Horror Movie Handbook meets Callous Director.

Another good scientific story sacrificed to Hollywood’s Lowest Common Denom. THE RELIC finds a field researcher dabbling in tribal drugs on the dark continent shipping a crate containing a strange fungus back to his lab at the Chicago Natural History Museum. Also in the crate is a relic of an ancient god that could supposedly transform into a monster to ward off enemies. What this has to do with bizarre murders at the museum, involving sucking out the victims’ hypothalamuses, is where science and pseudo-bullshit collide.

As do Detective D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore, all Chicago mob ‘tude) and evolutionary biologist Dr. Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller, all slinky waistline). He wants to close down the Museum to find the killer, who may be lurking in the subterranean crawlspaces, while Margo’s boss (diminutive Linda Hunt) wants to keep the Museum open for a gala for political dignitaries.

We’ve seen this flow chart before. The people who don’t believe – die. And of course, innocent bystanders die – because they’re working too late, because they walk into dark rooms without turning the lights on, because they insist on trying to escape through a sewer chest-high with water, because they’re too far down in the credits…

THE RELIC is a formulaic quickie from mediocre director Peter Hyams; a linear, straightforward monster movie with good scares, good tension and not revealing too much monster in the first act. That being said, it could have been tighter, as Hyams seems to have shucked off the science and storyline of what appears to be a very interesting novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child – Relic – and replaced it with thriller movie convention. I mean, with four screenwriters, they’ve even got the cat jumping out at us from a cupboard, in a jump-scare attempt. Yeah, someone actually wrote that into a screenplay without being sarcastic or ironic. It didn’t help that the lame acting for the subplots (especially Chi Muoi Lo’s atrocious line-reads) made us wish more people would get eaten more quickly.

There is an underpinning of science to this whole escapade, where DNA identifies the killer as not quite human, a mutation with other genes spliced in. This, of course, encourages ignorant talk about “evolution” – a precept that no one on this film understands, least of all the writers and director. “It’s rapidly evolving into something else!” No, it’s mutating. One solitary creature cannot “evolve.” The creature feeds off hormones in the human hypothalamus; chilling sequences where bodies are found decapitated with the brains sucked out – which sparks more scientific conversation sprinkled liberally with dumbo-jumbo. So though the movie has some visceral scares, it is tempered by everything around those moments.

When revealed, the monster is fantastic. Blame the great Stan Winston; a half-galloping artiodactyl, half-reptile, half-Predator half-ManBearPig, an excellent roaring powerhouse of special effects.

The problem with the pseudo-science is that it leads to nothing: Uncovering the mystery of the beast doesn’t lead to an understanding of how to kill it, capture it or study it. It’s pretty much on the chopping block with guns and explosives from the get-go, no matter what it’s composed of – shyeh! Real “scientists” you got here! It was just a device to run from and to blow up in a fiery finale. While eating a lot of people along the way.

Thrills, chills, kills. Ills.

END

Outland-ish.

It’s HIGH NOON in space. Well, sort of. Well, not exactly. Well, not at all.

HIGH NOON (1952) is about the dark side of human frailty. OUTLAND is about some space outlaws too stupid not to shoot their cowboy guns in a pressure dome.

Director-writer Peter Hyams: he knows the “how” to make a film, he knows the “where” to get funding, he knows the “why” of driving a plot – but he still knows nothing about the mechanics of space. And I don’t know why he insists on setting his adventures time and again in a medium he is completely ignorant of.

When Hyams pitched OUTLAND as “HIGH NOON in space,” he was just lucky enough that the greenlight executives knew as little about space colonies and gravitational mechanics as he did.

Sean Connery is Marshall O’Niel in a small Earth colony stationed on Io, the volcanic moon of Jupiter. He is one honest man pitted against the corrupt Io administration (led by Peter Boyle) that is selling fatal illegal drugs to the colonists. When he attempts to shut down the cartel, the administration sends for professional killers from Earth to cancel O’Niel’s contract. O’Neil can only find one honest citizen (Frances Sternhagen) to stand with him against the killers.

And all ignorant physics breaks loose.

