This is a film from The Asylum, home of the ‘mockbuster’. On the off chance that you’re not hip to their brand of cinema, these are the guys who brought you such bootleg classics as ‘The Day the Earth Stopped’ and ‘Transmorphers’. The Asylum specializes in making unbelievably cheap retreads of successful Hollywood films, apparently in the hopes of tricking drunk people at their video store’s last call. They shoot fast, they shoot cheap and they use C.Thomas Howell much more than you might expect. The quality of their output is spotty, but you can’t salt the work ethic.
Really, if you’re looking for an evening of Badfilm, you can take your pick – the entire catalog is amusingly bad and impressively ambitious, given their sub-million dollar budgets. I picked ‘War of the Worlds 2’ because it had a few qualities that made it special to me.
The first is ambition. ‘War of the Worlds 2’ is a sequel to The Asylum’s own remake of ‘War of the Worlds’ from 2005. They made their own version of one of the most popular sci-fi stories of all time, and then did HG Wells one better by making a sequel. A sequel where people fly fighter jets to Mars. A sequel where the aliens appear to have been created in Google Sketchup. A sequel where the second billing goes to ‘Kid’ from the 80s rap sensation ‘Kid & Play’.
The sheer balls. You have to respect the balls.
The second is C. Thomas Howell, most famous for his bravura blackface turn in the seminal 80s affirmative-action comedy ‘Soul Man’. Not only does he perform in this thing, he directed it. What that means is that we know exactly who to hold responsible for his truly baffling acting choices.
Those choices include but are not limited to: speaking like Batman through the entire film, gazing into the middle distance even when interacting with other people, walking like a background dancer in ‘Thriller’ and generally playing the entire movie as if he’d been pithed early in the first act. Somehow C. Thomas the director never gave any meaningful notes to C. Thomas the actor, or the notes he gave indicated he was on the right track. In either case, I’m looking forward to his ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio‘ – maybe James Lipton can get him to elaborate on his process.
I can’t defend the pleasure I take in this sort of thing, but if you’ve got similar inclinations toward ambitious but misguided art this will definitely give your popcorn a purpose. Streams for free on Netflix. You could probably find the DVD somewhere, but even I think that’s ridiculous.
C. Thomas Howell in ‘Soul Man’ – in case you forgot:
War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave Trailer:
Christopher ‘Kid’ Reid in better times:
