What's that in the distance?...Is that what's left of our careers?

Okay, after being absent in my oh-so-valuable reviews of all that is cheesy in the world of B-movies, I’m finally back to a level of free time which allows me to indulge in this irresistible fixation of mine. The first movie I chose to review sadly has no deep meaning for me, no grandiose karmic communication I felt had to be imparted to an unsuspecting world. Nope. It just happens to be what was in my DVR for me this weekend.

So here goes a review of MegaFault, another venture from Asylum Home Entertaiment which has a lot of potential which was allowed to all shake to the bottom while the CGI team tried to make the graphics more believable. There was a lot to work with this time in the way of the cast, including Eriq La Salle, of ER fame (as well as one of my favorite 80’s movies, Coming To America), Bruce Davison (X-men and a schnike-load of other work), Brittany Murphy (whose “girly” movies I’ve never liked, but could appreciate her fortitude in working opposite of Ashton Kutcher), and Paul Logan (who others may say isn’t a plus, but whom I loved in Komodo Vs Cobra). To the credit of the cast they all played their parts very well. Maybe too well for a movie of this limited caliber. There wasn’t any sense of fun at any point from any of the cast, except an occasional smart-ass line delivered by the background actors. I know this is a disaster movie, but it’s a very far-fetched disaster movie, and one put out by Asylum Home Entertainment. C’mon folks, I know it’s not as fun of a premise as Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, but roll with the punches and revel in the cheese factor!

I think the seriousness that “end of the world” movies incite is what turns me off of them. There seems to be a fear of making fun of anything, no matter how ludicrous the storyline gets. We have a man who specializes in blowing up mountains, named Boomer, and when he takes out a mountain, it causes a giant crack across North America, pretty much dividing the United States in two as it tears through the earth. The military enlist cute little Dr. Amy Lane who has no problem leaving her daughter and husband behind to go investigate the earthquakes, and then get called upon to calculate where the military should fire this secret weapon they have in space that can (wait for it….) start earthquakes! Back to the old “cure amnesia” theory of halting a crisis, whereby you simply have to start another earthquake in the right spot and the world will remember it’s real name is Alice, and she has a dog named… I mean, you’ll stop the first earthquake.

Not to be outdone, the cure then weakens the mantle. Naturally we then get a mega volcano that has to be stopped by blowing up a whole bunch of stuff, ’cause, well, they were running out of reasons why Boomer needed to keep hanging around.

There’s not much of substance along the way, but you do end up liking Amy Lane and Boomer, because they’re played by actors who know how to create empathy. Again, it’s just misplaced for a little movie like this. They’re acting like they’re going for an Oscar instead of just trying to keep their careers in forward momentum.

The special effects here are typical Asylum. Not horrible, not great, but still just bad enough to elicit a giggle. I think that’s why I keep watching Asylum’s movies, because at least half of them I can get through as a result of that cheese factor. The other half (such as The Terminators) are so bad I can’t get past the first thirty minutes, despite my stubborn, masochistic nature.

If you’re a fan of disaster flicks, you will probably enjoy Megafault. If you’re a fan of cheesy movies, you’ll be left wanting (and feeling a little sorry for Brittany Murphy and Eric La Salle).

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, Asylum Home Entertainment, Brittany Murphy, Bruce Davison, Eric La Salle, MegaFault, Paul Logan, You Poor Bastard

Giggles galore!

As soon as I saw the title Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, I knew this movie was meant for me. I laughed my way through the wooden acting, and the frugally dispersed CGI of a cool looking Mega Shark and Giant Octopus. I even went so far as to watch the “special features”, and those were even funnier. The “outtakes” give one actor about five minutes more screen time than the two minutes he actually had, because he couldn’t get one of his three lines right. Listening to the four main actors discuss the movie is almost painful to endure. They try to talk it up, but look in their eyes. They’re dying inside as they do so. Three of the four don’t even get enough courtesy to have their interview conducted inside a nice, quiet room where you can even hear them. But that’s okay. For Debra Gibson’s segment I was too distracted by the guy working behind her who kept showing butt crack every time he bent over. The funniest extra was the short clip with the “cinematographer”, especially as he tries to get the poor camera person to help him demonstrate a cheap, but effective, technique to mimic a submarine being thrashed around.

