“Mammoth”

Tonight at 9 on SCI FI

(two stars)

WHY is this mammoth so angry?

For tens of thousands of years, it stood frozen (andquite dead) in a block of ice, andnow it has come miraculously to life following the crash of a mysterious meteor into a museum in which it was on display.

You’d think a prehistoric wooly mammoth – the lone survivor of a species long presumed extinct – would be happy to be alive after all that time.

But no – this mam moth is simply not interested in engaging with the modern world, other than rampaging through it.

Hey, mammoth – what is your problem?

At one point in this new made-for-TV monster flick premiering tonight on SCI FI Channel, the museum director (Vincent Ventresca) explains that, while mammoths were herbivores, they were quick to defend themselves when they felt threatened.

Apparently, this particular mammoth feels threatened a lot, especially when there are people around to be stomped on.

Still, it is not completely clear why this mammoth is so touchy, although this wouldn’t be much of a B-level, drive-in quality movie if the mammoth in the title was friendly and precocious.

When we tune in to see a movie called “Mammoth,” we expect to see an angry hairy beast flinging bystanders aside with his trunk or impaling them with his huge tusks.

This mammoth uses both methods to defend himself, which makes for some action scenes that would have been more effective if the computer-generated special effects used to bring the mammoth to life were not so unpersuasive.

In many shots, we don’t even see the whole monster. The scenes are either too dark or he’s too big to fit into the frame.

Naturally, the central conflict in the movie concerns the effort to neutralize or kill this beast – an effort spearheaded by the nerdy museum director, with help from his teenaged daughter (Summer Glau) and eccentric father (Tom Skerritt).

The bottom line is: A TV movie about an extinct mammoth come violently to life should have and could have been a lot more fun than this.