Mammoth: Cold, hungry, possessed by an alien... Time to rampage!

A stomping good time!

Mammoth is a very entertaining B-movie. It starts off right with graphics of a spaceship flying around ala Mars Attacks!, and immediately gives us a closeup of the mammoth it decides to possess. The tone is set properly with the bungling, absent-minded father, played perfectly by Vincent Ventresca from The Invisible Man, the doting, oddball grandfather played by Tom Skerritt, and the long-suffering, surprisingly normal teenage girl played by our favorite robot psychopath from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Summer Glau. The dad gets so engrossed in his work on the mammoth at the museum that he naturally forgets his daughter's sixteenth birthday, and that he was going to take her to get her license. Add to that a meteor strike (which gets our poor frozen mammoth zapped) that takes out all electronics in the area, including vehicles, and dad looks like a schmuck, indeed.

We get a brief glimpse at the home life and see that dad is an emotional wreck after losing his wife, and his daughter is tolerating his inept parenting with the typical teenage attitude and angst. The grandpa adds the sense of normalcy, even though he monitors radio frequencies for inevitable alien attacks by people in gorilla suits. (Just watch the movie to see where that comes in. It's totally worth it.)

Naturally the daughter sneaks out with her little 'he's not my boyfriend!' friend, named, of all things, Squirrelly so they can go to a party out in the woods. Dad discovers she's gone, freaks out, but is stopped by FBI agents at his door investigating the meteor strike, and who know a lot more than they let on. The fun really starts as the dad agrees to help the agents only if they can do so while they look for his wayward daughter. On his way out the door with the attractive female one, the granddad helpfully shouts, "Try not to get her pregnant on the first date!"

There is a lot of action in Mammoth, and thankfully not too much gore. The movie is written with a lot of tongue in cheek humor, including a scene with a couple making out in a car (naturally slating them for slaughter), and it turns out not to be teenagers, but a couple who snuck out of the old folks home for a tryst. Watching their teeth jiggle around in a glass on the dashboard as the mammoth lumbers towards them made me laugh for all the right (and wrong) reasons.

The CGI on the mammoth is superb, at once looking polished and cheesy. I think someone borrowed Discovery Channel graphics, because the creature moves just like you'd expect a rampaging, alien-possessed mammoth to move. It's not all that cute, but it I find out there's a stuffed toy mammoth prop for sale, I'd be tempted to buy it. Apparently the alien in the mammoth must sustain itself by sucking out the life essence of its victims (at least the ones it doesn't crush), and that's a nice, non-gory thing to witness.

There's more to the storyline than just a rampaging, alien-possessed mammoth, which I was shocked to find actually added to the plot rather than making it drag. One scene with a dismembered hand crawling around, and then being subdued by a phone book being dropped on it, is a riot. The little hand has a lot of personality, kind of like Ash's demon-possessed one in Evil Dead 2.

Once again between the acting and the writing, this is a movie that I will watch over and over again, and am seriously contemplating adding it to my ever-growing Amazon wish list. It is a movie done in the proper, irreverent spirit of B-movies, has a ton of great one-liners, and is well worth spending time on which would otherwise have been productive!