Space Cowboy Poffy

Like Hyams’ own CAPRICORN ONE (1978), this movie is flawed at such a bedrock level that we would have to re-educate him from kindergarten level upwards for any of this to make sense, so we throw up our hands and file it in the “pure fantasy crap” section. To begin with, it’s quaint how Hyams is trying to get all “scientific” by locating the action on Io – a tectonically unstable moonlet in volcanic flux being battered like taffy by Jupiter’s gravitational forces – where it is impossible to sink foundations to even start building a habitable Earth colony. (It would look like that planet of lava where Obiwan and Anakin battle in REVENGE OF THE SITH, 2005.) And then to have everyone walking around like they’re not in one-quarter Earth gravity. (It’s not like Hyams doesn’t know this – a title card gives us this factoid – then completely ignores its ramifications.)

Once a week a shuttle arrives from Earth. Sounds plausible – if you live in Detroit. But if you’re on Io – and the one-way trip from Earth takes about two years – that means the shuttle transit company or the mining corporation that runs Io is flush enough to afford 104 shuttles, plus 104 crews plus 104 tanks of fuel and two years worth of food onboard 104 shuttles… is everyone just raking in the space-Euros in the future or doesn’t money exist anymore?

I could go on. And on and on. Like CAPRICORN ONE, not one aspect of this movie is thought through. It’s like watching one of those little outlandish plays you put on for your parents when you were seven. From the ridiculous 80s disco decor to the fact that bad guys would behave like 18th century cowboys and fire weapons indiscriminately within the confines of a biosphere. Even in the childish actioner TOTAL RECALL (1990), a bad guy thought twice before firing towards the Perspex dome that enclosed the city.

The story of the One Honest Man deserted by his supposed compatriots still holds some weight – and Connery is the right man to hold up such derision on his broad, righteous shoulders – but the story is buried under the weight of ignorance that informs every single scene.

Marshall O’Niel’s wife – like Marshall Kane’s (Gary Cooper) in HIGH NOON – deserts him. The surrogate “partner” who stands by O’Neil is an interesting social phenomenon:

In the 1950’s, when voluptuous Katie Jurado was cast as Kane’s ex-lover, movies were being made where couples slept in two single beds; so though Kane’s actual wife deserted him, it was not even considered that Gary Cooper would fool around with Jurado, because he was the Pure Hero and the institution of marriage was ironclad, unbreakable – so Jurado’s hotness was an unrepressed tension, a “tragedy” because it could not be acted upon.

Here in OUTLAND, Sean Connery’s 1980’s surrogate is an old woman (Sternhagen), because society’s new norm denotes that if a movie female is hot, it is presumed that a virile man like Connery would definitely have a romantic entanglement with her – so they defused the issue of Married Hero Being Dishonorable by making the surrogate old (although Sternhagen must have been a homewrecker in her day because she still retains a vestigial sexuality and amorous intent towards Connery). If HIGH NOON or – God help us! – OUTLAND is re-made after 2011 (sorry, “reimagined”), the surrogate role would go to a Megan Fox or some smooth-breasted, flat-bellied blond who owns no clothes that cover her midriff – because nowadays, the goalposts for honor and repression in movies have been moved once again, and it would be unthinkable that Hero should get no trim after beating up bad guys. Wife or not, Hero gotta get laid!

P.H. Moriarty leads the bad guys (Hatchet Harry from LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, 1999).

This movie could have been set anywhere – Hyams shoots himself in the foot by setting it in outer space; there are no idiosyncrasies that set it apart from being anywhere on Earth. Poor Connery can’t win, though. If he had remained James Bond, he might have ended up doing a space movie even worse than OUTLAND – MOONRAKER.

END

A Sound of Chunder.

A Sound of Thunder. One of the greatest short stories ever written. By one of the grandest Grand Masters of Fantasy, Ray Bradbury.

A SOUND OF THUNDER. Vomitous movie.

In Bradbury’s science fiction short story, a company called Time Safari offers big game hunters the opportunity to go back in time and kill dinosaurs. Rule Number One is: Stay On The Path, a floating metallic walkway that ensures no interaction with the prehistoric environment. During a hunt, a man steps off the path and inadvertently crushes a butterfly. When the hunting party returns to the present – the world as they know it has drastically changed. Though there are paradoxes in any time travel story, Bradbury’s tale was a quick jugular stroke, a parable of the ripple effect.

