Director: Thom Eberhardt
Cast: Robert Beltran*, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Sharon Farrell
Have I Ever Seen It Before: Never. It always felt like a movie that was bopping around there in my peripheral vision, but never quite came in for a landing. If it weren’t for <Beyond the Cabin in the Woods>, I might never get to some of these.
Oddly enough, it took a bit of doing to even get my eyes on the film now. Forget any of the array of streaming services I already foolishly subscribe to, I couldn’t even get Prime or Apple TV to rent me the movie. It was starting to feel like I might be doomed to pay out-of-print prices for physical media.
And then there was Tubi. Ah, Tubi. It doesn’t seem like the damn thing should work, and yet, it is there. Sure, I was inexplicably barraged with commercials a few times, but even Hulu does that, and apparently, I’m paying for the privilege.
Did I like it: You know, I really started to. If the whole movie was Dawn of the Dead (1978) in a movie two screen movie theater run by employees varying from the disinterested to shiftless**, I might have loved the whole thing. But the movie absolutely runs out of steam right about the time Robert Beltran shows up*** and by the time things are concluded I’m not sure what the story was supposed to be about, but it was definitely not about red dust as an ongoing threat for the human population (the dust clears with an errant Los Angeles rain), it’s not about young people coming to grips—if even in a humorous way—with the end of the world (because they all turn on a dime to be hyper-domesticated by the time the closing credits roll around), and it certainly isn’t about anyone’s ongoing feud with DMK, because that couldn’t possible have mattered less.
*Yes, that Robert Beltran.
**Yes, I’ve seen <Demons (1985)>, in case you’re in a recommendation mood.
***Insert your own joke about the Star Trek franchise here.