In case you ever wondered why movies like "Schindler's List", "Ghandi" or "Saving Private Ryan" are so unendurably horrible, it's because they're so grotesquely unrealistic and absurd! Truly brilliant movies are plausible and terrifyingly authentic … like "Mammoth", for example! This movie has – hands down and without a doubt – the most intelligent and convoluted screenplay ever written and it's a downright disgrace (blasphemy, even) that this landmark of cinema shamefully got overlooked during the Academy Awards Ceremony in 2007. Dig this: a meteor, carrying an alien parasite, crash-lands in a museum of national history and invades the frozen remains of a 600.000 year-old mammoth. The humongous prehistoric elephant promptly awakens and goes for a walk in the nearby woods, disturbing an illegal teenage party, a senior citizen's sex excursion and the already disturbed family life of museum curator Frank Abernathy. He goes after the mammoth, along with his sweet sixteen daughter and her horny boyfriend, a CIA agent with beautiful big boobies, a retarded redneck sheriff and his own B-movie obsessed father (oh Tom Skerritt, whatever happened to your career?). Like I said already, sheer genius filmmaking, complete with profound dialogs, brilliant plot twists and some of the most advanced hi-tech computer engineered special effects ever beheld with human eyes. The alien invader is some kind of body snatcher and literally sucks the life out of his victims' corpses through the mammoth's trunk. Phenomenal performances all around, particularly from the gorgeous Summer Glau, who's in fact a 25-years old but effortlessly depicts a troublesome teenager. In short, this is the type of motion picture Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès envisioned when they invented and developed the medium of cinema! Make sure you don't miss it.

The end of the Ice Age some 10, 000 years ago reduced the numbers of mammoth across the globe, but over hunting by us is what brought them to their knees. All the more interesting it becomes then, considering that today, scientists are 80% of the way to cloning the mammoth using recovered DNA strands. It would be doing a justice to the species, something that this TV sci-fi channel flick does not do, and while Mammoth sounds about as absurd as they come, the makers embrace the absurdity and take a somewhat comedic approach to this. Although it could've been maybe a bit funnier, the film is amusing and reasonably entertaining to watch if you catch it on TV one afternoon. An alien probe crashes down on a museum in New Orleans, and more specifically on the room in which a fully preserved mammoth is displayed. Something inside the probe brings the giant back to life and it breaks out, and hits the town, crushing anyone in it's path, and sucking their souls out through its trunk. It is up to the Mammoth keeper Dr. Abernathy and his family to save the day.The role of Dr. Abernathy is the kind where Bruce Campbell would be perfectly at home in. He is a quirky nut. Had Campbell gotten involved with this Movie, it may have have been a great film. Summer Glau (Firefly) is kind of cute, and she is certainly not the helpless kind of chick. The mammoth itself is quite a character as well. It is less of a woolly mammoth and more of a zombie mammoth. This over-sized CG beast is kind of a Elephant caricature: with a trunk that is twice as wide as its legs, a mouth that looks decayed, and a pair of semi-reptilian eyeballs, and patches of hair which occasionally make it look like a French poodle (depending on the angle)Good thing then that the movie is played partially for laugh. It is still long way from great, and with so many of these movies out and about (somewhere) in the world, Mammoth is in no way unique, but it is amusing.

Goes for a satire of oldy sci-fi stuff from the drive-in era. Some of the cliché sight gags work, enough to sit through it.The story itself is pretty lame and poorly developed, an idea ripped from Night at the Museum. Some alien toy that looks like an xbox360 is used to animate a Wolly Mammoth from some bones on display at the local museum. From there it's just a series of "Do you recognize what movie this joke refers to?" type events. Everything from the "couple making out gets attacked" bit to the "Men in Black" jazz parades by in no particular order. Lines are corny (on purpose), and characters are all pretty dumb(also on purpose).The intentional hokeyness is funny in places, with the over-acting being the only real minus. An OK watch if you have nothing else to do.

How can you run out of ideas for a re-animated by alien technology zombie soul sucking mammoth? This film shows you how and it's a real shame.I appreciate that the film is not taking itself seriously (the Spaghetti Western showing it's intention for fun) but it takes ages for the comedy timing to hit form (in fact the autopsy room scene much later in the film) and most viewers will probably have lost track of the plot due to time spent flicking through TV pages, getting a brew etc.This shows a lack of concentration by the development team and jokes that may have seemed funny during the writing process clearly fail on the screen.Somewhat like The Faculty the film self references movies of its genre but unlike the aforementioned film Mammoth does this badly except on a few occasions (The Jurassic Park and "Werewolf howls" - Mammoth trumpeting parts). Having someone make movie references can work but they have to be logical choices and not used all the time.Too many good ideas are not fully realised and the film needs to decide if it wants to be a comedy horror or played straight as different actors seem to have different ideas.It is by no means the worst movie I have ever seen but it's definitely one for a very rainy afternoon.