Actuarial Science Movie Reviews

Phantom Empire is a total waste of time and money. In the view
of the director, the showing of a few bare breasts is an okay
substitute for story and characterization. I kept falling
asleep while trying to watch this totally boring and completely
forgettable bit of film history. I'd reveal the plot, but I
don't want to bore you.

The plot has more corn than a corn farm in Iowa. It is not just low budget, it looks like no budget. The humor is crude, the acting is not quite on par with the Tomb,a previous movie where most of the actors came from. But it is a cult classic type. I found it amuzing and a laugh every couple of minutes. The bare breasted cave bunny is odd but I believe that was thrown in to keep you from failing asleep. Overall worth the watch on boring evening when the reruns are showing.

Save your money and just give a 5 year old a video camera. There are only two shorts on the whole DVD with any real artistic and cinematic qualities. The rest were enigmatic, trite, meaningless short films with bad acting and terrible dialogue (when present). The glowing reviews I read which prompted me to buy the DVD could only have been written by those that produced the films in hopes of luring your money out of your wallet, or, other people like me that hated it and want company for their misery so they aren't the only fools who got duped and purchased it. On a technical note, the DVD lacks any scene selection, forcing you to use fast forward/reverse to get to any place on the disk. There are no extras, special features, or captioning options (of which I need). It will reside in my coaster collection along with 150 AOL CDs and failed CD-R attempts.

Duel on Planet Z
The film is on smash cuts super sci-fi and I wish it was at the beginning of the compilation. The film reminds me of one of those old on going movie teaser. ( superman,or the racketeer) Sure its cheese, but its a well done copy of the the 1950's style of sci fi film making, It's only 3 min but spoofs so much .obvious wires, space orbs( tinfoil balls) Lasers, mind altering unexplainable sci fi powers, capt kirk fighting , and when its all over the scene capping scream to the sky (...)Plus if you see this movie you must watch you director interview towards the end of smash cuts compilation. The interview is just as fun to watch as the short its self.

The movie was surprisingly poor for a 1965 film. The story line was meandering. The special effects were hokey and Basil Rathbone was on screen about a total of 15 minutes for the entire movie. Overall compared to other SF films of this time period, it sucked. Don't fall for the Amazon.com hype. There are much better films to buy on DVD. This is not one of them.

This film is much better than it looks. Its a film about the exploration of Venus and its really good especially if you factor in when it was made. The scenes with Basil Rathbone at the lunar base are definitely a little hokey and I didnt recognize Faith Dominque (This Island Earth) at first, but the rest of the film is great! The plot is basicly explore Venus and rescue the first team that landed and got into trouble. The explorers have a really neat hover craft that they travel in to save their comrades. There is a tough metal robot that is realistic. Dinosaurs and other nasties try to make a meal of various crew members without success. Its just an all around fun film along the gendre of First Spaceship to Venus. The special effects are innovative and impressive especially considering the time when the film was made. I saw this film when I was a kid and was happy to make its reacquaintance. If you like classic science fiction, you will love this film.

The only thing this movie has going for it are the special effects, after that forget it. In the original, which had surprisingly good special effects, we have the more important element of characterization and a great storyline, all true to Jules Verne's vision. Add to that a terrific cast with the always great James Mason in the lead, and you have all the makings for a great film.

In THIS schlock of a film we have cardboard characters that only make you plead for them to wind up in the jaws of a dinosaur. (Sigh) They just don't make em like they used to.

James Mason we need you!

Great news for fans of the classic James Mason/Pat Boone version...DVD to be released 3/4/2003!!

Jules Verne would turn over in his grave if he saw this ... flick. This movie is an insult to die-hard Jules Verne enthusiasts. It's obvious that no one (illiterate screenwriters, director, and/or the actors) read the book. Adding a line here or there from the context doesn't do it. I don't understand how Hallmark could have sponsored such an ignorant and stupid project. Bleh!

What a horrible movie. No redeeming value whatsoever. This movie is what happens when all of the budget goes to CGI special effects (and they ain't that great) and none is spent on writing or editing.

There's just something about ghost ship movies that I cannot resist, so when I spotted Lost Voyage, I had to watch it. The fact that the movie is a straight-to-video/DVD release I had never heard of before made no difference. Judd Nelson was a familiar name from the 1980s, and the presence of Lance Henriksen from TV's Millennium series seemed to bode well. It's quite an interesting movie, not necessarily in a good way. There are a few moments of decent suspense, and the acting really isn't all that bad, yet the movie seemed to pose questions it never intended to answer, and the special effects are just plain weird.

As the movie opens, we see the beginning and ignominious end of the final voyage of the cruise ship Corona Queen in 1972; somewhere in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle, the ship disappeared into an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon. No sign of the ship was ever found ' until now. After more than twenty-five years, the ship has suddenly been spotted by a fishing vessel off the coast of Bermuda. This news is particularly interesting for Aaron Brown (Judd Nelson), whose father and step-mother were among the passengers of the ill-fated cruise. He has obsessively studied the Bermuda Triangle ever since, and now he finds himself one of the first human beings to set foot on the mysterious ship in over a quarter of a century. With him are Dana Elway (Janet Gunn), the star of a paranormal based news show, and her crew, alongside a trio of salvage men led by David Shaw (Henriksen). They discover the ship to be in remarkably good condition, but no sign of crew or passengers is to be found. As you might expect, bad things start happening that try to be creepy but never really are, and the dwindling number of individuals on board find themselves in danger of heading back into whatever claimed the ship way back in 1972.

