orld Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Champion Chyna stars as the lethal head of security for a shadowy government organization in UPN's Alien Fury: Countdown to Invasion. The movie debuts April 21 on UPN. Dale Midkiff (Time Trax) plays government bureaucrat Bill Templer, head of a super-secret defense department division called S.T.R.A.W. that's based, for no apparent reason, in San Diego. After the loss of their Lunar Prospector 2 spacecraft, the government decides to cut S.T.R.A.W. from the defense budget, so a desperate Templer goes into action. Using faked photos allegedly from the space probe, he goes public with the shocking "truth": aliens on the moon are arming for an attack on the Earth!
Naturally, no one on Earth is too keen on getting vaporized a la Independence Day, so a plan is quickly thrown together by the panicked government to use "Peacemaker," a satellite armed with a nuclear warhead, to blow up the moon. Not too coincidentally, using Peacemaker will necessitate S.T.R.A.W.'s return to the defense budget.
Before long, unwitting San Diego police detective (and hardcore WWF fan) Kevin Anjanette (Whitfield of Secret Agent Man) stumbles across Templer's hoax and runs afoul of S.T.R.A.W.'s chief of security, Ava Zurich (Chyna). Anjanette soon learns, however, that Templer's hoax might be based on truth after all. He enlists the aid of Templer's estranged wife (Philips) in a last-ditch attempt to stop the launch of Peacemaker--which would destroy not only the moon, but some real aliens that may be living there.
The long, long, road to Chyna
Rob Hedden, writer and director of Alien Fury, must be stopped before he's allowed to make another film--even something as unlikely to be seen as a UPN science fiction movie. Everything about this movie--from the painfully awkward "jokes" (after one character runs down a list of government acronyms, Templer reminds him not to forget "TOFL-time out for lunch") to the soap-opera-level acting to the Radio Shack special effects--it all misses the mark. As the plot lurches its way to a painfully obvious "twist" ending, viewers will no doubt be clamoring for these two hours of their lives back.
The biggest problem with the film, though, is the presence of Chyna herself. She's obviously there only as a sad attempt to attract a little ratings runoff from one of UPN's only truly successful programs, WWF Smackdown!, and viewers aren't allowed to forget that for a second. When viewers meet Anjanette, he and his buddies are watching WWF wrestling on--of all things--UPN! When Anjanette meets Chyna's character, he insists that he used to watch her wrestle. Please, no reminder is necessary. Just watching this mountainous, mannish woman attempt to deliver the briefest spurts of dialogue rams the point home like a pile driver. What's worse, she seems to have been shoehorned into several parts of the movie in an effort to give her more exposure, which only hurts the already uneven pacing.
The other performances are almost universally awful, although Whitfield and Groundhog Day's Stephen Tobolowsky stand out in the dismal crowd. The film is also very dark: that is, the lighting is just terrible, possibly in an attempt to hide the cheap sets and costumes. The audience never even gets to see really alien aliens ... and for a movie named Alien Fury that's just infuriating.
Alien Fury makes The Rock's appearance earlier this year on Star Trek: Voyager look like Citizen Kane. Please, even if you're the biggest wrestling fan on the planet, steer clear of this piece of tripe. It's the only way to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
-- C.J.H.
he world is going to end in six hours and Patrick (McKellar) just
wants to be left alone. Even on the brink of apocalypse, however, mundane
matters intrude. He makes a token appearance at his parents' house, where
his mother pretends it's Christmas. Before he can retreat to the solitude
of his apartment, a woman named Sandra (Oh) begs him to help her find a way
across town so she can spend the last hours of life on Earth with her
husband.
Patrick does his best to aid the damsel in distress, but unlike typical
movie heroes, he doesn't have the slightest idea how to hotwire a car. He
tries to get an old high school friend to give Sandra a ride, but the friend is busy
passing out tickets to his first--and last, of course--piano recital,
scheduled for one hour before the fatal stroke of midnight. Their quest
brings them to the apartment of another friend, Craig (McMullen), who is busy
working his way through a laundry list of sexual exploits, including trysts
with a black woman, his high school French teacher, and a virgin.
As the hours slip by, Patrick and Sandra become resigned to the fact that
they have little choice but to spend Armageddon with each other. Sandra has
her own plan to defy cruel fate, while for Patrick, who is haunted by
tragedy, the world effectively ended a long time ago. In the brief time
remaining, can these two strangers forge a bond that will give some meaning
to their final moments?
An intimate look at Armageddon
Last Night saw very limited release in the United States, but is now available on DVD. Writer-actor-director Don McKellar conceived the film as a sort
of counterpoint to movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact.
Instead of focusing on heroes and their high-tech hardware, Last
Night looks at the lives of ordinary people in Toronto as time runs out
for the human race.
The film's clockwork doomsday evokes not just Y2K hysteria (remember all
that?) but also the sense of an impending execution. Though we never learn why the world is
going to end, it feels more like the act of an uncaring cosmic bureaucracy
than some astronomical phenomenon.
McKellar shows us the expected looting and rioting, but perhaps the most
chilling moments are the darkly comic episodes of eerie normality. A gas
company executive (played by noted director David Cronenberg) calls his
customers one by one, thanking them for their business and promising every
effort to keep the gas flowing until the very end. A radio DJ plays the top
500 songs of all time while a local television station offers inane coverage
of the last news that will ever be.
In the role of an
emotionally repressed widower, McKellar plays his part almost too well,
shielding the audience from his character's grief. By contrast, Oh conveys
Sandra's growing desperation with an intensity that's sometimes painful to
watch. As she prepares to end her life with Patrick, she delivers what is
both the film's funniest and most poignant line, impatiently imploring
Patrick, "Tell me something to make me love you."
When I saw When Worlds Collide as a kid, I remember wondering what it would have been like for the people who didn't get away in the spaceship. Last Night provides a haunting yet curiously hopeful answer.
-- Curt
orld Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Champion Chyna stars as the lethal head of security for a shadowy government organization in UPN's Alien Fury: Countdown to Invasion. The movie debuts April 21 on UPN. Dale Midkiff (Time Trax) plays government bureaucrat Bill Templer, head of a super-secret defense department division called S.T.R.A.W. that's based, for no apparent reason, in San Diego. After the loss of their Lunar Prospector 2 spacecraft, the government decides to cut S.T.R.A.W. from the defense budget, so a desperate Templer goes into action. Using faked photos allegedly from the space probe, he goes public with the shocking "truth": aliens on the moon are arming for an attack on the Earth!
he world is going to end in six hours and Patrick (McKellar) just
wants to be left alone. Even on the brink of apocalypse, however, mundane
matters intrude. He makes a token appearance at his parents' house, where
his mother pretends it's Christmas. Before he can retreat to the solitude
of his apartment, a woman named Sandra (Oh) begs him to help her find a way
across town so she can spend the last hours of life on Earth with her
husband.
