Directed by Russell Mulcahy

Written by Gregory Widen

Run Time: 109 minutes

A guest review by Karl Hoegle

	Connor Macleod (Christopher Lambert) He must have really needed the money, or failed to read the script before agreeing to this turkey. Hmmm… Was there a script?
	Juan Sánchez Ramírez (Sean Connery) 3.5 million for 9 days work! I guess that even a screen legend can’t pick all winners. His bio-rhythm must have been low that day.
	Louise Marcus (Virginia Madsen) I hope she fired her agent after this debacle. I sure would have.
	General Katana (Michael Ironside) I hope he looks upon this movie and says “I was soooo drunk when I agreed to do that”

He must have seen the budget for this turkey!

Please allow me the indulgence to start this review off with a disclaimer; I loved the original “Highlander” movie, along with the entire concept of one man from each country fighting each other until the end for the amusement of the Gods, etc. This piece of tripe not only soured my fond memory of the first movie, but has stolen some of my ability to give any sequel an unbiased view. This movie is the only one so bad that I went to the theater manager and demanded a refund. Not asked for, but demanded. (I was able to score free tickets to a different movie, so I was only partially successful, I guess.) Be warned, this one is pretty awful.

The first “Highlander” movie started much like this one; we see a crowd of people watching some form of entertainment and we zoom in to see the Highlander in all his brooding glory. No one broods like Christopher Lambert, nobody. We meet Connor as an 80 year old duffer, barely able to stay awake long enough to hear the not-so-fat lady singing opera in a venue clearly marked “Opera”.

It ain’t the body, it’s the mileage

On the same block you might be able to go to “Bar” and get “Drink”. Connor sees the Wagnerian opera and it reminds him that he was not born of this Earth (Clearly an error, as he had relatives in the first movie that remember him as a child) and that he, Ramirez, and a host of nobodies were rebels on the planet Zeist in the distant past. They were exiled to Earth from this dying, desert like planet because they were fomenting sedition. General Katana (Michael Ironside) chews so much scenery with his “I am not a bad guy, I am THE bad guy” hammy-ness that you just feel sorry for the guy. He has his soldiers who are clearly armed with projectile firearms, lasers, and artillery eschew said weaponry for swords, just so there would be more screen time eaten up with actors jumping about and getting stabbed, chopped, and blown up. Katana, upon capturing Ramirez and Macleod, takes them to his masters instead of killing them there in the desert. His masters ban the two of them to future Earth, where they will be immortal and can fight for the prize; a return ticket home.

Planet Zeist sucks!

Let me get this straight; I try to overthrow the government of my home desert planet, I screw up and they catch me red handed. But instead of making an example of me by putting me in a huge blender, they send me away to a distant planet in my future that is green, rich and verdant. There, I can fight the other immortals for the prize of returning to Zeist in the past and becoming mortal again, hopefully magically cured of my need to overthrow the current regime. Or, I can choose not to fight and live on lush green Earth forever. Who thought this crap up? Did Brian Clemens even watch the first (and in my opinion, the ONLY) “Highlander” film?

This review can’t even begin to touch on the thousands of errors, lousy special effects, goofiness, or general disdain for the intelligence of the viewer, so I will condense into small chunks for brevity’s sake.

The Earth’s Ozone layer is almost gone; Connor and Alan Neyman build a shield above the ozone layer to protect the fragile eco-system below. Yay. No one questions the scientific prowess of an ex-antiques dealer from Hudson Street. The Shield Corporation that they formed makes a fortune by charging everyone for protection. If you miss a payment, what can they do? Make tiny holes in the shield to fry you and only you? Stupid…

This shield makes it always rain, always hot and humid, and all sunlight is gone. Plants somehow adapt. Somehow. Question: Without sunlight, wouldn’t it get cold pretty quickly?

Rebels led by Louise Marcus break into the local shield generator station, run a test, and see the results plainly state that the radiation above the shield is normal. Why this is news to them baffles me, as it is the ozone layer that is gone, and it protects us from normal radiation levels. So the test proves nothing.

Katana has his handy Earth-O-Vision TV set glued to Connor Macleod, and since he has nothing better to do, he calls his two stupidest soldiers in to travel to Earth and kill Connor. The brighter of the two (and that is saying something, his I.Q. must be in the low 40’s) asks why not just let Connor die naturally, he is barely walking by himself now, and having trouble finding nurses willing to change his Depends® undergarments. Katana slaps the impudent fool and tells him to get on with it and just kill him.

Louise Marcus easily finds Macleod and asks him why he built the shield. He looks at her with the patience of someone talking to an addled insanity victim and gently tells her it was “to save everyone”. She avers that the “Ozone layer has healed itself, and the radiation levels from the Sun are normal”. How could she know this? The test she ran showed that the solar radiation levels above the shield are normal, which has no bearing on whether or not the ozone has replenished itself. Connor points out that it would take more energy than the entire Earth has to shut down the shield. (!) This new science continues to puzzle me here, as it takes energy to keep something powered on, and loss of power tends to shut said unit down. Oh, well. Louise still wants to take her chances. If she is wrong, she is murdering every living being on the planet. Talk about guilt!

The Shield generator!

While Connor chews this over, the two goons attack, one on a hover board and one with small wings, and the flying is about as believable as a politicians’ promise. Wires shine briefly, speed and conservation of momentum are ignored, etc. Sigh. Connor eventually kills these two clowns and becomes immortal again, after feasting on their life energy. The only good scene in the entire movie is where a suddenly young Connor walks out of some flames and broods. No one broods like Christopher Lambe… Oh, wait, I already said that. Sorry. At this point, I said loudly and clearly in the theater “This movie had better get real good, real quick”. Sadly, it never did.

The finest assassins Zeist has to offer!

Katana gets the belated news from his Earth-O-Vision that his goons hath snuffed it, and decides to do it himself. He materializes on Earth in a subway train and kills a few innocent people, asks a young boy if he ever wanted to “drive” one of these. I guess they have trains on his desert home planet of Zeist and even evil Generals aren’t allowed to drive the trains no way, no how. He eventually gets it up to 670 KPH which equates to 416 miles per hour. Riiight. Faster than a speeding bullet!

Meanwhile, Louise finally convinces Connor that she is right; they decide that they need help. Connor screams “Ramirez!” for no reason and unbeknownst to the two of them a lightning bolt reconstitutes Ramirez in modern day Scotland, where he appears in the middle of a Shakespeare play of “Macbeth”. He innately knows where Connor is, (Remember he died long before America was discovered in the first movie) and scurries off to meet his second destiny. I know if I was resurrected I would be more than a little amazed at that. The last thing I’d want to do is anything even remotely dangerous!

They meet up, and after some half-hearted swordplay to pad the run time they decide to blow up the shield, but only after Connor and Louise check out the ozone level by climbing up a 12 to 19 miles long ladder inside a mountain and seeing for themselves. They have no trouble breathing in the stratosphere, the near absolute zero cold and scant oxygen doesn’t bother either of them in the slightest, and they view actual sunlight in all its glory, Louise for the first time. Riiight! If I climbed a 12 to 19 mile long ladder, my forearms would make Popeye’s look small in comparison. That Louise is one tough broad!

Above the ozone layer. Seriously.

They climb down the 12 to 19 mile long tube and meet up with Ramirez. They easily break into the compound by driving in and allowing themselves to be shot with over 100 bullets each. The car’s trunk, which holds Louise in it, must be armored as she suffers not a scratch. Connor and Ramirez wake up in the infirmary where the doc is putting the moves on Louise, and they overpower him and head to the final scene. They get caught in a trap, a huge spinning fan blade in a tube relentlessly advances, and Ramirez pulls a magic hand gesture, slowing the fan blade. He states that “We each have a full measure of life. If we summon it all up in one try, we can do something magic” and somehow opens the locked door, allowing Connor and Louise to escape. He then ran off the set and cashed his paycheck which was over 10% of the total film budget and got the hell out of there. I can’t blame him.

This movie has dozens of fans! [Dennis: ha ha]

Katana catches up to the duo in the generator room, Connor fights him, and ends up killing him. The power of the Quickening enables Connor to safely step into the power beam that dissolves most matter on contact and disrupt it, destroying the shield and returning Earth to its former sun drenched glory. I’ll bet sunglass vendors made a pretty penny that day. The plants were pleasantly surprised as well.

The movie ends, Connor and Louise walk into an improbably starry night with Ramirez babbling in the distance, probably laughing on his way to the bank. We are left with a nagging thought that we could have watched paint dry and been much, much more entertained.

Planet Zeist Bro-mance! Get a room, you two!

Karl Hoegle (Feb 2012)

Read more about Highlander 2 at

Directed by Kevin Reynolds

Writer by Peter Rader and David Twohy

Run Time: 135 minutes

A guest review by Karl Hoegle.

	Mariner (Kevin Kostner) So many fish jokes and puns that I could use here, but I will refrain.
	Deacon (Dennis Hopper) So over the top, I wonder if he read the script or just improvised as he went.
	Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) Whew! Easy on the eyes…at least until she gets an impromptu haircut.
	Enola (Tina Majorino) Enola gets a haircut too; making her more of a moppet than anything else.

I must admit that at the beginning of this stinker I was impressed; the Universal globe that denotes the studio that foisted this gem on us slowly filled with water and the land masses eventually disappeared. Kudos to the marketing genius that thought that one up. It is, unfortunately, the best part of the entire 2:15 minute snooze-fest. No clouds; I guess the entire Earth had great weather that day. (I presume the Picture was taken from surface of the Moon.)

THE FUTURE!!!

“THE FUTURE!!!” booms a loud, authoritative voice that informs us redundantly that the polar ice caps have melted (no reason why is ever given or even wondered about). “…Covering the Earth with water”… No! I thought that if the polar ice caps melted we would all be covered in green cheese. Sigh. I hesitate to point this out, as there would be no movie otherwise, but all of my research gives a top limit of 200 feet of additional water above sea level if all of the polar ice melted, including the bulk of the ice that lies unseen under water. Ice takes up more space than water, so melted ice would actually tend to even out, if not lower the average sea level. Also, the ice there can’t melt, as the average temperatures in the Antarctic are around NEGATIVE 31 Fahrenheit in the summer.

Sooo…I guess that in the “FUTURE” water has become fluffier and takes up much, much more space than is physically possible now. I’ll suspend my disbelief for Kevin this one time, I guess. We get our first bit of action as we see some feet, hear some odd sounds, and a stream of urine fills a container. Lovely. Talk about setting the tone for the movie. The protagonist (Let’s call him the Mariner, since they don’t let us in on his name) pours this vile fluid into a Rube Goldberg device, pumps a handle a few times, and voila! fresh, drinkable water pours out the other end, although it must still be pretty damn warm… Yuck! He greedily downs this fluid, and rinses his mouth out with a bit and spits it into his lime plant, that I will call “Fred” from now on since it never gets named either. Ugh, this movie already has me gagging.

Question: If all the Mariner needs is fluid that can be filtered and drunk, why not use some of the FREAKING ocean that is all around? All that has to be done is the salt filtered out to make it potable. Urine has myriad poisons, acids, and whatnot. Sigh. There is a throwaway line in a deleted scene that has Helen ask why not use hydro, but the Mariner tells her that the seawater clogs the filters. Since the line was cut, I feel it not germane to the argument.

Anyhoo, our fish-man with no name sets his anchor and dives for the bottom, looking to loot some treasure from the watery grave of our technological society. While he is doing this, a bandit sneaks up, steals lots of his stuff including Fred’s fruit .He is about to escape when the Mariner comes up for air and eyes his unwanted guest with suspicion. They talk a bit, and just when the Mariner finds out that he has been boarded, the new guy points out that there are 2 “Smokers” on the horizon. Smokers are the nominal “bad” guys, still using eeeevil fossil fuels and mechanical conveyances whilst the “good” guys are using politically correct wind power to get around. I’d like to point out that everyone wears “Mad Max” type clothing, and is oddly filthy dirty for being on a world where you can literally take a bath by stepping wrong. The Smokers give chase, Mariner hits a cleverly placed lever, and his boat hoists sail and runs like a bat out of hell. He drives over the thief’s boat, disabling it and making him easy pickings for the Smokers who let the Mariner go.

Meet the Smokers

The Mariner sails for a bit, and then finds a floating metal island and decides to trade with them. They let him in only when they see that he has a huge jar full of dirt. They stare in awe of this bounty, and allow him entrance. Question 2; if anyone wants dirt, all that they would have to do is to put a bucket on a rope and drag it behind them. Sigh. One would think that fruit and vegetable seeds would be more valuable than mere dirt. Question 3: wouldn’t said dirt be rendered useless from residual salinity?

He trades for a bunch of items and the prize he was after; a tomato plant (complete with a pound of … you guessed it… DIRT!!!) I guess no one thought that was odd when they wrote the script, he pays for a bunch of items including a plant with a pound of dirt in it with… a pound of dirt! As he is leaving, the villagers ask him to impregnate a local girl before he goes, to help keep their gene “pool” clean- ha ha. He declines, and instead of allowing him to leave, they look behind his ears and see the reason he can stay underwater for hours at a time… gills!! This is a capitol offense, and he is tossed in a metal cage above the sewage pool they apparently keep for just such occasions. The locals wanted to kill him outright, but the local cop saves him.

We are introduced to the other main characters, the barmaid Helen and her adopted daughter Enola (Alone, spelled backwards) who, coincidentally, has a map to mythical dry land tattooed on her back. Ouch! They try to escape in a makeshift balloon with her gran-pappy, but he bungles it and flies away without them. She shifts instantly to plan B, namely seducing the Mariner (who she knows is a mutant) and use him to escape the nameless atoll with her adopted daughter. He tells her to bugger off at first, but as they are lowering him into the cess pool, he has an amazing sudden change of heart and agrees. A “pack” of Smokers attack, (sorry!) perfect bad timing for all as the barmaid easily breaks the lock with a big knife. The Mariner then gets free, grabs a machete and promptly tosses the weapon 50 yards into a bad guy about to kill the cop who tried saving his sorry ass earlier on. Debt paid in Waterworld.

The Mariner and the girls escape the atoll, and run into Dennis Hopper slumming as the main baddie named Deacon, who is so over the top with overacting that I just know he saw the script and thought “ What the hell, one last paycheck…”. After a lot of bad shooting and some really excellent music, they escape again and find open water. I really don’t see how, with a clear day and a visible horizon they should be easily spotted until they pass 4 miles or so away. The Mariner wants to toss Enola to the sharks, as she is excess baggage. Nice guy, our hero! Helen refuses to let him and offers herself to him in exchange. He declines sex for some strange reason ( second time in 1 day! ) but agrees to let Enola stay. He vacillates quite a bit in the movie, I think he may have borderline schizophrenia.

Deacon then returns to his main ship, the Exxon Valdez, complete with a picture on the wall of Cap’n Joe Hazelwood. After some more patented overacting that would frankly make Shatner jealous, they set a trap for the Mariner and his crew at a floating repair shop. Question; during the day with no stars at all to navigate, how would anyone find anything? A compass shows only magnetic north, it can’t help you find a nameless atoll or a floating repair shop, much less a non-anchored, free wheeling boat under sail. Yet the Smokers find anything and everything they want with amazing regularity. Anyhoo, Deacon surprises our stalwart group with the trap, and shoddy henchmanship allows Enola, Helen and the Mariner to escape yet again. Deacon gets upset.

In an unbelievable scene, the Mariner inflates a see through dome he must have made for this purpose and uses it to allow Helen to go underwater with him and see the sunken cities, with (I must admit) amazing special effects. I saw a nuclear sub rusting away on the sea bottom, which would tend to lend credence to a war being the cause of the ice-melt. This explains how he can get so much dirt and the odds and ends that he has festooned about his boat. When they re-emerge, (ignoring the bends as the dissolved nitrogen in their bloodstreams doesn’t kill or cripple in Waterworld) they find that Smokers have Enola in their possession, kidnapping no longer a serious offense. We now also find out how the Smokers find everyone; a pair of bloodhound sharks, trained to go after scents. Riiiiight! I wonder who trained them… Roy Scheider would be proud.

The Smokers torch the Mariner’s boat and leave, having little Enola squirming and screaming in their grasp. Mariner and Helen find what is left of the original atoll that Helen and Enola came from, and restock there. They grab weapons, provisions, and even the grand prize of a stolen smoker Jet-ski.I am sure that the good citizens of … (Well, I’ll call it Atoll-Town since it is never named) would give up all this booty just to hopefully get a bit of revenge on the Smokers. The Mariner takes the stolen Jet-ski and tracks down the Exxon Valdez by following empty plastic containers floating in the water. Did those Smokers have tapeworms to leave a trail as easy to follow as that?

The baddies think that the Mariner is one of their henchmen limping back home and allow him entrance, and he promptly kills everyone. Enola tells Deacon that the Mariner has no name so that death cannot find him. ( Note to self, in ten or so years, change name and move!). In the final showdown, ( thank goodness!) The Mariner drops a road flare that he didn’t have down a pipe and ignites the oil. There is an old man in a rowboat floating on the oils surface, and when he sees the flare (and his imminent doom) he says quietly “Oh, thank God” and everything explodes. I must admit, this scene tugged at my heartstrings for some reason. Not the explosion, that was the usual ho-hum Hollywood fare, I meant the old man. In just one line, he stole the show. I guess the fumes from that particular fuel oil aren’t toxic.

The Mariner grabs Enola and escapes, Deacon jumps in the plane that somehow survived the destruction of the world, and gives chase. Then the impossible happens, the old man (Helen’s dad from the beginning) swoops in and saves everyone in the balloon that barely was big enough in the beginning of the film for three and is now large and very roomy. Deacon crashes his Jet-ski into two others all gunning for Enola at top speed, with the moppet treading water ( Earlier we found out that she can’t swim, but the Mariner taught her ). Last question: Why does Deacon still need her? He made a copy of the map, and has it in his possession. Sigh. The Mariner rescues Enola with a bungee jump rope, and they float off, using Enola’s back map as a guide to find dry land. If this is the only dry land available, so one would assume it is Mount Everest. Our intrepid explorers find Enola’s parents dead in a Gilligan’s island type cottage and all present tell her how much her parents must have loved her, as they presumably suddenly developed mental powers.

The Mariner has to leave, dry land just isn’t for him. He makes a replacement catamaran and goes, the music swells, and we realize that this movie is in reality nothing more than an elaborate 2 hours and 15 minute chase scene. I want my 2 hours and 15 minutes back.

Things I have learned from this movie:

1.) In the future, water is much fluffier and takes up more volume.

2.) If you use tracking sharks, you can find anyone on the ocean.

3.) If there was no land masses, the wind on our world would gale at near hurricane speeds pretty much constantly. Not on Waterworld.

4.) Waterworld has zero cloud cover and little shade, but no one tans.

5.) This movie is referred to as “Fishtar” or “Kevin’s Gate” for a reason.

Karl Hoegle (June 2011)

Read more about Waterworld at

Directed by Joe Finley

Written by Howard Cohen and Lance Smith

Run Time: 80 minutes

Although I typically wouldn’t want to review a sequel without first posting a review for the first of the series, I’m going to make an exception for this movie. Why? Two reasons:

1) It’s not really a sequel: it’s more of a "follow-up".

2) This movie really sucks.

Let’s quickly compare the 2 films, "Barbarian Queen" and "Barbarian Queen 2: The Empress Strikes Back":

Both are low-budget sword-and-sandal affairs featuring Lana Clarkson as a rebel leader set on overthrowing whatever generic eeeeeevil regime that happens to be in power. There are plenty of boobs, lame sword fighting, and bad special effects in both films, yet I found that BQ2 contained a lot less misogyny, a much more lame-brained plot, a copious amount of ludicrous plot contrivances, a mud-wrestling scene, and even worse special effects than the first…

I just had to review it. Duty called. I had to answer.

Let’s just say that BQ2 makes BQ1 look like "Lawrence of Arabia" in comparison.

The title itself, Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back, is rather amusing: The main character has a different name in each film…so why the "II"? Clarkson is not an Empress in either film, so I can only assume that the bit about "The Empress Strikes Back" was tagged onto the end in a vain reference to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Since "Barbarian Queen 2" obviously has nothing to do with outer space, and was made 9 years after the aforementioned George Lucas film, I have no idea how any connection could have been made between the two whatsoever…but you have to give then "E" for "Effort".

The beautiful Lana Clarkson is a well known name in the cheese-movie circles. Her first role was as Mrs. Vargas in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). A year later she appeared in a Roger Corman cheapie called Deathstalker. Lana’s performance as "Kaira" in "Deathstalker" convinced Corman to give her the leading role of Amethea in the 1985 production of Barbarian Queen. (Funny enough, she also played a character named "Amethea" in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II in 1989.) After Barbarian Queen, Lana Clarkson appeared in numerous Corman productions and other B-movies, in addition to garnering a cult following all her own. Lana also appeared in several TV shows, including The Jeffersons, The A-Team, Knight Rider, Night Court, among others. Sadly, and I sincerely mean sadly, Lana was shot and killed by reclusive record producer Phil Spector on February 3, 2003. Spector’s murder trial is still pending at the time of this review.

Writer Howard Cohen is a legendary schlock-meister having penned not a few low-to-no budget films. His opus includes a roller-derby ‘expose’ entitled Unholy Rollers (1972), Vampire Hookers (1978) (starring John Carradine!), the "Star Wars" rip-off Space Raiders (1983), the "Abyss" rip-off Lords of the Deep (1989), and of course, both of the Barbarian Queen sagas, among other sludge. I think you get the idea.

As for the other cast and crew? Nothing of terrible interest. The majority of the lead characters have appeared in various soap operas and sitcoms over the years. Since the film was shot in Mexico, the supporting cast (guards, thugs, peasants and so on) consists of primarily Mexican bit actors who generally get their asses kicked by Princess Athalia.

Oh yeah. Produced by Roger Corman. I love that guy.

