The Apocalypse (1997) Online

The plot is somewhat typical of a scifi movie, yet could've had potential: in the past, a crazy woman hijacked a ship carrying enough explosive chemicals to destroy a world. She rigged it so that whoever discovered the ship and reactivated it in the future would be stuck on it in a collision course with Earth. Jump ahead: the ship, thought long lost, reappears and a salvage crew goes to save the contents and make a profit. Unfortunately the second half of the team turns out to be terrorist hijackers with no social conscience who slaughter most of the first half, leaving only two survivors to stop the ship from it's final destination. Sounds exciting, right? There's even a wicked plot twist wherein the crazy woman has recorded video footage of herself reciting Shakespeare quotes that you have to complete every few minutes in order to continue accessing the computer system. Even the characters sound good: a tough-talking female salvage pilot; the naive bartender/wannabe space explorer; the pilot's ex boyfriend, a man so drunken with greed that he'd risk an entire planet to try and turn a profit. The effects are fairly good as well. So why then does this movie fail so horribly? Because the dialouge is some of the worst scriptwriting EVER. An example: Bad Guy With Gun Pointed at Door - "Little Pigs, Little Pigs, Let Me In! (BLAM!) Or I'll Huff! (BLAM!) And I'll Puff! (BLAM!)" You get the idea. The incredible talented of Sandra Bernhard and Laura San Giacomo (left with the incredible task of free-associating Shakespeare with a mentally deranged space woman) are wasted in this film that's so bad you might just enjoy it if you're in the mood to mock it while you're watching.

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.

This picture is nowhere near as rancid as "Space Mutiny", which will cause psychological damage without the superb MST3K treatment, but "The Apocalypse" can have effects with apocalyptic results on the human psyche. I was actually able to tolerate the entire movie. It's something I would not want to watch again unless I wanted to give myself an excuse to commit suicide. I even actually own the movie on LaserDisc! But, it's a great deal, considering that it was given to me, or would that be a curse? The acting is just terrible, with parts either overdone, or simply bland. The props is what you'd expect from a low budget production, with stuff that looks like it was assembled with packing materials and done in a warehouse, looking worse than a high school production of "The Technicolor Dreamcoat". The video monitor displays were obviously VHS videotape, since one of the special effect for those displays was just simply visual searching back and forth throughout the scenes, with parts of the video sequences showing dropouts, probably because the tape was being worn out through excessive use during production. The music will make you want to plug your ears in pain as it makes the Macarena sound like a masterpiece. The visual effects? What visual effects? I've seen better visuals on a "Three Stooges" skit. It amazes me how the company that was responsible for the production actually had enough money left over to distribute this garbage, even on LaserDisc of all things. A DVD version is also a waste of material. The videotape version would be best, since you probably will be able to celebrate when the VCR decides to eat it. This is a production where the source material deserves to be locked in a vault and left to rot, fade, and be eaten by fungus and mold. - Reinhart

I just watched this movie on the Sci-fi network. Let's make one thing perfectly clear: there has never, ever been a quality film or television show that has used the phrase `It's on a need-to-know basis'. Once you hear that phrase, and its subsequent follow-up phrase `believe me, I need to know', you can rest assured you're watching something written by someone with absolutely no creativity.

Sandra Bernhard is terribly miscast in this five hundredth derivation of `Alien'. Whining and sneering her way through this movie, she sounds ridiculously unconvincing spouting the technical mumbo-jumbo necessary for science fiction films. She aint no Sigourney Weaver, that's for sure. How someone so marvelous in something like `Roseanne' can be such a bad actor in films like this and `Hudson Hawk' is one of the mysteries of life.

This film has the production values of a high-school play: cheap-looking sets, bad lighting, and clumsy-looking props. The spacesuits look like second-rate rejects from Joe's Army Surplus. When Sandra comes back into the ship after a spacewalk, she flips the visor lid up, and there's no seal around it! The flimsy visor looks like it was made from a clear plastic pie-cover from Safeway. There are no special effects, unless you call an exterior shot of the spaceship a special effect. They couldn't even spring for some fancy flashing lights or decent music; tapping military-style drumbeats punctuate some of the scenes, while someone practicing a bass fiddle provides the rest of the music.

Typical of bad films, during the shootout scenes, many many shots are fired in all directions, but it is only coincidental that anyone gets hit, even at point-blank range. Is it wise to fire a gun onboard a spaceship while you're surrounded by all kinds of machinery that is keeping you alive?

Most of the film consists of close-ups of people standing around talking or arguing while sepia-colored walls float in the background. I'm convinced that the dialogue was written by a thirteen-year-old boy after watching video games for eighteen hours straight: `she belongs to me', `it's stuck in a loop!', `you don't drink martinis!', and so forth. You get the idea.

As if that isn't bad enough, a videotaped Laura San Giacomo rocks back and forth spouting Shakespeare. Good thing she had `Just Shoot Me' to fall back on.

The only way to describe the quality of this film is that this is the kind of movie they show on Saturday afternoons when the football game is pre-empted. The television station figures `what the hell, there's no one watching anyway.' It's either that, or an infomercial.

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.

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.

It wasn't even GOOD male bashing. There are no words for it. I'd much rather watch LOGAN'S RUN for the 50th time, or PIGS! Maybe kick back, drink some kerosene and have a little smoke. Sandra Bernhard is so harsh, she's long since left off being funny.

This film could have been interesting, but it wasn't. The thing that seemed most odd about this film was that a few times during the movie, the group started fighting with the guy who was trying to figure out the puzzles and save the ship. I suppose they figured that if he was beat senseless he could solve the problems more efficiently. Anyway, I try to find some reason to see a movie in most of my reviews, so you might consider this movie if you're interested in weird uses of Shakespeare.

I don't know what just happened to me. Sandra Bernhard was fighting David Crosby while the little hooker friend from Pretty Woman was performing "Scenes From Shakespeare." You read that right. It's a good thing that the MPAA does not enact capital punishment, because everyone involved would have been strung up as examples to aspiring actors, writers and directors with more enthusiasm than talent. Painful. Pro tip: adding (AND ENDLESSLY REPEATING THE SAME) lines from Shakespeare does not make your movie good; it actually highlights how crummy the movie is. The writing was puerile, the acting was a visual Columbine, and the plot couldn't make it. Not all of the cats in the world could have made this movie enjoyable or even watchable. If faced with the dilemma of watching this movie or...doing anything else, I can strongly and authoritatively recommend anything else.

The day I watched this movie was the dullest day in my life. I was sick, I was alone at home, the PC was being fixed, and there was ABSOLUTELY nothing else on the TV. Otherwise, there is no way I'm watching this movie. Now, thinking back, I wonder why I watched the whole crap... It's more than just stupid. It is stupidity and beyond. And... Sandra Bernhard appears to be the name, is so ugly, it's unbelievable. And I ask you? Who funded this peace of garbage? Who was dump enough? They didn't even tried... They use motorbike helmets with some plaster on them for the space suits!!! I can go on and on about how much this movie sucks, about the clichés, about the stupid bloopers, but... what's the point? The point is that if you haven't, than you should NEVER watch this film, unless you're a complete and total idiot. It's not even funny in it's stupidity... damn...

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.