I say this to preface the fact that I have never seen a movie with less respect and/or understanding of this requirement than Mothman, a Syfy Original not to be mistaken with the Mothman Prophesies, which was a ghost conspiracy theory with Richard Gere. Instead of Gere, our primary star draw is Jewel Staite, who apparently was on Firefly and a bunch of other television shows I never bothered to watch, so all I can really say about her is that she looks about ten years older than the rest of the actors. She and her friends accidentally offed a dude and covered it up ten years ago, which led to her leaving West Virginia, but now she's back as an important journalist...who is on assignment to cover the Mothman Festival in that town. This triggers the appearance of our titular monster, who despite being described as a "relentless demon of evil who punishes those doing wrong," apparently was okay chilling for a decade waiting for one dumb broad to come back.
So, you ask, how does Mothman work? Why, with the well known affinity of moths towards mirrors, he is able to poke himself out of any reflective surface to getcha! I wish I was kidding! The first death immediately nullifies any potential creepiness of the concept, where the reflective surface is the side of a metal mobile home. Still, it might have been a sort of intriguing concept if not for the fact that the film makes it impossible to understand the limits of Mothman's power. In one death, Mothman murders via a car's rear view mirror, but later on is flummoxed by not being able to fit through a 24-inch television screen. In some cases, shattering the mirror slows down the monster, but in another part all that destroying the mirror does is have the shards magically come to life and stab into the person. Sometimes Mothman is able to punch through a car, sometimes he can be batted away by a slender woman.
The monster's motivations and weaknesses are similarly impossible to figure out. We're told that the monster only punishes those that pervert justice, but in the film's "climax" scene, he's just flitting around killing random people at the fair, including cops (I'm not willing to believe this is social commentary, sorry). In a flashback we're shown that he was responsible for a bridge collapse that killed three ne'erdowells, but it also killed a score of other people.* So is Mothman just a dick? As for weaknesses, who in the fuck even knows. Sometimes guns are capable of scaring Mothman away, sometimes he doesn't give a shit, sometimes he's caught in an explosion and just walks away. We're told Mothman is repelled by sunlight, despite the number of scenes before and after this where he's attacking in the middle of the day.
Perhaps the reason for this mess is that alot of the info for this comes from the stereotypical Crazy Old Man, played by Jerry Leggio. Ignoring the fact that despite living in the town for most of their lives, none of the cast has ever even heard of COM, they still immediately rely on him for information. One of the two inadvertently hilarious images of the film is the lead actress looking through his handbook on the Mothman, which is supposed to be full of creepy imagery but instead is nothing but vague scribblings of the sort seen in coloring books where someone refused to obey the lines.**
I suppose I should warn of SPOILERS when saying that in a shocking twist, he's sort of on the side of Mothman because of the guilt he feels for his own crimes (leading him to put out his eyes because apparently you have to see the Mothman to die from him, though needless to say like every other rule that's ALSO proven wrong later on). He gives the protagonists the means to "banish" the Mothman, but this turns out to actually summon him fulltime. But then he also gives the heroine some knife that actually does kill the Mothman. But then it turns out in one of the stupidest TWIZT endings even among Syfy Originals, the heroine is possessed maybe by the Mothman? So was the COM a double agent? END SPOILERS BUT YOU SHOULD READ THEM ANYWAY
Of course, even if there was anything approaching internal logic, the movie would be fucking terrible. One notable difference of Mothman from some other Syfy originals is that they actually were willing to show our monster man pretty early. This isn't a good thing, since Mothman looks like a garbage bag with red flesh light eyes and $5 wal-mart monster hands. The deaths are similarly boring, since all Mothman does is grab people and turn them into spilled chili or spill strawberry sauce on them.
Ultimately, I don't regret watching Mothman, since it's rare to see a movie this internally mindfucked. I'm not going to shittalk the writers, since imdb revealed they're generally staff writers for television (including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so the more likely story is meddling from on high, especially considering the climax is a fucking attack at a carnival, which is roughly half of the climaxes in Syfy originals. But, jesus christ, what a mess.
*: It should be noted that the actual Mothman attack is just it swooping down at the victims in a convertible, so it's really unclear how this caused a bridge collapse. No doubt Mirror Powers were involved, though.
**: the second inadvertantly hilarious scene is a shot of the heroine throwing her rear view mirror out of the car, to which he see Mothman sullenly waving its claws out of. Truly, the high point of modern horror.
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