	Princess Athalia (Lana Clarkson) The beautiful Princess Athalia is often captured and stripped of her top. Not that I’m complaining. In a climatic battle at the end of the film, Athalia leads her band of rag-tag rebels into battle against the numbskull Hofrax and his Legion of Idiot Guards. The outcome, well, read the review…
	Ankaris (Alejandro Bracho) Usurper and Hofrax’s boss, Ankaris has stolen the throne from King Iko. Who? Don’t worry, you never see the King. It feels like we started the movie in chapter 3 or something. Whatever. Ankaris is a wimp and loves to chew the scenery whenever he gets the chance. Which is basically every time he’s in front of the camera.
	Aurion (Greg Wrangler) Wimpy bad-guy cum good rebel. We eventually learn that Aurion is Athalia’s ex-boyfriend, so hey, maybe they’ll get together at the end of the film. Gee…you think?
	Zarla (Rebecca Wood) One of many hot babes that populate the forests of Mexico. Ooops. I mean the Kingdom of Ankaris.
	Tamis (Cecilia Tijerina) Being Ankaris’s bratty daughter, this young lass has her eyes on the throne. Unfortunately, a slight miscommunication puts an end to all that as you shall see…
	Hofrax (Roger Cudney) Hofrax…my dear…Hofrax. You eeeeediot! Head of Castle Security and the Legion of Idiots. This dude is so inept, you really have to wonder how in the hell he reached such a powerful position in the castle pecking order. Still, looking at the other morons that seem to be running this dog-and-pony show, it’s not so surprising after all.

Settling back with a nice cold beer, the film begins.

Open in Athalia’s bedchamber. A doting nurse is doing her best to get the young princess into a set of respectable clothes. "Nobody is going to make a lady out of me!" Athalia shouts while hurling jugs of water against the wall and stressing the break-point of her low-cut shirt to the maximum. Some raw exposition fills us in rather quickly that Athalia’s father, "The King" (nice name), is away. Yes, it’s simply noted that he’s, <ahem>, "away". Well, fine. It turns out that Generic Bad Guy, Ankaris, was ostentatiously left in charge while the King’s "away". Anyway, for some unexplained reason, and most things are left unexplained in this film, Athalia is to appear before Ankaris in the throne room.

Athalia is somehow forced into a white gown and appears before Ankaris. The eviiillll, power-hungry Ankaris and his eviilll chief of security (or whatever they called it back then), Hofrax, are stomping around the throne room waiting for the young princess. (The throne room is so sparsely furnished and devoid of adornments that I’m positive it’s used in other scenes requiring "a room in a castle". I also noticed that the floor of the throne room is tan linoleum. How authentic.) Anyway, when Athalia demands an audience with her father, Hofrax somberly informs her that the "beloved King Iko" was killed in battle. Not wasting any time, Ankaris demands the "Secret of the Scepter" in order to finalize his ascension to the throne. At this point you may be asking yourself "The what of the what?"…Don’t worry. This film will fill you in on the details when it’s ready to.

At this point one of the friendlier "bad guys" (and Athalia’s ex-flame), Aurion, notes that the King’s body was never found. I’ve never been too sure just what the hell Aurion’s role in the new evillll regime is supposed to be. He mopes around all the time, longing for Athalia and doing his best to avoid eviilll duties (i.e., pillaging, etc.). Why doesn’t Hofrax just have him executed as a potential traitor? Gee, I wonder if Aurion will use his position as, whatever he does, to help Athalia overthrow Ankaris. (Do you hate these names yet? I do. Imagine how much fun I’m going to have spell-checking this damn review…)

Blah. Anyway, Athalia refuses to divulge the "Secret of the Scepter" (why can’t they just call it The Scepter’s Secret?) and she is led away to Ye Oulde Generic Dungeon by a couple of guards that look like they wandered in from a scene from "Monty Python’s Holy Grail".

OK, Athalia is led away to a holding cell where she is sentenced to languish until she reveals the Secret of the Scepter. After a short while the Ankaris’s teenage daughter, Tamis, pays Athalia a visit in the dungeon, ostensibly to deliver Athalia some much needed food. Almost immediately Tamis begins plying Athalia for information regarding the Scepter. This unusual interest in the magical device fails to set off any alarm bells in Athalia’s head, but she still refuses to use the Scepter’s power because if she does, and her father is still alive, "he will die". (I don’t know how that works, nor how she could use the power from her cell even if she wanted to. Don’t bother trying to make sense of any of this. It’s all just a bunch of goofy crap. Just go with the flow, ok?)

To my non-surprise, Tamis pulls forth a stealthily concealed dagger and gives it to Athalia. Armed with the dagger, Athalia quickly dispatches the (lone) guard outside the door and the duo make their way through an amazingly understaffed and under-guarded castle to the Scepter room. Floating above a dais in the center of the room is the much vaunted Scepter of Power, or whatever the hell they call it. Closer inspection reveals that it looks like something a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast might have made in a high-school metals class, but hey, let’s be nice and pretend it’s the Scepter of Power, ok? It makes the movie go a lot smoother if we do.

Athalia recites some hocus-pocus and plucks the Scepter from its magical perch. To Tamis’s disappointment, Athalia has not released the Scepter’s full power. Athalia hesitates, noting that there are "more words", but she’s afraid to say them because of her father. Um. OK. Note sure what’s happening here…did I fall asleep for a couple of minutes just then?

Moving right along, the trap is sprung as Hofrax enters the chamber with a couple of guards. As a half-hearted sword fight breaks out, Athalia tosses the Scepter to Tamis, assuming she’ll flee with it. Instead of running to safety, Tamis giggles and nonchalantly hands the Scepter to her father, Ankaris, who has casually descended into the chamber from a long stairway which I certainly didn’t see in the previous shot of the room. Hmmm. Anyway, Despite being faced with execution, Athalia refuses to give away the Scepter’s secret, whatever the hell it might be.

Blah, blah, blah. This is really taking too long. Before being taken to the dungeon again, Athalia surprises everybody by grabbing the Scepter out of Ankaris’ clutches and, through the magic technology of playing film footage in reverse, hurls it back onto its magical position over the pedestal. One guard, obviously lacking in IQ, grabs the Scepter (which if you haven’t already figured out by now is a royal "No-No") and bursts into flame. Well, sort of. Some flames shoot out from the base of the pedestal so we can just assume that he is aflame. Oh, I’m sorry: They’re magical flames as indicated by the guard simply disappearing into a puff of smoke, leaving his empty garments and helmet laying on the floor.

Ankaris finally gets fed up and orders Athalia to be publicly executed the next day. Why not immediately execute her? Because then she won’t have time to pull off a preposterous escape. Tamis starts to whine when she realizes she’s been deprived of having Athalia as a slave, and Ankaris simply grants her Aurion to placate her. Furthermore, Aurion is ordered to marry her when she’s old enough to ascend the throne. Aurion swallows his pride, smiles and agrees to the plan.

The next day Athalia is led through town bound to the back of a horse cart. Now, let’s take a look at Hofrax’s security measures:

Athalia is loosely tied to the cart around her wrists only.

Three guards ride in front of the cart looking forward.

The only guard actually in proximity of the prisoner is sitting down looking out the back.

In other words, nobody is watching Athalia. Bravo, Hofrax!

Athalia wriggles free of the ropes and kicks the rear guard out of the cart. This fall of a whopping 3 feet is enough to knock the guard unconscious (even though he’s wearing a metal helmet). Taking advantage of the lax security, Athalia quickly kicks another guard to the ground, rendering him unconscious as well. To top it all off, Athalia steals a horse and rides out the front gate…right past 2 more guards who just stand and watch! You eeeeeeediots!

After this ‘daring’ escape, a squad of guards pursue Athalia into the surrounding forest. For some reason, Athalia’s horse stops and somehow topples down an incline. (Maybe it was suicidal.) This bizarre equestrian behavior allows a "tense" moment as a guard catches up to Athalia and is about to dispatch her. Fortunately for Athalia, an arrow flies out of nowhere and sinks into the guards chest at which time he does a somersault (!) and dies.

The source of the arrow is an attractive barbarian woman, Zarla, who is clad in an overburdened leather bikini top and mini-skirt. As Athalia gives her thanks, Zarla strips the guard’s body of valuables and leads Athalia along a dirt road to her hidden rebel village. Did I mention a dirt road? Good. Because you can see the tire tracks. I’m really trying to suspend disbelief but things like that just aint helpin’.

The village, probably named "Village of the Bad Perms", appears to be populated by a gaggle of sooty faced lads and lasses. The village matriarch, Erigena, a rather down-and-out looking leader with a terrible perm, doesn’t think Athalia has what it takes to be a member of the clan. Yeah, yeah, let’s just get the fight started already so we can see some boobs. After a couple of shoves, a full-out fist-fight breaks out between Athalia and Erigena. As luck would have it, heh heh, Erigena knocks over a barrel of water resulting in the world’s first mud-wrestling match. I kid you not. To add to the fun, both Athalia and Erigena’s tops are torn off in the scuffle treating the viewer to some gratuitous muddy-breast shots. (If you think this is gratuitous, watch the first "Barbarian Queen" film…yowza!)

Village of the Bad Perms

Anyway, the two soiled combatants roll around for a while before Athalia lands a solid left-cross on Erigena’s chin, effectively ending the muddy melee.

Cut to see Hofrax and a group of soldiers harassing a pair of peasants in the forest. Why? To facilitate this ridiculous story line. (Note that the peasant’s cart is the same one used to carry Athalia to the gallows earlier in the film.) Anyway, the peasant girl runs off and is quickly overwhelmed by a trio of guards who promptly tear off her top (of course) and prepare to have their way with the helpless waif.

Fortunately for the young woman, a group of rebels lead by Athalia pop out of the bushes and surround the guards. Hofrax demands that the rebels drop their weapons and surrender. No dice. A ridiculous battle breaks out complete with crappy sword fights, rubber arrows, terribly timed punches, and everything that could possibly go wrong in a sword-fight sequence. Many times you can see the square pad under the actors’ shirts into which an off camera stage hand fires a plastic arrow. (These arrows then bend when the victims fall to the ground.) Just as the battle is getting heated, the guards ride off to alert the castle.

With a head-spinning jump cut we return to Rebel Village where Athalia is doing her damnedest to rally the villages to her side. With a luke-warm inspirational speech, Athalia unsurprisingly fires up the villagers’ ire and they pledge their allegiance to their new leader. What Athalia doesn’t know is that Hofrax is leading his own group of soldiers back into the forest the next morning to be rid of the rebels once and for all. Bet you can’t wait to see that battle, can you?

OK, let’s see. Athalia and Zarla are out hunting for food when they come across yet another hot leather-clad barbarian woman. (Where the hell do all these people hide from each other? And who does their hair?) Anyway, the stranger turns out to be a mute: a victim of Hofrax’s brutality. She pulls down a black scarf to reveal a long (fake) scar across her throat. Yadda Yadda. The trio make friends and Hot Mute Blonde (HMB), hoping for a bit of retribution somewhere down the line, joins the rebels.

The next day we see Hofrax, Aurion, and a group of Mexican bit actors herding a group of forlorn peasants along a forest road for some reason. Boy, it must be hell being a peasant in this district. How do they ever get anything done? Anyway, this time the film crew covered the dirt road in a thin layer of hay in order to hide the tire tracks in the soil, so that was a nice touch. This odd procession of Renaissance Festival rejects is brought to an abrupt halt when they notice Athalia blocking the road. Hofrax and Athalia exchange a few sharp jibes, for example,

Hofrax: "If you’re so fond of [the peasants] maybe you should join them.."

Athalia: "I was just thinking of asking them to join me."

Hofrax: "That’s the last thing you’ll ever ask of anyone!"

(Hofrax then sneers as the actor playing him struggles to get his sword out of the scabbard…and this guy is supposed to be Chief of Security…sure.)

Hofrax charges Athalia and suddenly, and most mysteriously, he becomes ensnared in a rope loop around his arms which yanks him off his horse and leaves him dangling from a tree limb. Unfortunately for the special effects crew, you can easily see the rope going into the back of his shirt and into a harness around his chest. In fact, the rope that he’s ostensibly hanging from is so loose that it eventually wriggles up and lays limply around his shoulders and neck. I really can’t over-emphasize how shoddy all of this is.

Oh boy. Another ludicrous sword fight between the peasants and the royal "guard".

Fight High Points:

Comedy Relief Rebel Woman (CRRW): a clumsy rebel who falls a lot and mumbles, "I’ll never get used to this," while dusting dirt off her rear end.

Lots of guards begin "impaled" by swords where you can plainly see the sword simply being shoved up under the actor’s armpit. I mean, it’s not even close!

Did I mention some of the profoundly worst choreographed swordplay I’ve ever seen?

Anyhoo, Aurion is knocked out and a captured, because, you know, he’s Athalia’s old boyfriend and all. Oh gee, Hofrax is captured as well. Why they simply don’t kill him is beyond me. Well, I guess the movie would end and we wouldn’t want that, now would we.

Back at the rebel village a victory celebration takes place where you can glimpse almost every Medieval movie cliche in the book. Over in a corner we see that Hofrax has been bound to a post where he awaits his fate. Athalia strolls over to the prisoner and asks him why he’s so afraid of women.

"I’m afraid of nothing…women are a waste of time," Hofrax snarls.

"Everyone has something that can destroy them," Athalia snaps back, "One night with me would be the end of you!"

Boy, if I had a dime for every time a woman said that to me…I’m telling ya.

After setting the record straight with Hofrax, Athalia has a few words with her ex-flame Aurion, who has been released from his bounds and is strolling around the camp in slacks and button down shirt. (!)

To make a long story short: Aurion tries to convince Athalia that she should return to the castle. Athalia tries to convince Aurion that her cause is just. Aurion takes off Athalia’s bikini top and they have sex in woods.

After that touching scene, the two love birds return to the village square to see that the villagers have humiliated Hofrax by stripping him down to his underwear. Yeah, I guess that makes up for his regime’s years of brutal oppression, kidnapping, and murder. That’ll teach him a lesson. (If you listen to the laughter, you can easily discern that it’s the same 3 second audio clip looped over and over onto the soundtrack. What? Was it too expensive to have the extras actually laugh?) Ok, Aurion and Hofrax are tied up anew, sat atop a pair of horses, and sent back to the castle as a warning to Ankaris to stop the oppression.

Once again, just kill Hofrax when you have the chance! I hate this ‘Just Give Him A Warning This Time’ crap. Furthermore, they sent Hofrax back without even being blindfolded, so now they’ve just given away the location of their base camp! Stupid rebels.

Back at the castle we see Hofrax wrapped in a blanket getting his ass chewed out by Ankaris for being a numb-skull. (A justifiable ass-chewing if there ever was one.) In the course of the discussion Hofrax brings up the fact that Aurion seemed a bit too ‘kissy-kissy’ with the traitor Athalia. Aurion plays it cool and defends himself by noting that a prisoner has to do what is commanded. (Not always true, but we’ll let it slide Aurion.) Sensing Ankaris’s suspicion, Aurion reassures his lord that his allegiance lies with the kingdom. To test the jelly-spined Aurion, Hofrax "rewards" him by allowing him to carry out the first executions of rebel prisoners.

So much for the Send-Him-Back-And-Tell-The-King-To-Stop-Oppressing-Us plan, Athalia! Gee, the first thing they do is start executing rebels. Nice one. Well, the whole stupid thing is simply a trap to lure Athalia into the castle so she can be captured…so she can be tortured and show her breasts some more…so she can escape…so she can win in the end. I hope I’m not revealing too much here.

Well, since the rebels are pretty much a bunch of morons, they show up in the castle’s town square just as the execution’s are about to commence. Now, you’d think that the rebels would try to cover their identities just a bit since Hofrax was able to see their faces while being held prisoner at their camp. But do they do that here? Noooooooooo. They just show up in the town square as casual as ever. Needless to say, Hofrax spots them right off the bat.

Oh wait. It was only some of the rebels who showed up sans disguise. Athalia, Zarla, and HMB have disguised themselves as nuns. Apparently nuns in this region dress up in light-blue bed-sheets with pointy hoods…sort of like powder-puff blue Clan members.

"The sisters want to bless the prisoners," a knuckle-head guard reports to Aurion. Glancing down at the, <ahem>, nuns, Aurion realizes that it’s Athalia and the others incognito. Since he’s really a good guy at heart, Aurion allows them to pass through the perimeter and approach the condemned prisoners. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. One of the guards asks the "sisters" to bless his sword. (!) Athalia obliges but says that she can’t bless the sword unless she’s holding it. (Oh lord.) The guard hands his sword to Athalia and is promptly stabbed in gut for his troubles. (Do they have IQ requirements to be a member of the Royal Guard?)

Somehow everybody in the town square is suddenly armed with swords and they immediately commence to dispatching the hapless Guard left and right. The continuity in this battle scene is appalling. Guards appear and disappear on the gallows from scene to scene. Bodies appear on the ground where there were none just a second ago, and so on. As the rebels scramble out of the castle, a guard at the gates (who wasn’t there a second ago!) actually stands with his arms in the air waiting for the rebels to run up to him and stab him in the gut. This movie makes Python’s ‘The Holy Grail’ look like a National Geographic documentary! Ridiculous! Anyway, the rebels flee the castle but due to the lame script, Athalia is finally overcome and taken prisoner again. What I mean is, Athalia does everything possible to be captured so the story can continue. My head is starting to hurt at this point in the film.

Anyhoo, Hofrax imprisons Athalia in a dungeon and straps her to a rack. In order to give her a "taste of what’s to come", Hofrax grins and twists a wheel which presumably lengthens the rack and sends shock waves of agony down Athalia taut body. Well, this is how it’s supposed to work. In the film, the wrack doesn’t move an inch, and you can see that Athalia’s arms are bent nearly 90 degrees at the elbow, so I can’t really see how she’s ‘stretched’ at all. In fact, she looks more bored than anything. True to form, Hofrax also takes this opportunity to rip off Athalia’s top and treat the viewer to more boobage.

Despite this excruciating, <cough> torture, Athalia refuses to divulge the Secret of the Scepter. (Yes, remember that from the first 2 minutes of the movie?) Hofrax takes his leave and goes up to eat dinner, giving Athalia some time to ponder her fate. Apparently the village idiot was responsible for tying Athalia to the rack because she wriggles her hands free in about 2 seconds and quickly slips out of the dungeon. Needless to say, since it’s one of Hofrax’s dungeons, the door is unguarded.

With a brand new leather bikini-top safely in place (where the hell did she get that from?!), Athalia makes her way through the unguarded castle hallways to the Scepter Chamber. Alas, Athalia is afraid to use the Scepter’s power to save her skin because of the idiotic side-effect that the power will kill her father if he’s still alive. (!) (That has got to be the
lamest plot device I’ve ever heard of. OK. One of the lamest.) After agonizing over what to do for a few seconds, Hofrax bursts into the Scepter Chamber and recaptures the desperate rebel. (And the point of this scene was…?)

In a hilarious edit, we immediately jump cut from the Scepter Chamber to see Athalia rebound on the rack…bare breasted yet again. Man, I will say that they do give you a lot of eye-candy in this film.

Moving right along…Hofrax has had enough BS and tells Aurion to dispatch a group of soldiers to the rebel camp to deal with them once and for all. This mighty military force consists of 4 mounted soldiers and 8 soldiers on foot. (What, they couldn’t spare 8 more horses for the poor soldiers that now have to jog behind the horses all the way to the rebel encampment…while wearing full armor?) Note that the number of soldiers being sent out this time is the same as it was the last time the guards got their asses kicked, so you would think that Hofrax would send, oh, I don’t know, a thousand soldiers this time. But no. I guess they couldn’t afford the extras. Don’t worry. Aurion is a good guy, so he sends the guards to wrong location.

Meanwhile, back in the dungeon, Tamis the Brat puts a poisonous spider on Athalia’s arm. (A tarantula, of course.) Now things get a little hard to follow. The spider supposedly bites Athalia’s arm, so I guess she has just a few days to live. We cut to the throne room to hear that Athalia’s father, the King, is returning…so that’s, uh, a bad thing for Ankaris because he can’t be ruler anymore or something.

Oh gee. Jump cut to outside the castle to see Comedy Relief Women, Hot Mute Blonde, Zarla, and a couple peasant dudes hiding in plain sight (literally), trying to figure out how to break into the castle and rescue Athalia.

You can’t see us: we’re hiding.

Anyway, the rebel rescue squad manages to sneak into the dungeon and release Athalia. Oh yes…Aurion tags along too because, you know, he’s really a good guy and loves Athalia. We never get to see the rescue scene, of course, simply because it’s so implausible that the writers just decided to skip over the whole mess and simply cut back to the rebel camp.

Hey, Ankaris…maybe you should review ‘Ye Oulde Security Procedures’. Dipstick.

Tamis, heart-broken that her future husband Aurion has defected to the rebels, casts a spell on herself that transforms her into a grown woman. Swearing to avenge Aurion’s betrayal, Tamis heads out to the rebels in her new body. (You know what I mean. Please don’t ask me to go back and re-watch that sequence. Please.)

Moving right along, we go back to the rebel camp. (Back and forth, back and forth…la la la dee da dee da…) Athalia has partially recovered from the spider bite and Aurion tells her the news that her father is in fact alive and heading back to the castle. (Where was the King? How long has he been gone? Why was he away? How about a little back story…anybody? Hello? Can anybody hear me? Is this thing on?)

OK, I think I have to move this along a bit. Athalia recovers with the aid of some good food and a little lovin’ from Aurion. We now learn that Comedy Relief Woman is named Noki. Thanks.

Unfortunately, a group of the King’s soldiers pulls into the camp and reports that Athalia’s father is actually dead. (Oh brother…whatever.) When you recover from the trauma of hearing that news, you can rejoice in the fact that Athalia has accepted her duties as the new Queen and is to lead the rebel forces in battle against Ankaris the very next day. (In a hilarious bit you can see that one of the extras in the crowd of rebels pumps his hand in the air and begins to cheer before Athalia finishes her speech. The other extras mumble something to him and he embarrassingly puts down his arms. I really love catching screw-ups like that. Makes all the pain worthwhile.)

The next scene shows the rebels practicing their sword skills in preparation for the upcoming battle with Ankaris’s forces. Athalia notes that the rebels are "growing stronger every day." I think that’s rather odd since in the previous scene she said they would be marching against the castle "at dawn". Nice continuity.

Later that night we see that Tamis has infiltrated the camp. Even though Athalia was supposedly cured of the venom, she is now back in bed and delirious with fever. Because of the venom she unwittingly mutters the final stanza of the Secret of the Scepter, which, unsurprisingly, Tamis just happens to overhear. Fortunately, Aurion recognizes Tamis (don’t ask, please) and she is captured. Instead of killing her (won’t they ever learn?!), Athalia orders Tamis to be dressed up in rebel garb (i.e., leather bikini-top and mini skirt) and forces her to accompany the rebels on the assault.

Later that day, the King’s guards approach the castle while the rebels hide in the woods. After showing Hofrax the King’s body, the gates are opened so the body can be brought inside the castle. Of course, this is all just a ruse, and the rebels immediately storm the gates and, due to Hofrax’s continued lack of any common sense, gain entrance to the castle without a single casualty.

