The Gratuitous B-Movie Column 5.04.08: Issue #12

Posted by Bryan Kristopowitz on 05.04.2008

"Warbirds" and "Battlespace"

The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Issue #12: "Warbirds" and "Battlespace"

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the twelfth issue of the internets movie review column that has never seen a nun teach a dog how to bake a cake, The Gratuitous B-Movie Column, and I am your host Bryan Kristopowitz. This issue, I take a look at the Sci-Fi Channel original production "Warbirds," and easily one of the worst movies ever made, the 2006 sci-fi crapfest "Battlespace."

Warbirds



Since starting this column I've made an effort to try to see the new original movies produced by the Sci Fi Channel. So far, since February, I've seen all but one of the new originals (I missed out on "Rock Monster." Freaking DVR. I'm waiting for the eventual replay, which seems to be taking forever. Can't put "Rock Monster" on again, but "Mansquito" seems to be on every two weeks), and for the most part I've enjoyed them. They're usually quite a bit of fun, and, heck, they seem to be the only game in town when it comes to consistently producing relatively good, low budget B-genre movies. HBO and Showtime aren't in that business anymore. Spike doesn't seem all that interested. And the big broadcast networks have been out of the "TV-movie of the week" business for years. If it weren't for Sci Fi and the general DVD world, there'd be nothing to watch B-movie wise. Of course, not every movie made (and this goes for the majors as well as the low budget movie factories) is going to be a worthwhile viewing experience. Sometimes, what's being shown stinks. "Warbirds," the latest new original Sci Fi production, has all of the trappings for a nifty little B-movie watching experience. World War II fighter pilots being attacked by flying dinosaurs in the Pacific? Who the hell wouldn't want to watch that? But the flick, directed by Kevin Gendreau, isn't half as exciting as its subject would suggest. In fact, the flick is kind of bad.

No, wait, it isn't kind of bad. It's just bad.

"Warbirds" stars Jamie Elle Mann as Max West, a top notch female civilian military test pilot, who, along with her team of fellow female test pilots (Betsy Quigley, as played by Shauna Rappold, Hoodsie Smith, as played by Lucy Faust, Vickey Teeling, as Gizza Elizondo, and Lana, as played by Stephanie Honore), is ordered by the base commander to fly a Colonel W.R. Hamilton (David Jensen) on a super special secret mission to an unnamed island in the Pacific, as Colonel Hamilton has in his posession a secret payload he must escort to said unnamed island. Max really doesn't want to take the job, as her team has been flying across the country to Hawaii basically non-stop and are exhausted. But orders are orders, and Max and her gals don't want to let the country down. So off Max, Betsy, Hoodsie, Vickey, and Lana, with Colonel Hamilton and his men and the secret payload, go to the Pacific and the unnamed island.

While in mid-flight, they come upon a nasty electrical storm that makes Max want to land. The Colonel tells her that she can't land, she has to keep going, their mission is far too important, it's too dangerous to land, etc. Then Max and the Colonel argue over who is really in charge. Suddenly, weird flying creatures (they're kind of like dinosaurs, and that's what the moviemakers were probably going for, but truth is I have no idea if they really are accurate depictions of flying dinosaurs. So I'll just call them creatures from now on) appear and buzz and attack the plane. Minor chaos ensues (one of the engines dies, the wing is slightly damaged, and someone gets a piece of shrapnel embedded in the forehead). Max lands the plane at the nearest piece of land in sight, which ends up being a different unnamed island.

Soon after they land, the Colonel and his men search the island for trouble. And trouble they do find. But instead of finding the creatures, the Colonel and his men find a group of Japanese soldiers, the same group od Japanese soldiers we saw at the very beginning "disturb" a cave home of one of the flying creatures. So the Colonel takes the Japanese soldiers prisoner, take them back to camp, and hold them until the Colonel figures out what to do next.

Now, the plucky Americans, both male and female, find themselves stranded on a deserted island with not only their sworn World War II enemy, but an increasing number of super hungry flying creatures. Just what the heck are they going to do to get out of this? You'd think that every second they remain on the island would be frought with increasing danger. No one knows what the Japanese soldiers are going to do, and the creatures could swoop down presumably at any second and start chowing down on the protagonists. Sounds pretty freaking dangerous.