A Sound of Thunder was published in 1952 (according to Wikipedia, the most republished science fiction story of all time), and illustrated Chaos Theory, Darwinism, and The Butterfly Effect (which would only be coined in the 1960s by Edward Lorenz). In Bradbury’s story, the wonder of time travel was overshadowed by corporate greed, in turn overshadowed by the mortal danger to humanity’s existence itself.

While in the movie A SOUND OF THUNDER (directed by the uneven Peter Hyams, CAPRICORN ONE, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO), a clutch of bad actors goes through the time portal again and again to try to rectify their mistakes, like an excrement version of BACK TO THE FUTURE. The movie has nothing to do with Bradbury’s powerful tale, except the initial jolt of the time traveling prehistoric hunting party. Egregious liberties are taken with Bradbury’s story – baboon-faced reptiles, plants overrunning Chicago’s concrete, time waves rippling through the city, CGI insectoids – for which Bradbury should sue the pants and underpants and ass-hairs off the filmmakers.

Novice writers Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier should start a Big Balls Agency, for thinking they could actually add elements to a Ray Bradbury story that would improve it. How do these guys walk in a straight line with balls this big?

Ben Kingsley is the corporate owner of Time Safari, with a hairpiece so bad he looks like Burt Reynolds, Edward Burns is his dazed and confused lead hunter, Travis, and Catherine McCormack (who was Murron MacClannough in BRAVEHEART) is the scientist with the best breasts.

I can’t possibly relate the hundreds upon thousands of egregious stupidities and asinine pieces of dialogue, but here is just one, spoken by David Oyelowo as some kind of “scientist”: he refers to the Pleiades star cluster, “The Seven Sisters, they look like stars, don’t they? But each of them is a whole galaxy.” Uh, no, idiot scientist, they’re actually, uh, stars.

Those three morons who rewrote Bradbury’s story forgot they didn’t know anything about physics or astronomy. Or writing.

Best part of the movie is Catherine McCormack’s chest straining against her disheveled one-size-too-small blouses.

END

“You’re right – black IS slimming!”

End of Intelligence.

Arnold fans will holler in joy, fans of brainless action will holler in astonishment, and Catholics will just holler.

Illogically written by Andrew W. Marlowe and ham-handedly directed by Peter Hyams, END OF DAYS gets The Terminator out of his open-backed hospital gown (Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s return to the big screen after his heart operation), whilst blowing things up in Mysterious Ways and blaspheming Biblical verse to give Catholics something more to whine about.

When I woke up this mornin’
Coulda sworn it was Judgment Day!

It is 1999 and doomsayers the world over live in trepidation of their computers going fritz and losing their downloaded porn. Even as the technological stank of Y2K muttons the New York streets, ex-cop turned alcoholic security guard, Jericho Cane (Schwarzenegger, with the perfunctory “dead-wife-and-kid” backstory for Loose Cannon effect), must brave theological waters to save 20-year-old virgin Christine (Robin Tunney) from being conscripted as – wait for it – The Bride of Satan. Dun dah daaaarrrh!

Stupidity ensues.

For every anti-hero, there is his anti-Christ. Gabriel Byrne is the devil here – and he’s out to party like it’s 1999, on a mission to impregnate Christine with the Anti-Christ between 11 pm and 12 midnight, December 31, 1999 – ironically, in the hour that all porn will be lost – thereby bringing about the End of Days. Being able to read minds, conjure hallucinations and employ limitless magick, it doesn’t occur to Satan to expedite the impregnation process by appearing months in advance and courting Christine as a Teen Model and then closing the panty raid easily at the appointed time; instead, he appears on December 28th like a Keyser Soze Terminator and wonders why she doesn’t welcome him with open thighs… (See above comment re: stupidity.)

Here is a movie where nothing makes sense the moment it is uttered, let alone after contemplating its veracity or mythology. A priest (Rod Steiger) tells Jericho that ‘666’ is really ‘999’ upside down with a ‘1’ in front of it. So wait – Prince is the Anti-Christ?

Satan Soze pursues Jericho and Christine (J and C – get it?) around town, at no point doing anything which would actually precipitate their capture. In one scene, Satan recreates Jericho’s wife and child to tempt him into revealing where he hid Christine. But if he can see so deeply into Jericho’s mind in recreating his family with enough nuance to inspire nostalgia, why can’t he see where Jericho hid Christine not ten minutes ago?

