The Apocalypse

If you manage to get through the entire film and give it more thought than it warrants, you may find seeds of what could have been a good film scattered throughout.

Sandra Bernhard did a fair job with her leading role, only to be let down by the rest of the cast, the writing, directing, and effects (I suppose the sets were passable). Laura San Giacomo gives possibly the worst performance, completely over the top spouting incoherent snatches of Shakespeare. It appears that her part was filmed later and edited in, as she never interacts with the other actors and the "hacker" uses male pronouns when referring to her and her image.

This seemed as if several amateurs each directed a couple randomly-selected scenes without regard to each other's work, as characters are played very differently in adjoining scenes with no sense of development. The film ends suddenly and poorly, as if someone with an eye to the budget yelled "Cut, print!" the instant that the money ran out.

Perhaps this film itself was a salvage operation, where the shoot terminated prematurely and the studio edited whatever had already been filmed into something they could release upon an unsuspecting public.

Even though I checked this movie out for free, it was a huge waste of my time. Pathetic acting, terrible special effects, and a plot that goes nowhere are the BEST things about this movie. Don't waste your time.

This movie is not as bad as it may seem at first. The screenplay is ludicrous sometimes, but the actors save the day: Sandra Bernhard plays the captain of a spaceship who hates the rest of the world and spends her time off in bars, kicking some teeth in. Tougher than Ripley ("Alien"), less scrupulous than Han Solo ("Star Wars"). Frank Zagarino is an intense villain who gets plenty of opportunity to hurt and kill people. And Laura San Giacomo I remember from "Quigley" is amazing as the crazy programmer using Shakespeare quotes for passwords.

Talking about quotes, here's my favorite line from the movie (re-translated from German dubbed version, so maybe not exactly the same words): "There's no danger our ship could be hit by a meteor. It is too big." Say you love logical thinking.

Anyway, I found this quite entertaining despite several flaws in the story (voted 5/10). The worst one: we are not told what became of the programmer, she just disappears from the spaceship. One little correction: the cargo on board threatening to destroy the Earth is not nuclear warheads as mentioned in the plot outline, it's an element named "Solarium" that will blow up when staying too long in a magnetic field.

If these movies - there seems to be about one per year - could possibly hew any closer to copying "Alien", they would. It is merely the aim of these films to make Alien all over again. The music. The characters and their conflicts. Even fragments of dialogue! "I don't trust so and so ...", "All I want is what's comin' to me..." These things either take place in space or underwater. Virus(1999), set on an ocean ship, was an interesting variation. The prime point of entertainment for me is the fatuousness of the imitation.

A crazed computer genius named Goad (Laura San Giacomo) sets a spaceship named the Agamemnon, loaded to the gills with an highly unstable substance, on a collision course with the Earth! The Agamemnon has been encoded by Goad to start on its preprogrammed destination once it is revived by a salvage team. J.T. Wayne (Sandra Bernhard) is the Captain of the Salbor, the salvage ship that undertakes said mission. Things go awry for the Captain however when a portion of her assembled crew lead by her former lover, a cutthroat type named Vendler, double-crosses her and looks to gain the valuable Solarium aboard the ship for himself. However he didn't count on Goad's reprogramming of the ship's systems. Yet even in the face of defeat, Vendler refuses to give up his hold on the ship or listen to reason or logic. Now as the clock ticks down to a collision with the Earth, Wayne and her new crewman, a former bartender named Lennon (Cameron Dye), must try and find a means of stopping the Agamemnon or millions on Earth will die!

Well I have to admit this is competently made. They keep the action moving nicely along and the visuals often prove distracting and interesting. The whole concept with Goad shows some level of originality and I enjoyed Laura San Giacomo's performance as a crazed computer programming genius who has a God complex and an obsession with quoting Shakespeare. Where this falters is when our story changes its focus to J.T. Wayne, played by an horrifically miscast Sandra Bernhard who constantly uses the catchphrase "And Don't You Forget It!" and basically goes all out to put off any male in the movie, including the man who is supposed to be her love interest. The failed attempts at humor in the film are far more likely to make viewers shake their heads in disbelief than cause them to laugh. In fact, this film frequently has this effect on any viewer who can manage to sit through the whole thing. To me, it is this element of "I just cannot believe what I am watching" that makes this so bad it's almost good.