But it isn't. Not for one second. Even when the "minor chaos" ensues on the plane as the storm and the flying creatures wreak havoc you don't feel like anyone is in peril ever. Everything appears, everything comes off as understated and somewhat blah. The flick never finds a way to work within its own understood structure, where the budget is low and there will be commercials. Nothing seems to flow the way it should. Again, it's all just so blah. The flick needs to tighten up, to amp up the tension and the conflict. The actors all work well enough by themselves and have an interesting look (the female characters definitely work the "period" look of the story's time), there's very little real camraderie among the female friends. Jamie Elle Mann, as Max, and Shauna Rappold as her alleged best friend Betsy, don't feel like friends. There's no sort of inside friend banter between them or really among any of the women. The talk that's supposed to be that kind of banter comes off as nothing more than poor dialogue. The conflict between Max and the Colonel never comes off the way it should. There's no real animosity for them to overcome, and when they do (oh come on, you know ahead of time that they're going to come together at some point) it comes off as just something that has to happen, not something that happened because the characters haave come to an understanding.

And then there's the contingent of captured Japanese soldiers. I have no idea why there needs to be more than one, and their big nationalist moment towards the end of the flick is so ridiculous it's hard to fathom why the four people credited with the story thought it was a good idea. If the point of having them is to both "humanize the enemy" and to give us a moment of potential suspense where we're going to wonder if everyone, American and Japanese, will come together to fight off the flying creatures, the movie fails miserably at following through on it. And the "secret" payload that is under the direct command of the Colonel and locked in the belly of the plane is simply ludicrous. If the payload is meant to help express an anti-war sentiment, the movie makers also fail miserably at expressing that, too.

And excuse me, but why are the flying creatures ignored for large chunks of time? Why aren't they the main danger in the story, the thing the American and Japanese soldiers have to rally to fight against?

At least the effects are kind of interesting. The aerial dogfight scenes where the females pilot Japanese fighter planes against the flying creatures are neat, and the obvious CG planes never come off as annoying. The flying creatures are kind of cool, especially when they appear in groups. Like most Sci Fi Channel movies, the sound design isn't that great, so the flying creatures (and the machine guns and the explosions and the planes) don't come off as well as they probably should. I seem to be saying that quite a bit here. "Warbirds" should be quite a bit better than it is. But it isn't good at all.

Only see "Warbirds" if you're really, really, really curious, or if you're bored and you have nothing else better to do. Otherwise, avoid it. Although I think if someone with more skill and money decided to remake it, I think he or she'd have a pretty good movie on their hands. Maybe.

So what do we have here? Gratuitous war movie march music, hole digging, exploding styrofoam rock wall, gratuitous Japanese soldiers walking around with flashlights, lighting a flare, gratuitous flying creatures that may be dinosaurs, gratuitous hot WWII period dames flying military planes, gratuitous old photo of home, gratuitous lame radio pilot banter, a massive electrical storm, engine shrapnel to the forehead, a melting plane engine, buzzing the water, crash landing, searching the island, gratuitous handgun holsters to the side, potential moment where someone says they're all "up shit's creek" but it doesn't, a destroyed radio room, a flying creature attack, gratuitous young soldier crush, flying in formation, machine gunning flying creatures, wing skidding, a plane cut in half, sneaky Japanese characters, making a belly shirt, a military officer hanging off a cliff, diving into grass, a potential team up, gratuitous pushing huge fuel drums up a hill, a chick fixing an engine, shooting a flare gun, an oil explosion, stepping on a hand, eating a pilot in mid-air, beating a flying creature with a fire extinguisher, arm ripping, and a huge explosion.

