DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/15/10

 

After watching EARTHSTORM with Stephen Baldwin, I thought to myself, "Wow, I sure would like to see another cheapo Canadian ARMAGEDDON-inspired Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie with the word 'storm' in the title." 

Well, the good folks at the SyFy Channel and Lionsgate must've heard me, because sure enough, here's DARK STORM (2006), a cheapo Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie made in Canada with the tagline "Armageddon is on the horizon."  Yay...

At least Stephen Baldwin fit the part of a building-demolition expert in EARTHSTORM.  Here, he plays a scientist named Daniel Gray who's part of a secret government project to collect dark matter in space.  (I'm not quite sure what "dark matter" is, but it's one of those neat things like wormholes that you don't really have to understand in order for it to be a cool subject for a sci-fi flick.)  Seeing Stephen Baldwin in a lab coat is like seeing a gorilla wearing a tutu--somehow, the two just don't go together.  I kept expecting his associate Dr. Fred Flintstone to show up at some point so they could sneak out and go bowling together.

Anyway, this project is supposedly being done to benefit Mankind somehow, but the weaselly guy in charge of it, Dr. McKray (Gardiner Millar), turns out to be a dirty rat who's planning to turn the whole thing into a deadly weapon and sell it to the highest international bidder.  While demonstrating it to the visiting General Killion (William B. Davis, better known as Cancer Man from "The X-Files"), who controls the government purse-strings that finance the project, a containment leak in the orbiting dark-matter-collecting satellite is detected and a cloud of dark matter is spreading over the atmosphere.  (Sorry, but I'm just going to have to keep saying "dark matter" a bunch of times during this review.)
 

Dr. McKray doesn't want to lose his funding so he forces the reticent Dr. Baldwin and his coworkers to ignore safety measures and proceed with the demonstration, which causes the dark matter to enter our atmosphere at different points known as "spikes", wreaking all sorts of havoc with the weather and disintegrating airplanes and buildings and stuff.  This is done using that TV-quality kind of CGI that looks pretty good in some scenes and so hot at all in others.

Not only that, but Dr. Baldwin gets exposed to some errant dark matter himself during the botched test, which gives him strange super-powers that enable him to start his car without keys, lob dark-matter fastballs at bad guys, and repel focused beams of destructive dark matter with his mind.  He's Dark Matter Man!  This, too, turns out to be part of the repulsive Dr. McKray's plan to turn himself and everyone else into a race of dark-matter superbeings in order to bring Mankind's evolutionary process to its ultimate peak.  Wow--sounds just crazy enough to work!

It's interesting seeing William B. Davis as a good guy for a change, but without those fake cigarettes he used to chain-smoke on "The X-Files" he doesn't really know what to do with his hands anymore.  Camille Sullivan (THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT), who looks and sounds a bit like Sarah Jessica Parker but I didn't hold it against her, is okay as Dr. Baldwin's wife Ellie, and Keegan Connor Tracy (WHITE NOISE, FINAL DESTINATION 2) does a fairly good job playing the nasty agent of an unnamed government bidding for the dark-matter weapon.  I liked Rob LaBelle (FIDO, "Taken") as Dr. Baldwin's dorky associate Andy--he reminded me of a skinnier, shorter-haired Larry from the Three Stooges. 

Some of the dark-matter storm scenes are pretty cool but there are just enough shots of calamity and destruction, with varying degrees of cartoony-ness, to remind us that this is going on while the talkier, less-expensive scenes take up more running time.  Dr. McKray eventually has Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin kidnapped and taken to his secret dark-matter destructo-beam installation, and it's up to them to find a way to foil his evil scheme.  It all builds to a final super-powered showdown, with predictable results.

I liked EARTHSTORM better because its "Buck Rogers"-type space shuttle mission and other cheesy sci-fi elements were brighter and more fun.  DARK STORM, which is darker, more earthbound, and  a bit dreary at times, is a fairly entertaining time-waster and I didn't hate it, but that's about it.  

DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 10/17/10

 

I really like imminent-doom-from-space movies like ARMAGEDDON, DEEP IMPACT, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, and their directionally-inverted counterpart, THE CORE.  The makers of EARTHSTORM (2006) obviously like them, too, because their movie is very similar to these in several ways except a very obvious one: budget.  It's an epic disaster flick scaled down to barely the size of a Sci-Fi Channel movie (which, in fact, it is), with most of the drama taking place in--as Paul's very clean grandad from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT might have put it--a cheap CGI shot and a room, a barebones space shuttle interior and a room, and a room and a room.

