus hands the newest Asylum knockoff a fair enough five out of ten.  it clearly tried, but it just couldn’t tackle what it set out to try.

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Talking to MTV News, Woody Harrelson revealed that he has landed a starring role in 2012, Rolan Emmerich’s upcoming apocalyptic disaster movie.

He says that his character is a "sort of modern version of the Greek Cassandra, a prophet nobody believes." Adding that he’s the "guy who’s been talking for a long time, the whole world thinks he’s crazy."

Harrelson joins John Cusack, Danny Glover and Amanda Peet in the film which begins shooting later this year in Vancouver.

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An in-depth, spoiler-filled review of the storyline for Roland Emmerich’s $200 million 2012 project has been posted on Latino Review, the site that magically gets access to scripts of major upcoming films. The review reveals that the disaster movie will focus on severe storms on the surface of the Sun that has a grave effect on Earth, causing earthquakes, tsunamis, dust clouds and whatnot.

The reviewer is not kind, however, as he notes that the film is full of clichés, one-dimensional characters and “heavy handed attempts at emotion and morals” that it “borders on self-parody”. I don’t know if it’s too late for a rewrite, but the film certainly needs one it seems.

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