Cheesy effects and great actors. What a combo!

Sweet, mad as a hatter Sean Connery is the only reason I sat down to watch the classic train wreck that is Meteor. Already old enough to feel he needed to wear a toupee, but still exuding that Connery charisma, he holds his own against other stellar actors who got suckered into this thing.

Meteor was plagued by all sorts of problems, mostly due to the folks behind it having grandiose dreams of a blockbuster, but not enough resources or people skills to pull it all together. Sadly for them, this was a flop back in 1979, but for the Queen Of Cheese sitting down to watch it finally in 2009, I loved it.

Meteor has all the elements that make a great B-movie disaster/science fiction flick. We have astronauts all the way out in a spaceship near Jupiter and Saturn. We get to see them converse with space command back on Earth, with absolutely no delay. Spiffy technology since there’s at least a few seconds delay just between Earth’s orbit and the ground! The acting aboard the space craft as a deadly meteor heads their way is awesome, too, especially with the cheesy lighting effects to simulate combustion. We get more questionable science as a comet zips through an asteroid belt and drags some big rocks with it, and one at least five miles wide ends up on a direct course with Earth, along with some baby meteors just big enough to cause lots and lots of damage, including destroying a ski resort, causing a tidal wave, and other general mayhem.

Even more ludicrous is the science behind how the meteor is going to be stopped. The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. both have secret, illegal space weapons with nuclear missiles, originally pointed at each other. The plan is to cut through some political b.s., provide some political posturing, but ultimately aim those missiles at the meteor instead, coordinate a launch that will divert the giant mass away from the planet, yet not just break it up into smaller, just as deadly pieces that will hit us anyway.

Really, it’s not the bad science or laughable attempts at a political or military drama that will keep you watching this thing. It’s the heavy, ominous music that sounds every time the meteor is seen rolling slowly, inexorably on it’s path of doom. It’s the long, drawn out sequences as the missiles are readied for launch, again with overbearing, giggle inducing music throbbing away, making sure we know this is a serious moment we should all take pride in as citizens of the Earth. Or something.

The acting of the main cast is definitely more than this film deserved. Sean Connery is the bitter scientist sucked back in to save the day. Karl Malden is his friend and liaison who does his best to stand between him and the paranoid military man played by Martin Landau. Brian Keith plays a very convincing native Russian scientist, delivering his lines in an accent that makes you forget all about that diabetes-inducing show, Family Affair. Natalie Wood is beautiful and smart as his English translator, and Sean Connery’s tepid love interest. Henry Fonda takes a brief turn at being President of the United States, naturally being more noble of character than any real politician would be under those circumstances. The tons of secondary characters are all top notch, adding alternate touches of humor and melodrama. Even some of the silent, just in the background characters are a riot, including a duo of ladies in a caved-in subway scene who are doing their nails with looks of ultimate boredom as they await rescue.

There have been lots of disaster movies before Meteor and tons after, and arguably Meteor is not well done. However, there’s a certain charm to it with it’s over the top music, above average acting, and laughable premise of how the world would be saved from a crisis like this, not to mention the overtly phallic symbolism in all those nuclear rockets (which the movie lingers on for several minutes longer than necessary to simply say it’s ‘dramatic’). It’s got the 70’s hair, the 70’s wardrobe, the 70’s attitude about politics, the military, and science, and an awkward, unrequited romance between a young Russian translator and an ‘old enough to be her grandfather’ American scientist. It all adds up for a popcorn-munching couple of hours. In the end, if the looming meteor rolling towards you doesn’t make you giggle a bit, you’re not watching this for any of the right reasons!

Tags: action flick, b-movie, Brian Keith, disaster flick, disaster movie, giggle factor, Henry Fonda, Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Meteor, Natalie Wood, sci fi, Sean Connery

The Earth has to deal with a serious case of sunburn, or something...

The world is in danger again. This time the plot focuses on global warming, and how much methane is in our atmosphere. I promptly got distracted by jokes about cow farts, and don’t really know the ultimate outcome.