But the special features weren’t what drew me in. It was the ridiculous plot, passable (I’m being generous) acting, and whiplash-inducing blips of CGI. C’mon, people, a giant shark takes out a passenger jet in mid-air! And attacks the Golden Gate Bridge! Show me that in the previews and you know I’m going to be salivating to watch the rest of what passes for the movie.

Sadly the previews give away the best parts, but this is such a train wreck I will be buying myself a copy when I see it cheap enough. $19.99 definitely is not cheap enough, but get down to the $7.99 range, and I’ll be reminding people about it at Xmas time.

So what’s all the hub bub about? Debra Gibson is an ocean scientist who is exploring underwater. She notices whales going nuts and crashing themselves into icebergs. This in turn knocks away enough ice for her to catch a glimpse of two prehistoric creatures locked in mortal combat, just before they come back to life and zip away into the murky depths. Giant sized incidents occur around the globe, including an attack on an oil rig, and our fun little plane munch. Governments naturally get involved, and our lovely scientist finds herself caught up in it, along with her former professor, and a forced love interest in the guise of a fellow scientist from Japan. After some lame science, an even lamer excuse for the main characters to have sex, and an even lamer resulting hypothesis about pheromones as a result of that sex, we’re off on a monster hunt.

Really, don’t bother trying to figure out the plot. It’s the same old stuff with government conspiracies, scientists saving the day, and narrow escapes thrown in. This is a low budget (comparatively) movie, and it shows in the small cast and limited sets. I’m actually pretty impressed with how much bang for their buck Asylum gets for their bad movies, and don’t mind how much they recycle things between them. I’m watching for giggle factor and cheese, and Asylum delivers at least one time out of five.

For the beleaguered cast I have to give props for at least having fun with the movie. Yes, in their little interviews they may be taking it a little too seriously, but at least that didn’t filter too much into the actual movie. There’s a lot of tongue in cheek delivery of lines, and I get the feeling that they were trying not to roll their eyes as they said most of them. Debra Gibson isn’t the best little actress in the world, but she’s definitely not as bad as some I’ve seen. She holds her own against poor bastard Lorenzo Lamas, who sounded like he really wanted them to kill off his character so he wouldn’t have to risk a sequel. Her professor, played by Sean Lawlor, is the believable mentor. The love interest, played by Vic Chao, plays his role a little too “this will get me an Oscar, right?”, but he’s still very likable, and has decent chemistry with Gibson.

All in all, Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus is a giant waste of time. However, it’s a funny-groaningly-bad-leave-you-giggling-and-feeling-slightly-guilty-about-finding-it-so-funny, giant waste of time. And for the Queen Of Cheese, that’s good enough!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, Asylum, b-movie, creature feature, Debra Gibson, giggle factor, Lorenzo Lamas, Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, Sean Lawlor, Vic Chao

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

Cool shark graphics, horrible English dubs, and cheesy fun!

There’s just something about a shark attack movie I can’t resist. When it’s a German made flick with horrible English dubs, that just melts the cheese into a bubbly fondue.

In this case we have Shark Attack In The Mediterranean. A man, Sven Hanson, is trying to keep his life together after losing his wife in what we’re told is a horrific shark attack. His teenage daughter is into jet skies and stealing people’s boyfriends (even though she does it so sweetly, and the current girlfriend is such a snot you can hardly blame the guy), and rolling her eyes at her father. His best friend is head of the local police force, with a wife wasting away from cancer. Our hero flies a helicopter, and his latest passenger happens to be an attractive marine biologist, Julia Bennett, arriving on the island to help with cancer studies involving lots and lots of sharks. We now have our basic setup of conflict.

Right off the bat we get a young girl (horribly dubbed with a voice too young to fit the actress) setting the stage by telling a tale of tragic love that ends at the bottom of the ocean. The girl is with her family, all tourists in this Mediterranean paradise who wanted to cage dive with sharks. Well, the sharks aren’t biting, so the captain of the boat decides to drag the cage, with the tourists still inside, along the bottom to a more dangerous spot where sharks are guaranteed. The cage gets caught on the bottom, the rope breaks, one of the tourists cuts their hand, and they’re suddenly surrounded by an awesome display of fluid shark graphics. Even knowing it’s got to be fake, it really looks cool, and eerily realistic, including sharks biting at the cage trying to catch a nibble of fingers and other parts.