After a title sequence that resembles the opening of "Star Trek:The Next Generation", the movie kicks off with the moon being struck by a huge asteroid.  Not only does this send a shower of huge meteorites raining down upon the Earth, but it also causes a gradually-widening crack that threatens to break the moon itself into pieces.  Worldwide weather chaos ensues as well, and we get to see the usual idiot newsguys standing in the middle of it as they breathlessly give us the play-by-play.  The CGI in the "meteors hit city" scenes is okay--not great, but not actually laughable, either.  It's a small-scale disaster, to be sure, but if you scale down your expectations to match, then it's not so bad.

Scientist Lara Gale (Amy Price-Francis) is summoned to the ASI, or "American Space Institute" (which is the equivalent of NASA in the alternate dimension in which this story seems to take place), by her colleague Dr. Garth Pender (John Ralston), to help whip up some kind of solution to the problem.  Lara's late father predicted that this scenario might someday occur and came up with his own theoretical remedy, based on his belief that the interior of the moon was composed mainly of iron.  This, however, was ridiculed by his peers in the scientific community, including the President's current Chief Scientific Advisor, Victor Stevens (Dirk Benedict), one of those characters whose sole purpose is to arbitrarily laugh off all the rational solutions proposed by our heroes and insist on doing things the stupid way.  Benedict, who was Starbuck on the original "Battlestar Galactica" and Face on "The A-Team", is used to playing stupid characters and does a pretty good job here.

The plan, as it is, consists of sending astronauts to the moon to blow up some nukes and cause the crack to collapse in upon itself.  In ARMAGEDDON, the fate of mankind rested on the world's greatest oil driller.  Here, it requires the expertise of ace building-blower-upper John Redding (Stephen Baldwin), who just happens to be the world's greatest demolition expert.  He gets summoned to ASI headquarters, and we just know that before you can say "Press the button, Stamper!", he's gonna end up having to go into space himself to make sure the job gets done right.  Upon hearing the plan, he protests, "I don't know anything about the moon!" to which Dr. Pender responds, "Nobody knows more about how things collapse in on themselves than you."  Well, you can't argue with that.

After a bunch of scenes consisting of people in rooms talking to each other, with a few "ehh" disaster shots thrown in here and there, we get to the film's most gripping sequence: the launch of the shuttle during a furious tropical storm.  With time running out and no backup plan, Redding and the two shuttle pilots must go for broke and take off even as various systems hover in and out of "no-go" status and the storm rages around them.  Things also get pretty tense during the shuttle's approach to the moon through a dense field of debris.  By this time, I wasn't expecting ILM-level effects, so I found these scenes visually adequate.  What sorta had me scratching my head, though, was the fact that they seem to have gravity on board the shuttle.  I guess you just can't simulate having a big lug like Stephen Baldwin floating around weightless without spending some serious cash.

Speaking of which, these Baldwin brothers really are a bunch of big lugs, aren't they?  Don't get me wrong--I like them.  But they look like the kind of guys you'd see hanging out at a Flintstone family reunion.  Alec used to be the slim, handsome one--his "Flintstones" character would probably be a movie star named "Rock Granite" or something--and Stephen was the lanky, kid-brother one.  Daniel, the middle Baldwin, was the original "big lug" type of the three.  Now, they're all starting to look more and more alike as Alec and Stephen's physical appearance begins to move closer toward the middle ground inhabited by Daniel.  A time-lapse montage of close-ups from their movies, in chronological order, would probably look like one of those transformation scenes in THE WOLF MAN.  One of these days we won't even be able to tell them apart, and they'll be able to star in an all-Baldwin remake of WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.

Anyway, once Redding and the astronauts reach the moon, they discover that the nuke plan isn't going to work and that an alternate plan based on the theories of Dr. Gale's late father must be improvised (which will vindicate the old guy at last).  Take that, you dumb old President's Chief Science Advisor!  This leads to a sequence similar to one in APOLLO 13 in which the eggheads at mission control must devise a way to utilize only the equipment and resources available on board the shuttle to conquer the problem.  And a certain level of suspense is maintained as the shuttle is bombarded by debris while the clock ticks down to the point beyond which it will be too late to save the Earth. 