I remember Solar Attack decides that the way to save the world is to shoot nuclear missiles at the North Pole. Okaaay…. Sounds reasonable in a B-movie world, I guess. Then there’s something about Russians versus Americans, and all that old Cold War conflict coming to the surface now that an American billionaire used Russian technology to launch his personal manned craft into low orbit, but it blew up, killing an American astronaut/pilot, and everyone wanted to blame the Russian technology, but it was really because of a huge “coronal mass ejection” that lit the methane in the atmosphere on fire and incinerated him, and then the billionaire knows what’s really going on but no one will believe him now, but he has friends with Russian subs so he takes matters into his own hands to save the world… and stuff.

All I really remember is that after a slew of disaster movies in my recent viewing history, this one at least didn’t have a precocious kid that needed a healthy dose of discipline and a lesson in manners. This one at least didn’t have a contrived treacle-filled sub-plot about family sticking together through tragedy, or society trying to carry on in the aftermath of disaster. This at least just stuck to questionable science, showed plenty of pretty lights to make sure we know there’s lots of “coronal mass ejections”, and a requisite fist fight/action scene or two.

It just didn’t keep my interest, however. I don’t think it’s all the movie’s fault. I think it’s because I’ve seen so many of this genre of film in the last few days, and just got burned out. I know I fell asleep a couple of times trying to watch it, but there wasn’t anything going on that made me sit up and take notice. It’s just another typical “we’ve got to save the world…again” movie.

I watched it mostly for Mark Dacascos since he’s sunk to the level of Casper Van Dien and Lorenzo Lamas. Decent actor, has plenty of action star chops, but he’s not so good that he can rise above mediocre roles like this. Sometimes he’s funny, and then sometimes intentionally so. I also watched it for Louis Gossett Jr, an actor I feel deserves more respect than a movie like this. I didn’t watch it for anything else except a morbid curiosity about how bad this would get.

To sum this up, I tried to watch yet another disaster movie, and got absolutely nothing out of it, including an even halfway decent review. I’ll give it another try in a few months and see if my “disaster movie tolerance level” has subsided, but I don’t have high hopes that anything will save this movie for me.

In the meantime, I’m eagerly awaiting my next movie from Netflix, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, and the following trailer will tell you why!

Tags: disaster movie, Disaster Movie Tolerance Level, Joanne Kelly, Louis Gossett Jr, Mark Dacascos, movie review, Solar Attack, solar flares, Solar Strike, Sugith Varughese, We Have To Save The World Again

It really should be plural, since there was more than one asteroid, but that name was already taken...

With the video game Asteroids already calling ‘dibs’ on that name, this made-for-tv movie from NBC decided to use it in the singular form, even though there are actually more than one asteroid threatening the planet. Maybe they were running on the theory that it was ‘one asteroid at a time is threatening the planet, so technically we’re correct, so nyah!‘. Of course, it’s not a good enough of a movie to do in-depth research to figure out, so we’ll drop this whole part of the conversation.

The movie starts off mildly interesting with an astronomer watching a comet, and noticing that it’s picked up some hitchhikers. She decides that it’s noteworthy enough to call FEMA, and a very brief interlude later we have the evacuation of Kansas City, Missouri ordered. We have to deal with tons of side stories about different characters so we know there’s a ‘human face’ to the coming disaster. The astronomer has a precocious kid, a too-good-to-be-true father who’s also a great doctor, and a deceased husband to make sure there’s opportunities for treacle. The FEMA agent is dedicated to his job to the point of risking his life at the drop of a hat. We have a firefighter with a wife and children, where the wife doesn’t understand why he has to keep fighting fires when she needs him at home. There are other gripping stories peppered throughout, but it’s mostly filler to make up for the lack of actual asteroid action, and the fact we were promised a science fiction-y sort of tale, but got an uninteresting human interest story instead.

It wouldn’t have been so painful if it weren’t by the numbers human beings triumphing over disaster and reaching out a helping hand to everyone around them. It’s unrealistic, and knows it is, and practically screams “This is the way we should all be, don’t ya think???”. Beat me over the head too much with this type of message and I just want the whole world to explode so I don’t have to watch good actors get dragged down by lazy, saccharin-laced writing.

The first half of the movie wasn’t so bad. This was where they put the asteroid action, and we even get a nifty scene with Kansas City flooding. I liked it mostly because it wasn’t slick CGI, but instead someone actually put the effort into making a scale model, and then flooding and filming that. The blue screens were hit and miss. Some were seamless, but the ones that weren’t jump out at you waving their arms. The shots of asteroid chunks hitting are passable, but not done as well as the flood scene.