Satan can make an assassin talk without a tongue, yet he can’t make that assassin unjam a semi-automatic weapon. And when Jericho shoots Satan at point blank range, Satan is courteous enough to open his shirt to reveal the wounds closing, so Jericho won’t worry unduly about Satan’s health – not sanitary to go about with open bullet wounds… Matter of fact, instead of simply possessing Jericho himself to get close to Christine and rape her, Satan expends so much unnecessary energy on side-projects (crucifying the tongue-less guy, blowing up Jericho’s partner (Kevin Pollak) and then saving him, and then blowing him up again, ridiculously battling Jericho when he could snuff him out with the effort of thought) that we wonder whether a more efficient assassin/lover shouldn’t be put on the case – say, Antonio Banderas.

What I find most precious about END OF DAYS is Arnold’s valiant attempts at The Method: “sad” means scrunching up his eyes and not blurting out anything in a foreign accent; “depressed” means raising a bottle to his lips and not blurting out anything in a foreign accent; “deathly scared” means widening his eyes and not blurting out anything in a foreign accent. There’s definitely a pattern here, if we could only decipher it.

In the end, the devil is dispatched not by the holy men whom Catholics pray to for deliverance from apocalypses such as these, but from the atheist Jericho. While the timid men of an impotent god exhort “faith” and quiver in their cells doing nothing about Satan actually walking amongst them, the Prince of Darkness is thwarted by a nullifidian with a big gun and a foreign accent. Which clearly says something that Catholics blindly refuse to hear: that even if the Devil were to exist, those who have been indoctrinated to unconditionally and irrationally fear him would be unable to conjure a belief in his downfall, let alone act towards it. Further, they might not truly want him defeated, for only through his contrary polarity does their god’s existence become tenable.

For it is written in the Book of Revelations: “And the Prince of Darkness shall descendeth upon the Earth without any solid game plan, and impregnate a virgin on a date which won’t have any significance until the Gregorian Calendar of the 1500s adopts the day-numbering which will put it in synch with the equinoxes, also adopting the Anno Domine syntax supposedly in congruence with Christ’s birth, the date of which has been forgotten, Christians appropriating the pagan Saturnalia festival in its stead. And the Prince shall effect a Revolution through tight purple pants and ambiguously-lesbian band members…”

I can believe the people being drained of blood and crucified, and the alcoholic built like a Mr. Universe; I can believe that a giant, supernatural monster can’t kill a guy armed only with a foreign accent; I can even believe that the devil needs to perform some hokey thirteenth century Celtic Druid ritual as foreplay – but what I cannot believe is the 20-year-old virgin in New York City in 1999.

Especially around Prince…

END

A Midget in the Footsteps of Giants.

The POFF 9000

No one said it would be easy. Following in the mythic footsteps of Stanley Kubrick and equally legendary Arthur C. Clarke. Maybe it was this inimitable pedigree that gave lowly Peter Hyams the impetus to craft such a reasonably watchable sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A tension-filled space trek where we laugh at John Lithgow, gasp at the skyscape and weep for a computer, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO is a one-step-forward, one-step-sideways kind of movie.

Considering Mr. Hyams is the writer-director behind two films that boast “scientific” backdrops, yet lay claim to the most scientifically-bereft storylines of the technological age (CAPRICORN ONE and OUTLAND), 2010 surprisingly retains much hard science in its telling and is consequently a more enjoyable experience for it. Due in full, we must presume, solely to the dogging of author Arthur C. Clarke, who was in constant communication with Hyams through the production process. (Clarke’s book of the same name was more or less plundered for initial momentum, rather than adhered to devoutly.)

To state the obvious, the story picks up 9 years after Kubrick and Clarke’s pioneering and inimitable 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A joint Soviet-American mission, headed by American scientist Heywood Floyd (now Roy Scheider, was William Sylvester in 2001) and Soviet Commander Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), is sent to Jupiter to retrieve the abandoned hulk, USS Discovery (found silently spinning in orbit about Io, one of Jupiter’s moons), to gather data on the “failure” of the HAL 9000 computer and to maybe make sense of Dave Bowman’s last intriguing transmission regarding the Monolith, “My God! It’s full of stars!”

