Really Awful Movies

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A hulking Bo Svenson in a bowl cut, is somehow more sinister than the ineffectual creature in Snowbeast, a 1977 horror show of a film that takes a minimalist approach to…well…everything.

These are some of the weakest special/practical effects you’ll ever see. Promise.

As skiers prepare for a tepid winter carnival in Colorado, billed as “an orgy of fun and games,” a banner descriptor belied by the sad-sack school gymnasium, hanging balloons and marching band that belts out Rule Britannia, one of their ranks goes missing.

Eyewitness accounts of a large hairy creature, neither human nor known beast, are met with skepticism…If horror films rewarded such queries with core competencies, they’d be 35 minutes long instead of 90.

The ski resort is owned by granny matriarch Carrie Rill, who instructs her grandson Tony to bury the tale, because it’s bad for business dontcha know?

Local strapping Sheriff Paraday obliges, saying the missing skiers were killed by a bear, rather than a fantastical Yeti creature roaming the backwoods, which looks like someone in a mink coat moving their arm into the frame. [Editor’s note: Interestingly, six years earlier, the actor who played the sheriff, Clint Walker — best known for Pancho Villa, The Dirty Dozen and the Western, Cheyenne — narrowly escaped death in a skiing accident at Mammoth Mountain, California. Walker fell off a chair lift, and was pierced through the heart with a ski pole].

But don’t expect anything death-defying here, as far as scares are concerned.

At the resort, as it happens, is former ski champ Gar Seberg (Svenson), who gets wind of the cover up and heads up into the mountains to look for his missing missus.

Snowbeast is notable for little other than a gregarious Svenson attempting (at times), a southern accent.

There’s also a bizarre subplot where the chalet matriarch’s grandson makes a very transparent play for Svenson’s wife. And right in front of him too!

Wacky (and unintentionally hilarious) made-for-TV fare.

** (out of 5)

Much like R.O.T.O.R., which features a Robotic Officer of the Tactical Operations Research, Cyborg Soldier has an I.S.A.A.C., or Intuitive Synthetic Autonomous Assault Commando.

But it’s not as if R.O.T.O.R. is held up as the pinnacle of originality, dismissed at the time (with ample reason) as a cut-rate Terminator or a discount RoboCop.

Cyborg Soldier, is a knock-off of a knock-off of a knock-off, and it’s a pretty precipitous slide from the aforementioned classics (and Universal Soldier too!), and the film’s hampered by a budget that’s not so much shoe-string as flip-flop.

Former UFC middleweight champ Rich “Ace” Franklin plays the cyborg.

He’s “The ultimate weapon,” and this is the ex-Ultimate Fighter’s first acting stint, playing a prototype not surprisingly, birthed from a secret government lab (where the best evil plots are hatched).

He’s a super-being, a genetically modified Ubermensch who speaks in clipped tones, and has never met a contraction apparently: “I DO NOT KNOW, I CAN NOT SAY.” Then again, that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to robo-speak.

And he’s pretty much indistinguishable from your average human, save for a complete lack of emotion (OK, he shares that trait with sociopath humans) and weirdly, he’s never heard of Jesus: “Who is this Jesus you speak of?” You’d think that his Frankenstein creators would’ve added deities to this nano-tech automaton’s vocabulary for Christ’s sake!

He’s on the run and kidnaps a lady cop, Lindsay (90201’s Tiffani Thiessen), while evil government ops try and track him down.

It’s up to the cyborg and new ally Lindsay to find out his identity, and this leads to a bunch of exposition from the awesome Bruce Greenwood about a secret plot to turn federal inmates into cyborg warriors.

Sounds like a plan.

R.O.T.O.R. asked the question, “How do you stop a killing machine from going berserk?” And the answer in Cyborg Cop is apparently, get Tiffani Thiessen to humanize him. She does this while draped in a too-big plaid shirt, and looks like at any minute she’ll bust out a Crip walk.

Cyborg Soldier puts two words that when slapped together, should mean action movie gold. It doesn’t measure up, but has one amazing goon-kill, and some serious explosions. Plus, there’s the compulsory bullet self-removal scene.

** (out of 5)