The second half of the movie is when it all goes belly up. The asteroids are done pummeling the Earth, so now it’s time to watch everyone wander around aimlessly, shout at FEMA agents who are trying to help, or do dumb ass things like leave a town where you and your kids are safe in order to rush to where the big asteroid hit because you think your firefighter husband might be dead. I’m sorry (actually, I’m not), but if my spouse did that, the first thing I would do would be to scream myself hoarse at them for bringing my children into harm’s way, especially because of such a stupid reason. What would she have done if her husband were really dead? Let her kids hug the corpse while they breathed the dust-filled air in a disaster zone? Of course we’re also supposed to believe this resulted in happy endings all about when in real life I think it would have ended in divorce court.

Maybe I’m just cynical and unfeeling, but this painful endurance test would have been a heck of a lot better if it had just gone for a quick ’science fiction’ resolution and left all the angst out. Send even more planes up to shoot the asteroids with even more lasers. Super heat the atmosphere by igniting the methane from all the cow farts so the asteroids dissolve on impact. I don’t know. Just do something different than what I sat through for nearly four hours and am now kicking myself for doing.

If I can do any good in this world, let it be this. Let my warning to not waste your time on this ‘epic’ mini-series go out in the universe and save even one person from my experience.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, Annabella Sciorra, Asteroid, asteroid hitting the earth, catastrophie movie, disaster movie, Michael Weatherly, Micheal Bien

Stephen Baldwin says 'I'm a hero! Really, I'm awesome! Aw, c'mon, call me 'awesome'!'

I feel like a meanie-bo-beanie for being unable to restrain my laughter at the expense of Stephen Baldwin. He puts on a convincing show of wanting to be an actor, but he’s pretty much the same character in a different hat in everything I see him in. And he picks roles where he gets to be the hero in a non-threatening kind of way, so he can feel assured that he’s being all clean-cut and a good role model, or something. It ends up feeling very fake, but it does give me cheap laughs that I’m sure will be put in the column heading of ‘Yep, she’s going to hell’ when it’s time for me to face my maker.

That being said, Earthstorm gives me lots of ‘going to hell in a hand basket’ kind of giggles, and not all of them are because of poor Stephen Baldwin’s attempts to have a career. (Seriously, Stephen, how much does it hurt your ego to know you’re cast in a role only because you’re the only Baldwin they can get, and they just want your last name?) The plot of Earthstorm is delightfully bad science, and involves the moon cracking apart after an asteroid hits it, and the United States determined to fix it, because gosh darn it, that’s what the United States is supposed to do!

It turns out that our only hope is in the skills of a demolitions expert who knows how to bring down a building without scratching the surrounding area. Enter Mr. Baldwin and his team of a cute young girl who considers him a father figure, and a smart young man who seems to just be there as character ballast. Mr. Baldwin’s character is obsessed with his work after losing his wife, so he’s all tough and hiding his emotions, see. That’s acting! Of course he presents the same expressions while talking about his late wife as he does when he’s recruited to work for the government to save the world, and when he’s informed he’s being launched in a space shuttle in less than an hour.

But I digress. The speed with which the government moves makes sure you know that this is fiction, especially when they pull together a shuttle launch to the moon to include an untrained, not fit for space travel, guy to tag along. I know this is a disaster/world is gonna end movie, but everything about it is just so ludicrous I couldn’t help but laugh all the way through. Watching the shuttle navigate through a storm of moon rock debris is just a riot, while at the same time pretty darn cool. Watching Mr. Baldwin tend to an injured astronaut on the flight, cobble together a replacement device to deliver the proper detonating force when they realize they brought the wrong thing (d’oh!) on the trip, and manage to be a reassuring presence to his cute young lady demolitions crew member almost simultaneously brings ‘ludicrous’ to a whole new level for me. It’s so bad, it’s awesome!

The ending is very trite ‘edge of your seat’ showmanship with little actual drama or tension. The very end is so cutesy as to be a replacement for syrup of Ipecac if one needs to induce vomiting. Overall I would watch this movie again, and if I found it cheap enough may even buy a copy. It’s really that over-the-top cornball bad! And Stephen Baldwin, you may not be a cheesy actor by choice, but obviously the powers that be decided that this is meant to be your fate. I’m glad to see with your continued choices of roles that you have embraced this truth as much as I have. Cheese on, least favorite of all the Baldwins. Cheese on.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, Baldwin brothers, Dirk Benedict, disaster movie, Earthstorm, giggle factor, least favorite Baldwin, Stephen Baldwin, watchable

The most lukewarm movie about heat you'll ever see...

Meltdown: Days Of Destruction is a disaster flick that follows pretty much every formula, including ones that make it bland, predictable, and completely forgettable. Poor Casper Van Dien is the lead in this endurance test, and while he’s still got that certain something that makes me watch him, it’s not enough to carry the heavy load of a plodding, hackneyed plot.

He plays a cop with an ex-girlfriend who didn’t bother to tell him he was a father until his little girl (now eighteen) was five and already hating him. He also has a current girlfriend who’s there just as a placeholder while the world falls apart and everyone realizes how important family is. The daughter naturally has an ex-con boyfriend a little too old for her, bringing down the ire of mom and dad, and gives us trite conflict that all resolves neatly.

We meet a scientist at the beginning who gives lots of dire warnings about how we really shouldn’t be firing rockets at asteroids in space. Seems like solid advice, which comes to fruition when the asteroid breaks into three pieces, and the largest one skips across the Earth’s atmosphere like a rock on a lake. The scientist turns out to be the brother of the new girlfriend, and so they all end up tagging along together.

There’s a lot of useless setup to show what a good cop Van Dien’s character is, which is all for naught as chaos ensues. Two days into the crisis the government lets the public in on the secret that yeah, the temperature is rising, and guess what? It’s going to keep rising, and we’re all gonna die. Let the riots and the looting begin!

For some reason everyone is trying to get to the airport, even though it’s clear that vehicles aren’t doing well in the heat, and are, well, blowing up. But these supposedly smart people are convinced an airplane landing at a specified time will get them all safely to the North Pole. Okaay… Why not? It’s not like there’s any logic to the rest of the movie.

Because they ran out of plot points in the middle of the movie, a dirty cop conveniently stumbles across the group, and kidnaps the brother, since the brother is the key to getting on the plane. We get gun battles, lots of scenes showing how cruel we are to each other in a crisis, unless you’re the lead characters in a disaster movie, and road warrior style retro-fittings of refrigeration units on cars in less time that it took to get my oil changed last month. We also have to put up with lots of discussion about everyone’s feelings, which made me feel slightly naseous.

To save you the terrible headache and craving for whiskey, I will now provide ending spoilers. You have been warned, and I emphasize I am doing this to help you, not hurt you.

At the end we get more gun battles, the North Pole-bound plane exploding in mid-air (which we don’t get to see because they used up their budget on something, we just don’t know what), and a completely ludicrous self-healing of the earth’s orbit. It was mentioned earlier that the earth could just realign itself in a few days, and we’d know because it would start raining. So of course after the bad guy is dead, the dad and the new boyfriend have bonded over shooting people, the old girlfriend and the old boyfriend get back together leaving the new girlfriend to step aside all noble like because ‘they belong together’, and remaining bad guys have scampered off, what do you suppose happens now?

What’s that sound? Oooh, oooh, oooh! It’s rain! Rain! Our crops are saved! Although not really because they neatly skip over how much the world has gone to hell in a hand basket and the worst is probably still to come as everyone tries to rebuild and grab power and fight over the limited resources left behind.

But it’s all okay. Something good does come out of it. The movie is over, and we never, ever have to watch it again.

Tags: action flick, asteroids hitting the earth, b-movie, Casper Van Dien, disaster movie, Meltdown Days Of Destruction, painful test of endurance

I will never ride the subway in New York because of this movie...

We make another foray into disaster flicks this week with Disaster Zone: Volcano In New York. Right about now you should be thinking, ‘Wait, wasn’t there another movie not that long ago about a volcano erupting in a major U.S. city? And didn’t it actually make it to the theaters, and even have respectable actors?’. Yes, of course there was. It was Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche and Don Cheadle. And because it enjoyed mild box office success, B-movie disaster movies are going to keep copying it.

