Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 21, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Mammoth appears at first glance to be one of the Sci Fi Channel’s typical creature features: a giant CG something-or-other is revived/genetically created and goes on a rampage, with a combination of government experts and civilians attempting to stop it. But Mammoth is different—which is not to say much good. It brings humor to the mix, at times verging on a parody of the modern low-budget monster genre, but the tone is wildly schizophrenic, to the point where neither the mirth nor the mayhem (pretty much negligible anyway) has much impact.
Our story takes place in Blackwood, a very Romanian-looking Louisiana town where Frank Abernathy (Vincent Ventresca) is the curator of the local Pleistocene Museum. An odd-looking mammoth encased in ice (which remains frozen despite a lack of any visible cooling agents) is the star attraction, but of course it doesn’t stay immobilized for long. A meteor crashes into the building and unfreezes the beast, which proves to be no ordinary prehistoric pachyderm—in addition to stomping on things real good, it also sucks out people’s lifeforces with its trunk. As we’re shown in animated-cave-painting opening titles that stand as the movie’s cleverest sequence, the animal got that way via UFO intervention back in prehistoric times.
That’s a heck of a goofy premise, and might have paid off in a fun genre spoof if director/co-writer Tim Cox and fellow scribes Sean Keller and Brooke Durham had settled on a consistent approach. Instead, after the silliness of the setup, the mammoth’s first murder is played seriously, and too much of the first half hour is devoted to banal domestic drama involving Frank and his neglected daughter Jack (Summer Glau, unrecognizable from Firefly and Serenity ’cause she actually had a character to play in those)—to the point where those who tune in late might think they switched to the Family Channel by mistake. A scene set at the tamest teenage party imaginable (Jack’s boyfriend invites her to “blast off and find our own party” by…sharing his iPod!) is soon followed by a raunchy sequence involving geriatric sex in a car (which does incorporate an amusing Jurassic Park takeoff). And the violent, tragic demise of a sympathetic character occurs shortly after a bit in which our hero asks someone, “Can I be frank with you?” and she replies, “You are Frank.” Oy.
Character motivations aren’t much more consistent—Frank is by turns enthusiastic and fatalistic—in a movie whose idea of humor is to have a little whoosh sound when a Man and Woman in Black pull off their sunglasses, or for a dumb deputy to step in a huge pile of mammoth poop. It probably won’t come as a surprise that the title beast never looks like anything other than a digital creation, but it is somewhat disheartening to see Tom Skerritt, star of the classic Alien, reduced to dropping lame sci-fi namechecks as Frank’s B-movie/UFO fanatic father. It may be refreshing for some to find a Sci Fi premiere that doesn’t take itself so seriously, but in trying to have its cake and spoof it too, Mammoth winds up falling between two stools with a very loud thud.