So our pilot and his passenger come along in the nick of time to save the day. It gives us a chance to see that they have a lot in common, and to make it clear they’re going to be love interests. We also get a chance to see our hero be an over-protective father when he sees that his daughter is part of the crew of the ship in such dire straits. Arguments ensue, we get some melodrama over the father wanting to move back to Germany and the daughter not wanting to go, and the police friend stepping in with his sick wife to talk about living every moment instead of living in the past. Good stuff, and probably very well acted, despite what the voice actors would have you believe.

But the meat of the story is about a megalodon. It’s entirely unbelievable how a renegade scientist came into possession of a megalodon, although believable that it then escaped. However, the ensuing graphics are so very cool I can forgive all of this movie’s plot holes. You really need to watch the movie so you can hear first hand all of the flawed science, but more to see the CGI of the megalodon as it cruises the Mediterranean. There’s a scene where the hero is basically fishing for it with his helicopter, and the megalodon grabs a hold of the lure. We get several minutes of slick, believable underwater scenes of the shark rolling and thrashing, putting the folks at Discovery Channel to shame.

There’s also plenty of humor throughout Shark Attack In The Mediterranean, provided both by the ludicrous storyline and by secondary characters that are riotously exaggerated. Humor is what’s missing from a lot of B-movies lately, and this was like a breath of fresh air for me. Finally, another movie that doesn’t take itself so seriously, and revels in the cheese!

Shark Attack In The Mediterranean isn’t terribly original, but it’s fun, and has the best shark CGI I have seen. Surprisingly there’s no gore, which made me happier yet. A little blood, a flash of a body, but nothing horrendous trying to gross you out. Basically this is a well done B-movie about a prehistoric shark come to life, and was worth every second of screen time. If you love Shark Attack 3: Megalodon in all of it’s cheesy glory, you’re going to enjoy this movie for all the right reasons!

Alright, the trailer is in German, but it’s the effects on the shark that make this movie so cool to watch!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, b-movie, German to English dub, giggle factor, megalodon, Patriq Pinheiro, popcorn munching afternoon, Ralf Moeller, Shark Attack In The Mediterranean, shark attack movie

In space, no one can hear you act in a bad movie...

Jack Scalia deserves better than this movie. He must have been desperate for work back in 1996 when Dark Breed was made. He got shoved into a tiny pigeonhole of a character who potentially has a lot of depth, except the writers were afraid to venture into the deep end. He’s a decorated war veteran with strong feelings about how other vets are treated, takes the lives he saw lost very seriously, takes his job very seriously, and still loves his astronaut ex-wife. He now works for a shadow agency of the government which sent him up to a secret space station to retrieve astronauts previously sent there. And by retrieve, apparently that meant retrieve the bodies. He faced off against an ugly alien, and still has horrible nightmares about the experience. With all this back story we should have a richly developed character, and an interesting story.

We should, but we don’t. It’s not that interesting of a movie, even with aliens possessing the bodies of astronauts who went up in yet another secret space launch, only to crash back on Earth. We have bad aliens who want to hatch their eggs and destroy the planet. We have a good alien who also possessed an astronaut (the ex-wife of our main character/hero) who is out to fight the “Dark Breed.” Why they’re the “Dark Breed” and she’s not is never explained. Or maybe it was, but I missed it because I was too busy downing another cup of coffee to stay awake.

There’s a little gore, a little violence, and a lot of action, so that at least is pretty cool to watch. There’s a ludicrous scene where the good guys are driving off in a van that has a giant dish satellite on top of it. The dish falls off the van and drags behind it, slowing them down. Jack Scalia’s character tries to cut it loose, but in the process ends up sitting in the dish and basically road surfing behind the van. Kowabunga! Or something…

There are some laugh out loud funny moments. One of the aliens gets loose from his restraints after being captured and put in a hospital for observation. The human host ends up running around and making sounds that I’m sure were supposed to be terrifying, but I swear to god was just a recording from a hog calling contest. A little difficult to take that part as seriously as they meant it to be. There’s also plenty of stereotypical military jargon that I doubt is actually authentic. Plus one of the officers is a lovely young lady with non-military approved hairstyle, and way too much makeup. The banter among the good guy characters is often funny, but not always intentionally so.

Another scene that cracked me up was when the astronaut possessed by the good alien meets our hero in a diner. The waitress is nonplussed by the yellow eyes and stilted vocal patterns. She’s too busy being snarky to her because the alien is wanting to order pizza for breakfast. None of the other patrons are even paying attention to the lady in an astronaut’s jumpsuit with the U.S. flag all over it, although I’ll admit that part is probably true to life.

