An intact mammoth is displayed in a block of ice in a natural history museum in Mammoth (2006), shown in Europe by the non sequitor title Outbreak.

This is yet another fantastically inept Sci Fi Channel cable movie. The absurd giant ice cube glows blue, does not need refrigeration to keep it from melting, nor does it make the room in which it is displayed the least bit chilly.

This is a set-up so pigshit ignorant one wonders if pod people have taken over the Sci Fi Channel's production teams.

A girl named Jack (Summer Glau, the robot-babe from the Sarah Connor Chronicles) has a cool old grampa Simon (Tom Skirrit of Picket Fences) who is a horror film fan who runs a little cinema.

Her dad Dr. Frank Abernathy (Vincent Ventresca, star of forgotten fantasy series' The Invisible Man & Prey) works with the magically unmelting ice cube mammoth.

The mammoth turns out to be a beacon that contacts a distant flying saucer culture. No, really, that's the premise.

Aliens send a device from outer space which crashes into the museum like a meteor, bursts open the giant blue ice cube, & reactivates the mammoth.

An alien now inhabits the mammoth's body, using the trunk as a vacuum cleaner to vampirically suck life out of people. Soon government agents arrive, with less than a day to contain the threat or the town will be eradicated by means of nuclear bomb.

Even if you like the FX for the mammoth, the budget was too small to show more than a few seconds of the beast. So the film relies instead on bad comedy bits inserted here & there, & nutty characters failing to register as entertaining because the script is so lame & their acting not much better.

Only Tom Skirrit is capable of investing any life or conviction into his grampa act, & he makes the codger's devotion to flying saucer lore somehow credible despite the story's largely intentional silliness.

I'm not exaggerating about the blithering idiocy of the script. It asks us to believe such nonsense as liquid nitrogen can be sprayed from a firehouse without freezing the hose, or that a mammoth can sneak up on people so quietly no one hears it coming, then vanish just as quickly without anyone being able to tell where it went.

The film for most of its length seems to have been intended for ages six & under, & for the least discerning kids Mammoth just might be as tasty as canned corn. However, when Jack's boyfriend is summarily killed for the film's one gore-gag, the impact is mainly, "Well gee, that's not appropriate in a film otherwise for preschoolers." So I guess it's aimed at no one.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl