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

Mega Snake has a lot going for it, especially in the acting talent department. The whole reason I tuned in was for Michael Shanks, but the rest of the cast does an awesome job keeping the lines funny, and the action cheesy. One of my newly discovered favorite ‘minor part’ actors, Todd Jensen, puts in a great performance as ‘Big Bo’, a complete jerk that still makes you feel sorry for him when he gets what’s coming to him. Harry Anichkin and Nick Harvey play a pair of back woods hunters that know how to put together all sorts of snake luring and killing devices.

Ben Cardinal plays a stern, believable man guarding the secret of the giant snake, which hunted his people nearly to extinction. When John T. Woods’ character, ‘Duff Daniels’, comes in to the shop to buy another batch of snakes for his religious sect, naturally this mysterious snake in a glass jar catches his eye. In true stupid, arrogant son of bitch character, he makes sure to not be careful after he steals it, and unleashes the terror on the community.

Duff is the older brother of Shanks’ character, ‘Les’, who watched as their father died by snakebite during a religious ceremony when he was a child. Duff naturally thinks his little brother is a coward for having a healthy respect and fear of things that can kill you, so there’s your family tension for a bit of drama. Les is afraid of a lot of things, including commitment to his girlfriend, Erin, who is played by Siri Barus. Erin starts off very shrewish, and I intensely wanted Les to dump her melodramatic ass for his partner, Fay, who is played with glee by Michal Yannai. When Erin takes up with ‘Big Bo’, we get some well played juvenile games in a bar as everyone tries to make everyone else jealous. Normally I would find this boring, but it fits into the story well, and is a lot of fun to watch.

We get a lot of CGI action of Mega Snake, watching it grow, having hints of it snacking on household pets, and a whole coop full of chickens. Once it gets the appetizers out of the way it just keeps on growing, and keeps on eating. Pretty soon a lot of the ‘local color’ start getting picked off, too, adding to all the tension between our main characters. Livestock is left in steaming, regurgitated piles that ain’t pretty, and Les ends up as a suspect, mostly because Big Bo is an ass.

Of course the truth is discovered and a hunting party heads out to tackle the beast with various unfortunate results. There’s even the requisite ‘You have to cancel the county fair!’, ‘Are you kidding? That’s the biggest attraction of the year! I ain’t canceling it!’, ‘But people are gonna die!’ ‘Well, you’d better get snake hunting, then, shouldn’t ya?’ exchange (not direct quotes). This gives the perfect chance to give a cameo that made the train wreck watcher in me do a double take. We get to see ‘Feedback‘ from Who Wants To Be A Superhero?‘. He gives us valuable safety tips, faces off with Mega Snake for a few seconds, and then herds a bunch of cute kids to safety as he adds ‘Wow, that’s a big snake’ to his acting repertoire. As far as cheesy cameos go, this one was a riot, and definitely not a waste of time.

Overall Mega Snake is a very good creature feature B-movie. There’s a lot of colorful characters to keep the story moving along, lots of humor, and great CGI on the beastie. I’ve watched this one a couple of times, and while I don’t think I’ll ever buy it on DVD, whenever it is on I will hope to have time to watch it again. It’s coming up on rotation on Sci Fi on February 28, 2009 and March 5, 2009, and I encourage you to set up a recording device to catch it. The giggle factor is worth it!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, b-movie, Ben Cardinal, cheese, creature feature, Feedback, Harry Anichkin, John T Woods, Mega Snake, Michael Shanks, Michal Yannai, Nick Harvey, sci fi, Siri Barus, snakes, Todd Jensen, Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Raging Sharks has an impressive list of names that caught my attention almost as much as the promise of shark footage. The train wreck career that Vanessa Angel has sucked me in with an inexorable force that would not be denied. Add to that Corin Nemec, formerly of Stargate SG-1, and Corbin Bernsen, the stern and disapproving father on Psych, and I was hooked. Todd Jensen puts in a very good performance as a total jerk who kicks a lot of ass, and just makes you beg for him to become shark bait. He’s been in a lot of movies I’ve been watching lately, and I have to give him props for diversity.

The movie starts off with aliens, which is cool. A part of their ship ends up in the Bermuda Triangle, and casts off an eerie orange glow, and also has little orange granules inside that the local shark population goes nuts over. Anyone unlucky enough to dive in the area gets chomped on with extreme prejudice.

Naturally there’s a lab at the bottom of the ocean nearby, although I’m not quite clear how they got it there without disrupting the sharks. I think we’re supposed to assume the orange stuff doesn’t start making the sharks nuts until after the lab is all set up, and a storm is coming in. After an attack, plans are made to get everyone out of the lab and to shut the whole project down, which is a side plot that doesn’t keep my interest. There’s yet another side plot about the husband and wife scientist team (Angel and Nemic) wondering about the fate of their marriage while they study the ocean. Boring, but not too distracting since they quickly get separated.

Corbin Bernsen arrives on the scene in a sub to save the day, and to deliver Todd Jensen’s character so he can start being an ass about the accident and threatening to arrest Nemic and shut the lab down. Somewhere along the line they realize the sub isn’t equipped to evacuate an undersea lab, so Nemic and Jensen venture through the shark infested water to get stuck in the lab again with everyone else.

There’s a lot of side characters of interest, a lot of banter, and a lot of sharks. They make a point of saying that there’s so many different species in the same area that it’s amazing, but we only see great whites as far as I remember. Not a bad thing for me, but I thought it was a waste to mention it if you’re not going to show it. The side plots start getting all muddled, but at least towards the end we get some good fight sequences, and more sharks. Plus, at the end of all the ludicrousness, we get more aliens!

There’s not much noteworthy about this film, other than the weird alien twist. If you’re squeamish about shark attacks, you won’t be able to get through the onslaught. If you’re scientific, you’ll be mortally offended at someone surviving an undersea explosion less than a meter from where they’re hiding. But if you’ve got a sense of humor about bad movies, you’ll giggle through a good deal of this and just be entertained by the end of it, like I was!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, aliens, Bermuda Triangle, cold fusion, Corbin Bernsen, Corin Nemec, Psych, Raging Sharks, sharks, Stargate SG-1, Todd Jensen, Vanessa Angel, watchable