Stephen Baldwin does a good job and is likable in his Barney Rubble kind of way.  The supporting players are good, particularly Matt Gordon as "Albert", one of the eggheads running around mission control like a chicken with its head cut off, and Richard Leacock as "Ollie", the mission control guy who wants to abort the shuttle liftoff.  I also liked Redding's building-demolition helper, Bryna (Anna Silk).  She's very appealing in a "girl-next-door" kind of way.  Does Bryna get together with Redding in the end, like I wanted?  I'll put it this way--no.  GRRRRRRRR!!!  The final romantic pair-ups in this movie are infuriatingly wrong, and made me want to smash the DVD into little pieces, mix it with mashed potatoes and gravy, and eat it, thus symbolizing my total victory over this film and everyone involved. 

But on further reflection, I decided that such a course of action would probably be overdoing it a bit.  After all, EARTHSTORM is just a low-rent sci-fi actioner that is fairly entertaining if you catch it in the right mood, and it's not going to kill me if it doesn't end exactly the way I wanted it to.  But Stephen Baldwin's character and Amy Price-Francis' character ending up together?  Pffft--never gonna work.  Just wait'll she sees how much hair this guy's gonna leave in the tub every time he takes a shower.

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

ROADKILL -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 8/4/11

 

One of the most fun movies named "Roadkill" that I've seen since they started making movies named "Roadkill", ROADKILL (2011) is the rare example of a SyFy Channel movie with a CGI monster that doesn't totally suck.  It's as though my TV suddenly had a "fun" knob that I was able to turn up after the opening scenes heralded imminent boredom.

With some of the most excruciatingly obvious expository dialogue imaginable, we learn that Kate (Kacey Barnfield) has moved to Ireland to work and her American friends have joined her there for one last reunion vacation.  This includes old flame Ryan (Oliver James), best friend Anita (Roisin Murphy), med-school brother Joel (Colin Maher), clownish nerd Chuck (Diarmuid Noyes), not-so-best-friend Hailey (Eliza Bennett), and token black guy Tommy (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who, no kidding, says "Yo, yo, I'm down wit dat" in his first scene.

Of course, we want all of these people to die horribly as soon as they open their mouths, which looks like a pretty good prospect when their motor home pulls up in front of an isolated store that looks like something out of "The Irish Chain Saw Massacre."  Anita wants to purchase a necklace worn by an inbred yokel named Luca (a very effective Ned Dennehy), and after a dispute the kids make off with it, running over an old gypsy woman in the process.  Before she dies, she puts a curse on them--one by one, they will all be snatched away by a giant mythical bird, which, needless to say, threatens to put a damper on their vacation.



After a stupid beginning, this Irish backwoods stuff actually starts creating some ominous atmosphere, especially when the fleeing youngsters get hopelessly lost in a creeping fog and start hearing scraping sounds on the roof of their van.  Not only that, but the stock characters start acting kind of like real people and we begin to slightly care about them.  It isn't long before we see the massive Roc dive-bombing at them with its giant claws outstretched, and surprisingly, the CGI is pretty good.  Then we get our first shockingly gory death scene, and it's a humdinger.

Now I'm enjoying ROADKILL instead of dreading it.  The kids run into all sorts of trouble including a flat tire that somebody's gonna have to go out there and fix, the usual lack of cell phone functionality (didn't see that coming, did ya?), and the serial reappearance of an increasingly hostile Luca along with his yokel brethren.  It turns out that Luca needs that necklace as a talisman to ward off the Roc, whom he also appeases by staking out hapless passersby as sacrificial bird food.  Drina (Eve Macklin), Luca's really hot sister or cousin or whatever (I don't think it really matters), also gets into the act with a sawed-off shotgun, heightening my interest level to an unhealthy degree.



The rest of the film manages to keep the tension pretty taut with several scenes of suspense and a few character moments that are unexpectedly resonant.  Performances seem to improve as the situation gets more frantic, and the fact that nobody's safe from the rampaging Roc keeps us on edge.  Stephen Rea (THE CRYING GAME) even shows up at one point as a local cop who isn't quite as helpful as he should be.  The ending, far-fetched as it is, puts a satisfying capper on the whole thing.

The DVD from Vivendi Entertainment is in widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound.  There are no extras or subtitles.

Don't get me wrong--ROADKILL isn't some kind of wonderful flick and I'm not guaranteeing that you'll love it.  It's just that when my expectations are so low, being surprisingly entertained by a movie like this tends to make me regard it rather fondly.  And as far as these SyFy Channel monster-of-the-week potboilers go, it Rocs. 

ROADKILL -- DVD Review by Porfle

12 DISASTERS -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 1/7/14

 

If one disaster makes for an exciting movie, then twelve of them would be twelve times more exciting, right?  Well...we're talking about the SyFy Channel here, and 12 DISASTERS (2012) is just the same old story they've been rehashing for years only with some slightly different but equally rinky-dink CGI.

