User Reviews

Actually, not bad for a Sci-Fi channel movie.

Essentially, it's 1857, and a small town in Pennsylvania is beset by a plague, and makes a Faustian bargain with the town's magi to cure it. They all get to live forever, but they have to sacrifice one of their number every year to a bad CGI ogre and can never leave the town, lest they disintegrate. They never get cable.

Oddly, no one ever finds this town for 150 years, until four college kids find it. Two wander into town while two others release the Ogre early. Well, the Ogre goes on a rampage, and hilarity ensues.

But this is a little better than most of the 100 similar movies that Skiffy buys from the Direct to DVD discard bin. The performances are okay, and it's better than the usual "dead teenager" horror movie.

The weakest element is the ogre itself. It looks like it was made by some Warcraft Nerd on his computer.

Ogre starts in the small (two buildings actually...) town of Ellensford in Pensylvania during the year 1859, there a terrible plague has spread through the town infecting & killing a lot of the population. Local mage Sir Barlett Henry (John Schneider) claims that by using his magic he can rid Ellensford of the deadly plague but at a price, with nowhere left to go & their friends & family dying all around them the townsfolk have no choice but to agree. Sir Henry uses a spell to manifest all the disease & evil in the town into a huge unfriendly flesh eating Ogre that demands a human sacrifice every year to appease it. Jump forward to the Present Day as four friends, Terry (Kyle Labine), Leah (Kimberly Warnat), Mike (Ryan Kennedy) & Jessica (Katharine Isabelle) find Ellensford while out camping in the woods. They discover the town is trapped in time & has been terrorised by the Ogre for over a Century, however the townspeople have had enough & decide to fight the Ogre & free themselves from the curse...

This American Canadian production was directed by Steven R. Monroe & originally premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel & to be brutally honest Ogre is crap. Yet another 'Creature Feature' with terrible CGI computer effects I think there's a factory somewhere which churn this type of film out for the Sci-Fi Channel, the Sci-Fi Channel sure likes it's generic lifeless 'Creature Features' & I have seen dozens of the things on there. The script by Chuck Reeves is a little bit more imaginative than usual although the end result is still the same, for a change the giant creature/insect/monster isn't a result of a genetic experiment gone wrong or the result of some experiment to create the ultimate weapon for the military which are the usual stand by explanations. No, here there's a small town stuck in a time warp that is a clear rip-off of The Village (2004) which is terrorised by a big Ogre that doesn't look too dissimilar to Shrek (2001) & then it spins the whole story around the old as mud plot about teenage kids becoming lost & then menaced by something evil that isn't a million miles off The Blair Witch Project (1999) or any number of teen slasher flicks. Unfortunately none of these elements come together to make a good film, Ogre is really slow going, it's boring, it makes no real sense (if the town is cut off from the real world where did they get supplies from like food, clothes, candles, bullets etc & how can this huge Ogre that usually roars & stomps his feet about generally making lots of noise sneak up on so many people without them noticing?) if you think about it & the special effects are far from special. The set-pieces revolving around the Ogre are poor, they lack energy or excitement & feel very flat. The character's are poor & I never felt for anyone who was killed, the dialogue is poor, the subplot about the evil mage Sir Henry goes nowhere & by the hour mark all I wanted was for it to finish.

Right lets talk special effects, the Ogre looks awful. The Ogre makes an appearance within the first ten minutes & it's an awful CGI computer effect, why didn't the makers keep him in the shadows until much later in the film? Why show such a bad special effect so early? It just ruins the films credibility straight away, it's hilarious to see the various character's try to act terrified around it when it just looks so poor. It never moves anything on the ground when it walks, it never leaves footprints despite being huge & it never really feels like it's there if you know what I mean, it just feels like a computer image on the screen that doesn't interact with anything else. The film has a really bland look & feel to it, the period costumes are alright but we never see more than two buildings at any one time & in my book that doesn't even equate to a street let alone anything approaching that could be described as a town. The gore is tame, there's a severed arm, a severed leg, a slashed open stomach, someones head is stepped on & crushed & the best bit involves someone getting their head bitten off by the Ogre & their headless body falling to the ground spurting blood from the neck stump, unfortunately we never do get to see the Ogre eat anyone.

If you take away the poor CGI computer generated Ogre then the film isn't too badly made but it doesn't have any style or substance. Shot on location in Vancouver in British Columbia in Canada. The acting isn't too bad to be fair, the kids are suitably attractive if nothing else.

Ogre is another poor Sci-Fi Channel 'Creature Feature' that tries to be a bit different but at the end of the day turns out exactly the same as any other except for the setting, Ogre isn't as bad as say Bone Eater (2007) (what is?) but it's still pretty bad all the same.

I don't quite understand some of the previous comments about this being a decent film. It isn't.

The acting is absolutely terrible to the point of being unwatchable. OK the script doesn't help with some true bilge. But that doesn't mean they can't put some effort in making it less laughable. Like how everyone that dies just stands there doing a comedy scream before the ogre.

And don't get me started on the Ogre. Fair enough its low budget but i've seen poor 5yr old TV adverts with special effects far better. Its frankly unforgivable for a 2008 film.

Which brings us on to the plot *****spoiler alert**** Its frankly crap with holes larger than Mars and inconsistencies galore. It actually starts getting annoying that even though the Ogre crashes around, trembling the ground Jurassic Park style, he still manages to silently creep up on people from behind. They then slowly turn round and scream for 10 seconds whilst the Ogre flaps his arms about and then kills them. For something that moves so slow you find yourself shouting 'run you moron'.

