Lord of The Elves aka Age of The Hobbits aka Clash of Empires (2012)

Okay, confession time. I have a bit of a weakness for Bai Ling. I know she's not the world's greatest actress, but I find her alluringly watchable in whatever awful B-movie she turns up in.

And Lord of The Elves is a classic of that genre. Crafted by the masterminds at The Asylum as a mockbuster of Peter Jackon's first Hobbit movie, this was originally called Age of The Hobbits until the lawyers stepped in and its name changed to Lord of The Elves.

Then, without any warning or explanation, it suddenly underwent a bland renaming to Clash of Empires.

The Blu-Ray I have of this is entitled Lord Of The Elves, but for the sake of clarity I should point out at this stage that not only is the word "lord" never used in this 82-minute flick, but there are also no "elves" in it, nor is that word mentioned either.

Of course, both of these words do have connections with the rather popular Lord of The Rings movies, but that's surely a coincidence, right?

Inspired by real-world archaeology, the action of Lord of The Elves takes place 12,000 years ago on Flores Island, Indonesia (where examples of an early hominid, Homo floresiensis, were found in 2003).

But this is an Asylum movie, not a National Geographic documentary. As well as being populated with giant lizards, some of which can fly (like dragons), and giant spiders, the island is home to three types of human: the diminutive vegetarian Tree People, cannibalistic cavemen called the Rock Men (who ride the flying lizards on occasion), and a tribe of hunters that the Tree People refer to as "giants" but are simply humans.

When the Rock Men raid the Tree People village - to stock up on snacks for their cooking pot - one family escapes, fleeing to the land of the "giants", where they gain assistance from Amthar (Stargate SG-1's Christopher Judge), Laylan (Bai Ling), and a couple of disposable prehistoric red shirts.

Together, despite being severely outnumbered, they stage a rescue mission on the Rock Men's encampment in the hope of saving the captive Tree People.

Shot on location in the jungles and mountains of Cambodia, Lord of The Elves certainly looks mythic.

It just kind of falls apart when people get involved.

Eric Forsberg's script is simplistic, to say the least, and much of the acting is am dram level. While some bad dubbing contributes to this, I have a suspicion that Christopher Judge was the only true actor on set, and most of the rest were Cambodian locals randomly roped in because they 'looked the part'.

I'm sorry, I can't help myself...

Except for eye candy, I'm not exactly sure what Bai Ling or her character really contributed to the movie. Being generous, you could say that Laylan has a basic revenge arc, but she could easily have been excised from the movie and nothing would have changed.

Of course, I might not have been so keen to watch it. But that's a different story entirely.

The giant creatures, and the faux-dragons, are delivered as mediocre CG monsters, but actually they're not so poor that they take the audience out of the moment (come on, you're watching an Asylum joint, what were you expecting? Marvel Studios level CGI?).

The monsters help add some colour to the otherwise human-centric "fantasy" tale , which, barring its prehistoric setting, has an element of Willow about it as well.

Let's be honest, Lord of The Elves (or whatever you want to call it) is not a great movie, and bears absolutely no resemblance to any of the big budget Hobbit movies.

However, if you're a fan of classic cavemen movies, such as One Million Years B.C., Clan of The Cave Bear, Quest for Fire, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth etc then you might be able to eke out some silly fun from this nonsense.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)

It is inevitable that one day mankind will be superseded by ape-kind and I will be at the front of the crowd, waving my flag and cheering on our new simian overlords.

With that bias in mind, my predisposition was to expect greatness from Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (hoping it would wipe, forever, from our collective consciousnesses Tim Burton's ill-conceived abomination of 2001).

What I wasn't expecting was just how damn awesome it was!

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is, without a doubt, the most perfect piece of filmmaking of 2011, from Rupert Wyatt's direction and Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver's script to the motion-capture apes and the humans they interact with.

The plot pacing was superb, the foreshadowing excellent, and the beautiful little Easter eggs for fans of the original ape films (from Caesar's model of the Statue of Liberty and the name "Bright Eyes" through to line-lifts such as "it's a madhouse", "get your hands off me..." and a certain other key line delivered by a key character) simply showed how much care and attention had gone into this movie, and its respect for its cinematic predecessors.

James Franco plays research scientist Will Rodman, working on a cure for Alzheimer's, but a catastrophic accident during final testing makes his boss order him to have all their test subjects - chimpanzees - put down.

Will takes pity on a baby chimp and takes him home to be a companion to his father Charles Rodman (John Lithgow), a former music teacher and scholar now in the grip of Alzheimer's.

The chimp, who they name Caesar, soon becomes a central part of the family unit, especially when Will tests his gene-therapy on his father and it works.

Unfortunately, years later, the therapy starts to wear off for Charles and he finds himself in an altercation with his obnoxious neighbour, a pilot called Hunsiker (Stargate's David Hewlett).

Caesar jumps in to save his friend and ends up being taken in by the authorities and handed over to an animal control centre run by John Landon (Brian Cox) and his obnoxious son Dodge (Tom Felton).

It is here, eventually, that Caesar hatches his plan to liberate his fellow apes and take revenge on mankind.

That brief summation of the early scenes of the movie doesn't even begin to do it justice.

As well-rounded as the human characters are, the film truly belongs to Caesar - the CGI ape created by motion-capture technology and based upon the performance of the incredible Andy Serkis (already renowned for brining life to such diverse characters as Gollum and King Kong).

Given that the bulk of his feelings and emotions are expressed through sign language, gestures or facial expressions, Serkis has made Caesar an incredibly complex and well-rounded character.

If he doesn't get some mighty gong for his performance here then there truly is no justice in the world.

You also have to feel slightly sorry for Tom Felton, having played the 'bad boy' of Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy, for all these years, his first post-Harry Potter role is just as objectionable. But he suitably slimy as Dodge and gets his just desserts at the hands of the apes he loves tormenting.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is a classic 'science-experiment-gone-wrong' movie and naturally ends with a breath-taking action sequence that makes great use of the streets of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, that's not the end of things because as the closing credits hint, and picking up on clues sown throughout the movie (man's first manned mission to Mars, spacecraft disappearing etc), the groundwork was been laid seamlessly for the inevitable sequel.

And it couldn't come soon enough...