Ed Quinn (BEHEMOTH) heads a cast dotted with several SyFy vets as rugged family man Joseph, whose 18-year-old daughter Jacey (Magda Apanowicz, SNOWMAGEDDON) turns out to be the "chosen one" in a long line of mystical women going all the way back to the Mayans.  She's the one who will have to stop the ancient Mayan prediction of the end of the world on 12/21/2012, as foretold in--brace yourselves--the Christmas carol "The 12 Days of Christmas." (The film's original title, as you might guess, was "The 12 Disasters of Christmas.")

You're probably singing that to yourself right now but it won't really help until you get to the part about the "five gold rings", which Jacey and her dad must locate and which are buried (for some damn reason I couldn't figure out) in secret locations all around their remote, rustic town (the usual Canadian location subbing for the U.S. Northwest).  Only with all five rings can Jacey ward off the impending twelve disasters which will destroy the earth.

We never really understand what the rest of the world has to fear since the disasters only affect their own small town, and most of them don't even qualify as "disasters."  There's a bad-CGI tornado, a mild earthquake, and some pretty cool giant ice shards that rain down out of the sky and skewer a few citizens (including Joseph's mom).

At one point, a crack in the earth releases some red gas that disintegrates a few bad guys who are under the impression that they can save themselves by sacrificing Jacey by fire (including the typical evil industrialist played by Roark Critchlow of EARTH'S FINAL HOURS). 

Another fissure in the earth's crust releases a sort of heat force-field that fries anything that tries to pass through it,  including some really poorly-rendered rescue helicopters.   The most interesting "disaster", for me anyway, is a rapidly-spreading cold wave that flash-freezes everything in its path, but we only get to see a few selected townspeople get turned into ice statues.  This is mainly due to the fact that these scenes don't feature a whole lot of extras.

Probably the dumbest-looking of the various deadly perils is a string of out-of-control Christmas lights that wrap themselves around a hapless victims and zap him to death in what might be Clark Griswold's worst nightmare.

The final and supposedly deadliest disaster occurs, as it so often does in these flicks, up in the mountains, where some meager volcanic effects billow and spew as Jacey and her dad scramble to locate the last ring.

Their quest to do so gets decidedly tiresome in the film's second half, as Critchlow's character menaces them while his cowardly cohort Jude (Andrew Airlie, APOLLO 18, "Defying Gravity") holds Joseph's wife Mary (Holly Elissa, ICE QUAKE) and son Peter (Ryan Grantham,  ICE QUAKE) hostage. (But at least you can pass the time picking out all of the script's obvious Biblical references.)

Director Steven R. Monroe of 2010's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and its sequel (as well as 2006's LEFT IN DARKNESS) turns in a passable but rushed job of bringing the screenplay by writer Rudy Thauberger (SNOWMAGEDDON) to a semblance of life.  Performances range from okay to not-so-great, with Magda Apanowicz as Jacey managing to work up the most convincing displays of emotion.

As Grant, an old codger who tries in vain to warn everyone of the impending doom, is veteran actor Donnelly Rhodes, whose mile-long list of credits includes playing the gambler who accuses Robert Redford of cheating in the opening minutes of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID.

The DVD from Anchor Bay is in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound and subtitles in English and Spanish.  No extras.

If you catch 12 DISASTERS in the right mood, you'll probably get some "bad-movie" enjoyment out of it.  At any rate, most of us pretty much know just what to expect from these SyFy Channel "end-of-the-world" flicks and whether or not we want to waste precious moments of our lives watching them.

12 DISASTERS -- DVD Review by Porfle

THE BIG TRAIL -- DVD Review by Porfle

 Originally posted on 10/26/11

 

It's not every day you get to watch a 1930 blockbuster movie in widescreen, with enough sheer spectacle to leave even modern viewers breathless.  The movie in question is Raoul Walsh's Western epic THE BIG TRAIL, a young John Wayne's first starring role and a genuine treasure for Western fans.

Shot on 70mm film using an early widescreen process known as "Fox Grandeur", THE BIG TRAIL was expensive to shoot and expensive to project--new equipment had to be installed in theaters just to show it--and with the onset of the Great Depression, it seemed the "Fox Grandeur" process had come along at just the wrong time.  Only a couple of theaters in New York and Los Angeles ever exhibited the widescreen version, while everyone else saw a much less impressive 35mm Academy aspect ratio version that was filmed simutaneously.  It would be another two decades before Cinerama offered moviegoers such wide vistas again.