Dark Breed had a lot of potential, but fell very short of it. There’s a lot of angst going on with the astronauts possessed by the “Dark Breed”. They are cognizant of what is happening to them, and what the aliens are making them do, but are powerless to stop it. There’s a tense scene where the humans are temporarily in control of themselves while the aliens are presumably resting, and they debate whether they should kill themselves while they have the chance. As soon as a gun is raised the aliens yank control back, and two of the three actors play it off wonderfully while the third seems to be too distracted by the uncomfortable yellow contact lenses he was forced to wear.

I watched this one strictly for Jack Scalia. I was hoping for a cheesy performance like I got in Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep. I was disappointed. There is a lot of cheese here, but there’s good cheese, and then there’s cheese that’s just so stinky you can’t even be in the same room with it. Dark Breed falls somewhere in between.

Trailer contains some blood and gore. But, if you watch it, it’ll save you 90 or so minutes, because they put most of the film’s major points in it!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, alien movie, astronauts possessed by aliens, b-movie, Dark Breed, Jack Scalia, movie review, We Have To Save The World

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

This cover is awesome! I wish the movie were, too...

Once again the movie industry makes a movie where they can at least say, “We got a Baldwin…”, and it is dear Stephen Baldwin. We’ve had a slide backwards in acting proficiency since The Harpy, and he once again displays one facial expression to encompass all ranges of emotional states, whether it is learning of his father’s death, waking up in a hospital after being attacked by a shark, or realizing his wife has been kidnapped by the stereotypical bad guys. I think we’re also experiencing a slide backwards in physical fitness, because the movie makers are careful to not make us see Stephen Baldwin shirtless, but they can’t keep us from seeing things jiggle around under his shirt when he runs down a street.

The premise of this movie is promisingly ludicrous. People are seeking Marco Polo’s treasure, which is supposed to be under the canals of Venice. Venice begins to have more and more “boat accidents” that result in floating body parts with teeth marks in them. Stephen Baldwin’s character travels to Venice with his wife to identify his father’s body, who is also classified as a “boating accident” despite the teeth marks. When the Italian police refuse to listen to the know-it-all, monotoned American, our hero decides to pick up where his father left off, especially once the bad guys approach him and offer him a schnike-load of cash to help them out in the search.

Turns out that there are lots of sharks in Venice, and they’re big ones, all great whites. Supposedly they were dropped in as babies, and never found their way out to the ocean before they got too big to leave (or died because this isn’t their environment, and the trauma should have killed them). So now Venice has hungry sharks in their canals snacking on divers, and then getting more aggressive and attacking gondolas and people passing on the street. That’s right, people passing on the street. You heard me.

Along the way an Italian cop alternately helps and hinders them based on her own agenda. The bad guys proclaim they need Stephen Baldwin’s character alive to help them, and then send in ninja assassins in the next scene to spray his hotel room with bullets. There are other fight scenes placed throughout, but there’s just not enough shark action to satisfy me. We have to wait too long in between those moments, and then it’s a lot of spliced Discovery Channel footage with some goofy, but fun, CGI, but instead of making it a nice, fluid sequence, they flash back and forth between sets in the movie. I guess they were trying to build suspense, but they just irritated me.

Basically, this is another movie with great potential for cheesy goodness, and it falls short. I don’t know if Stephen Baldwin had a hand in how things played out, but it all ends too goody-goody-gumdrops, and it just doesn’t fit the tone of the movie. I personally think he insists all scripts be rewritten to make him a hero, but also to make sure we have happy endings for all the characters who “come through” in the end. What surprised me in this movie was the violence and the blood, because lately Stephen seemed to steer a wide path clear of them, most likely for personal reasons.

Whatever the case for why Stephen Baldwin “landed” this role, once again he only provides painful comic relief. Maybe he thought acting with Scarlett Johansson’s cute older sister, Vanessa Johansson, would lend him credibility, but he was wrong. I hope Vanessa didn’t think that acting with a Baldwin would help her career out any, either.

For a better, more entertaining, shark movie, go for Deep Blue Sea, or even better, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Watch Sharks In Venice once, get over your disappointment, and move on.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, b-movie, shark attack movie, Sharks In Venice, Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa Johansson, Venice

Lacking in any actual revelations...

