Written by Evan Purcell, April 5, 2016, at 7:00 p.m.
Every Tuesday, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Alien vs. Hunter. This week, things get heroic with Almighty Thor.
Almighty Thor came out in 2011, the day after the first Marvel Thor movie hit theaters with its mighty, phallic hammer. It’s been on the Syfy Channel a bunch of times since then, sharing its many low-budget charms with the millions of stoners and insomniacs who watch Syfy Channel in the middle of the night. Keep in mind, however, that this movie should not be confused with Thor: Hammer of the Gods, another Syfy Channel movie that shares the same plot, characters, and themes with Almighty Thor. That one starred the oldest brother from Home Improvement, and this one… does not.
As you might expect, Almighty Thor follows our titular Norse god on an epic hero’s journey. After his father and brother are murdered, he’s tasked with keeping the Hammer of Invincibility away from Loki, who wants to use the hammer to destroy the Tree of Life. The hammer was forged inside the tree (as hammers often are), and is the only thing capable of killing it and destroying the world.
Our hero is played by Cody Deal, who was never on Home Improvement, and he seems a little too surfer-dude for the role. For most of the movie, he’s not particularly almighty. It doesn’t help that he keeps losing fights and running away from Loki.
Loki, thank God, is played by Richard Grieco, an aging star who invests the role with both enthusiasm and discomfort. He walks around with a giant, magic bone and summons CGI hellhounds whenever the movie starts to lag. He’s either covered in pancake makeup, or that’s just what he looks like now. Basically, he’s the single best thing about this film.
The rest of the acting is pretty memorable. Thor’s father Odin (now with two eyes and zero vocal inflections) talks like Zordon, the giant head in a tube from Power Rangers. He’s very Shatnerian in his ability to add random pauses in the middle of his dialogue. Here’s a sample: “I have dreamt… of the stars in the sky… turning black. What does this mean?” He sounds less like a Norse god and more like a robot grappling with human words for the first time. My personal favorite moment in the entire film is when Odin thinks that Thor has died. He pauses, looks at his feet, and then whines, “I wanted to die… with both my sons.” It’s a master class in what not to do when a camera is pointing at you.
Odin’s older son doesn’t leave as big an impression, but he has a pretty great death scene: “Give Thor a chance… to change… our fate.” As you can see, awkward pauses seem to run in the family.
Thor’s partner-in-arms is a Valkyrie-trained warrior named Jarnsaxa. She’s played by Patricia Velasquez, whom you may know from The Mummy Returns. She’s a Venezuelan actress, which might explain why some of her lines sound a little off. Now, I’m not talking about her accent (although it is pretty adorable that she pronounces “Asgard” like “Ass-Curd”). I’m talking about sentences that you’d expect an ESL student to say during a book report.
At one point, she says, “We must to get to the training camp.” Later on, she shouts, “You almost lost a hammer!” as if Thor had a bunch of Hammers of Invincibility lying around, and he happened to misplace one of them. She also says “parameter” instead of “perimeter.” (Not to be outdone, though, Richard Grieco mispronounces “escape” twice, so there’s that.) These are easily remedied mistakes, but a movie like this probably only had one or two takes to get things right, so if the dialogue was close enough, they just kept going.
Of course, the rest of the dialogue isn’t exactly Shakespearean. (It doesn’t even have that fake-Shakespeare gloss of the Marvel movie.) The whole script feels like it was written by a teenage boy who’s still grappling with the mysteries of his changing body. Let me give you some sample dialogue, and you can see how ridiculously phallic everything sounds:
“Feel the power of the hammer!”
“Think of it as the shaft of a spear.”
“I swing hard enough.”
“I want you to taste the bitterness of my rise to power!”
“The power of the bone… is the only thing that can release them.”
I mean, come on! That has got to be intentional, right? No Hollywood screenwriter would write dialogue like that without secretly chuckling to himself. I can’t even imagine what Sigmund Freud would think of this movie. He’d probably be chain-smoking his cigars by the film’s climax, when Thor and Loki smash their hammers together until sparks shoot everywhere.
The story itself is pretty nonsensical. People are randomly opening and closing portals without explaining why or how. Thor and his friend transport to the real world for about 10 minutes, before transporting back to Generic God-Land. We don’t know how Loki escaped from Hell or how Thor can switch dimensions. All the characters have superpowers, but no one explains what they are. Thor can jump over tall fences. Loki can bring back the dead, but not really. It’s very, very inconsistent.
But then there are moments when the movie seems to over-explain things for no reason. For example, Loki somehow knows that Odin gave Thor some vital information on his deathbed. To explain how he knows this, Loki says, “Your father spoke to you with his last breath. I can smell it.” Thank you, screenwriters. Now everything makes perfect sense.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of all of this is that the characters’ goals seem to change from one scene to another. The most obvious example is when Thor and Jarnsaxa start walking through a cave on their way to the Tree of Life. Thor tells her to wait behind, and she says she has to go with him. We cut to Loki for about 10 seconds, and when we get back to the cave, Jarnsaxa tells Thor, “You must go alone.” Did any of the filmmakers notice how inconsistent this was?
The rest of the movie has the same problem. Odin tells Thor that the hammer will appear at the next full moon. If he doesn’t retrieve it, the hammer will be lost forever. A few scenes later, Thor gets the hammer and no one mentions full moons ever again. Thor is constantly switching his mind between hiding and fighting. Odin and Jarnsaxa do the same. Toward the end of the movie, Thor decides to stay on Earth so he can protect it from Loki, but he’d only been on Earth for a few minutes and hadn’t interacted with any humans while he was there. (Except for a mugger. The only human with a speaking part is a generic mugger.) So why did Thor suddenly change his plans? No idea.
Everything leads to (spoiler alert) one of the most bugnuts crazy climaxes in any Asylum film. After losing his magic hammer, Thor goes down to Hell and starts punching lava until his fists create a new hammer. Then he goes back up to Earth somehow. Loki, meanwhile, hits the Tree of Life with his own hammer, thus starting the apocalypse. We see stock footage of wilting flowers, so we know that the world is being destroyed. Loki and Thor fight with their hammers and Thor wins (of course). Then the Tree of Life fixes itself for no reason and about a dozen extras gather around Thor to show their gratitude. If you don’t have the stomach to watch this entire film, please just watch the last ten minutes. It will be seared into your brain for eternity.
At every turn, Almighty Thor is aggressively charming in its cheapness. It’s the kind of movie that flashes back to scenes that happened less than a minute before. It has action scenes where extras run in literal circles because there’s not enough space on their tiny sets. The fight choreography is so badly staged that I couldn’t tell if Loki punches Odin in the balls. (I rewound the movie about four times, and the jury’s still out.) This entire movie is the dictionary definition of “direct to DVD.”
There’s a definite thrill in watching a low-budget movie embrace its total lack of money, but my favorite thing about Almighty Thor is just how weird it is. How can you hate a movie that has a scene where characters touch a wall and chant “gateway” until it turns into a gateway? How can you hate a movie where a Norse god wears a trench coat over his Viking clothes and runs through downtown LA until Richard Grieco summons hellhounds with his giant bone? I assume the filmmakers knew they were making something dumb and weird, and they just went for it 100 percent. They swung for the fences (with their big ol’ hammers) and this was the result. All hail Almighty Thor, the perfect mockbuster.
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Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, be careful where you swing your hammer!
