Hey there, hope everyone is eating right, staying away from Taco Bell, mixing in a salad now and then. My stack of Blockbuster clearance movies still calls out in pain, let's keep working down the line.
Sigh...it's so tall.
So this is a shitty cable tv movie shot in 10 days for under a million bucks, most assuredly as a tax write-off for some studio executive looking to buy a second yacht for his mistress. What's it about? Doesn't matter. Who is in it? It (mostly) doesn't matter. Does it strive to say anything important about the human condition and how adversity forces us to find new ways to overcome challenges while retaining our sense of self-worth? Yeah, why not, sure.
It's Alien on a island with a couple of killer robots, ok? Don't overthink this. Who are the robots? US military machines run amock due to lighting strikes turning them into murder-bots. Essentially clearance rack Tripods from War of the Worlds, they are armed with pew-pew lazers, machineguns, grabbing claw hands, and spinny head-chopping blade thingies, they look to be about the size of a Chevy Equinox SUV? The CGI models look like Nintendo 64 cut-scenes, but at least they tried.
Zap!
Who is trying to stop them from (presumably) escaping the South Pacific island they are currently trapped on and laying waste to the world? Glad you asked, because there are a bunch of people who will try (and mostly) fail to get the job done. I tell you what, let's just run them down, ok?
The Final Girl (duh).
Name: Hot Scientist Lady
Weapons: The power of math?
Appearance: What Hollywood thinks all female scientists should look like.
Notes: I think she helped design the robots? I wasn't paying attention, but she clearly knows a lot about them and stuff.
Go Army! Rah!
Name: Ruggedly Handsome Army Guy
Weapons: M-16 with Infinity Clip, perfectly feathered hair.
Appearance: Your waiter at Applebee's in LA who you just know has a spec script burned to a DVD-R in his locker just in case a producer comes for lunch during his shift.
Notes: Head of an "elite team of Special Forces" hahahaha.
I should have got his part.
Name: Slightly Less Handsome Army Guy
Weapons: Plastic M-16, chip on shoulder.
Appearance: A casting agency headshot come to life.
Notes: As second banana to the lead Army guy, SLHAG hangs around to question orders and make right wing statements about palm trees and coconuts.
Could you guys not drill out my barrel?
Name: Token Casting Minority
Weapons: Lazer gun made from spray-painted PVC pipe.
Appearance: Umm...he's tall?
Notes: His lazer gun was hyped up to be the primo robot-killer, but TCM dies so quickly that it never really plays a part.
Oh, fuck, I'm gonna die.
Name: Expendable Red Shirt #1
Weapons: Prop M-16, dark sunglasses.
Appearance: "Wait, is this not a speaking part? How much do I get paid?"
Notes: You know why he's here.
That'll be 20 bucks.
Name: Bradley's Weed Dealer
Weapons: Stolen gun, mustache comb.
Appearance: Anchor Man cosplay by way of my brother-in-law's Instagram page.
Notes: Bradley's Weed Dealer just robbed a cruise ship safe and crashed on this island with his girlfriend and get-away pilot.
Out-acted by a tuft of grass.
Name: Trixie the Stripper
Weapons: Meth eyes?
Appearance: Ever been on a Tinder date with a girl who says she's "studying exotic dance" at college and who gets 27 phone calls an hour the entire time you're trying to talk to her? Yeah, that's her.
Notes: Trixie is in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship with Bradley's Weed Dealer, a girl completely without agency or external motivations. She has great legs, though.
That's a lot of gel.
Name: Hunky McFlyboy
Weapons: Chiseled chin, smoldering steel-blue eyes.
Appearance: Like an extra from Laguna Beach with a faux-satin bomber jacket.
Notes: While nominally a wanted criminal (the robbers' get-away ride), Hunky ends up being the hero of the movie. Go figure.
So there's a lot of gunfire and lazer bolts and exploding helicopters and just a lot of terrible acting. They filmed this on a "deserted tropical island in the South Pacific", which looks suspiciously like a rented horse ranch 15 minutes north of Pasadena. I simply cannot be bothered to give you a blow by blow of the "action", but safe to say that the bit-part day-contract actors give as much as they can without risking hurting themselves and having to miss their shift at Walgreens. In the end Ruggedly Handsome Army Guy, Hunky McFlyboy, and Hot Scientist Lady are the only survivors (surprisingly). I figured that Hunky and the pretty lady would be the only ones to get off the island before the Navy nuked it from orbit, and they'd probably kiss and stuff before the credits rolled, so it was a shock to me when the third-wheel other guy was still there at the end. Other things might have happened in the third act, in fact I'm sure they did, but I don't think I remember much about it. I'm not going to lie, I watched this movie on mute and wrote this entire review this afternoon while listening to the soundtrack from the 2016 Doom reboot instead, so I might have missed some crucial plot points in the dialogue, sorry not sorry.
BTW, that was some metal shit right there, 9/10 would bang.
Ya'll need bigger guns.
Dutch Angles in the rainy dark, how artsy!
Bonus! In various off-island scenes there are three (3!) famous Star Trek alumni! But don't get excited, they are just here for the bare minimum needed to earn annual SAG credits for their cheap health insurance.
Sulu is "flying a plane", by which I mean "sitting in a chair in what passes for an airplane cockpit set". He is on-screen for exactly 57 seconds (I counted) and remains seated the entire time.
Warp drive engaged, Captain....
Worf (sans Klingon head-ridges, sadly) is "commanding the rescue operation", by which I mean "hanging around an office in a Dollar Store military uniform holding a unplugged phone". He is on-screen for exactly 109 seconds and never leaves his office.
It is a good day to call my agent....
And lastly the EMH Doctor from Voyager is Hot Scientist Lady's dad, he gets to do a bit more, but not much, and he's dressed like Fraser Crane on Casual Friday. He's on-screen for exactly 133 seconds and has way too much pancake make-up on his face.
Tossed salads and scrambled eggs....
Double bonus! There was this 4-minute pre-credits scene that was weird as shit. It was...essentially this movie, but set in a different place and with a different cast. A robot was running amock in the Bronson Rocks (seriously) and some Army dudes and some scientist types were trying to escape it. It has NOTHING to do with the rest of the movie, no one mentions it, it directly contradicts the info given in the rest of the movie, it's set thousands of miles away, and it makes no damn sense in the logic of the plot. I'm just guessing but it seems like this was a...I don't know, maybe teaser sequence shot just to show to investors to get the funding for the eventual movie? And they liked it so much that they just copy/pasted it on to the front of the finished film? Maybe they came up short and the needed it to pad out the running time to meet the contract requirements? Things like that happen in the cheap back alleys of Hollywood, that's for sure.
Chasing a pick-up truck, of course.
Triple bonus! You guys know I'm an aviation geek, so when they showed the robots messing with the criminals' stranded helicopter, and clearly showed the registration number on the tailboom, my interest perked up. This AS-350 actually was operated by the Spanish Highway Department in Europe from 91-04, before being sold to a Los Angeles-based helicopter rental company. It's showed up in a bunch of movies and television series, none of which I can be arsed to type here. As of January 2021, it's still buzzing around the skies of Burbank.
Compositing the CGI robots into this shot is pretty good.
Anyway, that's all I got, I'm going back to bed now.
[Editor Bradley: Ok, this is getting a little creepy, Nate. This is the third review you've left here surreptitiously in less than a month and nobody's seen you enter or leave the building. I'm beginning to suspect you're already inside.]
Written in February 2021 by Nathan Decker.
comments powered by Disqus
that's between you and the vengeful wrath of your personal god...