April 16, 2016

First of all, let me tell you straight off the bat that my rather high rating here has nothing to do with the film's quality. It has some decent aspects, mind you, but has 'TV-movie' or 'late-night time-waster' written all over it, despite Sir Christopher Lee's presence and a really good ending, for such a low-budget production. The beginning is also quite good and intriguing--it's everything in between that lets the film down. I like Sue Lyon (S… read the rest.

First of all, let me tell you straight off the bat that my rather high rating here has nothing to do with the film's quality. It has some decent aspects, mind you, but has 'TV-movie' or 'late-night time-waster' written all over it, despite Sir Christopher Lee's presence and a really good ending, for such a low-budget production. The beginning is also quite good and intriguing--it's everything in between that lets the film down. I like Sue Lyon (Stanley Kubrick's 'Lolita', although she's not a good actress, just an intriguing presence) and Macdonald Carey--but these actors are clearly at the stage of their career when if they're not doing theatre, they're taking TV-work or B-movies such as these, that fine actors such as Ray Milland, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford gave credibility to, in their declining years.

There isn't a lot of action. It's full of lulls and rather boring--you get a lot of sequences of looking at screens or printouts from those clanky old computers and printers that used to take up so much space. Lee does the best he can, there's good chemistry between Lyon and her protagonist-husband, there's good use of stock footage of disasters happening all over the world, and the climactic shot at the end is excellent despite the low budget. It made me wonder how it would have looked if shot a few years later, when 3-D made a brief comeback as a fad.

I gave one star (out of five) for one of my favourite horror actors ever, one for that shot at the end, and one for the way the poster reminded me of my favourite album cover--Oxygene by electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. How I wish his music from that album had been utilized instead of the shreck that was used. So, in total, 3/5, or 6 out of 10.

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