By the way, a quick cut-away shot shows Tamis has slipped her rebel guards and makes her way into the castle’s keep. Since she possesses the Secret of the Scepter this could spell doom for the rebels. So, if I may ask..why the hell don’t they kill prisoners that can irrevocably tip the balance against them? I hate hate hate hate this crap!

Imagine the lamest sword-fight sequence you’ve ever seen. Now multiply it by one thousand. You’re getting close to Barbarian Queen 2.

As usual, the castle’s keep seems to be wide open and unguarded. But shit, Hofrax, maybe you’re right…why not leave it unguarded? Why start guarding critical areas now, eh? Athalia and Aurion make their way to the Scepter Room with only token resistance. For some reason most of the guards they encounter are carrying spears which don’t seem very useful when fighting in a corridor which is 3-feet wide. But then again, Hofrax is in charge, so I guess it makes sense.

Oh brother. The final sword battle between Athalia and Hofrax. Yes, it’s just as lame as the others. The only redeeming factor is that one of the combatants is Lana Clarkson in a leather bikini.

Ah yes. Tamis finally reaches the Scepter Room with the Secret of the Scepter. Unfortunately Tamis’s father, Ankaris, is also there (why?), and mistakes her for a rebel because she’s still in adult form. Before she can reveal the truth, Ankaris cuts her down with his sword. According to the rules of magic, Tamis reverts back to her child form and Ankaris realizes what he’s done. (Oh…the irony, eh?)

Almost done, folks.

Athalia kills Hofrax. Big surprise.

In the Scepter Room, Athalia discovers that Ankaris has killed himself out of grief, so yes, ok, I guess the Scepter is hers now. Yea. She takes the mighty Scepter, ascends a castle wall and addresses the victorious rebel army. (Huh? Did they win? When did that happen? Oh…never mind.)

"It has always been magic that has kept our rulers in power, instead of the grace of those they rule. But that is the real magic. When the people believe in someone enough to trust their lives to them. That is the only magic that rule this kingdom from this day on!"

To top off this rousing speech, and to prove her point, whatever that may be, Athalia tosses the Scepter to the crowd. So, I guess her point is that all power, no matter if it is the power to do good, is bad? What the hell is the point, Athalia?!

To be honest, I don’t give a rat’s ass because this stupid movie is over and I’m going to have a couple of beers and try to get over all this.

Dennis Grisbeck (Feb 2011)

Read more about Barbarian Queen 2: The Empress Strikes Back at

Directed by Stephen Hopkins

Written by Akiva Goldsman

Run Time: A whopping 130 minutes! [Dennis: Ouch!]

Tagline: Danger, Will Robinson!

Budget: 75 million Total US Gross: 69.102 Million (136 Million worldwide)

A Guest Review by Karl Hoegle

	John Robinson (John Hurt) Super Dad!
	Maureen Robinson (Mimi Rodgers) The glue that keeps the family together.
	Judy Robinson (Heather Graham) Eye candy for Joey
	Penny Robinson (Lacey Chalbert) Teen angst!
	Will Robinson (Jack Johnson) 10 year old brainiac.
	Elder Will Robinson (Jared Harris) 30-something brainiac.
	Dr. Zachary Smith (Gary Oldman) He should have a black cape, he is so evil!
	Robot (Voice of Dick Tufeld) Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’
	Blawp Computer generated Money maker. [Dennis: Oh dear lord! What the heck is this?!]

Once again the Monster Shack has graciously allowed my humble efforts to grace its hallowed web site. This review is for a movie that I just can’t bring myself to love nor hate. It has its moments both good and bad, the former being fewer but grander. I was worried when the movie started out with a huge wad of exposition, but boiled down it posits that all humanity had given up fighting, war was eliminated, and that all peoples, creeds, and nations banded together for the greater good. Riiight! But there was still an evil serpent in Eden ; the dreaded Seditionists were trying to blow up all that was good and take over. (Even though all humanity had given up fighting, war was eliminated, and that all peoples, creeds, and nations banded together for the greater good…)

Mankind is building a “Hypergate” that will allow them to bypass all that tedious flying about through space and use it to warp to Alpha Centauri where a new planet named Alpha Prime awaits our arrival. The Robinson family will travel the long hard journey (in cryosleep!) to Alpha Prime via a 10 year long conventional sublight spaceflight and build the other identical end of the Hypergate, presumably from whatever is on hand at that end. Seriously, this Hypergate is HUGE; giant space freighters have to go through it, so John Robinson’s Hypergate building abilities had better be up to par.

Question 1 : What if he dies before he can build it? No one is a backup for him, his son Will Robinson is the only science savvy person on board; I hardly think that Earth leaders would trust a 10 year old kid to build such a device.

Question 2 : Where the heck are the materials going to come from? Certainly they are not stored aboard the Jupiter 2. I mean it is freakishly roomy, but that is ridiculous! Also, the entire planet Earth is building this end of the Hypergate, it has been over a year and they only have a tenth done. How long will it take one man to do the same at the other end? Stupid…

The evil Seditionists try to blow the Earth’s portion of the Hypergate up, which makes no sense. They need the Robinsons to build the other end of the Hypergate so that they can sneak their colonists through and steal all the “ Alpha- Prime” real estate. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) And if they were building their own Hypergate, it would be plainly visible to anyone on the planet beneath it, as the Good Guys’® Hypergate is. It would be easier and much cheaper to just steal control of their Hypergate, once built.

A quick throw away sequence has Joey Tribbiani… I mean Major Don West in a macho outer space showdown with his sidekick Jeb Walker (sigh) defeating a pair of evil Seditionists’ suicide bombers, and Major West defies orders and saves his less macho wingman from a certain doom in a damaged ship. Seriously, why would they order him to let Jeb crash into the Hypergate, thereby accomplishing the Evil Seditionists’ plan and simultaneously depriving the Good Guys® of a pilot? Stupid… The original Don West (Mark Goddard from the TV series) tells them that the original pilot selected to complete the mission was murdered, ergo the need for Major West, and that the Earth will not be able to support human life in 20 years. I can’t believe that the governments of that era could keep a glaring fact like that from the populace. Plus, that gives Earth less than 10 years to transfer all living things from Earth to Alpha Prime. That is assuming it takes him less than 10 years for the lone scientist ( after his 10 year flight ) to find the materials, smelt them down to usable metals, and build the other end of the Hypergate BY HIMSELF!!! Preposterous!

After a bit of frenzied running about and heavy handed characterization, (I.E. Will Robinson is a child genius, Momma Maureen is caring yet stern, Dad is preoccupied with the mission yet cares about his family, etc.) The family finally gets into the Jupiter 1 (wait for it!) and prepares to hurl themselves into the void. Doctor Smith (a wonderfully evil Gary Oldman at his quirky best, in my humble opinion) sabotages the Robot and orders it to go berserk in a few hours and “destroy!”everyone. Unfortunately, his evil Seditionist cohorts double cross him and kayo him via remote control in the spaceship, thereby allowing them to save their bribe money. That sure happens a lot in this sort of movie; if I ever go evil I’ll want cash up front. The blast off sequence is top notch. When the ship is about to take off it is in a jiffy-pop style building, it is miles above a futuristic industrialized city.

(Imagine if they had an accident! Look out below!) It is shaped just like the Jupiter II from the TV series, and once launched and above the atmosphere, the outer shell blasts away exposing a sleek, outrageously cavernous spacecraft, named (Tada!) Jupiter II! Kudos, that sequence alone was worth my ticket price.

Meanwhile, Dr. Smith wakes up just as the robot goes berserk, wailing its arms and blowing big chunks of walls and computer equipment into sparking debris. Smith quickly realizes the error of his ways, and hits the emergency wake up switch to thaw the Robinsons and Major West.

Question 3 : If everyone is frozen, Dr. Smith was obviously an unforeseen stowaway, why would there be an emergency thaw switch, since everyone is in cryosleep? Were they thinking that the robot might need to wake them at the end of their journey, in case the automatic units fail? Possibly… Anywho, the robot has Momma Maureen and Penny (Lacey Chalbert with a squeaky chipmunk voice that grates on ones nerves) square in its sights, when Will shows up at the last possible moment ® with a homemade remote control that overrides the latest military security encryption and allows a 10 year old boy to instantly take complete control. Riiight…

I’d also like to point out that they must be using some futuristic technology that allows a spaceship to be much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, thereby breaking the laws of physics. Seriously, they sit at the widows in the control room of the ship, and to access certain controls they have the chairs elevate them 10 to 20 feet towards the ceiling. Why? This control panel would be impossible to reach without a space stepladder if they lost power, broke a chair, etc. Stupid! Meanwhile on the outside of the ship, the windows are nearly snug against the roof of the ship, causing me to doubt my sanity. This is the most spacious ship I have ever seen in Sci-fi, and I have seen plenty . You could play basketball with the high ceilings and spacious floor plans. John and Maureen’s bedroom is bigger than an Embassy suite at the swankiest hotel in Dubai . After discovering Doctor Smith, they realize he is in league with the Seditionists and probably the cause of their current predicament. Smith points out that they are about to get vaporized by the Sun, so that ought to top their priority list.

They maniacally try to break the grip of Old Sol, can’t do it, and decide to drive through the sun! Using the near-magical Hyperdrive that Prof. Robinson devised. “It will leave us with a random vector!” whines the brilliant scientist (who, as I said, invented it !). “We could end up anywhere!” he then whimpered. Sticking his chest out while sitting in his chair 15 freaking feet up above normal sane chair height, Major Don West deepens his voice and growls “Anywhere but here!” Realizing he has a valid point, and that they will all die in mere seconds if he doesn’t acquiesce, they shoot through the Sun and wind up in unknown space near a strange planet. And after a bit of excess verbiage a portal in space / time opens up for absolutely no good reason and a pair of odd spaceships are visible. Why? We never find out. Even Ed Wood didn’t use such obvious plot devices as unbelievably convenient as that. They cruise through the Deus ex Machina portal against John Robinson’s better judgment and half hearted bleating protests, and decide that one ship is human made (The Proteus!) and one is an alien ship. Momma Robinson points out it just looks wrong . (And it doesn’t have a name neatly stenciled on the outside).

Once aboard, they find tons of star maps, a weird (computer generated) monkey-like creature named Blawp that they instantly trust and adopt, and evil death space spiders. Blawp seems to be simply a tie-in for selling key chains, fast food beverage glasses, and tennis shoes, IMHO. They learn also that Don’s old buddy Jeb left Earth 20 years after the Robinsons were lost, as captain of the Proteus. I guess Earth could support life after 20 years, despite those dire warnings. The evil space spiders attack and Don sprouts cool armadillo-like armor that unfolds over his head to protect him. He shoots dozens of spiders, in a scene that could only be part of some video game tie in.

Do we really need to watch him blast so many spiders, one after another? Dr. Smith gets a scratch from one of the evil death space spiders, and ominous music lets us know that this bodes no good. After leaving the robot to do battle while they beat a hasty yet brave retreat, they get the hell out of Dodge and against orders, Don blows up the other ships in order to “never leave behind an enemy stronghold”. This bit of whimsy on Major West’s part causes the Jupiter II to crash land on the planet, right next to a huge transparent bubble. Will then states that he recognizes the bubble; it is a predicted side effect of his time machine. Of course, nobody listens, and we all know that we will be the worse for it.

Don and John take off to find more radioactive material for their severely underpowered ship, as it has exactly 1 half tank of fuel left, which won’t be enough to get the ship into orbit. Let me say this again; it takes more than half their fuel to reach escape velocity from a planet about the same size as the Earth. I guess once they reached Alpha Prime, they hoped that there would be refined radioactive fuel just lying about in massive quantities, as I am sure building the Hypergate would take at least a few trips out into orbit. Sigh. Dr. Smith cons Will into releasing him and giving him a loaded gun,
and Dr. Smith ruthlessly exploits the child’s innocence and takes him hostage. He meets up with Don, John, the reconstructed Robot, and a 30 something Will Robinson (We will call him Will the Elder) from this future. Just to point out the obvious, this planet, although cold, has breathable air, potable water, and lots of edible plants. Has it occurred to anyone else that this planet might be just as good as Alpha Prime? Stupid…

Will the Elder is telling anyone who will listen that he hooked up his ship’s Hyperdrive to his time machine and plans to leap through it and warn everyone not to leave Earth. How would that help? They MUST leave Earth, it won’t be able to support life in 20 years, or so they thought earlier. Who would believe a raving madman who dropped out of thin air and told a story as crazy as that? Meanwhile, Dr. Smith uses a control module that he stole from the Proteus earlier to control the Robot, since he didn’t have Will the Junior’s expertise in building remote controls for billion dollar robots. Talk about identity crises, the Robot is everyone’s pawn. Will the Elder laughs at Dr. Smith’s feeble attempt call the shots, and points out that he could not have survived all alone. A huge bug-like Dr. Smith (Let’s call him Bug Smith to keep it simple) drops from the rafters, and throws the non-buggy Dr. Smith out of what is left of the ship onto some rocks. “Never fear, Smith is here!” he opines. I guess that the evil death spider-scratch has had time to work its magic, much like Metamucil.

Bug Smith orders the Robot to kill everyone except himself and Will the Elder, but relents when Will the Elder begs him not to. He then orders the Robot to guard them off camera, and shoot them if they move. Luckily, the Robot doesn’t take him literally, as simply breathing could set off the “Crush! Kill! Destroy!” reaction from the Robot. Will the Junior talks the Robot into “forgetting logic” and be his friend, which instead of failing miserably like it would in any other universe, works here. They promptly escape; John Robinson sticks around and has a showdown with Bug Smith, using his sons’ pointy science award to scratch the dastard on his egg sac (!), reminding Bug Smith that the bugs “eat their wounded”. Time out, these bugs are only half bug, half human, so they wouldn’t necessarily follow the same rules, but there you have it. They do eat Bug Smith, and he gets pushed into the now open Time portal, seriously risking Earth’s admittedly short future by allowing a few stray evil death space spiders to fall through. Will the Elder spouts some saccharine platitudes about family, and they watch the time bubble burst. Time is now no longer separating the old from the new, earthquakes are tearing the planet apart, yet both Jupiter II spaceships are co-existing. They watch the under powered Jupiter II take off and promptly get creamed by a boulder the size of a 747.

Will the Elder sends Dad through a quickly re-programmed time portal to the Jupiter II just before it explodes, hoping his dad will come up with a brilliant plan! This, despite the fact they haven’t the fuel to escape the planets’ gravity. If he would have followed his original plan, jumped to Earth before they took off and told everyone that Dr. Smith was a Seditionist stowaway spy I am sure that security would at least look , thereby negating the whole movie. You have to love those lapses of logic. Ah, well. Poppa John does come up with a novel idea, instead of using the Hyperdrive again (which worked fine to escape the freaking Sun!) they use more conventional means to fly through the planet, as it is breaking up.

Somehow, he just knew that there was a void through the molten core of the planet large enough for the ship to fly through and use the gravity assist to slingshot out the other side, reaching outer space. They bounce against the rock walls and even get hit by huge flying boulders twice, (both of which are the same rough size as the one that destroyed the Jupiter II in an earlier scene) but those are mere annoyances. Major West even gets to smile and say “Rock and Roll!” I’ll bet that the Rolling Stones are still packing stadiums in that era, albeit from wheelchairs.

They break into orbit and finally think that they are safe, when against all the known laws of physics, the planet’s gravity turns in on itself and promptly starts forming a black hole.

Another time out! All my reading suggests that it would take something with 20 times the mass of our own sun to form even the smallest of black holes, yet this tiny planet is doing so. You could fit almost 1,000,000 Earths in the Sun! I guess that it is getting an assist from the time portal bubble… You know, the one that popped and is no longer in existence? Stupid… Well, the end of this movie is in sight, and the Robinsons realize that the newly forming yet impossible black hole is sucking them in, so they decide once again to use the Hyperdrive, but this time they will use the star maps that they downloaded from the Proteus. Armed with said star maps, why would they then need to build the Hypergate? We never find out if they make it, I guess that they wanted to leave room for a (shudder) sequel. Thank goodness that the box office receipts were so dismal that they canned that project.

Final Question : They KNOW that Dr. Smith is going to turn into Bug Smith soon ; will they still haul his evil carcass around with them? Will they just continue to laugh off his multiple murder attempts? At some point, they are going to have to make a decision! Stupid…

Karl Hoegle (November 2010)

Read more about Lost In Space at

Directed by Robert Munic

Written by Joseph Barmettler

Run Time: 90 long minutes

Tagline: There’s no going back

Summary: A sub-par “Escape From Prison Planet” snore fest.

Before I begin, I want to reiterate that I know that the folks that make films like ‘Timelock’ aren’t expecting Academy Awards for their efforts; so I’m not out to criticize films like this based on high expectations.

But hell, that’s why you’re here right? You like to make fun of bad movies. You like to beat up on hapless film fodder and watch it squirm. You have an itch that the Monster Shack scratches for you. I’ve actually gotten a few emails in the past from people who have appeared or worked on these movies, some were indignant, some took it all with a grain of salt.
So look, all you film makers and actors out there who might have stumbled across this tiny, moist, Internet niche: Could I do any better? Probably not. Can I make a movie? No. Do I know anything about movie making? Not really. But I’m still going to have fun, so let’s get started.

(In case you’re wondering, I was contacted by a guy who made one of the movies featured in the Blurbs section who was a good sport about the whole thing. I also received email from the guy who plays the mute barbarian dude, Kai, in Robot Holocaust. He seemed a little peeved that I picked on the film, I wrote him back but he never responded.)

Anyway, back to Timelock:

The action takes place exclusively on the prison planet A4, a snow-swept ball of rock where “the worst are cryogenically suspended”. Actually, most of the prisoners are literally suspended by chains on a mountain side where they are presumably held forever. But why? Why?! The government pays to ship these violent criminals to a super-max planet so they can be hung out like Beef Jerky for all eternity? What’s the freaking point? Are they serving their sentence this way? If so, that’s not much of a punishment if you’re put into suspended animation for the duration of your term and then “thawed out” when it’s over. Who knows. I guess the writers thought it conveyed what a cruel, harsh system the future has in store for us.

Cut to shuttle pilot Captain Jessie Teegs, a no-nonsense female prison employee that shuttles convicted prisons from Earth to A4 for incarceration. “It’s below zero out there, 24-7,” the copilot informs the viewer since the tabletop model made of clay and scattered with soap flakes just doesn’t look that cold. Also, after living in Norway for nearly 10 years I’m just not terrible awe-struck by hearing about day-round below zero temperatures. That’s pretty much 4 months of the year here.

Meet our hero, Jack Riley, a wimpy, computer hacker and embezzler caught stealing a shitload of “neo-Dollars”, who was supposed to be transported to the minimum-security A1 planet, but was accidentally shipped to A4 instead. What a hoot! I love ‘Fish out of Water’ stories. Har har. Let the games begin.

The action starts pretty quickly when lead Bad Guy, Villum, kills a pair of guards and uploads a computer virus via a memory stick he had hidden in his tooth. (!) Naturally, the computer virus instantly disables all the security measures on the planet and the prisoners run amok killing every guard in site. (It helps that all prison cells consist of 3 walls and a force field. Why? So the prisoners can escape when the virus disables the force field on the fourth wall. Stupid movie.)

Sooooo….Captain Teegs runs around trying to make her way back to her ship to escape. Riley runs around trying to hide from the maniacal convicts. Oh, boy, will they meet and fall in love? Ack.

After a long, boring second act, one of the newly thawed out cryo-prisoners, McMasters, (described as “perverse and brilliant”…just like my web site) threatens to blow up the planet by exploding the prison’s nuclear reactor with wads of C-52, which I guess is 48 times better than C-4. (Yes, this movie is really is that dumb.)

Anyway, the escape ship won’t fly without its command program, which is stored on a 3 1/4 inch floppy disk (!)…wow. Advanced technology. So Teegs and Riley have to find it and I have to admit this movie has put me in an odd confused-angry-bored state right now, so I’m not really sure what’s happening here.

Ok, it looks like Teegs finally reaches the escape shuttle with the magical disk, while Riley catchs up with her after dispatching Villum in a Samurai sword fight! (Yes, that really happened; I’m not dreaming this.) Oh, wait a minute, I forgot that the planet was wired to detonate. Don’t worry, Riley defuses the bomb by pulling out a red wire. Now THAT was an exciting scene.

Blah, blah. Lot’s of things blow up, bad guys dies, good guys laugh.

Cut to Riley and Teegs in a hotel bed when Villum walks through the door and gives them new towels…WTF!!!!!?????

The End.

No kidding.

Read more about Timelock at

By Sean Ledden

War of the Worlds – or – quality time with the kids

And now, regrettably, we come back full-circle to Monsieur Spielberg. Remember how I complained in Close Encounters of the Third Kind of our long immersion into Neary household trauma? Well, now that stuff’s the entire movie! In a weird, Bizarro World sort of way, for everything is now reversed. In Close Encounters a visit by benign aliens destroys the Neary family. But in this 2005 remake of the H.G. Wells classic, evil invading aliens inspire the healing of the Ferrier family. I guess there’s nothing like the end of the world to help you reconnect with annoying teens and hysterical children. And gosh, isn’t that what it’s all about?

True, there’s a lot of post- 9/11 political subtext, and I give the filmmakers credit for trying, but even that isn’t Topic A. Like Contact and Mission to Mars, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds tries to make sci-fi relevant by making it (gag) personal. The real subject isn’t an alien invasion of planet earth, but the stress a “typical” (meaning dysfunctional) American family undergoes when confronted with danger. From start to finish we’re handcuffed to self-absorbed “everyman” Tom Cruise, his bratty teenage son and traumatized daughter, as they scream, run, and hide from various forms of alien peril – often fighting amongst themselves as they do so. Imagine being locked in a car with an arguing family from New York to California and you get the picture. On the plus side, there’s lots of sweaty exercise thrown in, as Cruise gets a killer workout carrying poor little Dakota Fanning over 167 miles of open country. Just watching him made my lower back hurt.

THE PLOT:

Our story begins in New Jersey, (probably a reference to Orson Welle’s famous radio adaptation, which also took place there) where dockworker and generic man-boy Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise – super intense as ever) is having a tough time dealing with “life issues.” First, his surprisingly elegant ex-wife is now with a prosperous WASPY kind of Prince Charming, which makes him feel threatened and insecure. Then there’s his sullen, angst-filled teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin), who makes him feel threatened and insecure. Finally, there’s his “wise beyond her years” daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning), who makes him feel threatened and insecure. And as if that weren’t enough, it’s the weekend he’s stuck with the kids that the aliens choose to invade. This makes him feel – threatened and insecure. – Who wants to bet me the movie doesn’t end with him hugging his kids?