The visions that some of the characters see on board the ship supposedly represent their biggest fears or most disturbing memories, but they don't really play that well. We are treated to numerous flashbacks and mysterious new visitations by Aaron's long-dead father, but none of these personal stories seems at all important in the end. I do have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of Scarlet Chorvat as the younger reporter scheming to take Dana Elway's job, and her storyline actually seemed to make a little bit of sense. The really weird thing about Lost Voyage, though, is its special effects. Things aren't really that bad until the closing scenes of the movie, when CGI animation suddenly runs amuck. Many of the climactic scenes look like the kinds of animation you would see in a computer or gaming console game; in a game, they would be impressive, but in a movie they are quite disappointingly fake; I can't recall ever seeing another movie wherein the animation suddenly took on such a peculiar look.

The real source of weakness in the movie, though, is the plot. Too many story elements are introduced for no apparent reason, almost nothing about the fate of the ghost liner is revealed, and the end of the movie is quite disappointing. To make matters worse, the two epilogue sequences make very little sense to me and only serve to reinforce the failed opportunities that seem to define Lost Voyage. Despite all of these problems, though, I cannot say I actually hated the film. It had enough potential to keep me interested, but a lot of that potential was wasted in the end.

"Lost Voyage" spends so much time building up the audience that when we finally get the payoff, we're underwhelmed. Done by the folks at UFO and City Heat Productions, this film is sort of like "Event Horizon" in the ocean. However, it lacks the visceral scares and weird gore effects that "Horizon" so effortlessly pulled off. A cruise ship goes missing in the late 70s in the Burmuda Triangle and suddenly reappears present day. Judd Nelson and Lance Henrikson are among the people who get to investigate it. What ensues are a few minor scares, but mostly some confusing camera angles that suggests the director got squeamish and backed off on the gore. Big mistake. Instead, the movie is only mildly scary and the characters too undeveloped to care for. Rent it only if you're having a B-movie marathon.

"Boa" isn't the worst movie ever. Actually, yes it is. This movie from director Phillip Roth (Velocity Trap, Falcon Down) is a triumph in bad filmmaking. It's predictable every step of the way, right down to how the giant snake is going to tear its prey apart. It's about as likable as "It's Pat: The Movie," only a little funnier. The special effects are terrible, hard to see, and very confusing at times. UFO LLC usually has some pretty sweet effects in their flicks, but this movie is different. It suffers from minimal visibility and a terrible lack of anything scary, let alone coherent, in the film. At least Dean Cain got a paycheck. As long as he's making a movie, I suppose the world is a better place. As long as it's not "Boa 2: Snakes Alive."

This movie was so bad it made me laugh with it's inconsistencies. They even had fake snow which was OBVIOUSLY some kind of cottony blanket like material (like what they use in department storefront windows at Christmas time). The other thing that had me rolling on the floor laughing was the way the "boa", that supposedly needed warmth, survived in subzero temps.

The bad language Dean Cain uses in this movie further detracts from the already bad acting. This movie is destined for MST3K reruns.

It is hard to imagine a monster movie that goes so wrong in so many different ways. BOA would have the viewer believe that a ten million year old huge reptilian-like snake could emerge from a nitrogen induced suspended animation to wreak havoc on the inhabitants of an Antarctic prison. Now I have no problem accepting the scientific implausibility of its sleeping for ten million years, after all, was the cloning of JURASSIC PARK any less believable? The problem with audience involvement is that the cast and crew show little respect for anyone's intelligence. The criminal residents of the prison were supposed to be the 'worst of the worst.' Yet, as I got to know them as individuals, they seemed a rather likable bunch. In fact, one of them, a nuclear missle smuggler, correctly identified himself as a political prisoner, a not inaccurate label since he intended to use that missle in defense of his homeland of Chechnya. Further, when he was released rather unwillingly by the warden to help fight the snake, it is he rather than the titular hero (Dean Cain) who emerges as the go to guy who has guns and guts. Cain, by contrast, seems wimpy and decidely uneager to tackle the snake, which, by the way, no one refers to as a boa. As for the snake itself, you would think that the advertised monster of any monster film would get plenty of screen time. This snake is seen slithering around mostly in the shadows and only parts of its anatomy are revealed. Rarely does the viewer get the snake's full monty. Much of the dialogue is predictably banal and heavy-handedly foreshadowing. When one of the criminals, an attractive IRA woman, tells Cain that because of her Irish fear of snakes, he should shoot her if the snake should capture her, then you know that is precisely what will happen. Most of the movie borrows shamelessly from other 'big snake' movies like ANACONDA and PYTHON. I have no problem with that either so long as the director does something novel with the borrowing. Not so in BOA. The best part was the grand finale, which involved the one who should have played the hero, the Chechnya missile smuggler. Here the director did something right. Rather than rip off snake movies, he rips off AIR FORCE ONE with the smuggler taking the Gary Oldman role. I am still trying to decide if the climax were dramatic or purposefully laughable. And this might be the underlying problem of BOA: modest laughter or even more modest shuddering.