This time we veer off to New York City. We see a fresh faced young lad show up for his first day of work as a unionized tunnel worker. We meet the main character, Matt, played with likable swagger by Costas Mandylor, who is in charge of the stereotypical smorgasbord of personalities who make a living prowling and digging through New York’s underbelly. He’s shocked at the inexperienced youth sent his way, and shocked again by yet another newcomer on his crew. This one’s a young lady named Karen Barbarini, played with a god awful supposedly New York accent by Pascale Hutton. But the job must get done, so everyone heads down to meet up with various horrible fates.

Boiling hot acid bursts from several pipes, killing two men on the crew, and injuring another. While trying to disarm dynamite ready to blow, Matt sees magma flowing. When he tries to convince the powers that be what he saw, he’s brushed off, and also put on leave while the deaths on his watch are investigated.

All sorts of government entities swarm to check this out, and one of the folks is naturally Matt’s ex-wife, Susan, played by Alexandra Paul. Sparks fly and before we know it she’s helping Matt uncover the mystery of what he knows he saw in those tunnels.

Meanwhile the root of the problem is a renegade scientist played by Michael Ironside. He’s being funded by a politician, is inexplicably ill and downing pills like they were M & M Minis, and a wee bit nuts. Mr. Ironside is easily the strongest actor on the cast, but he’s not given a ton of screen time. What he does have he makes good use of, and makes me totally believe he is a man unconcerned that one of his worker’s skulls has been spewed from his man-made lava tube, to lay on the floor still burning. He’s also unconcerned that his new device causes eruptions in suburbia. After all, some sacrifices have to be made when you’re taking such strides in geo-thermal energy.

There are all sorts of problems with the plot, so I ended up highly distracted around the middle. When the lava starts really flowing and everyone is acknowledging that yes, indeed, this be a volcano, the action picked up a little bit. Sadly however, where Volcano was non-stop action and had engaging characters, Disaster Zone: Volcano In New York doesn’t offer anything remotely in the ballpark. The characters are rather benign, even for the bad guys. There are a few points where the action picks up, but it falls back into sleep mode quickly. Characters are picked off in formulaic fashion, right down to when the gang of heroes splits into two groups, you know each team is going to lose one member.

Vague attempts at political intrigue, a mad scientist who just seems like he could use a hug, and old footage of underwater volcanoes just aren’t enough to make me ever watch this movie again. It’s a good time waster, easy on the brain, and gives a cheap laugh or two amidst the tragedies. Sadly for most of the actors, one of the tragedies will be that I won’t remember them after this review is done.

Tags: Alexandra Paul, Costas Mandylor, disaster movie, Disaster Zone Volcano In New York, Michael Ironside, Pascale Hutton, Volcano, Volcano In New York

I wonder what Sci Fi’s rationale is for airing movies under different names than they’re released by. I guess Polar Storm does sound a little bit better than Pole Reversal.

Maybe Sci Fi thought its viewers would get confused and think Pole Reversal would be a bad parody of Freaky Friday, and that the movie would be about how the North and South Poles are constantly bickering, and thinking the other has it soooo easy. The South Pole is jealous that the North Pole gets all the credit for being Santa’s place, but the North Pole is just too busy dealing with explorers constantly poking around in places they weren’t invited to pay the South Pole enough attention. Finally they get zapped by a gypsy with way too much time on her hands into having to live for a few days in each other’s icy shoes. After many a comedic turn, the story inexorably turns into a treacle-filled, nausea-inducing endurance test for the viewer, and we all learn that no one has it easy, no matter what end of the earth you’re capping.

But I digress. And why wouldn’t I? Polar Storm is just another disaster movie with nothing new to offer, other than the prospect of seeing Jack Coleman play someone other than Steven Carrington from Dynasty, or for you hipper viewers, Horn Rimmed Glasses guy on Heroes.

The basic plot is a large meteor strikes in Alaska, and hits so hard that it pushes the Earth off kilter. This makes the magnetic poles get all confoozled, and we get a bunch of ‘mini poles’ popping up all over the place. Anyone unlucky enough to live in the ‘circles’ of these mini poles get fried if they’re using anything electronic when polar storms (Aha! The name of the movie!) rush through. You can see and hear them coming from a mile away, so you have plenty of time to turn everything off, unless you’re unlucky enough to have a pacemaker.

