Monster Hunters, not to be confused with Monster Hunter starring Milla Jovovich. Scratch that thought. Because half the thing about any of these Asylum “mockbusters” is that confusion is at least half of the deal. So many Asylum movies ride on the coattails of the advertising spends of much bigger movies, maybe peeling off a few of the less wary hoping for more Milla Jovovich or whoever. Another tranche of viewers come to see what new depths have been plumbed by, say, The Twisters or Road Wars: Max Fury. Yet others see The Asylum as being on a bit of a mission – the bigger and more complicated Hollywood movies get, the more of a need for an outfit like this, which just feeds stuff in one end and out it pops at the other. As the old saying nearly goes, never ask what’s in the sausage.
Tom Sizemore in this case. He is, or was (he’s died since Monster Hunters was made ), a bit of a fixture with The Asylum for a while, turning up in films like Nazi Overlord (not/to be confused with Overlord). Bullet Train Down (nothing at all to do with Bullet Train). Or 2021 War of the Worlds (guess) to name but three of many.
Sizemore lends the films a certain gravitas and because the deal is clearly “one day’s work, max”, he tends to play desk roles. Here he’s a high-up in the army barking orders down the phone at intervals to the actual stars of this film – Anthony Jensen, as First Sergeant Shepherd, the near-retirement superior office on a base keeping an eye on post-Roswell UFO sightings. Connie Jo Sechrist as Specialist Stella Fairchild, Shepherd’s younger, smarter would-be replacement. Mark Valeriano as the boffin-in-a-Hawaiian-shirt Robert Drake. And Cherish Michael as Matteo, a ballsy and shouty shoot-first-ask-questions-later-if-ever kind of soldier. She’s more or less got “eat me first” stencilled on her back.
It is the “do they come in peace?” plot this time around, an alien spaceship – invisible (handy) – crashlanding on planet Earth and disgorging several very unsavoury creatures, which Shepherd initially goes out to investigate. Fairchild, Matteo, Drake and other soldiers, who will act as a palate cleanser between main courses, follow on. The fun comes from guessing who’s going to die first. Is it Matteo, or that barely introduced black guy? The black guy, are we still doing that?
So, yes, it’s kind of fun, in a guessing-what’s-coming kind of way. The production values are a lot higher than they were in the days of Sharknado and Megalodon and that wave of Asylum monster movies. Some things still remain The Asylum staples. In the rush to get things out, editing seems to go a bit by the wayside. This has the effect of making the actors look a bit crap – that bit where they’re just standing there not acting, reacting or doing anything at all would be in the trash in a film that had spent five more minutes in post production.
But they are a decent bunch of actors doing a decent and committed job. I particularly liked Valerian’s Bob – a dude-ish boffin is a breath of fresh air. I also liked Michael’s relentlessly unimpressed Matteo.
What’s not entirely clear – again a victim of the rush – is whether this is set in a world where alien “first contact” has already been made. It has, we hear, early on. Then it hasn’t. Then it has again. It’s a bit confusing but not entirely a problem. Really this is about people running around in scrubby desert while an alien, often invisible, plays whackamole with them.
We don’t see much of the alien, which is a good thing because the effects spend is not very high, not even on conceputal stuff. The spaceship, for instance, is about 90 per cent the one from Close Encounters.
The Asylum say they’ve never lost money on a movie and it’s obviously because they don’t spend any on them. They’ve made a successful business doing it their way and are clearly not aiming to make art but product. It’s Roger Corman’s old business model updated, which for all its exploitational chutzpah, also had something honest about it. I have a warm spot for them.
Monster Hunters – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