To their credit, Spielberg and writers Josh Friedmand and David Koepp get the set-up over with pretty quickly, and 14 minutes into the movie we get two big set pieces of the kind Spielberg excels in. First is a weird, stormy cloud formation that sends down strange lightening. Then it’s a dynamite showstopper as a giant alien war machine heaves itself out from under the ground. (Here I’d like to note the cool use of sound effects as we hear the machine gear up. And John William’s score, a kind of Machine March of Doom, is also very effective.) After incinerating scores of innocent by-standers the giant alien tripod lumbers off, as does the best part of the movie.

The very cool alien war machine.

Then it’s, gulp, into the car with Tom and the kids. (“No, no!” I scream, but when I lunge for the doors they’re locked. Robbie’s up in the front seat, seething with pent up resentment and pretending he doesn’t hear my frantic efforts to escape. Rachel’s in the seat beside me, eyes bugging out, and it looks like she’s getting ready to scream. Outside an alien death ray is blowing up the Bayonne Bridge, but I make another frantic effort to open the doors…)

Viewers who have been following the movie closely will realize that every car in the world has been knocked out by an electro-magnetic something-or-other from the aliens. Yet this car works. Because “everyman” Ray is our star and he figured out how to fix them. So he told his buddy the mechanic, who fixed the one Ray just jumped into. Great! Only Mr. Mechanic, bizarrely unaware that the world is ending around him, insists that Ray get out of the car because it doesn’t belong to him. And thus we come to the first MORAL CRISIS this movie throws at our distressed family. Like every MORAL CRISIS to come, this one is drawn out and rammed down our throats with a kitchen plunger. Will Ray steal the car? – Would I? Let me see, a 200-foot tall alien war machine is killing everyone with a death ray, and the only chance of escape is someone else’s car. Someone who isn’t there. It’s a no-brainer. The answer is Yes! – But the movie treats this like the temptation of Christ!

Back to Mr. Mechanic who, as I said, isn’t aware of the fleeing extras in the background, or the buildings blowing up down the street. Why doesn’t Ray just explain that they are all in danger and tell the idiot to jump in? Isn’t Mr. Mechanic worth saving along with the kids?….I guess not, and he is disintegrated a second after Ray pulls away. – You know, I want to reward movies that raise difficult ethical questions, but the set up is all-important. Are we really looking at an agonizing moral choice, or an easy chance for some cheap melodrama? … Well, let’s just move on. Speaking of moving, wouldn’t a working car attract the attention of the alien tripods?

Answer – not if it’s driven by a star! And so onto a New Jersey highway clogged with stalled cars and refugees. Oh, I do want to stop and compliment Dakota Fanning’s portrayal of a little girl freaking out from fear – she’s great. The only trouble is, that’s all she has to do for the rest of the movie – panic and be rescued by dad – who, sigh, realizes how important a parent’s responsibility is to his child – once the world is being destroyed by invading aliens. Awwwww. Who says every cloud doesn’t have a silver lining?

Justin Chatwin also does a good job with Robbie. So good that there’s rarely a scene he appears in that I didn’t want to slap him. His role is to be an aggravating, sulking weight around his intensely insecure dad’s neck. No wait, there is that time he leaps up onto a ferry ramp and rescues some people – causing Ray to look on with wonder and pride. It took a world-ending alien invasion to do it, but now he realizes his son isn’t a complete asshole. Awwww. That is, until Robbie abandons his sister and father to run over a ridge because he just has to see the army attack the war machines – and thereby gets himself all blowed up in a huge fireball. Welcome to another CRISIS POINT. Here too, the scene where Robbie tells his frantic dad he just has to “see this,” while sis is off sobbing by a nearby tree, and some friendly strangers start to drag her off, because they think she’s an orphan, is really, really, really drawn out. Honestly, it’s a relief when Robbie gets himself all blowed up. At least we don’t have to watch him sulk anymore, and dad can now concentrate on Rachael.

The alien attack on a Ferryboat begins.

Except that Robbie is immediately replaced by another emotionally unstable male – Tim Robbins giving a tour-de-force performance as Harlan Ogilvy, a crazed, gun-wielding survivalist-type who’s holed up in a basement. And so, after the forced march through an increasingly desolate countryside with possibly the most annoying father-son combo of all time, we’re now locked in a confined space with the ever-intense Ray, the aggravatingly hysterical Ogilvy, and traumatized daughter Rachael. Great.

We’re stuck down in the dark, cluttered basement for a pretty long time. This gives Spielberg the chance to dazzle with another set piece, this one a cat and mouse game as first a robotic tentacle loaded with sensors, and then some of the aliens themselves, come down to investigate the basement. It’s beautifully staged and edited, but the aliens themselves prove to be a problem. First, their look is very creepy – but haven’t we seen them before? More on that later. Second, they aren’t intelligent alien beings, but demons from a nightmare. Demons without a spoken language – or clothing for that matter. (Trivia note: My guess is that the CGI animators based the movements and body language of the aliens on baboons.)

The creepy, strangely familiar aliens

Throughout all of this Ogilvy becomes more and more hysterically nutty, to the point where he is endangering everyone’s safety. The icing on the cake is an icky little scene that suggests he might put the moves on little Rachael – and the dank allusion to child abuse fits in perfectly with the punishingly bleak atmosphere of the entire movie. This leads us to a high point of sorts, the ultimate MORAL CRISIS. Unable to think of an alternative, like knocking Ogilvy out, tying him up and then gagging him, Ray murders the man in the presence of his daughter…Just remember people, thinking won’t get you out of trouble, violence will. – No matter what those namby-pamby liberal elitists might try to tell you.

Now that he’s a murderer Ray drifts off into a peaceful nap with the little daughter he just saved. Only she gets spooked, runs outside and gets captured by an alien war machine. Oh well, I’m sure that Ogilvy had it coming to him anyways. And, not that I care, Ray runs out screaming and hurls a grenade he happened to find lying on the ground at the machine. A super high tech energy shield protects the aliens from the grenade, but not alas, from their own stupidity. For they capture Ray, a man they know to be armed with high explosives, and dump him into a big basket thingee attached to the outside of the war machine. It’s filled with all sorts of people who are periodically drawn into the war machine itself – there to be drained of their blood. (Insert Boris Karloff-style laughter here.) But Ray manages to get a live grenade into the machine, causing it to get all blowed up. And the audience cheers as the little guy finally hits back! Oh, and the captive people aren’t killed because everyone falls into a convenient tree. Just like a cartoon! Whatever. I look at my watch and wonder how much more time I have to spend with the murderer and his progeny.

Not that much! We’re almost to Boston, where Rachel’s mom should be. Once there Ray and Rachael, along with a horde of extras, discover that the machines are wondering around aimlessly or falling down. The aliens, it turns out, are dead – killed by earth bacteria they didn’t know to protect themselves from. Phew!

Now we come to the big, moist finale that’s full of (oh God, not again!) “uplift.” Ray and Rachael finally make it to the elegantly upscale and untouched townhouse of his ex-wife’s parents. (Not only did their block escape any kind of damage, but the house even has electricity!) Mom, her parents, and the WASP prince are untouched too, and we get Big Hug Scene Number One as mom and daughter cling to one another. Big Hug Scene Number Two comes a moment later when, in an utterly unbelievable and barf-inducing miracle, Robby shows up alive as well. As they cling to one another Tom Cruise gives the kid one of his super intense looks that either means a) he loves him, b) he wants to kill him, or c) both. It’s the only scary element to pop out as the movie sinks into a swamp of saccharine artifice.

As if the fires weren’t bad enough, Boston is now littered with alien war tripods too!

Fortunately, Cruise’s ex-in-laws still look FABULOUS! (Speaking of fabulous, Grandma and Grandpa are played by none other than Ann Robinson and Gene Barry – stars of the 1953 version… They don’t have single line of dialogue.)

Read more about War of the Worlds at

If you’re as depressed as I am after this feast of sour despair topped with saccharine uplift, I think you’ll agree that we need a pick-me-up and some genuine fun. And that can be had with a (gasp) big-budget American remake of War of the Worlds. Hold on to your hats, it’s Independence Day!

Independence Day? Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day?? Yup. Believe me, I’m not a groupie. Stargate was a hackneyed mess that left me frustrated and bored, and Godzilla was a perversely, enragingly incompetent fiasco – but Independence Day is a big B-Movie blast with one great shining virtue; it’s a terrifying alien invasion movie that’s about, get this, a terrifying alien invasion! And before you throw a shoe at my head let me explain.

Warships Away!

Independence Day hits the ground running with the arrival of a gigantic spaceship that has one quarter the mass of the moon. Soon dozens of saucer shaped ships, each 14 miles in diameter, detach themselves from the Mothership and descend into the atmosphere to hover menacingly, and spectacularly, over the cities of mankind. This sets off a large and varied cast of characters led by fighter pilots (Will Smith & Harry Connick Jr.), ex-fighter pilots who are now drunken crop dusters (Randy Quaid), and ex-fighter pilots who are now president of the United States (Bill Pullman). Joining the fighter pilots, both current and ex, is a delightfully old-school assortment of eggheads, soldiers, and politicians all scrambling to react. But that’s not all. We also get ditzy strippers, gay cable executives, and an adorable Golden Lab Retriever as well. (Guess which one escapes the alien fireball!)

Once genius scientist guy David Levinson (Jeff Goldbum) figures out that the aliens have set off a count down that in 12 hours will result in “checkmate,” he races off to Washington to sound the alarm. His warning comes in time to save the president and Air Force One, but it doesn’t prevent the destruction of New York, Washington, and L.A. in one of the best pulp spectacles to come out of Hollywood. It’s the “wow” moment that won Independence Day the 1996 Oscar for special effects.

Is mankind going to take such villainy sitting down? Of course not, and the Air Force launches a huge counter attack. But the courage and the missiles of the pilots are to no avail because of those ever-present high tech energy shields that invading aliens always seem to have. The sneaky, cowardly fiends! This utter failure seems to herald the end of mankind, until an old government secret, one that everybody’s heard about, presents a new hope. Air Force One then races to the fabled “Area 51” and a certain secret something that’s been under study there for 50 or so years. Once inside we discover that Area 51 looks like the ultra-cool headquarters of a James Bond super-villain. Just like we always knew it would. Yeah! Even more satisfyingly, once there everybody focuses on the invaders, and not their long dead fathers, ex-wives, or troubled children. Good gracious!

So a weather balloon crashed near Roswell? Yeah, right.

Amazingly, this focus on the problem at hand actually brings results, and brilliant science guy David comes up with an idea! It’s a one in a million shot – but it’s just crazy enough that it might work. Only, it requires a probably suicidal mission into the gigantic heart of the invading Mothership itself…

The evil mothership lurks in orbit above the earth.

Read more about Independence Day at

MONSTER SHACK EXTRA SPECIAL PHOTO BONUS
Now I remember where I saw the aliens from War of the Worlds before!

Independence Day Alien

War of the Worlds Aliens

Directed and Written by Dave Borthwick

Run Time: 60 min

There are very few movies that I find haunting, even moving. The kind of movie that I just can’t get out of my head after seeing it. This is one of them. "The Secret Adventures of TomThumb" is a short, poignant, and disturbing film. It features both animated ‘creatures’ and live actors in the same scenes, creating an unnerving effect; a nightmarish mixture of reality and imagination, both inhabiting a dark, gloomy, insect-infested world. Insects abound in TSAOTT: every corner, every wall, every window crawls with chattering, scurrying spiders, flies, and beetles. It is truly a fascinating world of shadow, gloom, paranoia, and even beauty. A world where light is at a minimum, and decay reigns as the darkness closes in.

The story itself revolves around Tom, an immature "boy" only a few inches tall. (His deformity was caused by a bug being accidentally smashed into his vial of "fluids" at the insemination factory.) Tom’s parents love and care for him, but eventually lose him to the Gestapo like "collectors" who burst into his house one night and take him away to a mysterious lab populated by mutants and monsters of all description. After befriending a half-skeleton / half-mechanical creature, Tom escapes the factory and joins forces with another "tiny" man: Jack (the giant slayer). Tom and Jack return to the factory and enter its main power core which they destroy, thus annihilating the evil scientists and themselves.

Whew. That was the summary. Now let’s take a closer look:

	Tom Thumb Our tragic hero. Tossed about by the winds of fate; doomed from the beginning.
	Papa Thumb Tom’s father who does what he can to protect his mutant son…ultimately paying with his life.
	Mama Thumb An innocent victim of an artificial insemination mishap.
	The Collector One of the many mysterious, evil men who work for the Laboritorium…abducting mutants and monsters from the dark recesses of the city streets to take them back to the labs for a lifetime of mechanized experimentation.
	Tom’s Friend This poor creature helps Tom to escape the Laboritorium only to be murdered by mindless villagers.
	Jack the Giant Slayer The villager that takes Tom into his care. Jack takes Tom on a suicidal mission to destroy the Laboritorium and kill the giants.

We open at the "Super-Seed Auto Insemination Plant", a horrible, automated conveyor belt with 2 rows of jars moving down the assembly line. One row of jars is ‘male’, the other row is ‘female’. A mechanical device squirts goo into the jars which then go further down the line where they are ‘zapped’ by an electrical spark. Viola. The miracle of life reduced to its nightmarish minimum.

A flying insect of some sort lands on a set of gears and is ground to a pulp. A bit of the insect, a head, a wing, some goo, who knows, drops into one of the jars, thus spawning the mutant Tom.

At the Thumb apartment, a horrible looking rat-bat-spider thing crashes through the living room window. We see Papa sitting at a table while Mama lies in bed enduring labor pains. To kill the time, Papa is playing with a rat in a cage. Well, not just any type of cage: the rat is wearing purple high-heels and tied upside down by its feet.

Moths flutter against the window.

Flies crawl over the walls.

A spider emerges from behind a picture hanging on the wall which reads: "He careth for you."

Eventually the labor pains climax and then subside. Mama reaches her hand under the sheets only to remove them covered in blood. In her hand is the tiny figure of a baby. Papa takes the baby from the shocked Mama and washes it off in the bathroom sink.

A pair of chicken feet sticking out from under a wet rag in the corner.

Papa takes the tiny infant back into the bedroom and proudly shows him to Mama.

The Collector stands outside, staring up at the apartment. Hissing, shivering, as if smelling out the location of the mutant baby.

Papa Thumb puts on his jacket and leaves the house…The Collector tails him from a distance. In a dark alley outside a "Puppets and Toys" shop, a mangy dog ruts in a garbage can while a spider looks on. Papa Thumb digs through a garbage can, tossing aside bits and pieces of broken toys until he spots what he’s after: a set of tiny doll clothes for Tom.

The Collector steps out from the shadows and hisses at Papa Thumb. Papa looks aside and scurries back to his apartment. As The Collector fades back into the shadows of the alley, a toy in the window of the shop begins laughing maniacally. It leans forward, taps on the filthy glass of the window and laughs again. (A scene which I found strangely disturbing.)

One night, Papa is showing Tom a card trick, Mama prepares dinner (cleaning flopping silver fish) and all is well. The clock strikes an hour (not the correct hour), and a knock is heard at the door. In bursts a pair of Collectors who scoop Tom up and toss him into a steel box.

Tom is taken to the "Laboratorium" where he is immediately rendered unconscious with a jolt of electricity. A bizarre experiment is carried out on him (Tom morphs and transforms into a series of horrible shapes and images). Eventually Tom is picked up with a pair of tongs, flung into a steel bedpan and thrown into a tiny cage.

Looking around, Tom notices another cage next to his. Through the grill of the door, a skeletal-wire arm reaches out and tries to open its cage. Unfortunately, an unseen figure (we only ever get to see a huge pair of rubber gloves) snatches Tom from his cage and carries him off for another round of horrible experiments.

A computer readout indicates that Tom’s mother’s status has been changed from "Mother" to "Terminal".

By the way, I use the word "nightmare" a lot in this review, but there is no other word that describes these scenes as well as that one does.

Back in his cage, Tom collapses from exhaustion and despair. (We see him laying alone in his cage sucking his thumb…another scene which I found rather moving.) Tom is awakened when his door opens. The odd creature who was imprisoned next to Tom (I’ll have to call him Friend from now on), has managed to escape and beckons for Tom to follow him.

Tom and his Friend now journey through the Laboratorium in search of a way out. They pass cage after cage of imprisoned mutant animals and monsters: some with wires into their brains, a skeletal cow bound to a rack and being repeatedly drilled by some sort of devilish machine, a charred animal of some sort smashing its head against the cage bars in despair…Truly haunting images.

After walking a bit, Tom and Friend discover a series of trolleys that speed along metal rails carrying unknown contents to distant locations within the Laboratorium. As the pair stand to the side to let one of the trolleys hurry past, a pair of rubber gloves comes out of the wall and opens the main energy core. (The words "Isolated Metabolite Particles" are stenciled on the side of the container.) Energy crackles as lightning bolts fill the air…then the core doors close and the gloves withdraw. Tom peeks into a small porthole while Friend shakes his head in warning.

Continuing onward, Tom and Friend come across more horrible experiments and desperate creatures. One creature, imprisoned in a tank of clear fluid, is merely a mouth and a hand. The hand taps on the glass and points towards a switch on the wall…a switch that will kill the power in that particular bank of doomed creatures. Heeding its plea for help, Tom throws the switch and the poor creatures in the room give out moans of relief and die. However an alarm goes off and Tom and Friend run for their lives, barely escaping by jumping down a waste pipe.

Tom and Friend emerge in a toxic swamp, far outside the city. A tiny man, wearing protective clothes and salvaging junk from the waste, spots Tom and fishes him out from the sludge. When Friend emerges from the pipe, the villagers panic upon seeing its horrible appearance and begin throwing stones at it while it desperately tries to free itself from the pipe. While Tom screams and begs them to stop, one villager finally stabs Friend in neck, killing it. Tom, now utterly alone and friendless, is led back to the village.

Jack takes Tom under his care and lets him stay in his home. Through simple sign language, Jack explains to Tom that he is gathering weapons in order to go into the city and kill the ‘giants’. Said weapons consist of salvaged hypodermic needles that he has filled with poison.

Back in town, Papa Thumb is drowning his sorrows at the local pub. This pub scene is an absolutely fascinating sequence of shots: a blend of insects, booze, spiders, transvestites, living bowling pins, and shadows. It is absolutely fascinating to watch. Anyway, Papa Thumb ends up going home with the local floozy and awakes the next day to see a fly covered Santa crucifix on the wall.

we see that Jack has headed into the city on his suicide mission to kill the giants. Tom tags along, and the first giants they spot are Man 1 and Man 2 (sort of, kind of, "friends" of Papa Thumb, in a universe where friendship does not, and can not, exist). The two men are passing time watching insects fight to the death on a wall. Jack gets into position on top of a cement post, poison darts at the ready.

Jack shoots poisoned needles into the men’s necks, sickening them, and knocking them unconsciouss…but not killing them. As we shall see, Jack uses the men as messengers, tying a message to one of the men’s sleeves.

Later that evening, the two men have bandaged their necks with dirty rags and pay a visit to Tom’s father. They show Papa Thumb the message: a map leading to a windmill outside of town, where Tom will be waiting for him. Discovering that his son is still alive, Papa Thumb breaks out the drinks.

The next day, Papa Thumb travels to the windmill where he is reunited with Tom. Jack hides in the shadows, but Tom convinces his father that Jack is a friend. Papa Thumb puts Town in his satchel, and reluctantly also brings Jack along for the journey back into town.

Back in the city, we see Man 2 nursing his stinking neck wound, which is now oozing green slime and pulsating under the tattered bandages. Papa Thumb happens to pass by and joyfully opens his satchel and shows Tom. However, when the man looks inside the pouch and also sees Jack, he recognizes him as the one who shot him with the poison needle and tries to kill them. Tom and Jack jump from the satchel and into a drain pipe while Papa Thumb fights to protect them. While Tom watches, the man gets the better of Papa Thumb and bashes his head in on a cement stairway.

Next we see a Laboratorium employee eating dinner. (The dinner wriggles and writhes on his plate, still alive…) He has a camera mounted on the wall behind him which is focused on his back. Watching the monitor in front of him, he spots flies that land on his back which he quickly reaches around and flicks into a bug-zapper.

You’ve got to see this movie.

Under the table, Jack and Tom have entered the room via an air duct. Jack pulls out a poison needle and stabs the man in the ankle. (I think this man might be The Collector, but I’m not sure…) When the man regains consciousness, he realizes that Jack and Tom are perched on his shoulder…with Jack holding a poison needle to his jugular vein. Forced to obey Jack’s commands, the man takes on a dark overcoat and takes them to the Laboratorium.

Once inside the Laboratorium, Jack kills the man with a jab to the neck and Tom shows him the way to the energy core. Tom opens the door to the core itself and him and Jack climb inside. An intruder alert goes off and a huge pair of hands reach in through the containment wall and attempt to grasp Tom and Jack. As the hands get closer, and closer, and closer, Jack pulls out a metal club and smashes the core itself.

A huge explosion occurs. Jack and Tom, screaming, are flung against the walls of the chamber and enveloped in a blinding, white light.

In the afterlife (Heaven?), we see a baby’s room. In the only scene that is not filmed in stop motion, Tom’s mother and father are holding a normal size newborn baby as sunlight streams into the clean, beautiful new room. Mama and Papa look at the baby and smile, cuddling and snuggling their precious child.

Papa looks over onto the wall and frowns.

Flies, crawling on the wall, scurry over the wallpaper and form a halo over the shadow of the baby’s head.

Flies.

Dennis Grisbeck (June 2005)

Read more about The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb at

Directed by R.G. Arledge

Run Time: 82 minutes

Search For The Beast is one of those films that defies description. But since it is my unpaid, and often thankless, job at this web site to attempt to describe such films, I’m obligated to give it a shot.

Let’s start out by noting that the film is part of a 4-film collection of Big Foot related flicks, called Big Foot Terror. The set includes "Shriek of the Mutilated", "Legend of Bigfoot", "Capture of Bigfoot", and our subject matter for today: "Search for the Beast". (And easily the worst of the 4, thus its inclusion on this site.)

By the way, this particular film was shot entirely on video, which should have immediately sent warning signals racing to my brain, and eventually to my fingers, forcing them to reach for the remote and shut the damned thing off.

OK, wait, to be fair I’m sure there are quite a few decent movies that are shot on video.

This is not one of them.