And did you know you can also use a polar storm to recharge your car battery after a previous polar storm fries your vehicle’s entire electrical system? I didn’t know that! I would have thought since the circuitry was burned out that a freshly charged battery would mean squat. But hey, this is a bad movie, so details are conveniently overlooked so the characters we’re supposed to care about can carry on.

There’s some trite melodrama about Jack Coleman’s character having issues with his military father, plus more issues with his teenage son resenting that he married one of his teachers. This is all just a smoke screen to hide the lack of anything substantial to hold the pieces of this together.

After a lot of pretty lightening storms, aurora borealis skies, and shots of the ground splitting open to swallow cars and people, we end up underwater in a Russian, diesel powered sub to deliver nuclear missiles to the bottom of the ocean. The idea is that to push the Earth back into alignment, you need to hit it with an equal amount of force on the other side of the world from where it took the initial meteor strike. This makes perfect sense in the B movie world, just like curing amnesia only requires another blow to the victim’s head.

This was watchable, but not memorable. There’s nothing wrong with it, per se. The acting is decent, and Jack Coleman is believable as a scientist who has all the answers when the government doesn’t. If the story focused less on the forced familial melodramas and more on the inaccurate science and technology, it would have been more entertaining.

I definitely won’t make an effort to watch Polar Storm again. Then again, maybe I’ll keep it on my DVR in case I ever need a sleeping pill.

Tags: disaster movie, Dynasty, Heroes, Horn Rimmed Glasses, Jack Coleman, Noah Bennett, Polar Storm, Pole Reversal, Steven Carrington

This was one of the hardest movies to find anything on the internet about! Sci Fi aired it as Ba’al: The Storm God, but it is known on IMDB simply as Ba’al. It was apparently made for television, which explains the lightweight action and substance.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought it would. It starts off with a very basic premise that we’ve heard a million times before. A mad professor is seeking four amulets with ancient power. This time it also involves the Dead Sea Scrolls, so we get to watch an entertaining, totally unbelievable, robbery of a museum to retrieve said Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course, we don’t know at the time what the robbers are after, but this isn’t really a spoiler. Not much in the movie is going to be.

We get taken all across the globe at breakneck speed, and the story splits down the middle between two sets of characters. We have the archeologists and a linguist (who is naturally gorgeous and way too young to have so many languages mastered) doing their puzzle solving and globe trotting. Then we have a weather expert and the military attempting to figure out what the heck is going on with all these mysterious storms! The weather expert is played by Lexa Doig who had a long stint in Andromeda, and also played in Jason X, one of the few slasher films I truly enjoyed (only because it made fun of itself so well). Sadly Ba’al is the last thing listed on her IMDB page, so she needs to get a better agent, fast. But I digress.

Normally split story lines just mean the writers were afraid they were going to run out of story before their mandatory hour and forty minutes (with twenty minutes for commercials). This time they actually wove the two together so it made sense, and even have them converge at an appropriate time. It’s nice when I don’t get dizzy from rolling my eyes so much at bad writing (other than my own).

Halfway decent story work and character development aside, what really entertained me was the CGI. It’s not going to win any awards, but the dark ominous clouds with glowing red eyes are still pretty cool. The storms that kick up are nifty to watch, too. Cars fly everywhere, buildings are uprooted from their foundations, and general mayhem is all around. It is a bit over the top, and there’s no logical reason why the main characters would manage to survive one of them simply by hiding under a large truck, especially after one just as big got tossed like a Lego, but hey, I was in a forgiving mood. I can even forgive how the entire plot of the movie evades me so quickly after I watched it, because cool CGI of an angry storm god appeases me that much.

It doesn’t look like this will hit DVD anytime soon, so you’ll just have to wait for Sci Fi to air it again, which I’m sure they will. For a natural disaster/ancient god type movie, it’s well worth a fair viewing. It won’t bog you down with a lot of details or facts, it won’t preach some higher moral lesson at you (even though it’s hinted at), it’s sprinkled with one-liners, and it will simply let you wallow in some well-deserved B-grade action.

Tags: cool CGI, disaster movie, mythology, not so original