The story takes place as a cattle drive blazes the trail for a wagon train full of settlers bound to reach the land north of Oregon.  For five months, director Raoul Walsh and his crew filmed 185 full-sized Conestoga wagons (or "prairie schooners") and thousands of extras on a 2,000-mile trudge across five states, facing conditions much like those experienced by the actual pioneers.  The settings, including a bustling river town, a massive riverboat, and various outposts along the trail, are meticulously detailed and wonderfully authentic, as are the costumes, props, and all other aspects of the production. 



The 23-year-old John Wayne plays buckskin-clad Breck Coleman, a tall, good-natured frontiersman who hires on as the group's scout for two reasons.  One, he's infatuated with a lovely young pioneer woman named Ruth (Marguerite Churchill), who can't stand him, and two, he's sworn revenge against the burly bullwhacker Frack (a Bluto-like Tyrone Power, Sr.) and his weaselly henchman Lopez (Charles Stevens) for murdering his best friend in order to steal his valuable stock of wolf pelts.  To complicate things, these skunks are in cahoots with a lowdown riverboat gambler named Thorpe (Ian Keith), who is also smitten with Ruth and is looking for an opportunity to shoot Breck in the back somewhere along the trail.

The actors, from the stars down to the extras, all look and act as though they belong in that era, despite the sometimes stilted acting styles (a leftover from the silent era, along with the expository intertitles).  And when the settlers encounter various tribes of Indians along the way, both friendly and not-so-friendly, they definitely aren't refugees from central casting--they're the real thing.  Much of this film is like a window into the past because the Wild West as we know it still existed at the time this was made, and Walsh's cameras were there to record it in its gloriously uncivilized state.



Breathtaking scenery and amazingly rich tableaux fill the screen throughout the film, with wagons, horses, and cattle often stretching as far as the eye can see.  One sequence shows the wagon train during a harrowing river crossing, while another details the grueling task of lowering the wagons, livestock, and people down the face of a sheer cliff by ropes.  We also get the obligatory "circling the wagons" scene (never as well-done as it is here) as the hostile Cheyenne attack and the settlers fight desperately to repel them. 

The excitement comes from knowing that these events are actually taking place and not being simulated by special effects or augmented by CGI.  From the rolling hills and mountains of the midwest, through miles of burning desert, and finally to the lush, majestic redwood forests (with a brief stop-off at the Grand Canyon along the way), the genuine locations used for THE BIG TRAIL are a non-stop feast for the eyes.

As Bill Cooke recently stated on the Classic Horror Film Board, "John Wayne may be a little rough in his first acting role, but was never more charming."  The financial failure of THE BIG TRAIL would relegate Wayne to a long string of B-movies until his breakthrough role as "The Ringo Kid" in John Ford's 1939 classic STAGECOACH, but his Breck Coleman character is just as likable and appealing as any he ever played.  He's earnestly convincing whether palavering with his friends the Indians, bashfully courting the gal of his fancy, or stalking his best friend's killers with deadly determination.



Marguerite Churchill, whom I always liked as Otto Kruger's sassy secretary in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936), is winsome as the girl Breck must try his darndest to win over.  As the loathesome Frack, Tyrone Power, Sr. is almost cartoonishly villainous, but he's a formidable bad guy nonetheless.  Tully Marshall is outstanding as Breck's pal, the aging frontiersman Zeke, while vaudeville comedian El Brendel provides love-it-or-hate-it comedy relief as a Swedish doofus named Gus who is constantly being harangued along the way by his tyrannical mother-in-law.

20th Century Fox's 2-disc DVD of this restored version of THE BIG TRAIL is a real treat for fans of John Wayne and of Westerns in general.  Despite some rough patches here and there, the film looks great and is always visually impressive.  Four informative featurettes and some photo galleries make for interesting supplemental viewing, although the same can't be said, unfortunately, for Richard Schickel's boring commentary track.  The second disc contains the standard fullscreen version, which is interesting for comparative purposes although you probably won't care to sit through the whole thing after watching the widescreen version.

For me, the combination of a great Western adventure with the novelty value of seeing a beautiful widescreen film shot in the early days of talking pictures is a thrill that's hard to beat.  Add to this the opportunity to watch John Wayne shine in his starring debut and director Raoul Walsh at the height of his creative skills, and you've got THE BIG TRAIL--surely one of the most spectacular and irresistibly entertaining Westerns ever made.  To borrow another quote from Bill Cooke:  "By the time this one is over, you actually feel as if you've taken a wagon train out West."

THE BIG TRAIL -- DVD Review by Porfle