Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: Mutant Chronicles (2008)

"What do you believe in?" - Severian

"I don't get paid to believe, I get paid to fuck shit up." - Maj. Mitch Hunter

"Any last words?" - Lt. Maximillian von Steiner

"Shut the fuck up." - Maj. Mitch Hunter

A pretty horrible flick with a convoluted story. Actually the story is as intriguing as a lot of comic books I've labored to read over the years, but let's say the execution of the film is pretty grueling. For starters it looks like complete and total dogshit. It looks like they used the same engine that produced Playstation 2 graphics back in the early 2000s. And the color is basically brown and gray the whole time. Besides that, is has an alright cast: Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, Jon Malkovitch, and this guy Sean Pertwee. I've watched him in four movies since summertime (the other three being EVENT HORIZON, DOG SOLDIERS, and SOLDIER.) I noticed his last name and looked it up and sure enough, he's Jon Pertwee (the 3rd Doctor on Doctor Who)'s son. Anyway, all of them are in MUTANT CHRONICLES!!! 
 

So the Chronicles is like an ancient Bible about Mutants. It is really old and foretold their coming and told of their subsequent demise at the hands of some hero. Before the movie begins you get this ten minute back story on how a long time ago at the end of the Ice Age some machine came from space and dug a hole into the ground that would turn men into mutants. Some dude defeated the machine, sealed it for all eternity and wrote a book about it that was stored for centuries in some monastery. Fast forward to the year 2700 and something and the world is divided into four corporations that are waging war on each other. No cities, no countries, the land is just divided up into four sections that are at war. We are thrown into the mix where Thomas Jane and Pertwee are soldiers fighting for their side. Doesn't matter which one, they're all the same really. Unfortunately for them, they've just blown a hole in the ground and broken the seal on the long covered up "machine". 
Very quickly, the shit goes down. Soldiers fall into this machine and are turned into "mutants" which look a lot to me like zombies. They are dumb and come after you and try to kill and eat you. That's a zombie in my book. Anyway, Jon Malkovitch is president of one of the corporations and him and the richest of the rich are taking spaceships and fucking off to Mars. Before he can split tho, he's hit up by Ron Perlman who is the head monk at the monastery I was telling you about. He (Brother Samuel) tries to tell "Constantine" that all is not lost and even though thousands of mutants are ripping apart citizens and society has went from total war to complete anarchy that if he gives him 20 soldiers, an airplane, and a nuke, they can stop this machine and everything will be totally cool.

So Constantine says yeah, go for it, I DON'T GIVE A SHIT, I'M GOING TO MARS WITH THE REST OF THE SANE HUMANS. And somehow (I can't remember) 20 characters are assembled to go battle the evil mutants way down in the hole at ground zero. Of course Thomas Jane is recruited, his picture is on the poster, but his buddy Pertwee was one of the first soldiers to be transformed into a mutant. We see him later though. Then there is a beautiful but deadly Asian lady, and another super hot monk chick who is bound by a vow of silence, a Spanish guy named Jesus "el Jesus"(!), a German guy with about ten names, an Asian dude and I guess like 14 more people, but I can't remember them either. I guess they're all supposed to represent some portion from each of the four corpo/countries coming together. 
The only thing I remember about the last half of this movie is they spend a lot of time getting to the machine and down into the thing itself. They fight a LOT of zombie/mutants, and pretty much all of them get infected and die off one by one. Perlman eats it, Pertwee comes back and helps them even though he's already a mutant, and even T.Jane himself gets infected and then gets a punk haircut and then kills everyone else. I also remember the machine looking like a cross between something in a cartoon and an old Nintendo game. Like they have to jump over fire pits and duck under swinging blades and shit like that. Anyway, yeah he seals it and thats the end. Should you watch this? No. Go bowling. Get out of the house for once.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014