We are at a small carnival with some dwarfs, freaks, a small Ferris wheel that barely reaches a few meters, and a fortune teller. Something new to attract people is needed, and that fresh new sideshow is a gargoyle-like creature which they hope will be a new crowd-pleaser. The city sheriff is invited to the opening show, where the monster will be unveiled under the banner “God’s Greatest Abomination”. The town’s God-fearing pastor, however, doesn’t like this, and believes the creature is The Devil himself. And of course, the opening doesn’t go as planned when the monster tears itself from the chains, spreads its wings and flies away to get itself some victims. Who could imagine that happening. The city’s first victim is none other than the pastor’s son, and since the Winchester brothers are unavailable, he puts the law in his own hands.
And in the meantime we get a middle part where the monster is hunted in the forest by incompetent police officers, since the forest is the cheapest place to shoot horror movies, and to stretch out the paper-thin plot. Although the tone seems somewhat family friendly and at times like a longer episode of Supernatural, there are some gory scenes to behold and decent make-up effects. The monster seems to be a mix of CGI and animatronics with more screentime than I expected, while the characters are mostly pale stick-figures where you quickly end up rooting on the monster, as one usually do in a zero-brainer like this. This is, however, one of the better SyFy movies made for TV (that I’ve seen, at least) from their endless catalog of cheap monster/shark films, especially in terms of the technical aspects – and it probably works best for the younger audience.
Director: Sheldon Wilson
Country & year: Canada, 2009
Actors: Lou Diamond Phillips, A.C. Peterson, Vlasta Vrana, Dominic Cuzzocrea, Simone-Élise Girard, Dan Petronijevic
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt1397497/
