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

Lot's of fun, considering it's a Hallmark Movie!

I normally wouldn’t encourage, even insist, you go out and spend hard-earned cash on a made-for-television mini-series, especially one as light and frothy as The Curse Of King Tut’s Tomb. However, for the $3.99 price at Amazon, I’m seriously considering snapping up my own copy, especially if I just need some little extra thing to get that free shipping. And this would be a fun treat for myself, because it’s light-hearted, fun, well-acted and surprisingly well-written.

First off, no gore for the sake of gore. There are a few eerie scenes, but it all fit into the story, and wasn’t there as cheap filler. It’s tame, so some folks out there might find this boring, but there are plenty of times when I just want something to watch that isn’t going to disturb me, or any youngster that might walk into the room. I hate to use the term ‘family friendly’ because that has such a watered-down, saccharin-sweet connotation, but I would be comfortable letting my little nephew watch this with me.

The story is set back in 1922 Cairo, with the hunt for King Tut’s tomb in full swing by various people for various reasons. Casper Van Dien is the main character, Danny Freemont, a total ripoff of Indiana Jones as far as being a young, charismatic young archeologist who also teaches. There are plenty of costumes that just made me laugh out loud at the intentional ‘borrowing’ from that iconic character. However, there are plenty of differences as the story progresses, including Danny being on the outs with most of his academic peers because of his radical theories, including the existence of Atlantis, and the purpose of four pieces of an emerald tablet that is in King Tut’s tomb.

We get to see his rival immediately, as Danny uncovers a third piece of this fabled tablet, only to have it stolen out from under him by Morgan Sinclair, a member of a secret cabal of powerful men. This secret society is out to control the world (naturally), and Morgan Sinclair has assured them that attaining the four pieces of this emerald tablet is the key. Morgan isn’t highly respected by his own peers, since his accomplishments are only as a result of following Danny Freemont around and stealing from him. However, he is a force to be reckoned with for his ruthlessness, and ability to seethe with anger at the appropriate times. I find it necessary to point out that Morgan Sinclair is played by Jonathan Hyde, an original player in the blockbuster The Mummy, so he’s an ‘old hat’ at this sort of role, and does it well.

The other main character is the love interest, a lovely French Egyptologist named Azelia Barakat played by Leonor Varela. She’s the stereotypical heroine for this kind of movie. She’s smart, beautiful, adventurous, despises (at least on the surface) our hero, and is conveniently engaged to another man to make her ‘unattainable’. There is believable chemistry between her and Casper Van Dien, and it actually helps the story that it’s such a platonic sort of romance, because that forces the writers to actually do some character development, as well as make sure the story is interesting enough to keep you watching.

There are plenty of other great characters throughout, but the main three I’ve just discussed are the ones that drive the plot, and provide a surprising amount of humor. Even the villain provides some great laughs as he deals with his underlings, and Casper Van Dien proves that he can deliver a funny line very well. The more roles I see Casper Van Dien in, the more I think it’s a shame his star never reached higher than Starship Troopers.

The plot on this movie is pretty generic, even though it has the twist of making King Tut an actual god who fights to save the world. Even at nearly four hours, it never dragged, and constantly made me wistful for at least this good of writing and acting in all of the movies I subject myself to. For the great price, I am definitely adding The Curse Of King Tut’s Tomb to my Amazon shopping cart, and I highly recommend you take the plunge, too!

Tags: adventure movie, Casper Van Dien, Danny Freemont, giggle factor, Jonathan Hyde, King Tut, Starship Troopers, The Curse Of King Tut's Tomb, the mummy