Pop quiz hot shot.

You have an ogre problem. He’s huge, ticked off, and looking for a human sacrifice. Oh, and you’re stuck in the 1800s.

What do you do? What do you do?

Not watching this movie would be a good start. To its credit, it does try to do something with the inept material other than throw a creature on screen to maul some poor hapless individuals. Ogre has a story to it, however ridiculous it may be.

One part M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and the other half typical Sci-Fi Channel Saturday night extravaganza, Ogre tells the tale of a small unknown village under a spell that gives them eternal life as long as they sacrifice one person per year to the ogre. They never age, they can’t have kids, and they apparently can never progress in technology.

All of this seems to be going well until a group of modern day hikers stumbles into the town looking for help, and an uprising against sacrificing their own begins. As expected, this seriously degrades the working relationship between the ogre and the townsfolk. To make his position heard, the ogre begins thrashing the various people unfortunate enough to stand in his way, leading to the usual array of blood and gore.

Surprisingly, the monster here is given decent screen time. Most of it is set low looking up at the sky as the ogre roars and shakes a lot, but it’s above the typical glimpses viewers of this TV fare usually get. The CG used to make it is a step up too, though still blatantly obvious.

The story dives into magical and all kinds of unexplainable curses to the point where it stops making sense less than 20 minutes in. The finale tries to be emotional, but in any movie on a budget like this, the whole thing is purely laughable. Performances from the leads are fine, including veteran low budget schlock actress Chelan Simmons.

For those who choose to suffer through the array of creature features tossed at audiences through the Sci-Fi Channel, Ogre is mildly amusing. That’s not saying this is a classic or even a decent monster on the loose movie, but a small cut above the standard junk the station airs.