Mongolian Death Worm is exactly the kind of smart/smartass B-movie that Roger Corman used to make. Its director/co-writer, Steven R. Monroe, got his start in television and worked some classic shows – like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Babylon 5 and Freaks and Geeks – so he knows how to work for the small screen. Its stars – Sean Patrick Flanery [Young Indian Jones Chronicles, The Dead Zone] and Victoria Pratt [John Woo’s Once a Thief, Day Break, Mutant X] – are also seasoned small screen pros. Put them together in a horror-comedy like Mongolian Death Worm and the result is pure, cheesy fun.
Flanery plays a scoundrel/treasure hunter named Daniel who is searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan – rumored to be a real treasure trove; Pratt is Alicia, a doctor working with Doctors for Hope – because Michigan has a lot of doctors. They are thrown together by fate – in the form of a Mongolian police officer named Timur [George Cheung], who wears a cowboy hat and talks like he’s in an old school western.
While Daniel is searching for treasure, and Alicia is trying to get vital medical supplies to a village that’s undergoing a devastating epidemic of cholera, there’s Patrick [Drew Waters], a manager of an oil drilling plant, who has a shipment of some big boxes that he wants shipped out of the country. Then there are the worms – they look a lot like a cross between Dune’s sandworms and the Graboids of Tremors fame [this is not a spoiler – we see a worm in the first ten minutes of the movie] – and the way they tie into all three main arcs.
Although working from a script by Monroe and Neil Elman, the cast did a fair bit of improvising and the looseness of the film’s dialogue suggests that they had way too much doing so. The actual story hits the usual horror movie beats, but it plays them as much for laughs as for scares – and provides plenty of both.
If Mongolian Death Worm was a theatrical release, it would fall into the categories of horror-comedy and goofy summer fun. Monroe elicits energetic performances from his cast and keeps the movie up tempo. Flanery and Pratt have terrific chemistry – and the film leaves open the possibility that Daniel and Alicia could meet again.
Like most Syfy TV-movies, I expect Mongolian Death Worm will get a DVD release. If so, I hope they go to the trouble of including a commentary track with Monroe, Flanery and Pratt. I expect it would be as much fun as the film.
Final Grade: B+