Directors – The Kondelik Brothers, Screenplay – Michael Varrati, Producer – David Michael Latt, Production Design – Anthony Pearce. Production Company – The Asylum.
Shellie Stering (Helen Martin), Mark Valeriano (Luke Sullivan), Madison West (Chloe Coyle), Doug Burch (Agent Pendleton), Sallieu Sesay (Ranger Graham)
Three university students, Helen, Chloe and Luke, have built a robot they call Hornet that they intend for use by emergency services. They take the Hornet out into the wilds to test it out just as UFOs appear in the sky. They then face regular people who have been taken over by the aliens. Fleeing, they realise the only method to fight back is to send the Hornet up against the aliens.
The Asylum is a low-budget US company I have written about before here on numerous occasions. Since the early 2000s, The Asylum have maintained a regular output of low-budget disaster movies, monster movies and killer shark films – they will always be remembered for the Sharknado (2013) phenomenon and the Mockbuster – low-budget films that are released around the same time as big-budget counterparts with a near-identical title designed to catch the attention of those who don’t look too closely on video shelves.
Hornet is one of the films from the Kondelik Brothers, Jon and James. The Kondelik Brothers have directed several films for The Asylum, including Airplane vs Volcano (2014), Age of Tomorrow (2014) and Arctic Apocalypse (2019), as well as several for other companies with Dam Sharks! (2016), Behind the Walls (2018) and Jurassic Galaxy (2018), along with their producing Snake Outta Compton (2018).
Hornet was The Asylum’s mockbuster version of the Transformers spinoff BumbleBee (2018) and was released on December 7, 2018, two weeks before BumbleBee went into wide release. The Asylum had earlier conducted a spinoff of the Transformers films with their Transmorphers series beginning with Transmorphers (2007), which has spawned two sequels, although Hornet is unrelated to these.
This does offer the unique distinction of being the first Transformers film – well technically it’s not a Transformers film, it’s only a film about a Robot but we’re not quibbling here – to be shot Found Footage style. Everything is shot with handheld camera except for the scenes with the characters in an interrogation room, which opt for a regular camerawork. It is also very economically shot with a cast of five while most of the film, excepting the interrogation scenes, takes place outdoors. Mostly the film involves lots of running around shot shakycam style.
The robot effects are passably adequate for an Asylum budget. Similarly so the alien UFO that appears – this is the case of an Alien Invasion that serves precisely the point the plot wants to deliver and has no purpose in the story beyond that. Ominously, there is no credit for who was responsible for the effects.
Trailer here