Blogger's note: Spoilers for the movie.
This is the fourth movie in the Asylum Studios Package, and I haven't mentioned how boring I find their start-up menu yet. It's an uninspiring blob of color, and I can do better with five minutes and photoshot. And it's on every single movie created by Asylum Studios, not just this disc. Naturally there are no special features.
Anyway, this is the third movie, and yes, we are still crashing down the ladder of quality. As much as I hate 'Passed the Door of Darkness' at least that movie could figure out how to master camera angles. It also had a plot I could somewhat take seriously.
In the Skeleton Man, a small group of army personnel who are training in a park disappear, followed by a search-and-rescue team. (I'm tempted to do a Hot Shots 2 joke about the men getting the men out who tried to get the men out, but whatever). So naturally, since the army has lost not one but two teams, they now flood the park with several combat personnel, perhaps working with the local police and SWAT to find their missing troops, and I dunno, maybe getting some helicopters to scout the area first?
Or maybe they could send in yet another team, one that's a little more dumber. They have never met each other before today, and they go undercover in civilian clothing, because...that's the last thing the trees would be expecting? And trust me, the more time I watch these actors, the more I realize how much they are not army material.
Anyway these people get hunted by a creature. There's actually something really familiar about this set-up: A group of people walking through a forest being hunted by a creature with thermal vision. I really got deja vu when this chick says 'If it breathes, we can kill it'. Eh, I'm probably just imagining things. Because as we all know, Asylum Studios would never rip off anything.
Only this time, the commandos are not being hunted by any normal 'predators'. Instead they are hunted by.....
...Skeletor for some reason. Who cannot be killed by bullets, so naturally the team spends most of the movie trying to shoot him. His motivations for hunting the team are not really explained. It is established that a group of archeologists found his skull somewhere at the beginning of the movie. After that he kills the archeologists and gets his skull back in the first five minutes. And then...he really badly wants to kill army people in a park somewhere?
At times, this movie is hilariously random. During one scene, this team of top-notch commandos are about to go to sleep. Since it's been established that previous teams disappear one member at a time, our protagonist immediately breaks off from the rest of the group, walks for an unknown time in the park, finds a road, spots Skeletor somehow, steal's a guys truck, drives down the road while Skeletor helpfully walks across it, misses Skeletor, explodes the truck, crawls away, gets sliced by the Skeletor, lies in the ground for an hour, then gets accidently shot and killed by his teammates afterwards. Even Skeletor is sometimes random, hunting the team one scene, then going to a never-established warehouse and killing everyone there a scene later.
How does this movie end? Since bullets fail, the remaining survivors trap him inside an exploding building. Yeah, I'm sure that will work. I will say this movie did manage to startle me a little towards the end, with the credits suddenly rewound itself. Congratulations Skeleton Man, you managed to provoke a reaction other than laughter.
FINAL GRADE: 1 out of 5. Aside from the long, drawn-out shots of people running, this movie could almost pass for a comedy.
How did Skeletor manage to take down a chopper with a bow and arrow, anyway?
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