As economically unsound as this venture may seem, plausible reasons are given for the mission, but – like they say – you’d have to be a rocket scientist…

Amid growing political tensions on Earth, the Soviet ship Leonov arrives at Jupiter with its Russian and American crew, Hyams performing a controlled set of vignettes to bring about tension between the crews (initially distrustful of each other), then building the tension around the giant Monolith orbiting Jupiter, which unites the crews for their lives’ sake.

Though it retains none of the breathtaking poetry and grandiose vision of 2001, Hyams’s lesser vision is aided by spectacular views of Jupiter and Io, thanks to Voyager 1‘s groundbreaking flybys of the planet in 1979. Mattes of these images are put to excellent use during a suspenseful spacewalk by astronauts Max and Curnow (Elya Baskin and John Lithgow), as they approach the dead Discovery.

“No, come around this way– no, stop pulling on your end– wait wait wait I got it, no, just float don’t try to swim– now you’re getting it tangled– wait, lemme pull this part around, no, just hold your end, don’t tug on it…”

Though science is bowed to more often than in his previous efforts, Hyams doesn’t quite shake off his trademarks of outrageous conceptual anomalies and immutable physics laws treated like arbitrary physics suggestions. (With the Earth and its Moon in the same screen shot, Hyams makes the same sophomoric mistake that most non-credible space movies make when depicting these two celestial bodies which are on average 240,000 miles apart – if they were as close as depicted onscreen, not only would tides be generating tsumanis daily, both celestial bodies would have torn themselves apart eons ago or smashed together due to gravitational attraction.)

After the Monolith mysteriously goes about its business of doing nothing on a monolithic scale, puny humans pondering its purpose, and after HAL is revived and jovially goes about his business of being unnervingly menacing, Dave Bowman (model mannequin Keir Dullea) appears to Floyd, in the form of a constantly-morphing old man/astronaut/elder, and tells him “something wonderful” is going to happen.

Only Arthur C. Clarke would have the temerity to blow up Jupiter. Crumbling under the confluence of millions of Mini-Monoliths, Jupiter goes nova and becomes a sun, whilst the Leonov makes a narrow escape. HAL, through the intercession of Dr. Chandra (an ascetic Bob Balaban, perfectly congruent with his typecasting from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and ALTERED STATES, who is somehow able to bring that same character to his future comedic roles with Christopher Guest), becomes sympathetic enough to weep for, when he is destroyed along with Discovery.

Another beauteous message from a mythic entity that no one on Earth will heed…

The last scenes of Earth and its twin suns illustrate Hyams’s kindergarten comprehension of planetary orbits: we are shown a constant two-sun sky everywhere on the Earth, yet in becoming our newest star, Jupiter (which is renamed Lucifer) has not changed its orbit, nor will it ever. Its orbit will appear exactly as it did when Jupiter was merely a planet – that is, it will continually “cross the sky” at a different rate than the actual Sun, thereby causing two suns to be in the sky at ever-changing positions, or sometimes merely one Sun in the sky, sometimes only Lucifer, sometimes no suns. (And I am surprised the great Arthur C. Clarke allowed this anomalous visual to be committed to film!)

After this silly sequence, we immediately jump-cut across the solar system – in an uncharacteristic grandiose sequence – to Europa, the moon of Jupiter that the Monolith forbad any landings on, in its final message to Earth:

“All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.”

And lo, the last frame sets up sequelae ad infinitum, as The Monolith makes a cameo on Europa, and the harbinger-like strains of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra crouches and then leaps at us – banging its head on Hyams’s lowered ceiling.

After all, for midgets, the ceiling can afford to be that low.

END

“Yes, Officer, third from the left. That’s the man I saw with the bloody gloves getting into the white Bronco…”

Idiotic fodder for Moon Landing conspiracy theorist idiots.

As a child in Australia, I remember seeing posters for CAPRICORN ONE: the visage of the lone, space-suited astronaut, movie title scrawled across his glare-shield. Something foreboding and sobering about that poster had me believing (as I attained full cucumberhood) that the film was one of the all-time greats, placed alongside 2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY, or PLANET OF THE APES, or SEVEN SAMURAI; a movie that rankled sensibilities and incited societal disturbance… Upon recently viewing for the first time this insipid, miscast, paranoiac, clueless attempt at professional film-making, I now realize it would more suitably rank alongside ERNEST SCARED STUPID, or GAMERA VS. GAOS., or MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE.

