When you sit down to watch a SyFy original film, you pretty much know what kind of experience awaits you. Bad acting, convoluted plot, and terrible CG special effects, these are all of the components that form films that are shown on SyFy. Most of the time, the films are unwatchable, but every now and then, a shiny “so bad it’s good” turd emerges from the compost heap. Unfortunately “Behemoth” is not one of these films.

When making a bad movie, the one thing you can do to find an audience, is to make sure that the viewer has fun. Some SyFy flicks are wall to wall creature on creature action, with a few human casualties thrown into the mix. The mistake that the crew behind “Behemoth” made, was that they tried to take the film much more seriously than it deserves. A low budget creature feature has no business being a slow burning flick, unless there’s an extremely talented director behind the camera. The creature doesn’t even appear until almost 45 minutes into the 90 minute runtime, and that’s just a quick glimpse at a giant eyeball peering through a hole in a rock, and a large swipe of what appears to be flex duct tubing.

The story never really materializes, combining elements of both cautionary environmental tales, as well as ancient world-changing catastrophic events. This is all somehow tied to Earth’s comeuppance, a punishment for our collective sins. As stated above though, these things are never really tied into the overall arch of the story, and little lip-service is paid to any one element of the mythology outside of a quick, unexplained mention. There’s a crazy old man, filled to the brim with apocalyptic theories of the world’s impending demise. What little explanation that is provided comes from his crazy ramblings that, until the giant “Tremors” knock-off emerges from the ground are written off as ramblings of a lunatic.

By the time the full scale of the creature is revealed, there are about 10 minutes left in the flick, and you’ve probably stopped caring a long time ago. There’s little to no creature/human interaction, no battle whatsoever, and a very small, almost completely bloodless body-count. Some movies find their way to the SyFy channel because of their outlandish, over-the-top nature. Some just have a hard time finding distribution. In the case of “Behemoth” it’s just a bad movie all-around. Even if you follow these films religiously, it’s a safe bet to go ahead and give this one a skip and wait for the next giant mutant creature cage match. There’s no fun to be had here, and nothing even remotely interested to look forward to.

I hate feeling like I’m being overly analytical of a film that clearly doesn’t deserve it, and had this have been just another fun B-movie romp, I probably wouldn’t have judged it quite so harshly. If you take your terrible film this seriously though, it deserves all of the vitriol that it receives. As far as Maneater/SyFy films go, “Behemoth” is a complete dud.