The plot, if you can dignify it with that term, involves an anthropologist who is sent out to capture "The Beast". No, not Satan: A creature that is just some poor stiff dressed up in a monkey suit rented from the local costume shop. Toss in a few weird rednecks, hell, toss in a lot of really really weird rednecks, a couple of loathsomely gratuitous sex scenes, and play it all out with acting that makes you want to give an Academy Award to a cardboard box, and you have Search For The Beast.

Open in the Okaloosa wilderness with an aforementioned gratuitous implied-sex scene involving a couple of redneck extras and a camera man who can’t seem to keep from bumping the microphone on his hand while filming. Well, to jump to the point, Unnamed Redneck Guy goes off "to the bushes" to take a leak.

"Don’t take all night," his girlfriend coquettishly calls after him.

"Ok," comes the succinct reply.

Ahh…what I wouldn’t give to be able to write dialog like that.

Anyway, the Beast gets them both in a vicious Jump-Cut Ambush which naturally reveals nothing of the titular beast. (Note From The Future: The Beast will get more than enough screen time before the movie ends, allowing the viewer to delight for minutes on end over the monster’s stunningly unbelievable costume.)

Cut to our hero, Dr. David Stone, out riding his horse in the forest looking for clues for the Beast, since, you know, he’s a Professor of Anthropology and all. (Stone is played by Rick Montana, star and director of Redneck Revenge (1996). He also appeared in Invisible Mom 2 (1999) and my personal favorite: Bikini Hoe-Down.)

On a side note, Stone plays out as a much more rotund, and believe it or not, less intelligent version of Dr. Lockhart from Boggy Creek 2.

Surprise, surprise, Stone’s horse gets "spooked" by something, it’s unclear, but Stone dismounts as he explains how his dog Pete "ran ahead to check it out", accompanied by the foleyed sounds of a dog fight (?!). The hilarious bit is that "Pete" is easily seen happily walking behind the horse, tail a-waggin’, despite the fact that the he’s supposedly "run ahead" and found something horrible.

Uhh…Pete…run ahead, I said "ahead!"

Stone continues to narrate the scene:

"I followed Pete [even though he was behind the horse!] and found something I’d never seen before." You see, Stone finds the remains of a "small, man-like creature". By the way, I paused the shot of him examining the remains and he’s holding up what looks like a bear paw. Er…man-like? Sure. You bet, Dr. Stone.

Having found what he came for, Stone informs us that "he immediately headed for home." Note that there is no sign of the baby’s remains being carried by the horse, so I don’t really know how it shows up later at the University. Maybe Stone shoved them in his back pocket.

Back at the University, a local big wig, Milton St. John, reads from a newspaper about the latest case of 2 missing campers, bringing the total to 47 "unsolved disappearances" in the last 25 years. (I suspect that his script was taped to the newspaper.) On a side-note: Milton is played by Drive-In producer, director, writer, and Schlockmeister Extraordinaire David F. Friedman, who must have been doing the filmmakers a favor by appearing in this mess. Or just doing it for a laugh. God only knows.

Meanwhile, Stone busies himself in a lab (complete with a buzzing Jacob’s ladder device! You’ve got to be kidding me!) by taking a hair sample from the baby creature’s remains in order to "compare it to all known species." (Wow…all known species? This guy is thorough!) Further narration from Stone indicates that he’s going to compare the hair with a "dog, cat, rabbit, and a cow." Sooooo…I guess comparing the hair with all known species was a bit too ambitious after all.

Moving right along. Milton calls Stone and asks him to lead an expedition to find the Beast. Stone agrees to come over to Milton’s place and discuss the terms. After hanging up, Stone continues the examination of the remains. He casually removes the covering sheets (by simply tossing them on the floor!) to reveal the King of Rubber Monsters. No kidding, I spit a mouth full of beer onto the floor when I first saw this. And really, I’m not a University Professor, but I think that comparing this thing to a dog, cat, rabbit, or cow is probably going to come up negative.

This is not a rabbit.

To be fair, I will give the filmmakers credit for not being reluctant to show off their special effects work. I mean, despite the absurdity of the baby monster, the camera lingers for a long time on the remains, giving the viewer plenty of time to pause the film in order to bask in its goofiness.

Later that evening, Stone shows up at Milton’s house to discuss the conditions of the expedition’s sponsorship. Milton offers to cover all costs and reward Stone $100,000 if he can bring back the Beast alive. Stone, being a True Scientist, doesn’t want to capture the creature, but offers to take pictures and "maybe a video" if it exists. (Actually, since the beast has killed 47 people, maybe he should try and capture it to prevent further deaths. Idiot.) The deal agreed to, Stone takes his leave to begin preparations. In the meantime, Milton hires a bunch of goons to tag along with Stone as "hired hands" with orders to kill the monster when Stone finds it, because, yes, his son was one of the monster’s victims and his heart demands revenge. (Characterization!)

The next day Stone meets his new graduate assistant and official Eye Candy: Wendy Williams (played by "Holli Day". Get it? Ha ha. No I’m not kidding. Look it up. And who could blame her for not wanting to use her real name in this movie.) Anyway, she convinces Stone to let her tag along on the Search. Yee-hah. Since she’s part of the team now, Stone takes her into his office (which is filmed in somebody’s spare bedroom because they most likely didn’t have a permit to film on the grounds of an actual university!) in order to show her some grainy video footage of the beast that a trapper managed to take. (Why in the world a deep-woods trapper would be lugging around a video camera in the first place is not explained.)

Science!

After a pointless Watch The Grainy Video scene, Stone escorts Wendy into the other spare room, sorry, laboratory, and reveals the rubber mask, sorry, infant monster.

"Oh my goodness, it is incredible," Wendy manages to say while stifling a laugh. (I’m not kidding here, folks. Both of them can barely contain their chuckles when Stone pulls back the sheet to reveal the ridiculous remains.)

The next day, Stone, Wendy, and 6 of Milton’s goons pile into Stone’s van and drive off into the wilderness to find the monster. Despite an expedition which may last days, the only equipment the extra guys bring are their weapons. (Consisting of an array of M-16′s and AK-47′s!)

On the drive to the wilderness Stone stops to ask for directions from a pair of authentic Good-old boys squatting on a pair of paint cans and playing guitars. Actually one guitar and one mandolin. I think. I’m not a music major.

Travel Tip #24: Never ask people like this for directions.

The two troubadours warn them not to go into the mountains because "nobody ever comes back!", which isn’t quite true since, er, Stone returned from the mountains in the first scene of the movie…but who’s counting? Anyway, Stone and the others park the van and the ponderous posse begins their 15-mile hike (!!) to where they’ll be spending the night. (Once again, let me point out that nobody has any type of backpack, gear, food, or water. Furthermore, half of them are just wearing shorts and t-shirts. )

And…the movie trudges pointlessly on just as Stone and the others trudge hrough the forest. The boredom is broken up by a tedious rappelling scene down an incline which is obviously not steep enough to require rappelling, and by the insertion of a completely extraneous scene with a pair of young campers; the girl, naturally, takes a topless swim. (The whole swimming-scene is filmed in a ‘peeping-Tom’ manner (including foleyed sounds of deep-breathing…ech!) which adds to the film’s overall sleazy feeling. I’m guessing that the director might be implying that the Beast is watching her, however recent establishing shots of the monster show it standing in the middle of an open field and nowhere near any type of forest, so go figure.)

Later that night the expedition sets up camp and sits around a campfire exchanging Beast stories. Unfortunately for the cameraman, the video camera used to film the scene is hopelessly underexposing the shot resulting in essentially a long shot of a reddish fire with an occasional blob of pale flesh popping into view. It also doesn’t help the viewing experience that the dialog is frequently unintelligible due to the chorus of crickets that continually dominate the sound track. It’s truly a lesson in how NOT to film a night scene. (Also, future film makers, don’t just point the camera at the sky in order to film sparks floating up into the air…it doesn’t work, and to be honest, it’s really not that exciting to watch sparks.)

Eventually everybody calls it a night. Unsurprisingly, Stone and Wendy end up sharing a gigantic tent. (Where’d that come from?!) To the thunderous roar of what must be an entire brigade of crickets, Wendy explains how she’s had a crush on Stone since she was an undergrad, (Oh, Bu-ruh-ther!), and since he’s saved her life (WHAT?!), she wants to "act on her desires." With that baffling exposition out of the way (he saved her life?! When?), Wendy indelicately slides over into Stone’s sleeping bag and the scene mercifully comes to a close.

The next morning Stone wakes up to discover that Dan, the leader of Milton’s hired hands, has sent the guys out to look around for the beast. Stone leaves Wendy and Dan to pack up camp while he goes to find Darlene (the token female ‘bad ass’ of the bunch…don’t worry, she dies soon. Ooops. Sorry.) With Stone out of the camp, Jim takes the opportunity to make on move on Wendy which results in the ever hilarious Knee-To-Da-Nuts bit. Hoo-weee! Now that’s some good ol’ Country fun!

Cut to see that Dan’s 4 knuckle-head redneck gun-nuts have actually stumbled across the creature and they immediately open fire with their weapons. "I don’t believe it!" somebody shouts as the <cough> Beast pokes its head out from behind a tree…and yes, the words "I don’t believe it!" came out of my mouth as well after seeing this woeful creature.

No. I’m not kidding.

OK, believe it or not, now the movie really becomes incoherent.

The 4 huge-guys open fire on the Beast but exclaim "We didn’t hit shit!". Apparently the director felt that was enough excitement for one scene as we immediately cut to see Stone, Wendy, and Dan trying to climb some rocks in order to get better vantage point. "I’ve had enough," Dan moans, "I’m heading back to camp." (Would that be the camp that he just finished packing up? Hmmmm.)

The film transcends the realm of merely Awful into the ethereal plane of Surrealistic Incomprehensibility as Stone’s voice is constantly dubbed over the shot yet his mouth never moves. Maybe he’s a Deep Woods Ventriloquist. No matter, Wendy doggedly follows behind as they clamber over stones ("Watch out…these rocks are slippery," Stone ‘says’ to Wendy without moving his mouth.) Suddenly Wendy ‘sees’ the Beast, even though it’s impossible from her position from deep within a ravine. Stone supposedly films a bit of the beast from a hiding spot but the monster somehow ‘spots’ them (once again, impossible from the angle), so he and Wendy scurry back to camp and tell Dan what they found.

Dan has some news of his own: the other guys should have checked in by now. (Bum! Bum! Bum!)

"Yeah, they’ve been gone since yesterday," he notes. (Yesterday?! They arrived yesterday! What the…?)

"Well, somebody’s gotta go and find those sorry bastards," Dan grumbles as he heads off into the brush to look for his buddies.

He quickly discovers one of his henchmen hanging lifeless from a tree and in an astounding artistic gesture, the director immediately cuts to show a gigantic toad sitting on a rock.

I play no role in this film.

Either the sight of his friend hanging gutted from a tree or the large toad sends Dan running back to camp where Stone is digging up what looks like a dog turd. (I’m not being sarcastic here…this movie is very, very strange. I mean, can you name any other movie that includes a scene that could be described by the previous sentence? I didn’t think so.)

Dan breathlessly informs Stone of his recent gruesome discovery: "I found Bob’s big ass hanging from a tree!" (I actually got a chuckle from that line.)

Stone explains that Darlene and Jay came back and blah blah blah…Now we’re getting names for the characters? Gee, thanks. But hey, it doesn’t matter. Three of the six rednecks have now been written out of the script and never appear again. The other 3, namely Dan, Darlene, and Jay, are soon to be Beast fodder so just follow along as best you can.

Meanwhile, Wendy discovers a patently rubber arm on the ground which compels the remaining trio to beat feet and get the hell out of the forest. (I’ll bet that the rubber arm was purchased from the same costume shop that they rented the Beast’s suit.) For some reason Dan suddenly clobbers Stone over the head and takes Wendy hostage. (Hostage?! From who? Why? What the HELL is going on here?) Jay and Darlene secure Wendy and steal Stone’s video tape as Dan ties him to a tree.

Since all the rednecks have to die one way or another, Jay, being a bad ass, decides to turn back alone and gun down the Beast. (Which actually isn’t too unrealistic of a plan since he’s packing an M-16 assualt rifle.) Upon confronting Jay, the monster simply raises its arms, yells ‘blarg’, and somehow avoids being hit by any of Jay’s 30 or so bullets. Out of ammo, Jay inexplicably drops to the ground thus giving the monster a clean kill. Good-bye, Jay. We never knew ye and never wanted to.

Blargh!

So, with Jay dead, this leaves Dan, Darlene, and Wendy trying to make their way back to civilization, while Stone tries to free himself from being tied to the tree. In a truly wonderful continuity error, the very next scene shows the trio walking through the woods with Jay to the far right of the frame even though he was killed in the previous shot! I love it!

Lemma tell ya: for bad-movie fans, these types of screw ups are like panning for gold and finding a nugget the size of your fist.

Anyway, with Jay dead, sort of, Dan, Darlene, and Wendy try to make their way back to civilization. In the meantime, Stone manages to reach his belt knife…yes, Dan tied Stone to a tree without taking away his knife…and frees himself. "I’m gonna track ‘em down," Stone grumbles, "and when I catch them…they’re going to pay in full!" (Cue Erik B. and RaKim…not. Man, I wish. Now that would have been hilarious!)

Sensing that the Beast is close behind, Dan comes up with a brilliant plan to put some distance between himself and the low-budget beastie: He simply shoves Darlene to the ground and runs away with Wendy. Nice. Darlene, somehow now completely unable to walk after falling (whatever), is attacked and killed by the monster. (During this attack scene, the monster obligingly turns its back to the camera giving us a perfect view of the zipper running down the length of the costume’s back. I was hoping that would eventually happen.)

Actually, when I watched the scene again, Dan accidentally kicks Wendy! Nevertheless, true to the script, Darlene tumbles to the ground in mock agony.

Closing in on his quarry, Stone spots Wendy’s bandana on the ground. Picking it up, he puts it to his nose and takes a deep whiff…"It’s Wendy’s," he confirms, "and does she smell good…Ummm!" (I kid you not!)

Soooo….Jim runs into another gang of Milton’s Rednecks and these guys look like they just graduated from the Mullet School of Hair Design. "Go back there and shoot anything that moves," Dan commands, "I gotta get her back to the Boss."

Once again, why on God’s Green Earth would Milton ever want a grad student hostage? I mean, what in the world were the writers thinking? Does this movie really require a subplot? It seems like they’re having enough trouble handling just the main plot alone (such as it is). It’s just makes no sense whatsoever, and is never explained nor resolved. I guess the writers just thought it would be ‘cool’ to have a ‘twist’ in the story. Well, it’s not cool if it doesn’t make any freakin’ sense!

Stone proves himself to be quite the practiced killer as he deftly slices the throat of one of his pursuers, takes his weapon, and then shoots a second guy in the middle of his face. (This guy is an anthropology professor?!)

The remaining redneck pursues Stone deeper into the forest but is quickly dispatched with a shot to the chest. (A pack of blood-hounds was also giving chase, well, at least their barks were added to the soundtrack. Naturally, when the last redneck dies the dogs simply disappear from the film. Talk about your sloppy continuity.)

"The world is a better place without you scum-sucking hill-billies in it," Stone trenchantly notes as he steps over the still-bleeding body of his last victim. (Like I said before, Stone is a college professor?! Pretty hard-core SOB if you ask me.)

For some reason, Dan eventually forces Darlene over a ‘cliff’ and down onto a rock ledge. As Darlene pleads for him not to leave her behind, Dan simply tosses the rope over the edge and abandons her. But really: Why, Dan, why? You dragged her complaining ass, at gunpoint, through the woods for the last 20 minutes, (I counted), and now you just abandon her? WTF? (Kids, if you don’t know, ask your parents what that means.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve hated a movie as much as this one.

Oh, and by the way. The <cough> ledge that Darlene is standing on is about 5 inches from the ground. The camera is simply held low and tilted up to make it look like she’s precariously perched on a ledge. Nice work, guys. Maybe next time you should try and cut out the bits where you can actually see the ground at her feet. Ohhh…I’m on the edge of my seat. Will Darlene make it?

Don’t fall!

As you can see in the above picture, the "sheer cliff" is merely a slight incline. Nevertheless, Stone "rappels" down the 4-foot ‘cliff’s face’ to the ground and helps Darlene up to the top.

WHEW!!!!

Wow…we’re at the one hour mark…which means…it’s only been one hour since the start of the movie? It feels like a freakin’ year.

Anyway, we see the monster chasing Dan through the forest since, you know, he’s evil and has to die the Villain’s Ironic Death. In a oh-so-creative touch, Dan stumbles past a barrel laying on the ground with a shiny sticker that reads "Hazardous Waste." He finally makes it back to the van, jumps into the driver’s seat, and is immediately killed by the monster who was hiding in the back of the van. (Uhhh….ok. Sure. You know, there’s no way the monster could have gotten ahead of him and gotten into the van unnoticed, but what’s the point of discussing something so relatively mundane this late in the game?)

Time out…so you mean to tell me that the monster is a result of hazardous waste dumping? Well, I thought he’s been killing people for 25 years, if that’s the case, then why is the barrel and the label nearly brand new? Just what the hell is going on here? Oh that’s right. There is no explanation for this junk.

Ayyyyeeeeeeee!

Cut to see a young couple setting up camp. (Just to give you an idea of the quality of this film, the boy and girl are credited as "Stupid D. Klown" and "Tweetie"!)

The girl, dressed in knee-high stockings, red mini-skirt and halter top (while camping!) , gets scared by some noises in the forest, so the young gentleman comforts the distressed lass by bending her over a barrel of toxic waste (!!) and, well, doing what comes naturally.

In a scene which probably ranks high with the most ludicrous shots I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching, the monster sneaks up behind the couple, kills the guy, and continues with the job at hand…without the girl even noticing. (!) Unfortunately for you, the reader, I included a screen shot because my command of the English language doesn’t allow me to convey the utter vileness in this shot. (The scene manages to trump itself by fading to black while the girl moans with pleasure. Kudos, gentlemen, kudos.)

I’ve now traveled to movie hell.

I’m really about to lose my lunch here, so I’m going to wrap this up now.

Stone and Wendy make it back to a dirt road where they’re picked up by, Irony!, that crazy guitar playing freak (Credited as "Crazy Joe"). Crazy Joe drops Stone and Wendy off somewhere, who knows where, who cares, and later that night we see that he’s actually in cahoots with the monster. What a PLOT TWIST! Proving itself to be truly tasteless to the bitter end, the film concludes with Crazy Joe and the monster about to take turns, er, ‘pleasuring’ a captive young woman. (She’s bound to a wall and topless, naturally. ) (I think she’s the woman from the opening scene. God only knows.)

So, yes, I’m going to go barf now. Then I’m going to gouge out my eyes so I never have to see anything this horrible again in my life.

The End. (THANK GOD!)

Dennis Grisbeck (Nov 2007)

Read more about Search for the Beast at

Directed by Anthony Doublin

Written by Dom Magwili

Tagline: "Past Predator, Present Alien, Future Terminator"

Run Time: 90 min

Sister Ann: "Who are you?"

Future Slave: "A tool."

I don’t think I’ve hated a movie as much as Future War since I reviewed Hobgoblins a while back. Everything, everything, everything about this movie is poorly executed. Acting, production values, sets, fight choreography, ‘special’ effects, story, pacing, continuity, direction. Did I forget anything? If so, well, I’m sure it sucked too. The story revolves around an escaped slave from the future (kidnapped from the past), who somehow ends up in the present. Cyborg slave keepers hunt him down with (rubber) dinosaurs. Future Slave (referred to simply as ‘FS’ in the review) befriends a former crest-fallen drug-addict-turned-nun (!) who helps him battle the cyborgs.

The actor who plays Future Slave (credited as "The Runaway" on IMDB) is one Daniel Bernhardt who certainly appears to be aping a more popular actor at the time, namely Jean-Claude Van Damme. It is a chilling display of impotent mimicry. I’m not saying that I could take him in a fight, and he certainly knows how to throw a kick, but the whole "Jean-Claude" look has got to go. To be fair, Daniel did go on to bigger and better things (could you really go down from Future War?), notably as Agent Johnson in The Matrix Reloaded, and a couple Blood Sport movies to boot. One other note, Daniel did the fight choreography for Future War. Just so you know who to blame.

The Cast:

	The Runaway (Daniel Bernhardt) Daniel’s career survived Future War (somehow) as he went on to show up in several other films, including ‘Agent Johnson’ in The Matrix Reloaded, and a couple of appearances in Bloodsport 3 and Bloodsport 4.
	Sister Ann (Travis Brooks Stewart) With a limited range of acting ability, Travis Stewart tries her best to play Ann, well, I think she’s trying. After Future War, Travis Stewart went on to play ‘Myrtle’ in Bikini Hotel before mercifully fading away into obscurity.

Our feature presentation begins with FS, Sister Ann, and Big Black Dude (BBD) walking through some sort of system of tunnels. The tunnels have the strange quality of adding an ‘echo’ effect to everybody’s voices. Why? God knows. "We found them, down there…", says Ann. Found what? We’ll find out. Maybe. FS nearly stumbles into a deep, dark, scary opening in the floor. Which is pretty amazing given how light the, *ahem*, tunnels are. FS, BBD, and Ann lean against the wall and shimmy their way along a ledge. Of course, we don’t see the pit as they shimmy, so it is obviously the three of them, oh how shall I say, leaning against a wall pretending to shimmy along a ledge.

Time for Ann to provide some back story via narration.

"Four days ago, a fire fell from the sky…and it brought a man who would change my life forever. It also came a pack of dinosaur-like creatures in various ages [??], shapes [???], and sizes and its [sic] masters…For all the questions I had about the heavens, all it brought was hell on Earth."

(Various shapes? Like round? Square?)

As the group of intrepid adventurers rounds a corner they catch sight of a pair of these dinosaur-like creatures, which actually are T-Rex knock-offs. (I will bet dollars to doughnuts that these dinosaur puppets were scavenged from a different film.)

The dinosaurs growl and act scary while doing their best to hide the fact that they’re made of rubber as FS, BBD, and Ann try to come up with a plan.

Well, it doesn’t matter. The dinosaurs give chase and, well, this is all a little confusing. Somehow the three humans get on the other side of a giant open pit (what’s with the pits around here?) One of the dinosaurs stops on the far side, gets shot, and topples into the hole. Yet, magically, the remaining dinosaur appears on the same side as the humans and gives chase anew. BBD somehow ends up laying on the floor where we see a dinosaur POV shot (yes, it’s a red filter) going in for the kill.

You know, it’s not a good sign to be so confused a mere 2 minutes into a film.