The concept might have been brilliant, were it not for the dogged naïveté exhibited by the screenwriters and technical personnel, all of whom, it is patently obvious, have never even push-buttoned a blender from Wal-Mart, let alone worked or even been allowed near the fail-safe redundant systems inherent in the NASA space flight program.

Poff-Scam

A manned mission to Mars is subverted by the very organization that launches it – NASA. Apparently, the Mars capsule’s life-support system would have failed, killing the three astronauts (a boring Sam Waterston, an ineffectual James Brolin and an as-yet-unindicted O.J. Simpson). In an inspired asinine turn, instead of mathematically proving that they had the grounds to sue the vendors who created the faulty system, NASA executives decide to waste incalculable time and energy on staging a fake landing on a studio set, in order to keep receiving funding for the mission; duplicity which doesn’t rectify any problems, save any money, or justify any effort, whilst confining the astronauts against their will, away from the public, for the duration of the “mission.”

The ruse goes swimmingly – with Earth’s media actually buying the fakery, which begs a treatise on stupidity at least as extensive as an Encyclopedia Britannica 24-volume set – until the returning Mars rocket explodes on re-entry and NASA realizes that, in order to continue the ruse, the astronauts have to “disappear” – but now NASA’s going to kill them themselves! ‘Twould be bittersweet irony if it weren’t so damn retarded.

The underlying motive behind all government collusion of this ilk is that massive profits be gleaned from the deception. But even with the aforementioned funding, the cover-up costs alone for such a slipshod conspiracy’s execution would far outweigh any reimbursement brought about by legal income. And that’s considering that the cover-up was a success – the fake mission itself was so sophomorically staged that it could’ve been picked apart by any first-year actor pretending to be a lawyer in any court of law at any time.

Writer-Director Peter Hyams‘s story-telling incompetence is astounding to behold: to fool the whole flight-ops crew and the media into believing the mission is underway, the conspirators “replay the radio transmissions of the astronauts’ recorded trial runs over the intercom.” Would this fool anyone remotely cognizant of human communication, let alone every single veteran technician in constant contact with the Mars spacecraft? Hyams likes to think we’re stupid enough to believe so. Hal Holbrook (as the NASA executive helming the conspiracy) almost seems embarrassed when he voices this idiocy.

Conspiracy Theorists must have thrown a week-long booze-up when this movie hit cinemas, cries of “We told you so!” reverberating off their Lonely-Guy hobbit-hole walls, postered with tech specs, affidavits, diagrams and blurry photos all “proving” that the Moon landings were faked as well.

Hyams’s decision to place NASA – one of the few truly respected, sorely under-funded, genuinely intellectually adroit institutions on Earth – at the heart of this conspiracy is defamation of the highest degree. And then (like the Moon-Fakers) to afford them not one jot of respect, by performing exactly zilch amount of research in the field of manned space missions. Technical malfeasance is elevated to art, as scene after scene insults audience intelligence by trying to sneak in any budget generic hardware or scenery or gadget that looks “scientific” and by sprinkling the dialogue with any technical terms that sound scientific to further the ill-contrived illusion. Trust me – it’s all bogus. There is no single area where one can begin to effectively critique the lack of dedication towards any kind of plausibility which would lever this film above that of cack wedged between the treads of my shoe.

Intermittent snappy dialogue between Elliott Gould (when he was still a leading man) and cross-eyed Karen Black is the only respite in a film overburdened with superfluous dialogue (OJ Simpson talking to himself as he collapses in the desert), pointless dialogue (“I’m four steps from the bottom, I’m three steps from the bottom, I’m two steps from the bottom,” as a crewman descends to the “Martian” surface), and downright idiotic dialogue (Telly Savalas‘s opening lines, and all the “technical” claptrap).

The most dangerous aspect of a hideously-deformed piece of trash like this film is the overwhelming sludge of misinformation it purveys. Use the time you would have wasted on this movie reading a book by Carl Sagan or Richard P. Feynman. Not only will you be more entertained – ya might jess learn yaself sumpin’. 

END