DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/15/10

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 10/17/10

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EARTHSTORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

THREADS -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

 Originally posted on 2/4/18

 

One of the most rigidly uncompromising and dramatically brutal films you'll ever see, the BBC production THREADS (Severin Films, 1984) is the result of director Mick Jackson and writer Barry Hines' desire to present the effects of thermonuclear war on humanity in the most harshly realistic manner, both visually and thematically, as possible. 

It was beaten to the airwaves by the American Broadcasting Company's TV-movie THE DAY AFTER (directed by STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KHAN's Nicholas Meyer), a film I like a lot but which, in comparison, only went about halfway in conveying the true horrors of an utterly ravaged post-nuclear society.

Now, of course, THREADS is rightly recognized as the true pinnacle of its kind, presenting, despite a budget of only half a million pounds and a shooting schedule of little over two weeks, what is with little doubt the most nightmarish, frightening, and ultimately disheartening film ever produced for television. 

Elements contributing to this include a cast of unknowns and a shooting style reminiscent of the British "kitchen sink" drama, showing everyday people going about their lives before and after the catastrophe which obliterates the very civilization upon which they depend for their survival.

Much early emphasis is placed upon simple comforts and joys of modern life, shot in extreme close-up inserts--a colander of fresh peas rinsed in clean water, a tin of cat food being opened, a handheld video game, a cold glass of milk, crocheting, etc.--things which we take for granted until they're all gone.

Everyday life itself is depicted through two families--one lower class, the other well-to-do--joined together by the love of a son, Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale), for a daughter, Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher), engaged to be married due to her unexpected pregnancy. Their playful romance and optimistic plans for a simple but happy life together are darkened by an impending world-crisis situation growing increasingly troubling as constantly portrayed on TV and radio news. 

With the situation reaching a flashpoint, we see how local government and civil defense measures would be activated in the event of a nuclear attack.  Nobody really knows what they're doing and it all seems rather ineffectual, as will soon be proven out.  Meanwhile, the expected run on supermarkets and inevitable price gouging heighten the sense that the threads of civilization are in the first stages of unraveling at the seams.

As THREADS begins to weigh more heavily on the viewer, a dispassionate narrator delivers exposition concerning inexorable world events and the effects impending nuclear war will have on resources, infrastructure, utilities, and basic human needs. 

Even the teletype sound effect that accompanies the on-screen text becomes more and more unsettling. Before long, the film has established a sense of foreboding that increases with every new scene of panic and desperation as people grasp in vain for ways to avoid or escape what is coming.  The pleasures of everyday life we've been shown earlier are slipping away, replaced by fear and despair.

That's when the bombs hit and THREADS dials it all the way up to eleven with an almost fiendish resolve.  Despite the lack of expensive and elaborate special effects, the nuclear devastation is shown in  extremely graphic terms as director Jackson creates harrowing images that haunt and terrify.  What follows comes as close to depicting the unimaginable as any film has ever achieved.
   
The rest of THREADS details the eventual breakdown and disintegration of every aspect of civilized society and a return to the Dark Ages (or worse) with millions of unburied dead, radiation sickness and other deadly diseases sweeping the dwindling populace, rampant starvation, and the oncoming effects of the darkening deep-freeze of nuclear winter. 

We follow what's left of our main characters as they struggle, and mostly fail, to survive on an almost purely animal level.  The story pulls no punches whatsoever and, considering the filmmakers' limited resources, is masterfully realized in harshly effective visual terms and a narrative that's utterly riveting until the final, heartbreaking image sends THREADS off on a haunting and unforgettable note.

The Blu-ray disc from Severin Films is in the original full-screen with 1080p HD resolution (in other words, it looks a lot better than the copy I taped off the TV in the 80s) and English mono sound with subtitles.  A stocked bonus menu consists of director's commentary, a recent interview with actress Karen Meagher ("Ruth"), interviews with the film's director of photography and production designer, an interview with film historian Stephen Thrower, and the US and re-release trailers.

I first saw THREADS in the mid-80s when it was picked up by Ted Turner for broadcast on his TBS Superstation. Both as an unremittingly grim cautionary tale and a powerful documentary-style drama/horror film, it has lost absolutely none of its power. 

THREADS -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Apocalyptic Zombie Feature "BY DAY'S END" Arrives On DVD/VOD Release March 17 -- Watch Trailer HERE!

"BY DAY'S END"

On DVD & VOD March 17


On DVD & VOD on March 17, starring Andrea Nelson (BIFL) and Lyndsey Lantz, By Day's End follows a lesbian couple down on their luck and on the verge of breaking up, find themselves fighting against the undead when a pandemic disease that causes insatiable hunger ravages the world around them.

WATCH THE TRAILER:

Synopsis: Carly and Rina, a lesbian couple on the verge of breaking up, are down on their luck and forced to move in to a motel.

But mending their relationship is put on hold when a pandemic disease that causes insatiable hunger ravages the world around them.

Battling depression and a ravenous horde of flesh-eating zombies, they try to survive the apocalypse armed with only a video camera and a quickly dwindling supply of weapons.

Love is never an easy road, and when they are forced to band together like never before, will it be enough to save them?

Apocalyptic Zombie Feature "BY DAY'S END" Arrives On DVD/VOD Release March 17 -- Watch Trailer HERE!

Hideous Radiation Monster From "Day The World Ended" (Roger Corman, 1955) (video)

Roger Corman's low-budget sci-fi shocker begins with devastating nuclear war...

...and a group of survivors in a mountain hideaway owned by Paul Birch.

Unfortunately, the house is surrounded by radiation mutants...
...of varying degrees of horribleness...

...but the worst is this hideous Paul Blaisdell creation.

It naturally takes an interest in Lori Nelson and Adele Jergens.

While Richard Denning and Mike "Touch" Connors handle the "good guy/bad guy" stuff...
...the wretched beast makes off with lovely Miss Nelson.

Blaisdell wears his own distinctively designed monster suit.
It may not look that great, but it's definitely memorable.


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Hideous Radiation Monster From "Day The World Ended" (Roger Corman, 1955) (video)