Cut to the present. No wait. It’s the future. I’m not sure. Whatever it is, a huge spaceship flies slowly past the camera.

Just a word or two regarding the opening credit sequence. Some genius thought it would be cool to show a credit, typically for just one person at a time, then cut to the film to show a bit of ‘action’. After about 2 seconds of film, cut to another credits, 2 seconds of film, credit, 2 seconds of film, credit…you get the point. This is truly the most annoying opening credit sequence I’ve ever had the displeasure to witness. (My favorite credit is "Special Appearance by Mel Novak". You might be asking who the hell Mel Novak is…I have no clue. But he’s appearance in the film as "Otis" sure must be special to anybody who actually knows who this guy is.)

We see (between credits), empty hallways in the space ship, alarms going off, more spaceship flying through space. OK, I see. There is some sort of mutiny on the space ship. Somebody manages to press a big red button on a generic control panel and launch a smaller escape ship. More ‘action’ scenes, sort of, of the smaller craft flying away from the main ship. Yes, the credits are still going on.

OK. Back on Earth some hippie dude sitting on the beach looks up to see the craft plummet into the sea. We of course don’t see the craft entering the ocean, that would have cost money. We just assume that’s what happened since we later see FS crawling along the beach.

Hey, some information pops up on the screen:

"From the future traveled a master race of Cyborgs. They made abductions from Earth’s past. The dinosaurs were trained as trackers. The humans were bred as slaves. Now a runaway slave escapes to a place his people call heaven…we know it as Earth"

Ohhh! I see! Their ‘heaven’ is what think of as good old Earth! Cool.

More credits: "Four days ago…"

Then cut to the beach. So in case you are just waking up, we are now seeing what happened before the opening scenes. Man, this kind of cool editing and playing with chronological continuity beats the hell out of Pulp Fiction!

OK, as I mentioned earlier, we now see FS crawling along a beach, I presume after having swam out of his space craft that ditched in the ocean. Cut to see two T-Rex legs walking along the beach in ‘pursuit’. You would think that a space craft plunging into the ocean followed by a T-Rex stomping along the beach in Los Angeles would draw a crowd…but not here.

Oh, it’s a baby T-Rex, as indicated when we see a Cyborg holding it by a leash. The Cyborg slips the T-Rex free of its leash and we cut to Dino-Cam, indicated by shooting the scene with a red filter. Cut to the Cyborg’s POV: Cyborg-Cam, as indicated by a big cross-hair in the middle of the screen accompanied by strange hydraulic sounds. I never knew that Cyborgs required hydraulics just to see. Another thing, the Cyborg, supposedly the ‘Master Race’, sees worse than the human does. Stupid movie.

Downtown LA, a bum is making a bed with old newspapers beside a dumpster. FS runs along, stumbles over a plastic bag filled with something or other, and topples into the bum’s lap. The bum screams in surprise, as does FS, I guess because they don’t have bums in the future.

Unfortunately for the bum, the baby T-Rex appears and makes a quick lunch out of him. What is odd is that we see the dino before it eats the bum standing next to a barrel. The barrel is taller than the dino by a good foot, so it appears that this terrifying ‘tracker’ is the size of a lap dog.

After dispatching the bum, the dinosaur attacks FS, who unsurprisingly makes quick work of the little bugger.

Oh yeah. After the dinosaur is killed it explodes. Go figure.

Now we cut to the first big hand-to-hand battle of the film. (Unfortunately not the last.) FS runs along and manages to hide himself away in some sort of shipping area full of empty cardboard boxes. How do I know they’re empty? Because you can see them fall over from the slightest nudge. Entire stacks of these boxes sway and almost topple over when FS simply brushes against them.

The cyborg (OK, simply Cyborg from here on out), who looks a little like Ron Jeremy trying out for a part in ‘Road Warrior’, uses his super-duper-Cyborg cam to find FS hiding behind a pile of discarded kitchen appliances. (What kind of place is this?) Cyborg and FS throw a few half-hearted punches at each other before FS runs and hides in a veritable maze of these empty cardboard boxes. I mean really, what the hell kind of place is this supposed to be?

Anyway, FS tosses an empty cardboard box at Cyborg, who deftly knocks it aside. After some perfunctory yelling, throwing wild punches, and half-hearted grappling, Cyborg manages to grab FS in some sort of WWF wrestling hold. In an almost unbelievable continuity breach, Cyborg tosses FS aside and out of frame, we then cut to see FS stumbling to regain his balance but now they are inside a building! Incredible!

I also love the way the same ‘smack’ sound is foleyed onto the soundtrack no matter where a punch lands. In other words, a punch to the stomach or face results in the same sound. Oh yeah, a kick sounds the same too. I never knew that every part on the human body will make the same sound when hit.

Ok, let’s move along. More punching, kicking, and a hell of a lot of screaming and yelling. No kidding, I’ve never seen so much ‘aaaaahaaaaaaaawwww!!!!!’ yelling before. And why would a cyborg yell? Ugg. Finally, FS tosses Cyborg into a pile of empty boxes, which topple over with a none-to-convincing sound of broken glass added to the audio track. Absurd.

The Cyborg disappears under a pile of boxes and FS runs off upon hearing a roaring noise from a puppet. Oops, I mean dinosaur. FS runs around through the piles, piles, and piles of boxes while being stalked by the dinosaurs. And no, this is not suspenseful in the least.

How did the T-Rex get into this building in the first place? Just curious…

Finally FS comes across a T-Rex, or is it the other way around? Anyway, using some of the worst forced-perspective shots I can recall, the dinosaur and FS end up "side by side" even though dinosaur puppet is obviously much, much closer to the camera. This is really first-year high-school film class stuff here. No, sorry. I didn’t mean to insult all the high-schoolers out there. This is just cheap, lazy cinematography.

Dinosaur takes a bite at FS, who, big surprise, "dodges" it. Counterattacking, FS takes a roundhouse punch at the dino and connects on the chin. Somehow, FS can punch hard enough to kill a T-Rex because it too dies and explodes.

Cut to see a nun, Sister Ann, driving down the street. Yup. Nuns, dinosaurs, cyborgs…this movie has it all, baby!

FS runs from the Empty Cardboard Box Inc. building and bolts directly in front of Ann’s car. Seeing his motionless form, Ann springs from her vehicle to render aid. We next see Ann bursting through the doorway of the halfway house where she works. Gasping for breath, Ann pleads with Huge Black Dude, and I finally heard his name, Fred. OK, Fred and some other loser, Oscar, go out to the car and bring the unconscious FS inside. (Why didn’t Ann take him to the hospital? And why do we see that it’s now pitch black outside when Fred opens the door for Ann?)

Later that day, or is it the same day, who knows, we see the police arriving at Empty Cardboard Box Inc. where the discovery of several half-eaten bodies has certainly raised some eyebrows. Oddly, the shot of a police car arriving at the scene has the entire sky ‘blacked out’ by either faulty film processing or matted out on purpose. Why in the world they did this is beyond me.

Arriving on the scene is none other than police Captain Polaris (!!). A female investigator suggests that a "mountain lion or grizzly bear" may be responsible. Polaris suggests calling the Humane Society or zoo. Gee, you think?

A uniformed officer calls Polaris over to the side to show him something in the dirt. The photography is so poor at this point that all I can say is that it’s either a dinosaur footprint, an explosion mark, or an oil stain.

Well, enough of all that action, we cut back to the halfway house where Sister Ann is having a smoke and talking about her lack of conviction regarding her choice as a nun. A nurse from the, ahem, "Clinic", has popped in to take a look at FS, laying unconscious in a spare bedroom. She notes that nothing looks broken but she can’t tell until some X-rays are taken. (Once again…why the hell didn’t Ann just take him straight to the hospital?) Promising to stop by after her night shift, the nurse takes her leave, but not before giving Ann a strange collar that she found on FS. (I’m not sure where he had it since in the previous fight scenes he clearly did not have a collar on his neck…)

Returning to Ann’s dilemma, Fred tries to console her, "Look, when we first met, you were hiding from a pimp, you just did a month in the joint, you were suicidal and addicted." I’m sure she feels better. Fred’s point is that Ann managed to clean herself up, and that becoming a nun is the right move for her. Really, would I make all this up? "Listen kid," says Fred, "everything is going to work out just fine…you’ll see." Wow. That was encouraging. Wow, I feel some much more empathy for the characters now.

The next day Ann is cleaning up in the kitchen, Fred is reading the morning paper, and a huge dude comes into the kitchen saying that FS is awake but won’t speak. For some reason Ann is now dressed in an Original Gangsta plaid shirt and sweat jacket because you know, she’s OG. Either that or the movie would be even stupider with her running around in a nun’s habit fighting dinosaurs.

Upstairs, in the "day room", FS is desperately scanning the radio stations in an apparent effort to contact his ship. Oh yeah, he’s also dressed in a sleeveless Gangsta plaid shirt. I’m not sure why they didn’t just leave his other clothes on him, nor who changed his clothes, but there you have it.

Fred tries to introduce himself, but FS ignores him while he busily shoves food into his mouth and scans the radio stations. Ann sends Fred and Huge-Guy out of the room so that she can try to "get him to open up" alone. Nothing seems to work. Only when she’s about to leave the room does FS jump up and pin her against the wall (?).

OK, let’s cut to the chase. Ann tries to get FS to tell her where he’s from, but he can only grunt and point to the sky. Ann doesn’t get it, so he smashes a bookshelf (!) and goes back to scanning the radio stations. ([The Royal Minister of Proof-Reading Sean Ledden notes: It's interesting how Future Slaves are violent, incapable of language, yet able to master complicated audio technology like the radio...Sounds like your typical teenager!]) Fed up with getting nowhere, Ann pops in later that evening to say good-bye for she’s going to go visit her aunt (!). FS grabs her and once again tries to explain where he’s from. FS can now say single words: "You….here…[points to globe]…me…here…[points to space above globe]". I hope I’m conferring the excitement of this scene to you. Ann still doesn’t get it. (Good grief, woman! Wake up!)

Anyway, somehow a tracker T-Rex appears outside the window. How the hell a Tyrannosaurus Rex could move about Los Angeles without being noticed is never explained. So, like I was saying, a T-Rex magically appears outside the window, growls, and smashes its head through the window and into the room. The commotion brings in Huge-Guy who waddles into the room and is promptly knocked aside by the T-Rex. You will notice that the mannequin that was used in the scene has brown skin, is thin, and is wearing a black shirt. Huge-Guy, who is supposedly being knocked down, is white, weighs about 300 pounds, and is wearing a green shirt. Isn’t this a great movie?

Fred then pops into the room wielding a shot-gun (!!) and drives back the T-Rex with a few blasts to the face. This counterattack gives FS and Ann a chance to run out the back door and escape. (Wow! Great tracker!)

The next scene shows Ann and FS walking down a street gasping for breathe, "Wow", says Ann, "I think we out ran him!" (Outran a T-Rex? By running down the middle of a street? And then where is the T-Rex? Stupid movie.) While FS and Ann walk down the street, Ann’s narration explains how FS really does understand English but his "Vocal cords needed to adjust to our language." Yup. You bet. Anyway, now FS can talk, although haltingly at first, but he gets better and better.

FS explains that he is "a tool" (I agree one hundred percent!), enslaved by the Cyborgs to create, er, things for them. Ann is skeptical. (Although she did just have an encounter with a T-Rex that busted into her living room…but anyway…)

Somehow, Ann and FS end up riding out of town in the back of a box car. (What happened to Ann’s car? Where the hell are they going?) Well, it’s suppose to be a box car but if you look carefully at the wood paneling, it’s the same that appeared in the opening scenes of the hallway. Yup, somebody just piled up a couple bales of hay next to the same walls, added train "sounds" to the audio track, and viola! FS and Ann are riding the rails.

After FS and Ann have a heart-to-heart talk (even exchanging Bible verses!), Ann’s narration continues. You see, she trained to be a nun, but had a crisis of faith. Oh brother. Let’s just move on. I’m sorry if I’m a bit impatient here, but this attempt at characterization is so stunningly awful it defies description. I mean, who freakin’ cares!? If you can manage to see ‘Future War’ a total of 5 times without cracking up, then you are a stronger person than me.

Yes, now they are back on the train where FS informs Ann that the tracker (i.e., T-Rex) will go back to where it first found them, i.e., the halfway house where all of Ann’s friends live. This doesn’t sound much like "tracking" to me, but whatever. Realizing that her friends are in danger, Ann decides to go back to the halfway house despite the fact that the tracker has "her scent." I’m also a bit unsure as to what Ann hopes to accomplish by going back and facing a flock of T-Rex’s. If it’s just to warn her friends, can’t she just call them?

FS offers to come along to help her but Ann basically tells him to hit the road because "this is something I have to do alone!" Does anybody understand Ann’s motivation at this point? FS quotes the Bible a bit more and finally convinces Ann to let him tag along back to the halfway house.

The next morning we see an old man walking around the forest reading a "Monsters" magazine. (Update Nov 3, 2005: A Tip O’ The Hat to Danny Runion at Sideorder Of Ninjas for informing me that this man is none other than sci-fi legend Forrest Ackerman. Shame on me!) I think the filmmakers could have just painted the words "Victim #1" on his forehead to make it a little clearer. Somehow, this guy suffers from Periphial-Vision-itus and doesn’t see the 15-foot high T-Rex standing beside him that quickly gobbles him up. We, of course, don’t see him being eaten. Instead we see the puppet’s mouth sort of ‘snap’ a few times before cutting to the next scene.

Back at Police Headquarters, Polaris has posted little stickers up on a map showing all the latest victims. He assumes that it’s "an animal from the mountains going on a rampage" and sends patrol cars out to intercept it.

Meanwhile, FS and Ann are still aimlessly walking around the streets of L.A. Since it’s now morning, late afternoon actually, I can only deduce that they’ve been walking for the last 36 hours, not including the time spent on the, *ahem*, train.

Cut to a couple of kids kicking a soccer ball around in a park. Somehow, again, nobody notices a freakin’ T-Rex in the middle of the day in LA and the dinosaur eats the kids. As before, we don’t see it. But we are treated to some terrible special effects.

Another shot shows some guys in some sort of storage room calling the police for help. A stage hand waving a spot light back and forth indicates that something exciting is happening in case you didn’t notice. There are also a couple of guys frantically blockading the door with, yes, empty cardboard boxes. I guess those should keep out a T-Rex, eh?

Suddenly we see FS and Ann being picked up and put in the back of a police car! For what? They’re just walking down the street! Stupid movie! In one scene they’re walking down the street, the next they’re sitting in the back of a cop car! Ack.

Cut to a, um, reporter giving a "live" report from outside Empty Cardboard Box Inc. (Referred to as "The 5th Street Warehouse"). In what I believe to be 2 of the utterly cheapest props I have ever seen in a movie, the reporter’s microphone has a piece of paper taped to it with a hand drawn number "2" indicating the TV station, and the cameraman’s video camera is a cardboard box with a lens sticking out the end. Incredible!!!

I mean, is this meant to be a joke?!

Sigh. Moving along.

Polaris orders the "Tactical Team" to move in and try to rescue the guys barricaded in the back room of the warehouse.

Yes, the Tactical Team moves into the warehouse which is, of course, a maze of empty cardboard boxes. By the way, the Tactical Team, led by "Joey", seems to be comprised of only Joey himself. At least that’s the only guy we see moving around in the boxes.

Back outside, Polaris decides to move into the warehouse with backups. Amazingly, FS and Ann are standing beside him and he tells them to come with him! Ok, let’s get this straight. A police car picks up Ann and FS for whatever reason. Then drives them to the sight of an animal attack, releases them right beside Captain Polaris, who then orders these 2 complete strangers (previously under arrest!) to come with him into the warehouse! What the hell!??

The new tactical team moves through the warehouse where they finally come across the T-Rex in a convenient open area (surrounded by boxes). The police begin to shoot but are told to hold fire because "Floyd" (!?) is behind the T-Rex and might be hit by friendly fire. I guess this means FS is going to do some more karate. <sigh>

On FS’s command, Ann tosses her jacket over the T-Rex’s head while FS cuts it throat with a huge knife. (Where did that come from?) The dead dino topples over and its exploding collar blows it up into a million bits. At that moment Polaris receives a call from headquarters warning him that more monsters have been sighted. FS tries to explain that the monsters are after him, at which time Polaris places him under arrest (!!). Under what charge?! FS obviously displayed he can kill these things, and he even offered to go kill the other monsters…but he’s placed under arrest?! ("He won’t run away this time!", says Polaris…huh?)

FS is tossed in the clink, namely an empty cell (in LA!?) big enough for him to do a bunch of karate kicks and punches for our enjoyment. It’s his way of gearing up for battle. I think. Ann, however, was released. She meets with Fred (from the halfway house, remember, it seems about a million years ago) and has him set up a meeting between her and the, *ahem*, "Twelfth Street Gang". (Oh brother!) so she can buy a bunch of weapons in order to fight the dinos without the police’s help.

Ann meets with the 12th Street Gang, all six of them, each wearing different ‘colors’. (Isn’t that a gang no-no? Aren’t they all supposed to have the same colors? Maybe this is some sort of gang coalition.) Some Classic Lines are exchanged and the gang agrees to give her some help. You see, Ann used to be "down" in "da hood". Yeah, ok. I’ll buy that.

The meeting goes as Ann had hoped, and she is told of a contact where she can fetch weapons and money. Oh yeah, and the 12th Street Gang is going to help them fight the monsters.

Back at police headquarters, a police psychologist, Dr. Tanaka, gives her professional opinion of FS: "Personally, I think he’s nuts." Suddenly "Federal Agents" burst into the interview room, Polaris is kicked out of the room (!), and the Feds press FS for info. Using a knife, they eventually dig out a transmitter from FS’s back (Without anesthetic! Why not?). "Sorry about all this humiliation," says Agent #1, "It’s my job." Indeed. The transmitter, a tiny red doo-hickey is taken to "the lab" for analysis.

Cut to see another Cyborg stomping around the police parking lot. Somehow, the Cyborg manages to get inside the police building without raising any eyebrows, and blasts open the door to the lab. (Now really people, how the hell did a shotgun-and-laser-gun-bearing cyborg get into the police building without anybody noticing. Stupid, stupid movie.)

Cyborg crashes through the door, and shall I say a patently styrofoam door, and kills the terrified technician.

By the way, if you think the scene in this movie with the cyborg breaking into the police station to hunt down a fugitive is a rip-off of the Terminator, then you are absolutely correct. I will say this about the guys that made this movie: they had a lot of nerve!

The whole Rampage-Through-The-Police-Station is so ineptly executed it defies description. The Cyborg blows away a bunch of cops and finally gets ahold of FS and starts dragging him away. One policeman opens what must be the weapon’s locker, which is shown as a room with guns hanging by nails pounded into the wall (!!!), and takes an M-16 off the wall. He unwisely opens fire on the Cyborg, but at least FS manages to get free while the Cyborg shoots at the other cop.

Let’s move this along. FS kills a T-Rex that was hiding in the police parking lot (!!!) and disables the Cyborg by hitting it in the stomach with a pipe. (Don’ ask. OK, ask. FS pulled the pipe off the wall.)

Back with Ann and the 12th Street Gang, Ann finally manages to convince the gang members to help them fight the monsters. Somehow, FS pops into the room, wearing his shirt that was removed in the police station, and volunteers to lead them to the T-Rex’es since "they can be found by water." (How did FS get his shirt back? When he killed the T-Rex in the parking lot he was shirtless, so I guess he must have made his way back inside, back to the interrogation room and got his clothes. Wow, he must really like that shirt!)

FS takes Ann to some sort of entrance tunnel to the underground tunnels that we saw in the beginning of the film. (See how all this is coming together? Pretty neat, huh?) He finds some dinosaur tracks in the dirt, but our “heroes” are nearly eaten when a T-Rex comes out of the entrance and starts chasing them. Fleeing the dinosaur puppet, Ann and FS jump into the back of some guy’s pick-up truck (thank goodness the truck’s driver was sitting in the front seat reading a newspaper…how convenient) and scream at him to drive away. The driver hesitates at first, but a quick glimpse in his mirror reveals the rampaging dinosaur and he burns rubber out of there.

In another obscenely blatant rip-off from another movie, the T-Rex chases the truck down the street, snapping at FS and Ann who are riding in the back of the truck. Sounds a lot like the scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex was chasing the jeep through the forest, eh? Well it looks a hell of a lot like it too. How did these guys sleep at night?!

Well, FS and Ann finally get away when they slam a gate shut on the dinosaur. (How they managed to close the gate while riding in the back of a speeding truck is beyond me…)

Suddenly we cut back to the meeting with Ann, FS, and the 12th Street Gang, which was actually happening before the scene we just saw showing the monster chasing them. Hmmm. Nice editing. Whatever, they hand out a bunch of weapons, including a dart gun (!!) and head out to do battle with the trackers.

Hey! Now they’re walking through the tunnels again! Just like in the beginning! That must mean that we have come full circle, chronologically speaking of course. Well, yes, these scenes are just as boring this time around too.

OK, FS, Ann, and some volunteers from the 12th Street Gang, or maybe it’s the entire gang, find a couple of T-Rex trackers and begin setting up booby traps. Well, one trap at least. This trap involves a large chain-link fence juiced up with electricity that will eventually be tossed on top of the dinosaur. Oops! Hope I didn’t give anything away.

Oh! One more thing. There is a time bomb emplaced at the tunnel entrance that is set to go off (according to the digital read out, of course) in about 5 minutes. Well, it’s hard to tell exactly how long it’s going to take because the display seems to count down faster and faster every time they show the damn thing.

Anyway, Fred gets chomped, as was shown in the beginning in the film, so the editors at least got that right. Another 12th Street Gang member (sporting a beret!) is also gulped up when his gun misfires (oh brother) and he charges the T-Rex with his knife.

Now that the 2 T-Rex trackers are dispatched, Cyborg decides to mysteriously pop up At That Very Moment. FS and Cyborg have a half-hearted fisticuffs, which results in, unsurprisingly, Cyborg getting his butt kicked yet again.

As another T-Rex comes after the humans, the time bomb reaches zero and explodes. The tunnel entrance is blown to bits. Well, at least the little styrofoam table-top model that was used to represent the tunnel.

The next day, or maybe next week, I don’t know, Ann is taking her vows in an extremely spartan "church". I mean, there is no way that this room even pretends to be a church sanctuary. Anyway, in attendance is FS and a dopey little kid from the halfway house.

Boy, there’s nothing that says "Movie Excitement" quite like watching somebody take Catholic vows in church. Let me tell you.

