Very well executed
Just so...so bad
Good concept, poorly executed.
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
View MoreI can live with poor CGI, if there is enough blood and a few laughs. I can overlook a shoddy, predictable script if the movie is fun. But this was so badly done and it wasn't even laughably bad.The worst, most tie breaking flaw is that the "monster" gets attached to the protagonist. He and the girl whose "pet" he's supposed to be bond, and he won't harm her. Then the monster-hunters, here specifically to kill it, tell us that it won't hurt her because she was kind to it, instead of "treating them like the monsters they are". As in, if they weren't being hunted in the first place, they'd be docile. Then the girl kills her pet anyway, just because, with zero rhyme or reason.The whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth. A bad B grade horror movie relies on humor to make it watchable. Making it heartbreakingly and senselessly sad instead makes it completely worthless, as a film.
View MoreI was not expecting anything extraordinary in this movie because of this being another low budget movie from Syfy. While many others hate Syfy movies (but keep on watching them for some reason), I enjoy them for what they are and Flying Monkeys is the best one that I have seen. The CGI is always bad in these movies, but Flying Monkeys has the best CGI out of the bunch. There are multiple actors with bad acting and there seems to be a strange unneeded anti-gun message thrown in, but I can overlook those things because of it being a fun movie. I don't need everything to be cinematic genius. This is a low budget television film B movie so I knew what to expect.
View MoreI'll be honest in saying that I was expecting to hate Flying Monkeys, as with a few exceptions SyFy's movies are terrible. Flying Monkeys is not a great movie, far from it in my view, but you can do with far worse. Admittedly, the dialogue flows poorly and reeks of cheese, the gore is very artificial-looking and trivialises the attacks rather than adding to them and the demon hunters and their subplot felt shoehorned in and like it was just padding out the running time. There also for me seemed to be too much emphasis on anti-gun control, I liked that there was a commentary but at the end of the day it felt overstated. However, while nothing particularly is top-drawer in Flying Monkeys there were assets that did seem better done here than in other SyFy movies. The movie is shot and edited reasonably competently, and while the CGI effects are not going to win any awards and look a little goofy they are proportioned quite well and at least they don't look like they only took five-ten minutes to make. The attacks are quite nail-biting and inventive, more so than usual actually, and the finale is exciting. The father-daughter relationship is something we have seen many times, but was quite touching here. The story of course is weird with the feel of two or more stories rolled into one, also ones that together don't particularly mesh well so the movie did feel muddled at times, but it is not too predictable and it didn't ever bore me. The music and sound effects fit with the atmosphere quite nicely and don't overbear the drama. We've seen these type of characters before, but while not all were necessary they weren't annoying. Even Wang had his moments. And who cannot love Skippy, he is very cute though he is equally convincing as a demonic monkey. The direction shows a director with more experience in this genre and one who knows how to keep things moving without it getting too overly-serious or overly-comical. The acting is better than average, Maika Monroe and Vincent Ventresca especially were quite good. Overall, weird but quite entertaining. A great movie it isn't, but I- and coming from someone who dislikes most of SyFy's output intensely - cannot bring myself to hate it. 6/10 Bethany Cox
View MoreAttempting to make up for his continual absence, a man's purchase of a monkey for his daughter turns out to be a form of demonic monkey-creature that begins terrorizing the townspeople and must band together with a group of hunters to take the creatures down.This turned out to be a solid, middle-of-the-road offering that had some rather fun stuff about it. One of the better elements here is the fact that the opening shock jump doesn't kill off everyone it comes in contact with, which is a pleasant surprise as well as the film's origin story for the creatures which is far better than expected and definitely has some good elements for later use coming out of it. As well, we've got a couple fine action moments with the multitude of creatures swarming over their victims in town at several big scenes, and the finale at the house is quite exciting. This is still plagued with the usual Sci-Fi Channel atrocious CGI and gore, but as well there's another flaw in the treatment of the guardians' search for the creature who seem shoehorned into the story without really doing much and their quest at starting at the front of the chain of possession halfway through the movie doesn't make much sense. Overall, this one wasn't all that terrible though.Rated R: Violence, Language and Brief Nudity.
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