Transmorphers - dir. Leigh Scott 2007 

I was planning on a little trip to Scranton, PA today, but it’s snowing like mad, and I’m a little wary of driving my Dad’s rear wheel drive Buick Roadmaster around the block, much less for 80 or 90 miles. Lucky for you, though decidedly unlucky for me, I happened to watch Transmorphers last night! Maybe if I write for a while, the snow will stop falling and I can get on my way.

The Plot: Inferior and indecypherable. It’s pretty hard to make heads or tails of this film, no matter how hard you try and pay attention. It goes nowhere, fast, then leaves you hanging indefinitely. I guess there’s some sort of human underground rebellion against the giant, shape-changing robots that have taken over the planet. There’s a lot of gun fights, but nothing ever really gets shot. TONS of dialogue that means absolutely nothing, and is often so muddled by the sound design that you can’t hear it anyway. Basically, you can’t really “watch” this film, but if you put it on and let it play from beginning to end, you can look at it for a full 85 minutes and gain nearly nothing.

What Makes it Watch-Able: To Caitlin, the person who suggested this, I tip my hat to you. It’s been a while since I’ve found a movie with so little that impressed me! The best thing about the film is, without a doubt, that one of the main “bad-ass” good guys is named “Itchy”. You can’t beat that. “Take him out, Itchy” “Itchy, it’s gonna blow!” When giant, transmorphing robots take over the planet, it’s nice to see that the rebellion took the time to thaw out Itchy to defend us. Seriously, best part of the movie.

There’s also a scene where the humans have one of the Transmorphers out on an operating table all cut open that ends up being pretty funny, and a scene in a locker room/sleeping area with about 6 moderately attractive women who could have fought all sexy, but didn’t.

About 5 minutes into the film, it becomes pretty apparent that the production had some serious sync problems, so almost every scene looks badly dubbed. You actually end up feeling bad for the actors, set designers, and everyone else who worked on the movie because the out of sync dialogue (which there is no end of) is uncommonly distracting.

Calling this movie a lame Transformers rip off is giving it too much credit–a bit like calling a smelly fart a lame rip off of the Mona Lisa. To sit through this film is to know despair. Thank God for Itchy, or I might not have made it.

No averted eyes

No breaks needed

2 out of 10

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