Gather round! You can watch your career nosedive with this flick!

I wanted to love Star Runners. It has a lot of potential to be a wonderful, riotous good time. It obviously took its inspiration from Firefly/Serenity, Starship Troopers, and even a little The Fifth Element. Problem is it didn’t run with the blatant ripoffs, and tried to pretend it had an original idea. That only works when you have an original idea. When someone can point at the screen and dissect the movie into categories based on what film it was ripping off, you don’t have an original idea.

What frustrates the holy heck out of me is Star Runners could still have been saved. If they’d embraced the cheese factor (which was evident in the movies that obviously inspired it) and went for laughs, I would have been a happy camper. Instead the writers got all serious with political intrigue and character self-sacrifices and genocidal atrocities. Even that would have been alright if they’d not taken so much time to setup this up as a ‘buddy’ movie, promising a rollicking good time as the main characters get captured by the government, and then sent on a covert mission to retrieve a mysterious crate. Naturally they open the crate to find a frozen, naked, woman inside who wakes up with no memory. We’ve been introduced to a couple of interesting secondary characters in the middle of a space bar that is blatantly a pale ripoff of Star Wars‘ Mos Eisley. We should be in for a ton of fun as the trio of characters make a run for it.

Nope. It gets all serious after that with just a few one liners here and there to break up the monotony. And it is monotonous. We get a space pursuit through a wormhole into uncharted space, a crash landing, tiresome arguments among the survivors, a mysterious abandoned base that the survivors realize was populated by their kind, and then bugs. Lots of giant bugs. While interesting on the surface, as the movie progresses it’s all ‘by the numbers’ and I kept checking how much time was left in the movie.

One thing that wasn’t wrong with this movie was the acting talent. We have Connor Trinneer playing the would-be swashbuckling captain, Ty. He waffles between playing by the rules, breaking them as is convenient. He’s charming and likable, which is good since he’s the main character. Then we get a horribly wasted James Kyson Lee from Heroes fame. He’s the sidekick, basically, and is portrayed as a smart guy, but with a few gaps in the common sense area. He’s the funny guy who points out the obvious. There’s also relative newcomers, Aja Evans and Toni Trucks. Aja Evans plays the tough girl who is stuck with our wayward gaggle of people after they crash land. She has more to her than meets the eye, and when we learn her real role, it’s one of the few interesting twists in the whole affair. Toni Trucks plays the ‘Leeloo’/'River’ sort of character, the gal who was frozen, wakes up with no memory, but oh, she’s really special, and not just because our heroes see her naked. Toni does alright with this character, but a better actress could have made her shine despite this script. The rest of the supporting cast at least add positives to this mess, but it’s just not enough to save it for me. Not even my favorite bit actor, Todd Jensen, lifted my spirits enough to say ‘Well, maybe it’s not that bad…’, because, well, it was that bad.

For a throwaway movie this is at least watchable, especially if you go into it knowing it’s going to be a mish mosh of other movies you’ve watched, and probably loved. But when it’s all over, you’re going to feel a strong urge to watch some quality sci fi, maybe pulling out Star Wars or even Spaceballs, because Star Runners is a train wreck that will linger in your consciousness, and make you doubt that good sci fi ever existed.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, Aja Evans, b-movie, Connor Trinneer, Firefly, Heroes, James Kyson Lee, Serenity, space bugs, Star Runners, Starship Troopers, The Fifth Element, Todd Jensen, Toni Trucks

Shockingly, these four careers managed to survive this movie.

Maybe because I didn’t see the director’s cut of Stay Alive I found it to be so lacking in substance that not even I could enjoy it. I would be curious to see this with nearly an extra fifteen minutes of footage that even introduces a new character and subplot, but I’d have to be pretty bored first to take that risk.

This relatively tame movie relies too much on the video game sequences, so just as you’re getting into the spooky vibe and are ready to jump, you get wooden video game graphics leering at you instead. Yawn. It doesn’t help that there’s no plot other than the overdone ‘Friend was playing this video game no one else has ever seen and then dies mysteriously and his best friend ends up with this game but feels weird to play it because that’s the last thing his friend was doing when he died, but hey, it’s alright because this guy has plenty of stereotypical gamer friends who insist they play it, and all disregard the creepy vibe they get when they’re asked to recite a bizarre seance poem about Elizabeth Bathory, and then these gamer friends all start dying in the game, and oh my god they’re dying just like they did in the video game and now it’s up to them to stay alive and stop the horror!‘ plot. Nothing new here, including the fact movies based on this weak of a plot line have always been boring.

While I’m thankful that the PG-13 rating kept the gore for the sake of gore out of it, it puts this childish gloss over everything, like they were being too careful to keep that rating. Was it because they figured they needed all the Frankie Muniz fans to boost ticket sales? Or did they really think that they were being all creepy and scary by skipping back and forth between lame computer graphics and live action? Yes, it’s interesting to watch the game mimic what’s happening in ‘real life’, but there’s no real sense of danger or urgency, even as characters get killed off.

The cast is made up of actors who have all managed to shake this movie off and maintain solid careers, which completely flies in the face of the curse of B-movie-ness, and bad B-movie-ness at that. Sophia Bush who plays the typical goth girl went on to One Tree Hill, for example, and Frankie Muniz is a lucky enough little bastard to have a choice between acting roles, or being a race car driver. Jimmi Simpson and Adam Goldberg were in the movie Zodiac. Even Milo Ventimiglia managed to survive his cameo role as the first victim to go on to be Peter Petrelli in Heroes. I think this ‘actor career survival’ phenomenon is what I find the most interesting about Stay Alive, which shows how little I took from the actual movie.

This could have just been made for television instead of released to a theater, but it apparently did quite well, and made a tidy profit over it’s nine million dollar price tag. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed there won’t be a Stay Alive 2, since they did the typical bad movie ploy of wrapping things up, and then unwrapping them as messily as a spoiled brat with too many presents on Christmas morning. If they’d have left things where they were at one minute before the ending, I might have been a little more impressed, which is to say, even remotely impressed.

Tags: Adam Goldberg, Blood Countess, die in the game you die for real, Elizabeth Bathory, Frankie Muniz, Heroes, Jimmi Simpson, Jon Foster, Milo Ventimiglia, Peter Petrelli, Samaire Armstrong, Sophia Bush, Stay Alive, video game movie

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