Supposedly Revelation is an occult thriller. I’ve watched it twice now, once six months ago, and then gave it another shot thinking I missed something that would make me think it’s great. Nope. It’s got nothing. Zip. Nada. At least nothing for The Queen Of Cheese.

A son returns home at the behest of a father who publicly disowned him after he got caught hacking into financial records for said father. There’s plenty of animosity, and we find out right away this is a young man devoted to his mother, so you know she’ll end up being a pawn. The father needs the son’s code breaking skills, and offers him lots of money to set aside his anger and help out the team he’s arranged.

At the heart of the story is an item called The Loculus which possibly contains the DNA of Christ. There is a lot of intrigue with The Templars, and a man who we’re led to believe is hundreds of years old. The Templars are after the DNA so they can engineer their own second coming of Christ, and mold the child’s personality to suit their purposes, which we’re supposed to assume are malignant. Since they go around torturing and killing people, that’s a pretty safe assumption.

The son and a pretty young alchemist join forces after a raid on the father’s house, and go on the search for The Loculus. Somewhere along the line a priest joins their cause, and helps move the plodding beast of a plot forward. Maybe because I read The DaVinci Code and thought it was a good read, but not worth the hype, maybe that’s the reason this code breaking, history rich story with lots of pomp and circumstance left me with a headache from shaking my head at it.

The movie tries too hard to be deep and meaningful, and then goes for a cheap thrill by showing the pretty alchemist naked. It seemed like it was thrown in for no other reason than to titillate. For all the characters have been through together, a tomb where they discover a priceless religious artifact just didn’t seem an appropriate place to consummate anything. Okay, I’ll buy that the characters having sex is the only way to get the pretty alchemist knocked up so she could be the mother of our next savior. If you’re curious enough how that’s possible, I’ll leave you to watch the movie. Maybe you’ll be more impressed than I was, which is to say, even remotely impressed.

Revelation started out interestingly enough with the father/son interaction, and a room full of fancy thinkers staring at even fancier images in a large room in an attempt to determine their significance. I think I would have enjoyed it more if they just kept it to a treasure hunt/code breaking/adventure sort of movie. The writing and acting were decent, but didn’t have enough spirit or spark to pull off the spiritual and religious debates it wanted to tackle. That left the ending, which should have been intense and leaving me wanting more, just squinting at the screen and wondering why the heck I put myself through this movie twice?

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, boring movie, code breaking movie, DaVinci Code, James D'Arcy, movie review, Natasha Wightman, Revelation, Udo Kier

Okay, Earth gets invaded by an alien race called Kulkus. The Kulkus demand eight million humans in exchange for not destroying the Earth. The reason? They need these eight million humans’ blood to create an antidote to a virus killing everyone on the Kulkus home world. So these eight million humans aren’t going to a happy place by any means, and instead are processed like cattle, treated like lab animals, liquefied, and their fluids sent through a wormhole back to Kulkus. The aliens overseeing the collection process are infected themselves, and have resigned themselves to never returning to their home world, because no living matter can travel through the wormhole. Unless of course they use this doomsday device that they are using to force Earth’s compliance.

So it’s not a happy story. It’s even more depressing seeing governments do the math and decide that they need to pony up the eight million people and hope that the aliens keep their word. It’s even more depressing to see the governments do even more math to determine how many people must be surrendered by each country. I don’t like having to think about what my government would do in a situation like this, especially when I know in my heart they would probably reach these same conclusions. So Alien Siege loses points with me for making me think instead of just pandering to my need for mindless entertainment.

Then of course we have the resistance in the United States with well meaning people fighting to free those chosen by the lottery system, despite the fact that just means someone else is going to be picked in their place whom they might not be able to save. It seems like a futile circle, except, back to that thinking thing again, I believe as human beings we would do it.

While there are some high thought process ideas in Alien Siege, there are also a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies which keep it from being a great alien invasion movie. Little things like the daughter of the main character being held because her blood contains an anomaly which makes her as valuable as thousands of humans, yet her father is released, even kicked out of the processing center, when he goes to see her. He’s scanned, it flashes on the screen that he shouldn’t be released because of the anomaly, yet they shove him out the door. There’s other stupid details that stuck out for me, like the father having to take his jacket off for the scan, getting kicked out of that office without anything being returned to him, and then having his jacket back on in the very next scene.