*****spoiler alert**** Nor is the reasoning of the Magistrate adequately explained. If you are as powerful and power crazed as he is presumably supposed to be, why bother taking over such a crappy backwater? Why not a nice town? Or New York? And finally the ending. Or rather the lack of one. They may have won the day but what then? They just wonder off all smiles without any word on how they are going to explain the stolen policecar and their brutally murdered friends.

In short, don't bother watching this film.

This is a hateful little movie, confused about what it is, although it is perfectly clear why it was made. Give the folks at SciFi a half-baked idea, throw in some frat boys and stick girls, alcohol, sexual innuendo and a bad guy of some kind (space alien, psycho killer, genetically altered bat, shark, ogre) and - voila! - another cellu/digital monsterpiece is, er, born. And why is it always so obvious that these movies are filmed in either Canada or a former Soviet bloc country? Moving on...

The story begins in 1859 Ellensburg, Pennsylvania, a town that has magistrates and lords, an odd premise for a setting in post-Constitutional America where there are no magistrates OR lords and the term "sir" is not a formal title, as it apparently is here. Are these descendants of Crown loyalists or are the writers completely oblivious to their own history? The movie doesn't really tell us. All we know is that Bo Duke is a "magi" - who wheedles himself the job of "magi"strate (ha ha) - who can save their town from destruction by sacrificing one person per year to save the lives of all the others. "One life for all life" is apparently the town motto. How feeding one person per year to an ogre - and what's an ogre doing in Amish country, anyway? - will preserve the town is not quite explained, either, especially since no one in the town ages, marries, gives birth or changes clothes over the course of the next century and a half. Their numbers dwindling, they're still letting Magi Bo brand one poor sod a year to give up to the ogre.

In present day, four "kids" head out on a camping trip to the Pennsylvania woods, ostensibly to find the mysterious town of legend - Ellensburg. Doofus finds it, promptly breaks his ankle and then sets about opening the door to the ogre's lair. Fittingly, he is eaten within minutes of breaking his ankle, as is the screeching, shrewy girl along with him. The other pair, Scrawny and Second Shrew, go off in search of help, which, of course, leads them right into Ellensburg, the town that doesn't exist. One thing follows another, the CGI ogre - green and broody, the Hulk crossed with a sea turtle - rampages, roars and attacks, people are eaten, certain truths hinted at but not really revealed and no one changes clothes.

Ogres might work better in a European setting, considering that the lore - of which there is plenty - places them there. Ogres in America, it just doesn't play. It's like Dutch cowboys - who would believe it and why? What for? Even Bo Duke and his magic zappin' stick can't do anything with this one, not even as a laugher. Another major bonk for SciFi Channel Originals...now there's a shocker!

aside from the stupid name the plot was average and full of clichés. but the absolute worst thing about this movie is by far the CGI. i truly was amazed when i saw it was released in 2008. i've seen better CGI in movies from the 60's. i only watched it hoping for another Legend of Earthsea but unfortunately SciFi really messed this up. you want a good ogre movie? go watch Shrek...that's a good ogre movie. the actors were kinda' bored. at times the acting reminded me of good porn actors. and also the props were...let's say insulting. in the final "kill the ogre" scene the 1800's arrows are anything but straight and although they hit the ogre they somehow fail to be seen...so just a piece of warning: BEWARE this is a BAD movie!!!

The computer graphics for the ogre himself weren't bad, but the costumes were closer to 1600's than mid-1800's.

The plot line was predictable and ridiculous, with many unexplained holes: why does opening the ogre's door allow him to freely attack the villagers? When two villagers are confronted in the woods, why do they stand and wait to be killed instead of running from the slow ogre (presumably in different directions)? Why does a shotgun blast fired one-handed with no visible recoil knock the ogre back several feet while three or four fired in quick succession barely phase him? Unlike Brigadoon, there's no suggestion that the village only appears infrequently -- in fact, there's a road leading to it -- so why is the local sheriff unaware of its existence? And why didn't he pursue his stolen police car? You can't convince me anyone watching didn't know that some idiot was going to extinguish a candle for no good reason and break a protective spell.

Sorry, unless you enjoy gore for its own sake -- and there's not much of that, considering the presumed carnage -- this movie has no redeeming value.

This film is one of those original movies by what is now called the SyFy channel. Yes, there are lots and lots of horror movies and science fiction classics from the 1950's through today, but instead of showing them they decide to make the most horrible monsters ever to grace the small screen. I can not believe these bad movies garner larger ratings than the classics, but then who would of thought that "Megashark versus giant octopus" would have been one of the top ten trailers of the year? This one has a setup that I can see what the makers of this film were going for. I kind of think they were sitting around a table and one of them said "let's make a version of the film the Village, but our monster is going to be real". And so they went with it and you the audience will probably not want to go there as the film plods along. The film features a town stuck in the past with the residents living out their days, immortal thanks to a spell put on the town. They will remain immortal as long as they sacrifice one person per year to the evil ogre. Well everything is going fine until a group of young people come across the town and proceed to do all the stupid stuff young people do in these movies. One of which left me rather flabbergasted, as two of them survive this nightmare and for some reason wish to go back. For what reasons I know not, I am guessing it is in fact to pad this film some, but wow what morons.