The Fallen Ones starts with archaeologist Matt Fletcher (Casper Van Dien) in the desert discovering the mummified remains of a 42 foot tall giant, now there's something you don't see everyday. Matt is working for property developer Morton (Robert Wagner) who wants to build a holiday resort on the land & he calls in fellow archaeologist Angela (Kristen Miller) for reasons I'm unsure of. Anyway they both try to figure out what they've got on they're hands when some of the team go missing, Morton calls in security guy Ammon (Navid Negahban) to handle the situation. Meanwhile ancient text translator the Rabbi Eli Schmidtt (Tom Bosley) translates some ancient text (as he would) & is shocked to learn of a evil prophecy in which these giants will rise up & take over the world for the Fallen One, or something like that. It's up to Matt to save the day & the whole planet...
Written & directed by Kevin VanHook, who also has a small role in the film as the ancient warrior leader at the start, I personally thought The Fallen Ones was a terrible film & it's as simple & straight forward as that. There are so many things that are just plain bad about The Fallen Ones both on a technical & conceptual level, the script doesn't make a whole lot of sense & it doesn't really get going until the final 20 odd minutes by which time I had almost lost the will to live. The character's are awful & as clichéd as you like, the dialogue is bad as in very, very bad & the entire film is predictable, I mean it's not going to come as a surprise that Casper Van Dien is going to save the day is it? It's not a huge surprise that the mummified giant is going to come back to life either so why wait until over an hour into the film when most of the audience will be in some sort of comatose state. This is bad, very bad. You have been warned.
Director VanHook doesn't impress, the fight scenes are absolutely awful & why dress your bad guys up in a horrible shade of purple? They look naff. To give it a bit of credit the special effects on the giant Mummy itself are actually good although there's not that many of them since he doesn't make an appearance for over an hour, there are also some normal sized Mummy's that look to have come straight from the set of The Mummy (1999), unfortunately these aren't used to any great effect & in fact are wasted as some comic relief. The mechanical Mummy was a pretty good idea but looked silly & there is no way on Earth that all those people inside could work in sync with each other to operate it, actually the more I think about the more ridiculous the idea is. Forget about any scares, tension or atmosphere & don't even think about any gore or violence because there isn't any.
Technically The Fallen Ones isn't anything special & apart from the impressive giant Mummy effects there's little her to get excited about. The ghost CGI & water effects are terrible, it was made-for-TV & it's shows. The acting was poor, Wagner looks embarrassed & this is probably the only thing the likes of Dien & Bosley can get these days.
The Fallen Ones is a bad film, there's no two ways about it as far as I'm concerned. Not recommended on any level or in any way, one to avoid.
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"What do you mean where did he go? He's a 42 foot Mummy." Terrible.
Mummified because I felt my brains being pulled out my nostrils
"The fallen ones" falls under the waste of life (WOL) category. I am sad that I am now two hours older was not entertained. My other family members also watched this movie and threw demeaning comments at the screen and rooted for the mummy. I felt sorry for the actors (Wagner). I have read other negative reviews and cannot add anything else to this movie other than it could be reduced to 25 minutes so it could take a 30 minute slot on TV without any loss of plot. It reminds me of a dish that has several good ingredients but when served is bland with no flavor at all. In my humble opinion, The 42 foot mummy should have been 8-10 feet and improved the plot by taking out the mystic and replacing him with several people who want to denigh the facts and want DNA samples for evil reasons. The heroes are discredited and tossed on there ear by their colleges. Later after everything was screwed up by the evil people. The heroes would save the day and prove everyone wrong.
Strangely i found myself enjoying it
I cant quite put my finger on why i enjoyed The Fallen Ones but i did like Van Diens,Navid Negahban and Tom Bosleys performance..i think they rose above the scripts limitations very well.. Unlike a lot of the low budget B movies out there,there were very few really bad lines and most of the plot made some kind of sense but the major letdown for the film came from the SFXs especially the cgi work which was mediocre at best,i could'nt recommend anyone actually go out and buy the film but i didn't think id wasted my time watching it and would suggest its worth seeing if they repeat again it on the SciFI channel.. One last thing i would like to add is about the music by Kevin Kaska and William Richter which i thought was excellent and of a much higher quality than you would normally find in this type of movie..