There’s character inconsistencies, too. One of the main aliens overseeing the collection process has issues with the morality of his assignment, especially when the “anomalies” mean they could stop collecting more humans, yet they continue to do so. Yet he does nothing to stop it. They set up his character to be a force of change, and then… nothing but disappointment, and a feeling of wasted promise. There’s also one of the resistance fighters who leads the father right to her commander without more than a blindfold, and a warning that if he moves, she’ll hit him. For a bad ass resistance group, that’s just lame. She at least turns into a sympathetic, engaging character, but we go back and forth on character motivations the rest of the film, and you just can’t keep up, or keep caring.

Brad Johnson (the poor man’s Tom Berenger) plays the father, and he is likable enough. Carl Weathers is horribly underused as a member of the United States military charged with making sure the populace complies with the lottery. His character should have been focused on more, because his is one of true inner turmoil, yet we just get a glimpse here and there. Otherwise the cast seems to be mostly culled from General Hospital, so maybe the writers were, too, and that’s why the story feels so scattered.

For one viewing, Alien Siege is worth it. But it’s definitely not cheesy enough for me, and made me crave a marathon of V: The Series.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, alien invasion, Alien Siege, aliens, Brad Johnson, Carl Weathers, Erin Ross, Kulkus, Lilas Lane, Michael Cory Davis, movie review, Nathan Anderson, poor man's Tom Berenger

Dead weight of a plot sinks this unseaworthy tale.

I was bored and decided, what the heck, I’ll watch an obvious quest for accidental viewings that is 30,000 Leagues Under The Sea. It has Lorenzo Lamas, so I figured it could be good for a few laughs. And it should have been.

This was frustrating, because it could have been very entertaining. They went with some slick CGI on the submarines and the nifty mechanical squid beasties at Captain Nemo’s command. There were even a few mildly entertaining exchanges of dialogue. There was a little bit of action. There was a little bit of intrigue. But there wasn’t enough of anything to keep it afloat, even for the less than 90 minutes of screen time they invested in it.

The main thing it was missing was Captain Nemo. We have to wait until at least halfway into it before we meet him, and then he’s there just to deliver a few hyperbolic “I’m going to show the surface world the evils of it’s ways by launching nuclear missiles at it!” lines. He’s supposed to be mad! Where’s the crazy? Where’s the feral looks as he realizes his plans are being foiled by land lubbers? Where’s anything that would have made him more interesting?

Sad thing is his character had a lot of promise, but they kept his screen time so minimal there was no chance to let the psychotic inside of him shine, like it should have. Instead we have to follow around Lorenzo Lamas and his crew, which includes his ex-wife, and none of them are interesting enough to make me care if they survive or drown. Again, they could have been, but they don’t focus on any of them long enough to draw you into their world. The banter between Lamas’ character and his ex-wife is bearable, but lacks the spark to provide any believable tension.

The basic plot is a submarine gets attacked by a squid beastie, and is stuck at the bottom of the ocean. Lamas and his crew are sent in with their nifty technology that creates a giant oxygen bubble underwater, with the intent to use it to save the crew of the submarine. Captain Nemo has designs on both the nuclear warheads on the sub, and the oxygen bubble technology. He wants the bubble to restore the lost city of Atlantis, which he has discovered. Things just get a little waffley after that, and I just nursed my glass of wine and waited for the inevitable predictable ending.

This is a movie that actually would have benefited from having more screen time, as long as it was used to develop the characters properly, flesh out the plot so things made sense, and given much more Captain Nemo. I was surprised it wasn’t a made-for-tv movie, since it had that feel all over it. If it had been a mini-series, I think it actually would have turned into something great, instead of this rushed-through, by-the-numbers (minus one) formula.

Poor Lorenzo Lamas. You’re not as great as a David Hasselhoff, but you definitely don’t deserve being stuck in a “Stephen Baldwin is the only Baldwin we could get” role like this one. Personally I can’t wait to see the upcoming Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus! It has a mega shark, a giant octopus, you, Mr. Lamas, and Deborah Gibson. If that kind of setup doesn’t provide a ton of laughs, my faith in this world will simply be shattered.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, 30000 Leagues Under The Sea, action flick, action movie, b-movie, Jules Verne, Lorenzo Lamas, so close to greatness it's frustrating, You Poor Bastard