Val Verde is a small Latin American country which produces and exports evil henchmen..you know, the guys who get offfed in all the adventure movies early on – the ones who spent several minutes shooting at the hero and then get popped by the hero’s one well-placed, over-the-shoulder shot.

In this 60Frames original show, we follow Carruthers, Ajax, Zaptop, Jax and the Uncredited Henchman (true to form, we never see his face) as they flee the attack and destruction of their evil henchmen training camp into the jungle where they soon realize that they’ve stumbled into a low-budget, humorous (for us, at least) re-make of predator.

Check out the first episode:

Written, produced and staring those dashing young comedians over at Elephant Larry, the 4 episode-show is most certainly funny but not quite ripe, in the same way that teenage boys amusing themselves by pretending to make movies are not really all that great…yes, this was a swipe at Smosh.

All snide remarks aside, the boys do a good job with what they have and despite what the Youtube cool kids say about quality not mattering for online video…which, as a viewer, I completely disagree with…it’s nice to see that the kind folks over at 60Frames do actually care about good videography, sound and post-production. Now, if they would just take some time to go over the script a little bit more…

The problem is really that, while making check-marks down the laundry list of action movie stereotypes, the story gets pretty much neglected. Hey, I’m a simple guy to please. You don’t need a 3 scene story arc that ties in all the individual character’s story arcs to make me happy…but I can’t help but feel that the show was conceived during an improv set one night, and that the guys did nothing more than create the aforementioned laundry list of action movie stereotypes and think of some way to tie it all together. Sure, it’s funny, maybe two episodes worth of it, but after that…who wants to watch anymore?

This seems to be a common symptom amongst the online videos created by stage-based comedy troupes…and one which seems to bother not just me. Only a few really troupes seem to have made the transition from stage to video elegantly: the Groundlings and Casanovas.

the Bottom Line:

3 stars out of 5. It’s a show to watch if your’re trying to kill some time at work. It is pretty funny but no where near compulsively watchable.