Morlocks (2011)

Waste of time

Very well executed

Really Surprised!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

After opening a wormhole into the future, a scientific research team and a military cover try to provide security against a swarm of ravenous creatures that have escaped from the future into the present time.This one definitely has it's moments, namely from the fact that the creatures here are definitely quite vicious and generate some brutal kills for their part, leading to a lot of blood-splatter throughout. The showdown in the lab finale also generates some really intriguing action shootouts due to the overwhelming swarm of creatures appearing and the attempts to take them out, though there is some problems in the fact that there's a little too much CGI in here, as the creatures, bloodshed and various high-tech weaponry are all rather poorly animated and the quantity gets distracting. Also, the technobabble about time-travel and wormholes, with all that scientific jargon, gets confusing after awhile since it doesn't seem to provide any clues as to what's going on and doesn't really help the film out, though this is certainly far from the worst that they've provided.Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Adult Language.

I often find SyFy movies to be mostly awful movies, but I keep watching them for the novelty value and also to see whether they are ever going to make a worthwhile movie to match their TV series. Well actually, they did do The Lost Future, I personally found that surprisingly good if imperfect. Morlocks sadly is to me another bad movie of theirs.Is it their worst? No, Morlocks is nowhere near as unwatchable as Titanic II, Quantum Apocalypse, Battle of Los Angeles, Alien vs. Hunter and 2010: Moby Dick. However it is still not very good. It gets some good points for a good idea and decent turns from Christina Cole and Robert Picardo, though both have shown they can do better with better material.Production values: Pretty lousy really. Morlocks is not the very worst-looking SyFy movie, that's possibly Titanic II, but there's nothing exceptional in how it looks. It is lit in a rather dull way, complete with haphazard editing. The CGI effects are awful, quite possibly the cheapest and most crude effects I've seen in a while, the Morlocks are horribly rendered and don't look scary at all. I do realise that Morlocks, like all of SyFy's resume, is a low-budget film, but I don't think that excuses a lack of quality in the finished products. Like I've said before, it seemed as though they were going for quantity in alternative to quality.Music: Nothing special, in fact rather forgettable and obtrusive even at times. Also a lot of it is in a slow tempo/rhythm, giving a furthermore sluggish feel to the film.Script: To be honest, I wasn't expecting good scripting from SyFy. Even in their few more tolerable efforts, it is one of the weaker assets. It was pretty much what I was anticipating really, cheesy dialogue, a lot of sci-fi babble and technical jargon. In regard to the latter, I got the feeling that even the writers didn't know what they were talking about. The whole "the Morlocks were here" exchange(especially the groan-worthy "because they're American? I don't know" bit) was particularly stupid.Story: Loosely based on HG Wells' The Time Machine, the idea was really good and had the potential to be so. The execution however was bad, worse than bad more than often. The story is told in a very predictable and pedantic fashion, with none of the Morlocks scenes coming across as thrilling, and the build-ups have a complete lack of suspense. Also those looking for an adaptation of The Time Machine will be disappointed, it bears almost no similarity and is no different to almost everything else SyFy has done, complete with contrived motivations and an anti-climatic ending.Direction: One word, incompetent. Far too laid back, with a lot of scenes lazily shot and staged in a clumsy and uninspired manner.Characters: Typical SyFy clichés, the bad guy, heroic officer, beautiful damsel-in-distress and so forth.Acting: Nothing great. Christina Cole is not great, but also not bad, at least she is more than a pretty face. Robert Picardo deserves better, but has some surprising subtlety in his performance. A decent actor David Hewlett may be, but can somebody give him a more interesting character to play, one that isn't too similar to everything else he's done, and one that enables him to do much less than moaning and whining.Overall, not the worst I've seen from SyFy, but it really ruined the potential of one of the better ideas they have ever had. 3/10 Bethany Cox

If I say this is a SyFy flicks then geeks immediately should know that it will be trash. But it's funny that all people who hates SyFy flicks still watch their new ones again and again. The story is mostly okay and when it started I thought, hell yeah, this is going to be a really bloody flick. But after the opening credits the budget was gone I guess and they used some cheap CGI effects to create the 'morlocks'. The stupidest thing is the fact that most of the blood was also CGI. The acting was rather okay but I kept watching it just to see how bad the CGI was. When will SyFy finally spend some money on good CGI? I wasn't involved with the characters at all, do I need to say more? For me no Mor(e)locks.

"Morlocks" are a race from H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine". When I see this in the TV listings, I'm thinking SyFy has come up with a fun new spin on the story. But other than the fact that time travel figures in to the story peripherally, there's no similarity at all. Even for SyFy, known for its dreadful production values, this is an all-time worst.The CGI is so bad it would have been embarrassing in the 90s. Today, it's unforgivable. The director (if they actually had one) gave up even having the actors pretend to fire their guns and just animated muzzle flashes on them--even on the guns that weren't aimed at the enemy.Things like breaking glass and tanks busting through walls look like they were animated by first-week film school students who just started learning CGI.David Hewlett shows that he is perfectly capable of playing the exact same character in everything he does, as does Robert Picardo.I have no idea how I managed to watch the whole thing. But at no point did I consider my time well spent.