Just as Ann accepts her vows, er, proclaims her faith, whatever it’s called, Cyborg jumps through the stained-glass ceiling (!) and promptly shoots a statue of the Virgin Mary (!). FS picks up one of the two church pews in the room (a church hall with only two pews) and tosses it at Cyborg who simply knocks it aside. (OK, FS is simply a human, a buff human, admittedly, but I don’t think he’d be strong enough to pick up and throw a church pew!)

Some more Pseudo-Kung-Fu Fighting takes place, which of course immediately results in FS getting his shirt torn off so he can expose his muscles. (Man, really, this movie is lame!)

Cyborg dude blows up yet another statue of the Virgin Mary (Doh!!). Ann notices one of those exploding collar thingees laying on the church floor (Now where did that come from!!!???) and tosses it to FS. A quick punch to the Cyborg’s chin knocks it to its knees allowing FS to attach the exploding collar around its neck. (In a hilarious continuity error, FS’s chest is covered in blood in one shot and completely free of blood in the very next. To make matters worse, the shots are shown several times in a row as if the film makers wanted to make sure the viewer spotted the error. Well done, gents.)

OK, the collar explodes and Cyborg dude bursts into flames. FS is injured, but hey, he’ll be OK.

As the movie comes to a close, we see Sister Ann flipping through her scrap book. A hilarious newspaper clipping states "Rehab center scores new counselor", which in my opinion, is an odd verb to choose in that context. The picture accompanying the headline shows, you guessed it, FS. Yup, he’s now a rehab counselor. Go figure. Even odder is that the picture of FS shown over the headline is a head-shot of him from the previous church battle with the Cyborg. Who was there to take that picture is anybody’s guess.

By the way, the movie is over now. You are free to leave and never watch this movie again.

Dennis Grisbeck (August 2005)

Read more about Future War at

Directed by Steven Seagal

Tagline: “His battle to save the Alaskan wilderness and protect its people can only be won…”

Run Time: 102 min

Other Titles: "Rainbow Warrior", "Spirit Warrior"

On Deadly Ground directed, produced, and starring Steve "Kick Yo’ Ass" Seagal, is a perfect example of a movie star’s ego gone wild. In 1994 Seagal was enjoying an admittedly well deserved 15-minutes of fame after starring in the successful Above the Law and its sequel Hard to Kill, not to mention a pair of luke-warm formula films Marked For Death and Out for Justice, both of which milked the standard One Good Cop vs. The World of Evil paradigm for a few more bucks…and hell, why not? These were to golden years of action-hero movies with such names as Van Damme, Willis, Stallone, and of course, Schwarzenegger.

Seagal hit it big starring as Casey Ryback, an ex-SEAL turned cook (!!) in the entertaining 1992 action flick Under Siege. (And before you ask: yes, I like that movie.) "Under Siege" grossed over $150 million world-wide and propelled Seagal to Super Action Hero status…at least for the time being.

Unfortunately for Steven’s career, he decided to leverage his stardom with the studios and agreed to star in Under Siege 2 only if he was allowed to direct his "own" action flick: On Deadly Ground. Warner Bros., possible just as intoxicated with Seagal’s success as he was, agreed to the deal and that’s why you are reading this right now.

On Deadly Ground tanked at the box office; grossing little over $38 million compared to the $50 million to make it. Ouch. The movie itself can’t seem to decide if it’s a Movie With A Message or an Action Film. Steven aimed for both and missed on both counts: There’s far too much violence for a family film and too much goofy spirituality for hard-core action fans just wanting to see Seagal snap some arms. (Although there is plenty of violence, there’s too many interminable ‘Spiritual’ scenes sprinkled into the story…you’ll see.)

Amazingly, Seagal saw fit to tack on an 11 minute (!!!) speech at the end of the film deriding oil companies and Big Business; Warner Bros. was forced to step in and trim the speech to 3 minutes after test audiences kept walking out of the ending…and believe it or not, my father and I walked out of the 3-minute version as well…talk about pain!

Co-starring as Seagal’s evil Texan antagonist is Michael Caine, who plays Aegis Oil CEO, Michael Jennings. (Seagal wisely provided the viewers with a visual clue as to Jennings’ origins: he wears a bolo tie. Otherwise, you might forget where Jennings is from given Caine’s tendency to drop his Texan accent and fall back to his normal Cockney dialect throughout the movie.) Caine is in good form in this movie, chewing the scenery as he tends to do when the director won’t, or in Seagal’s case, can’t, reel him in. (Check out The Swarm and Jaws 4 for some lovely examples of Caine’s goofiness.) Oh, and keep your eyes open for a (at that time) relatively unknown Billy Bob Thornton.

Our film opens with a credit sequence overlaid on top of beautiful shots of the Alaskan wilderness, at least that’s where I’m presuming it was shot. (A quick IMDB check revealed that only 1 of the 4 shooting locations where actually in Alaska where the film is supposedly taking place…the others where in Washington State and a refinery somewhere in California…oh well.)

The relative serenity of the opening shots is cut short as we jump to an oil-well fire where frantic firefighters struggle in vain to contain the flames. (I had to wonder what kind of an environmentally friendly movie this is when I saw the oil rig mock-up spewing enormous clouds of oily black smoke into the sky for the scene…and this wasn’t stock footage, so I can only assume that the fire was created just for Steven’s grand entrance…nice.)

As the camera pans across the fire we notice a helicopter coming in for a landing. (A rousing blast of trumpet fanfare confirms that Our Hero has indeed arrived.)

The Environmentally Friendly Movie

The first man out of the helicopter is, naturally, Steven Seagal who plays Forrest Taft (!!!), the Aegis oil company’s #1 Goto Guy when things go to hell. (At least that’s what his job appears to be; he’s never shown doing much of anything else…you know…like work.) Seagal treats himself to a leisurely camera pan up his back side (so to speak) in order to make the patented Star Turn, as if the audience was intended to say, "Hey…who is that with those black boots…it’s…it’s…he’s turning…it’s STEVEN SEAGAL!" Unfortunately the horror is taken up a notch quite early in the film as we immediately notice that gone is Seagal’s trademark full-length black coat, and in its stead is leather "Indian" jacket complete with beads, turquoise and all the other accoutrements that screams out Social Awareness With Bad Taste.

Forrest’s long time friend, Hugh Palmer, rushes up and explains that the fire was caused by faulty equipment purchased by Aegis CEO Michael Jennings (Michael Caine). In a fairly hamfisted "Gotcha" moment, Jennings throws open the helicopter door as Palmer continues to berate him…oops! Hoo hoo! I bet Palmer is embarrassed now!

(Being completely in love with himself at this point in his career, Seagal often includes stomach-turning dialog praising Forrest for being So Damned Good at pretty much everything. A good case in point is when Forrest scans the situation while a smarmy off-camera voice shouts "Forrest’s here! That fire’s as good as out!"…uggh. For the duration of the film I’ll denote clumsily foleyed lines with square brackets, i.e., ( ).)

A brief clot of exposition reveals that Jennings forced Palmer to use faulty "preventers" on the drill resulting in the fire. Why would Jennings rig his own drills with faulty equipment? Hell, I don’t know, but I Bet We’ll Find Out Soon. As the frantic men look own, Forrest grabs a heat shield (made of a piece of corrugated aluminum!…is that what they really use?!), and stomps up to the edge of the inferno. Jennings and a pair of Evil Henchmen look on with bemused interest.

After a perfunctory look at the blaze, Forrest orders everybody to back up so that he can extinguish the blaze by detonating an explosive charge. Realizing the danger involved in this last ditch maneuver, the firefighters all run back and hit the ground. Jennings, being a bad ass, stands tall and stares Forrest in the eye as the explosives, well, explode, into a gigantic fireball. (Give yourself a couple of points if you guessed there’d be a shot of Seagal, standing tall, silhouetted by an enormous fireball…It’s just this sort of pointless Macho bullshit that makes me cringe in disgust. OK, Forrest, you’re a bad ass. Fine. But what are you trying to prove here? And to whom?)

Oh yeah, baby,…I’m bad, I’m bad!

I had to chuckle at the next scene showing Forrest triumphantly sauntering towards Jennings accompanied by a chorus of foleyed cheers and applause…too bad that none of the extras are applauding! Whoops! Well, I guess we needed to see how Appreciative the Common Folk are for Forrest’s unparalleled ability to push a button rigged to a pre-positioned pile of pyrotechnics.

As you might expect, now that the sides of Good and Evil are clearly drawn, the movie has no other choice but to trudge onward to its predictable climax, and if I have to sit through it, then so are you.

Cut to a local dive bar full of oilrig workers. If you guessed that we will be forced to sit through Ye Oulde Bar Fight scene then give yourself two points. As generic country music blares out of a tinny jukebox, a drunken Native American is verbally and physically assaulted by a particularly abusive worker. Forrest sullenly watches from a nearby table until the script indicates that Enough Is Enough.

"Whatcha looking at, cupcake?" wisecracks the soon-to-be-pounded ruffian.

"Nothing much," Forrest wryly retorts as he strides over to Tough Guy. (TG).

("Fuck ‘em up, Forrest!")

Forrest calmly walks by and makes his way to the bar.

("Ya got lucky, Fuck Head!" another disembodied voice remarks from somewhere in the bar.)

TG and his drinking buddies return to their seats while shooting insults towards Forrest who has plopped himself down on a barstool.

As luck would have it, Palmer walks into the bar and suggests to Forrest that something is amiss with the faulty "preventers". (Don’t ask me…I guess they "prevent" fires or something.)

"If you still can’t figure out why Jennings made me use (the faulty preventers) anyway," Palmer murmurs, "check out the requisition file on Aegis One…check it out…then we’ll talk."

OK, why can’t Palmer just tell Forrest the reason? Oh…then the plot would be short circuited and the movie would be over. (Not a bad idea, actually.)

"I left my day pack and some weapons up at your place," Forrest abruptly remarks, "I think I’m going to pick them up and go up into the hills." (A day pack and some weapons? WTF?)

"They’re in the closet," Palmer exposits, deftly smacking us in the forehead with a Plot Point.

Palmer exits the scene as abruptly as he entered, clearly the way for the inevitable Bar Fight that we’ve been waiting for. (Ok, Tough Guy is named Mike. That will make things slightly easier to type when he gets his ass kicked.) Mike continues to abuse Native American Guy (NAG), culminating with tossing a beer into his face.

("That guy’s an asshole!" Female Foleyed Voice #32 trenchantly observes.)

I’ll just cut to the chase and say that Forrest quickly engages the rowdy workers and starts whooping their asses in that trademark Seagal technique of arm-breaks, body-tosses, and genital-crushing kicks and punches.

("MY NUTS!!!" one unfortunate combatant shouts as Seagal crushes his jewels in a steely grip. I’d just like to point out that, as any male can tell you, the first reaction after ANY type of testicular injury is not to shout "My nuts!"…it’s trying to breath, scream, cry, crawl, roll, and vomit all at the same time.)

("MY BALLS!!!" another one shouts literally 3 seconds later after having his precious pair destroyed by a savage kick from Forrest’s cowboy boot clad foot.)

After dispatching a rather large number of attackers, the scene winds up with Forrest and Mike standing face to face, ringed by a crowd of eager onlookers.

"We’re going to play the Hand Slapping Game," Forrest says. (The "Hand Slapping Game" is simply a testosterone-rich , brutal version of "Bloody Knuckles": you miss, the other guy gets to punch you, and vice versa. ) Needless to say, Forrest sadistically pummels the crap out of Mike after only 3 rounds.

In one of the truly oddest scenes of the film, Forrest asks the bloodied, gasping Mike, "What does it take to change the essence of a man?"

Mike, broken nose, crushed nuts, and gasping for breath, tears up (!) and says, "Time…I need time to change."

"I do too," Forrest whispers as the silently crowd watches in awe. With Native American-ish music playing, Forrest gives Mike a knowing pat on the shoulder and gives the previously abused NAG a ride home.

"You’re about to go on a sacred journey," NAG tells Forrest, because, you know, all Native Americans are highly spiritual and in touch with nature. (Oh…BROTHER!)

UPDATE Jan 26: Thanks to Spooky from the forums for sending a link to a video of this entire sick hand-slapping game! Thank you so much!

The Hand-Slapping Game

Meanwhile, Jennings stalks through the marbled halls of Evil Corp. while a flock of underlings fills him in on the latest news. Due to the recent fire (in the opening scene), the EPA has launched an investigation and a lot of bad PR has been spreading. The remedy? Jennings is to film a quick commercial touting Aegis’ concern for the environment and their unremitting devotion to safety, all taking place in front of a forest mock-up. At the end of the piece, Jennings vehemently complains about the "stinking" caribou that adorned the set while the commercial was being filmed, because, you know, he’s evil and really doesn’t care about the environment. See? He’s an Evil Capitalist. Wow, makes you think, doesn’t it?

Anyhoo, Jennings storms off the set and back up to his cavernous office. When word reaches him that the finishing of the crown jewel of Aegis production, the Aegis-1 oil platform, is going to be 3 weeks delayed, Jennings explodes in a fury and exposits that if the rig is not operational in 13 days, then the oil rights revert back to the Eskimos.

Yeah, you try to figure that one out.

To further complicate matters, an "unnamed source" within the company has been leaking information to the EPA about "substandard equipment." It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the informant is good ol’ Hugh Palmer (otherwise Jennings would have never figured it out), and when he Jennings realizes that the entire Aegis-1 project is at stake (with potential revenues of "billions of dollars a week"…A week?!!), he tasks his hired killer, MacGruder (John C. McGinley), with dealing with the "problem."

Aegis-1…you betcha. I hope a strong wind doesn’t come along…

The next day Forrest makes his way into the <cough> Control Room to investigate the requisition forms that Palmer mentioned the night before. Using a handy computer terminal already logged into exactly the server on which to find requisition forms, Forrest accesses the information with a total of 7 key strokes: indeed, the Blowout Preventers that Jennings has installed have failed nearly every quality control test.

Oh no!!! Not…Wait for next shipment!

As Forrest accesses this putatively important information, an alert goes off informing Jennings of the file access. Since this is a bone-headed movie, the only solution to this "problem" is just as bone-headed: kill him.

Now, how about some alternative solutions:

1) Change the access codes.

2) Revoke Forrest’s access to the computers.

3) Remove the stupid files from the file server.

But no, Jennings orders Forrest to be liquidated. (You really have to wonder how many other CEO’s assassinate employees for rummaging around computer files. Seriously, if you didn’t want anybody to see them…then don’t put them on the computer. Hell, why don’t you just fire him?! Sheesh.)

Cut to Palmer at home, busily downloading Aegis files as well off the network.

I want to take this opportunity to point out that I’m a computer geek, therefore I love taking screenshots of movie computer screens and having a good laugh. Case in point: Here’s Palmer’s download screen:

Download to the "A" drive?!

(Warning: Computer geek talk beginning)

It would appear that after doing a video card and file check (…a SuperMac card, no less!), Palmer proceeds to download the entire Aegis data store to the A: drive, which is a floppy disk! Yeah, I guess he’ll be disk swapping for the next, oh, 23 years.

Anyway, the entire download takes, and I kid you not, 2 seconds to reach 100%. (!!!)

Being the smart guy that he is, Palmer quickly initiates a "wipe" of his hard drive. (Hilariously, the prompt reads: "Type password to continue…Any other key to cancel". Now, if you are going to type your password, how does the program discern that the first key stroke is part of the password and not an attempt to cancel? (Or visa versa?)

(Sorry all non-computer geeks, this is a long, dull movie and I’m grasping at anything to assuage the pain.)

Returning to our movie in progress:

Jenning’s contract killers, MacGruder and Otto, show up at Palmer’s place and try to retrieve the incriminating records that Palmer was planning on handing over to the EPA. Palmer refuses and is gorrated, beaten, and finally tortured to death in a surprisingly lengthy, bloody, and brutal scene (including the charming finale involving getting his leg sectioned with an industrial pipe cutter).

(Really, just who did Seagal think the target audience was?)

Meanwhile, Jennings is holding a press conference explaining how Aegis is working hard to contain and clean up the oil from the latest spill. The local Eskimo tribal leaders, after years of Aegis abusing the environment, are bellicose and gleefully looking forward to when Aegis loses the regional oil and mineral rights in a mere 12 days. Jennings quickly shoots back that his company will not lose the rights because the Aegis-1 platform will be operational within the deadline. (I’m not sure that mineral right contracts are that simple, but there you go.)

Just as Jennings is leaving the press conference up comes a local Eskimo activist (and designated ‘cutie’) named Masu (played by Joan Chen). As the angry crowd pelts Jennings with verbal abuse (once again, you have to wonder how any company could remain profitable with that much local opposition), Masu glides up and tosses a cup full of crude oil on Jenning’s chest. ¨

"The blood of our people is upon you, Mr. Jennings," Masu adds for good measure as the oil runs down his suit.

Out in the hallway, Forrest confronts Jennings regarding the substandard preventers. To get to the point, since the shipment of new preventers is delayed 90 days, Jennings is forced to use the crappy ones in order to make the deadline so Aegis doesn’t lose the oil rights.

"How much money is enough?" Forrest asks, because, you know, making money is bad.

Anyhoo, Jennings sends Forrest out into the wilderness to presumably fix another oil leak. Little does our hardy hero realize that he’s being lead into a trap. (Jennings accompanies him in the helicopter out into the Alaskan forests. Man, doesn’t Jennings, as head of a major oil corporation, have anything, you know, to do during the day?)

Forrest hops into a fire-repellant suit and carefully enters the pumping station. As he plays his flashlight beam across the oil soaked floor, he’s shocked to discover Palmer’s mutilated body along with the bloody pipe cutter used to murder him. Forrest finally figures out what’s happening when he spots a bundle of dynamite taped to a nearby pipe. (Well, duh!)

From the helicopter, MacGruder detonates the dynamite via remote control as Jennings watches with glee. Assuming that Forrest is fatally fricasseed, the Bad Guys fly back to headquarters. Alas, they didn’t notice that Forrest was thrown free of the flames by the blast itself. (A concussion that would have killed any mortal man, but not Seagal.)

As luck would have it, a group of Eskimos happens to see the smoke from the explosion and rescues our frightfully wounded hero. "The spirit of the Man-Bear lives in the smoke," the tribal chief exclaims. Yes, Forrest is the "Man-Bear."

You may throw up now.

Back in the Eskimo village, Forrest is nursed back to health. Did I mention that Masu, the Oil Throwing Activist, Just Happens To Live in the Village? Oh. Well, she does. Who would have ever thought that? Oh, and her father is the tribal chief. What are the odds, eh?

Back at Aegis headquarters, Jennings is holding (yet another!) press conference.

("What kind of crap are you going to feed us now, Jennings!")

("Just answer the questions, you weasel!")

(…and this is the local press? Man, that’s a tough crowd.)

As the crowd gasps with disbelief, Jennings explains that the latest oil spills were acts of sabotage carried out by former Aegis employees Forrest and Palmer.

("That’s a crock of SHIT!")

Believing that Forrest is dead, and with the blame placed on his and Palmer’s shoulders, Jennings leaves the conference room content that there will be no more problems. The only wrinkle is that the cleanup crew hasn’t found any sign of Forrest’s body yet so Jennings sends MacGruder and Otto out in a helicopter to scan the area.

"There’s no sign of him yet, sir, and I can assure you we’ve been over every inch of ground," MacGruder reports from the chopper. (What…every inch of ground in Alaska?) Not impressed, Jennings orders them to continue searching because, er, Forrest’s body wasn’t found so that can only mean he’s still alive somewhere. (A bit of a false dichotomy I’d say, but there you have it.)

The rarely seen Alaskan Man-Bear.

Meanwhile, back at the Eskimo village, Forrest has recovered enough to sneak out of the sleeping house (in a perfectly fitting, brand new fur coat none the less!). Without awakening the slumbering villagers, he stealthily sneaks through the doorway and attempts to abscond with one of the dog sleds. In a wonderful scene, the sled dogs promptly attack Forrest. Unfortunately, they do not rip him to shreds and end the movie. (One dog does appear to bite him in the nuts…regrettably Forrest doesn’t shout "My NUTS!" like I would have liked. Now that would have been pretty funny.)

My NUTS!

The all too enjoyable sight of seeing Forrest being torn to shreds by a pack of viscous dogs is brought to an all-too-early end when the Eskimos rush out and pull the dogs off. Standing up, and with his clothes in amazingly perfect condition after having been ripped up by dogs in the previous scene, Forrest explains that he was just trying to get away because he’s a hunted man and his presence in village is a threat to everybody. (Sort of like any movie with Steven Seagal’s presence in it is a threat to your mental health.)

(I will be fair and point out that some of this movie was filmed in Alaska where the scenery is absolutely beautiful, so there is at least one redeeming factor…but it’s far from enough to actually make On Deadly Ground actually worth watching. )

Anyway, the wise Village Elder, Masu, and a bunch of extras decide to accompany Forrest on his journey back to civilization. Hopping into a couple of dogsleds, the gang takes off over the snow and ice. After a day or so (?), they take a break which affords Seagal the opportunity to include an absolutely sickening scene where the village Chief tells Forrest some Eskimo legends. Now don’t get me wrong, the legends are cool, but Forrest, so smug in his fur coat sitting in rapt attention, along with the cliche New Age synthesizer Native American music is just too much for my stomach to bear. To make matters worse, the legend revolves around the creation of The Bear and how he is to be the protector of the land. As the tale comes to an end, and I shit you not, Forrest nods in silent understanding of his quest because he is…the Man-Bear!

Really. I’m not kidding. Could I ever have made up anything so corny?

Oh God…the Chief wasn’t finished…he pulls out a feather, taps Forrest on his head whereupon he swoons and faints (!!), and sends him on a, <gasp>… Dream Quest!!!! Ayeeeeeeee!

Forrest’s spirit flies through some run-of-the-mill special effects shots of water, ice, and other crap, interposed with close ups of a bald eagle. His avatar finally arrives in the midst of an Eskimo ceremony, complete with topless Eskimo babes dancing around and being quite jiggly, if you get my drift.

Let me quickly point out that this is not a Gratuitous Booby Scene because it’s part of a religious ritual which reveals the sovereign nobility of the indigenous people. (A very perky people at that…heh heh. Ok, I know, I’m going to hell. But really, who did they think they were fooling?)

After watching a bit of topless dancing, we cut back to see Forrest’s spirit fight and kill a grizzly bear, which seems rather ironic since he’s supposed to be the land’s protector. Oh, sorry, he only stabbed it once before the bear tosses him into an icy river. (So he leaves the bear behind to bleed to death?)

