"Hold on… Let's think about this for
minute…" Words uttered on many an occasion in a horror
movie featuring young stupid adults who have just killed
somebody on accident. They'll bury the body or flee the
scene or setup a retard to take the fall or try to fix the
scene… and it's always a mistake because now the monster, the
mom, the bum that's now a spectre is going to kill them all,
just as they deserve. Today's dumb young adults are from
the SyFy original 'Mothman' and their cover-up plan was
particularly stupid.
Kate (Jewel Staite), Derek (Connor Fox), Mindy (Susie
Abromeit), Casey (Michael Ferrero) Sally (Jessica Erin
Sylvia), Jared (Michael Aills) and Jared's little bro Jamie
(Alex Hardee) are funning it up at the lake one evening but
little Jamie is being kind of obnoxious. We figured he
was gonna die in some way, and we were secretly hoping it
would come sooner than later. Our young adults decide to
play a trick on Jamie who drowns in the process and Kate is
ready to report this to the West Virginia authorities… but
let's think about this for a minute. They have had a
couple of beers and obnoxious kids accidentally drowning is
clearly a capital crime in West Virginia so let's say he
bumped his head and drowned on accident. Then let's have
every one of our young adults bash Jamie in the head with a
rock, including his loving brother, which will apparently
simulate the occurrence of a kid diving in shallow water and
bumping his head. I'm thinking where we didn't have a
crime scene before, we most definitely have one now, but
apparently the WVA investigators are kind of dumb.
Ten years pass, Kate has moved on and
is a reporter in D.C. and has no intention to ever go back to
Pleasant Point WVA until her boss forces her back home to
cover the Mothman festival. A festival dedicated to a
vengeful monster who feeds on blood and
murders people. That is
outstanding. Anyway, the band is back together but
nobody is really happy to see Kate, except for Derek who is
still digging on her, because they feel she abandoned
them. They did bash in the head of a dead kid with a
rock, but they don't seem to have too much of a problem with
that. That nonsense aside the Mothman festival starts,
which is great for this movie because it introduces us to one
the more amazing characters in low budget cinematic history,
that being Frank the nutbag (Jerry Leggio). Frank is
that guy who has all kinds of evil monster knowledge, sounds
like a loon, and has probably survived an attack or two.
Frank is also blind, probably by his own doing which makes his
crazy that more appealing. Frank informs Kate and Derek
that the Mothman exacts revenge on those who weren't punished
for doing wrong, and that would them and their friends.
Now it's dying time as The Mothman, only able to use
reflective surfaces to enter our world, gets down to the
business of killing young adults. It's brutal, it's
ugly, and it looks like its curtains for all of them, unless
Frank the whackjob has a solution to save the few that are
left. I was actually pulling for the Mothaman on this
one, at least until the Mothman turned into kind of an
asshole.
This movie was actually kind of educational. Before
seeing this I had thought that the Mothman was something that
Sci-Fi had made up, but no… the Mothman is real. Or at
least as real as any mythical monster that scares children
like The Boogeyman or Dick Cheney and to be honest I didn't
find director Sheldon Wilson's monster movie all that bad, or
at least I found it significantly better than the other Sci-Fi
monster I saw from the director in 'Carny'. True enough
our young cast of attractive young adults did tend to overact
at times and the Mothman himself was kind crappy looking in
full body shots, though it looked fairly ominous in close ups
and in smaller shots when it was crawling out of televisions,
broken mirrors or silver mobile homes. But considering
the standard setup and the standard execution of everything, I
still found the movie kind of enjoyable. Fun even.
Part of this was because of the overt stupidity of bashing a
dead kid in the head with a rock which immediately removed any
sympathy we might've had for these loons, but the majority of
it was Jerry Leggio and his tour de force as Frank the old
psycho. If scenery were Skoal, then Jerry Leggio had
this movie between his cheek and gum.
We even enjoyed the mythological setup for the Mothman, based
on the tried and true premise of evil whitemen and Native
American burial grounds which gives the Mothman a legitimate
reason to slaughter stupid young adults. Until they
ruined it all. I mean I know there's a fun event going
on that has Ferris wheels and stuff, and for some reason all
movie monsters simply hate fun events and Ferris wheels, but
when the Mothman started wrecking the festival we were
wondering why he was slaughtering folks who didn't do anything
to anybody which messed up the mythology the writers took the
time to setup. Then there was the way the Mothman was
eventually dispatched. Shooting at the Mothman didn't
work, even though that didn't stop anybody with a gun in the
movie from mindlessly shooting at the monster over and over
again, but our heroine was given a lethal Mothman dispatching
weapon by someone who wanted the Mothman to win. That's
a little dumb.
'Mothman' did lose its way the longer it went on but it least
it wasn't a total loss.