I liked N2 and N3 better than this one. The first two were normal filmaking and storytelling. This was a little weird and artsy. I think director Albert Pyun shows very good vision in his work, but this just felt a little awkward like an art film that just doesn't make it. Maybe it's only me. If you like Sue Price, buy this DVD. She looks great and is worth the viewing.

A strange film which probably will appeal to fans of female bodyuilding more than to Sci Fi fans, as the star Sue Price is frequently nude. The film contains far too much talking and not enough action, but despite it's obviously tiny budget, it is visually very impressive with some stylish camerawork, brutal violence and very odd Cronenberg like special effects. A film which will enhance Albert Pyun's reputation as the 'auteur' of the 'B' movie genre & though it's not entirely successful, it is a brave attempt at reworking the well worn 'android assassin' theme.

Nemesis 4 is the best in the series. At last we get Sue Price in near contest condition. In the previous installments she was soft and had a terrible cornrow hairstyle. In nemesis 4 she displays the physique, and hairstyle bodybuilding fans are accustomed to.This film also features faceless cameos by Sharon Bruneau & Debbie Muggli.Female muscle fans won't be disappointed.

Where are the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" guys when you need them? The original "Highlander" was, if not great art, at least original and entertaining. One of my favorite guilty pleasures, in fact. Don't ecpect more of the same here.

To call this remarkably bad sequal egregious would be to heap upon it extravagant and undeserved praise. The only thing that might make this movie bearable is an audience of good hecklers. Trust me on this--this is really and truly bad stuff. Really.

Unwatchable sequel is crap at best. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING is one of the worst films of all-time, no doubt. The story, which ignores everything said about the immortals in the first film, has an elderly Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) regaining his immortal powers to protect the world from devastation by an anti-ozone shield. Director Russell Mulcahy returns to direct, not that it matters; there's an okay score by The Police's Stewart Copeland; other than that, it's hopeless. For die-hard fans only. The Renegade Version, which is only a slight improvement, runs 109 minutes.

A total stinkbomb. A real PVC-plugger. Let's see, take a reasonably decent first film with an interesting Sci-Fi/Fantasy premise and totally flush it down the loo and make up some bull about being aliens from another planet?

Was Sean Connery that desperate for money? Hadn't he just won an Oscar a couple of years earlier in The Untouchables?

And what was the deal with the flying skateboards?

Where are the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" guys when you need them? The original "Highlander" was, if not great art, at least original and entertaining. One of my favorite guilty pleasures, in fact. Don't ecpect more of the same here.

To call this remarkably bad sequal egregious would be to heap upon it extravagant and undeserved praise. The only thing that might make this movie bearable is an audience of good hecklers. Trust me on this--this is really and truly bad stuff. Really.

Unwatchable sequel is crap at best. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING is one of the worst films of all-time, no doubt. The story, which ignores everything said about the immortals in the first film, has an elderly Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) regaining his immortal powers to protect the world from devastation by an anti-ozone shield. Director Russell Mulcahy returns to direct, not that it matters; there's an okay score by The Police's Stewart Copeland; other than that, it's hopeless. For die-hard fans only. The Renegade Version, which is only a slight improvement, runs 109 minutes.

A total stinkbomb. A real PVC-plugger. Let's see, take a reasonably decent first film with an interesting Sci-Fi/Fantasy premise and totally flush it down the loo and make up some bull about being aliens from another planet?

Was Sean Connery that desperate for money? Hadn't he just won an Oscar a couple of years earlier in The Untouchables?

And what was the deal with the flying skateboards?

Oh my God. I was SO dissappointed with this movie.

Where do I start.

First off, the acting was horrible. The only actor in this movie that was in part 1 was Peter (Jobes little friend). The first movie had a mysterious and low budget feel to it, which I love, and part 2 has a fluffy and hollywood feel to it, which I absolutely loath. Also, The connection between part 1 and part 2 was very weak. What's up with the telephone rings? That was a great idea, why didn't they keep that?!

...Trust me, if your thinking about buying this movie, dont!! But if for some reason you do, all the negative reviews here at Amazon will make perfect sense!!! This movie is BAD!!!

This movie was pure garbage. I enjoyed the first movie and thought part 2 would be a cool sequel. Boy was I wrong! Everything about this movie ...!

Oh my God. I was so dissappointed with this movie.

Where do I start.

First off, the acting was horrible. The only actor in this movie that was in part 1 was Peter (Jobes little friend). The first movie had a mysterious and low budget feel to it, which I love, and part 2 has a fluffy and hollywood feel to it, which I absolutely loath. Also, The connection between part 1 and part 2 was very weak.

But, I did like the story line in part 2; it was well written.

I tell you, I was sitting watching the movie with this look on my face, like someone in the room just farted amd the smell wasn't going away.