After floating to the end of the river (or floating until the special effects budget ran out), Forrest-Spirit arrives inside a magic hut. Seated inside are 2 women: One an old, wrinkly woman sitting in the middle of the dirt floor, the other a sexy naked woman writhing on a plush bed, beckoning to Forrest with a curl of her finger. Now, anybody who’s ever seen any Sword-n-Sorcery type film will immediately realize that the correct choice is the old woman…never, and I mean, never choose the hot babe in a situation like this.

Forrest wisely chooses the old woman and begins speaking to her in fluent Eskimo. (Forgive me if I don’t know the actual name of the Eskimo tongue. I know it’s like saying "he spoke fluent Native American…I know. I know.) Anyway, the old woman tasks Forrest with saving the land and teaching the intruders to "fear the bear".

In a shot too corny to describe, Forrest’s spirit is "reborn" from the waters as an Eskimo Wise Elder howls (!) and looks on.

<Monster Shack management apologizes for the lack of a caption, but it was not humanly possible to describe how corny this scene was>

Anyway, with Forrest’s <cough> rebirth <cough>, he’s off to battle evil corporations, protect the environment, and kill a gazillion people in the process.

Back at the Eskimo village, MacGruder, Otto and a couple of other Nogoodnicks show up and search their camp. The villagers look nervously on with stone-tipped spears as the M-16 armed bad guys ransack their huts while searching for Forrest.

Now really, I know these Eskimos are in Touch With Nature and are noble and what not…but still…stone-tipped spears…in the 20th century? So they’ve never heard of firearms? Give me a break. I mean, this is Alaska for God’s sake, not the middle of deepest, darkest Africa in the 1800′s.

Blah blah. As you might have suspected, Forrest’s upcoming lethal rampage requires some sort of moral justification otherwise Seagal would simply be wasting a lot of people just to show what a bad ass he is. (And Seagal would neeeeeeeever do that, would he now?) The putative source of his wrath is when Otto discovers Forrest’s charred protective suit. (Now just why would they bother keeping that around? Oh…so it can be found. Of course.) An argument breaks out…things happen, people say things and viola, MacGruder ends up shooting the village chief. With the angry villagers looking on and shaking their spears (whatever!), MacGruder and the others retreat to the helicopter and take off.

Where, oh where, is Man-Bear when you need him, eh?

Oh here he comes…racing across the frozen waste in a dog sled. (Where the hell did he learn to control one of those? Oh, that’s right, Forrest is now a Spirit Warrior…oh BUH-rother!) Rushing into the dying chief’s hut, Forrest kneels at the side of the fading elder. Masu translates her father’s dying words for Forrest: "You’re the Spirit Warrior, the Gods have already decided your fate…Eagle and Bear are your spirit guides."

Yes, you may throw up now. I’ll wait for you here.

Finished?

Ok, good, let’s continue.

Meanwhile, back at the Aegis-1 oil platform, Jennings (who has decided to be there in order to oversee the final days of preparations) chews out MacGruder for his failed mission:

"You didn’t find Taft, but you managed to kill an unarmed Eskimo in front of a dozen witnesses."

MacGruder blames it on the Eskimos, saying that they "attacked" him…oh blah blah, yes MacGruder, we get it: you’re Eeeeeeevil. Forrest will be dealing with you soon.

Meanwhile, back at the Eskimo camp, Masu gives Forrest the keys to the tribe’s snowmobile…"It’s for emergencies," she mentions. (Emergencies like…oh…the village chief being shot? Why didn’t you rush him to the hospital with it, you idiots!) Forrest hops on the vehicle and rushes off to Aegis-1 to deal with Jennings and the others. Oh, and Masu tags along because…ummm…you got me.

After who knows how long, Forrest and Masu swing by Palmer’s house to find it completely ransacked. (You remember, what seems about a million years ago, when MacGruder and Otto killed Palmer and tried to find the computer files he had downloaded?) Forrest makes his way upstairs and digs out his backpack that he had stashed in Palmer’s upstairs closet…you remember…the one full of his weapons that he was going to take with him on his trip into the forest. You don’t remember? Well, don’t bother rewinding. Just go with it.

Back outside, Otto is still flying around in a helicopter trying to find Forrest. If you stop to think about it, it’s pretty freakin’ absurd, isn’t Alaska like…oh…half the size of the continental United States??!! Be that as it may, he miraculously manages to find the snowmobile parked at the edge of a snowbank.

The helicopter pilot looks around and sagely notes, "It looks like the must have gone on foot from here!"

Uh…no shit, Sherlock. Man, there’s nothing getting past you, eh?

Anyway, Otto deduces that Forrest is probably back at Palmer’s cabin. How he figures that? Who knows, but at least it sets up the first of many Justified Showdowns where the bad guys will get their due.

So…yes…Otto and a couple of Evil Henchmen suddenly appear outside Palmer’s cabin. Just how they got there so quickly, where they got their weapons from, and why there are suddenly more of them than were in the helicopter in the previous scene is beyond me.

"Oh, it looks like my friends are here to play," Mr. Spirit Warrior glibly remarks when he spots a bunch of bad guys moving up to the cabin from the forest. I’ll spare you the next minute or so of runtime and just say that after a boring Spray-And-Pray gun fight, Forrest manages to kill everybody. It was actually a little disappointing because there wasn’t very much of Seagal’s, admittedly fun to watch, trademark hand-to-hand fighting in this scene. However, Forrest did ironically dispatch Otto with the same whale-bone item that he (Otto) earlier used to torture Palmer. Man…now that’s deep.

Back on Aegis-1, Jennings, MacGruder, and an Evil Corporate Hench-Woman are stomping around the corridors of the still unfinished refinery.

"Just who the hell is this guy?" MacGruder queries.

Jennings stops short and begins:

"Delve down into the deepest bowels of your soul. Try to imagine the ultimate fucking nightmare, and that won’t come close to this son-of-a-bitch when he gets pissed."

Mr. Jennings, I would agree 100% if you’d been referring to this film.

After a brief discussion, Jennings agrees to MacGruder’s offer of hiring "outside resources."

"You mean mercenaries?"

Bingo.

Obviously, these "mercenaries" are simply Forrest fodder to fill the remaining runtime until the Final Showdown. I betcha can’t wait, can you? (If you go against my advice and actually see this movie, make sure to keep an eye out for young Billy Bob Thorton as mercenary Homer Carlton.)

Meanwhile, the wily Forrest stops by a friend’s house, Johnny, in order to look at the computer disk that Palmer had stashed in his backpack before he died. You remember? The 3-1/2 inch floppy that holds the entire Aegis-1 document store? Forrest pops in the disk and an odd DOS-based spread sheet immediately pops up on the screen.

"These are the pressure readings from Aegis-1…the whole place is a goddamned time bomb!" Forrest expounds. Another page of the spreadsheet indicates that Jennings and his "dog-shit empire" (Forrest’s words, not mine) are up to other evil activities involving pumping toxic gases back into dry wells then trying to sell them off as full wells or some crazy shit. Sorry. I’ve really just about had it with this movie.

"It’s just like I always say," Forrest says as he makes his way to the door, "we have to blow it…and we have to blow it now."

(That’s something he always says? Maybe he’s referring to his latest movies. <rimshot>)

Masu isn’t quite in agreement: She’d (wisely) rather let the authorities handle it.

"Have you forgotten everything my father has taught you?" she implores.

"Do you think that hocus-pocus stuff is going to help us now?" Forrest answers in an incredible about face after his mystical Dream Quest he just experienced early that very same day!

"You see," Forrest continues, "I love the spirit world and I loved your father…I didn’t want to resort to violence, but I didn’t have a choice!"

Boy, that’s some mighty fine writing there, pardner.

As you might have guessed, this is Forrest’s BIG SCENE…which, unsurprisingly, falls flat on its face under the burden of its own conceit.

After delivering his scene which ostensibly will excuse him from all the violence his is soon to perpetrate, Forrest pushes a hidden button (!) and a wall swings open to reveal a room absolutely full of weapons.

Don’t laugh. This is a serious movie.

Oh, and here’s one of my favorite lines: As Forrest smugly peruses his secret armory he says to Johnny, "Give me this F-8 shotgun with all the magazines and ammo you got…gimme one M-14, a couple of .45′s, and the SSG…and…I think that will do it."

Gee Forrest , are you sure that will be enough firepower to take out a corporate suit and a few rednecks? Good grief.

(I still chuckle when I think of that line.)

I digress.

After loading up his weapons, Forrest and Masu mount a couple of horses and begin their journey to Aegis-1.

"You ride good?" Forrest asks. (Shouldn’t that be "You ride well?")

"Of course," Masu replies with a grin, "I’m a Native American!"

(I included that last line in order to show you just how revolting this film truly is. I mean, what were they thinking when they wrote this script?)

And, oh, just why in the hell is Masu coming along?

High above, the mercenary leader, Stone (played by R. Lee Ermey…better known as The Drill Sergeant from Full Metal Jacket), MacGruder, and some other Bad Guys are flying around looking for Forrest.

Think about this for a second: They’re flying around in a helicopter looking for somebody in an area the size of ALASKA!!! Granted, they’re pretty sure he’ll be somewhere around the Aegis-1 refinery, but still…come on! So we’re still talking about an area of what?…50 square miles of densely forested, mountainous terrain? Yeah, good luck.

Anyhoo, Stone asks about Forrest’s background in order to get a better idea of the man they are hunting. MacGruder admits that Jennings and Co. really don’t know anything about him. However, one of the mercs has done some research and informs the others that there is no record of Forrest…anywhere.

"That means he’s CIA…maybe even NSA." (Gasp!)

(I never knew the National Security Agency had a military wing, but there you go.)

Meanwhile, Forrest rides with Masu to an old, rickety shed out in the middle of nowhere. Inside the shack Forrest proudly reveals a gigantic stash of explosives: land mines, hand grenades, C4…you name it. Just where in the hell Forrest got all this is beyond me. Even if he did work for the CIA (NSA?), it’s not like you can opt to have your severance package paid out in explosives…can you? Yes, yes, I know. This is of course a lazy (and Seagal favorite) plot device to give a thin veneer of plausibility for Forrest being able to get whatever material he needs to Get The Job Done.

OK, where was I…oh yeah. Seagal. Crap. Movie.

Forrest quickly sets up some electronic doo-dad to send out a "signal" so that the mercenaries can find him…so, you know, he can kill a bunch of people.

All in the name of the environment, naturally.

The Bad Guys immediately pick up the signal on their own Evil Electronic Device and send in a bunch of guys on horseback to the location.

(Really now, isn’t Alaska, uh…big?…oh, forget it.)

Anyhoo, Forrest rigs up a gigantic wad of C4 to somehow explode exactly at the same moment the helicopter is just beside the run down shed.

Bye bye, helicopter.

(Since my head hurts, I’m not going to even go into how impossibly unlikely it would be to actually time something like that…let alone if it even would have affected the helicopter at all because…ouch…my head hurts.)

Forrest and Masu mount their horses and ride off for the Final Confrontation along with enough explosives to level half of Mount Everest. Nevertheless, in hot pursuit, is none other than MacGruder and the Mercenaries now also on horseback, which is odd, because I thought they were on the helicopter that was just blown up. I’ll go ahead and give this film the benefit of the doubt and say that I must have blacked out somewhere along the line and missed the way in which these guys magically transported from the helicopter to the horses.

Anyway, on the horses now, MacGruder and the others spot Forrest at the top of a ridge and storm off to capture him. Lucky for them, they quickly discover a booby trap the Forrest had hastily constructed.

"I thought this guy was gonna be good…" a Soon To Be Dead nameless mercenary scoffs.

(Billy Bob Thorton makes his appearance at this point. Mr. Thorton: If you are reading this review, I forgive you for being in this movie: You are one of my favorite actors…and I loved Sling Blade!)

Oh wow. The booby trap was just a diversion. Who woulda thunkit? Scratch a pair of careless Nameless Mercenaries that fall to the real booby traps.

Excitement!

Forrest and Masu (once again…she’s tagging along because…?) ride off with MacGruder and the others in hot pursuit. Give yourself a few more Beer Points if you guessed that Forrest and Masu would be forced to stop short at the brink of a Gaping Chasm. Oh dear. Are they going to jump it? My heart! My heart! What will happen next?

Yes, Forrest lights the fuse on a satchel charge, drops it on the cliff ledge, and hops over the chasm.

Masu follows suit because, well, she’s so vital to the plot at this point.

After Forrest and Masu safely leap to the other side, the satchel charge detonates and blows off the tip of the right-hand ledge, leaving the gap somehow impossible for the horses to leap over now that it’s about 2 feet wider than it was before.

"This guy is good!" Nameless Mercenary #4 remarks upon seeing Forrest’s handy work.

Nope…can’t jump it now…waaaayyy to wide now. Nosirree.

With that insurmountable gulf separating them from the bad guys, Forrest and Masu magically make their way onto the refinery grounds proper.

"You stay here while I blow the generators," Forrest tells Masu because it’s just that easy to do.

Yeah, well, I guess it is: Forrest manages to sabotage the main generator and the backup generator because…he’s just that damned good. Oh, and he’s shoots a guard in the head.

But he was a Bad Guy so it’s ok.

Meanwhile, Jennings finds out that Aegis-1 is due to go online in about 3 hours. (Seeing that there’s only 30 minutes of runtime left, I’m assuming that’s not going to happen.) Oh, and for good measure, Jennings has called in the FBI Anti-Terrorist Unit to bolster the refinery’s defenses against "that maniac" Forrest.

I gotta tell you, this movie is really dragging right now. (Probably like this review…I hope not.)

Moving right along…Forrest continues sneaking around the refinery killing random unlucky henchmen and mercenaries, which seems pretty cruel…Take for example, some random guard goes to take a leak and Forrest strangles him. I mean, how did Forrest know he was one of the mercs?

After about 5 seconds of sneaking around finally , Forrest reaches some sort of work area full of, well, workers. (Man..I gotta buy a thesaurus.) Anyway, Forrest simply shouts "Get out of here, it’s gonna blow!" and the workers immediately drop their tools and flee. Boy, that Forrest, huh? What an authority figure.

Things finally start happening when the generator that Forrest sabotaged finally goes kaput.

"The power’s out! We’ll have to reboot all the computers," a Nameless Nerd reports to Jennings.

"How long’s that gonna take?"

"Four or five minutes top!" (Yep…he’s using Windows.)

Forrest decides to set things in high gear and starts remotely detonating bombs that he’s placed at various key locations around the refinery. If you watch the explosions carefully you’ll see multitudes of workers fleeing for their lives which, in my eyes at least, makes Forrest guilty of being an irresponsible asshole and very close to being a murderer.

Blah blah.

The Mercenaries run around trying to shoot Forrest who busies himself setting up bombs at key points on the refinery structure. This scene gives Seagal yet another opportunity to pat himself on the back about what a bad-ass he is. This time via a pair of mercenaries discussing Just Who They’re Dealing With:

"He’s the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire."

(Ummm…I’m not sure what that means but let’s just go with it.)

"You could drop this guy off on the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear and without his toothbrush and tomorrow afternoon he’s gonna show up at your poolside with a million-dollar smile and a fist full of Pesos."

(That sound you just heard was me retching at the thought of Seagal in bikini underwear…oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.)

Initiate perfunctory Gun Fight Scene.

Wow…that was exciting.

As word gets around that Forrest is on the loose busily rigging the refinery to explode, the Aegis-1 employees and crew flee for the hills. In a charming scene, MacGruder makes his way to a waiting helicopter where Forrest is lurking. MacGruder tries to get away but Forrest grabs him and starts shoving him into the helicopter’s rear tail blades. Sensing that this could kind of suck, MacGruder tries to cut a deal, then attempts to attack Forrest, I think, it’s dark and I’m sick of this film. Anyway, it results in Forrest shoving MacGruder, face first, into the twirling blades…cut to a lingering shot of blood splattering over the tail of the helicopter.

On a side note, Jennings’ Right-Hand Evil Corporate Hench Woman tries to make her escape as well and ends up driving a truck directly into a gasoline pipe. Trapped in the cab, she can only watch as the pool of gas spreads to some flames and engulfs her in a gigantic fireball. Now seriously, she really didn’t do anything to deserve that. OK, sure, she’s part of an Evil Corporation…but being burned to death in a gasoline explosion? Mr. Seagal, I think you need some counseling.

Meanwhile Jennings leaves the control room and heads over to Aegis-1 in order to engage in some sort of process so that he can officially claim that Aegis-1 is "online", thus keeping his mineral and oil rights by beating the deadline.

(At this point in the film there is a brief scene with Billy Bob Thorton chatting with another mercenary, and it’s just painfully obvious that Thorton is in a completely different league than these other hack actors.)

Forrest continues the slaughter by immolating a trio of mercs who were merely standing around by a door. Yes, even though he could have quickly dispatched them with a flurry of bullets, Forrest instead chooses to open a pipe to pour raw gasoline over them, then ignite the hapless guys by making a spark with a bullet. Nice.

After killing a gazillion hapless mercenaries, Forrest and Masu reach the (unguarded) control room where our hero begins shutting down/flooding critical areas of the oil rig. (One scene explicitly shows a pipe spewing huge clots of crude oil sludge out onto the floor and presumably eventually out into the ocean…nice one, Forrest.) Down in some dark contrived set, Forrest covers his ass by noting that he’s setting up some sort of doo-dad in order to prevent an oil spill, since, you know, he is an ECO-HERO. (Never mind all the oil pipes his opened i the previous scene.) How he can now prevent an oil spill after rigging the entire platform to explode is beyond me…but then again…he’s just that good!!! Oh, and he also kills the main mercenary guy who was hiding in a gigantic pool of oil (Now that just can’t be good for the complexion), because he Just Knew that Forrest would be there, at that computer console, out of the bazillion other consoles on the platform.

Realizing that things are going to blow, and soon, Forrest and Masu try to escape but are trapped inside a room full of explosive container. (You know the kind.) Obviously, the bad guys can’t shoot because, well, the whole room would go up, so they have to try and take Forrest out hand-to-hand. Naturally, this gives us yet another opportunity to watch Seagal beat the living shit out of a bunch of overweight extras, because, you know, you just can never get enough of watching that. (Including a super-slow motion shot of a nerdy looking merc in glasses getting his head smashed with a lead pipe. What a humanitarian that Forrest is.)

Finally, and I do mean finally, we come to the (sort of) climax. Forrest somehow magically comes across Jennings (the script said so) and forces him against a wall with a pistol.

"You’re a piece of shit…You’re scum of the Earth!" Forrest trenchantly remarks.

(Shakespeare, watch out!)

Anyway, Jennings calls Forrest’s bluff and turns to leave. Being a man of honor (yeah, right), Forrest somehow whips up a wire lasso (From what?! Where?!) and captures Jennings; leaving him hanging by his feet from a huge crane hook. (Don’t ask…it’s as idiotic as you’re imagining right now.) Jennings, realizing that his goose is cooked, one way or another, shouts insults at Forrest who, after getting fed up with the verbal abuse, shoots the wire that Jennings dangles from, thus dropping him (or a stuntman thereof) into an miraculously convenient pool of crude oil.

Oh….the irony.

(I’m curious, do oil rigs really have gigantic open containers of oil just sitting around for people to fall into? Apparently so. I mean, this movie has been pretty realistic so far…)

More Pyrotechnic Pornography as Seagal runs through gigantic explosions in Super Slow Mo. (Masu manages to keep up as Forrest…er…"makes a path" for her…his words, not mine. Yup, "making a path" through a fireball.) Forrest and Masu steal a truck and zip out of the refinery just as it goes Kaa-blowey. Yeah. What a surprise. And man, that was exciting. I wasn’t really sure if they were going to make it or not.

Cut to the Alaskan state capitol where Forrest delivers his jaw-dropping 3-minute monologue about the evils of greedy oil corporations, foolish environmental policies, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

(Remember, the original version lasted TEN MINUTES!!!)

So here you have it in its entirety. I had to watch it all, and you know what…you’re going to enjoy it too!

“I’d like to start out by saying, thank you to all the brothers and sisters that have come here today representing this cause. I have been asked by Mr. Itok and the tribal council to speak to you and the members of the Press about the injustice that has been brought against us by some Government Officials and Big Business. How many of you out there have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to garbage or water . Or carburetors that can get hundreds of miles to the gallon. Or electric or magnetic engines, that can practically run forever. You don’t know about them because if they were to come into use, they’d put the oil companies out of business. The concept of the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for over fifty years. But because of the Oil Cartels and corrupt government regulation, we and the rest of the world have been forced to use gasoline for over a hundred years. Big Business is primarily responsible for destroying the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat. They have no care for the world they destroy: only for the money they make in the process. How many oil spills can we endure? Millions and millions of gallons of oil are now destroying the ocean and the many forms of life it supports. Among these is plankton, which supplies sixty to ninety percent of the Earth’s oxygen. This supports the entire marine ecosystem which forms the basis of our planet’s food supply. But the plankton is dying. I thought, well, let’s go to remote state or country. Anywhere on Earth. But in doing a little research I realized that these people broker toxic waste all over the world. They basically control the legislation, and, in fact, they control the law. The Law says, “no company can be fined over $25,000 a day” For companies making $10,000,000 dollars a day by dumping lethal toxic wastes into the ocean, it’s only good business to continue doing this. They influence the media so that they can control our minds. They have made it a crime to speak out for ourselves, and if we do so we’re called “conspiracy nuts” and we’re laughed at. We’re angry because we’re all being chemically and genetically damaged, and we don’t even realize it. Unfortunately, this will effect our children. We go to work each day and right under our noses we see our car and the car in front of us spewing noxious poisonous gasses that are all accumulative poisons. These poisons kill us slowly, even when we see no effect. How many of us would have believed if we were told twenty years ago that on a certain day we wouldn’t be able to see fifty feet in front of us. That we wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath because the air would be a mass of poisonous gas. That we wouldn’t be able to drink out of our faucets, that we’d have to buy water out of bottles. Our most common and God-given rights have been taken away from us. Unfortunately, the reality of our lives is so grim that nobody wants to hear it. Now, I’ve been asked what we can do? I think we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us rather than Big Business. This body of people must not allow the introduction of anything into our environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able to be chemically neutralized upon production. And finally, as long as there is profit to be made from polluting the Earth, companies and individuals will continue to do what they want. We have to force these companies to operate safely and responsibly, and with all our best interests in mind. So that when they don’t, we can take back our resources and our hearts and our minds and do what’s right.”

The End

Dennis Grisbeck (Jan 2008)

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