Best lines: "That was swell, skipper, can we go back for my stomach now?," "Welcome to Hawaii, ladies," "Oh, and girls, if the brass come by, remember, chests out. That's what Uncle Sam likes to see," "What's up, skipper? Looks like they're out of grass skirts, Bets," "This is insane! She's handling like a pig!," "She's gone, skip. She's dead," "Please, Colonel, trust the skipper to get us through this. We do," "I promised myself I'd die happy in Clark Gable's bed and I ain't breaking that promise! Hold on!," "Okay, hold tight, this is going to be like putting an elephant in a steam trunk," "Enough of this crap! Surrender now or I'll blow your head off!," "Do you feel your death approaching?," "Do me a great service, Takashi, don't be in a rush to die. Young soldiers think they must rush head on into the grave. That is the tragedy of war," "Hey, skipper, is this really necessary?," "Got a canary on your tail, Betsy," "And you just got your ass kicked by a girl," "Nah, nah, not today you bastard," "You speak English? Obviously," "I have more important things on my mind than escape," "Looking for something, Captain?," "Back into the lion's den, Betsy," "Things have changed. This time we have ammunition," "Put down your weapon and no one will hurt you. We are not barbarians. We are not Americans," "Call me 'ma'am' again and I'll shave your heads," "That felt good," and "That was one hell of a firecracker you just dropped."

Rating: 5.0/10

Battlespace



And then there's "Battlespace," the super low budget sic-fi alleged movie from the fine folks at Maverick Entertainment, the people who brought the movie world "Doomed," a movie I reviewed for this very column not that long ago (you can read what I said about that flick here). Now, "Doomed" wasn't that great, but at least it kind of resembled a movie and had somewhat interesting stuff in it. "Battlespace," written and directed by Neil Johnson, isn't a movie. It isn't entertaining in any way. It is so freaking boring I have no idea why anyone involved wanted to keep their name on it. And I have no idea why Maverick Entertainment said, "Yeah, let's release this as is because it's fabulous."

"Battlespace" is a movie about someone in the future, I think, telling a story about something that happened in the past because the universe is coming to an end, humanity figured out how to put its conciousness in a computer chip, and it's that consciousness on a computer chip that will hopefully survive so whoever or whatever exists in a new universe knows that story and the story of humanity. The flick jumps for no apparent reason between the "real" world, where people are hooked on virtual reality, and some kind of futuristic world where a hot blonde warrior woman, Mara Shryyke (Eve Connelly) is a genetically engineered something or another being hunted by some guy for some reason. For most of the movie, Mara is walking around the desert, looking at the sky and the sand, collapsing for no reason beyond the director wanting to do a slow pull back to an aerial shot of Mara in the desert. All of this nothing is endlessly narrated for some reason by Mara's daughter (I have no idea who that is. I assume it's Connelly). And this narration just goes on and on and on, like someone reading a book nor related to what's happening on screen. Now, the people involved with this flick would probably say that the narration is essential to the story, that it is the story, but I beg to differ. Because you can't follow any of it, because you have absolutely no idea what the hell any of it has to do with what's going on, it's all irrelevant. I just can't fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea at any point, especially after it was completed.

Now, the flick does have a nice look to it. Hell yeah it's cheap, but so what? Eve Connelly looks great in her sci-fi warrior get up, and the outdoor settings and the CG environments and whatnot look neat enough. So why the hell didn't Johnson just play the movie straight, make it a low budget sci-fi chase movie? Did Johnson decide he didn't trust himself and figured he needed to explain what the hell was going on? Or did he just think he could make an even worse movie than Uwe Boll's "Alone in the Dark?" It sure as hell seems that way.

That's all there is really to say about "Battlespace." It's an incredibly stupid, boring, pointless movie, a total waste of time for the movie makers, the producers, the actors, and ultimately the audience. Avoid this movie. It sucks.

So what do we have here? Pointless exposition that has nothing to do with the story, space ships, gratuitous low budget special effects, sound in space, talking computers, endless narration, low budget space battles, exploding space ships, a first aid kit, gratuitous weird dreams, plastic guns, tumbling down a sand dune, gratuitous endless pull backs of the camera to a sky view, sand fruit eating, rock climbing, falling into water, throwing rocks at a force field, sneezing, a robot with a gas mask, killing a robot with a big rock, rocket riding, dragging a body, coat stealing, a prop gun from "Starship Troopers," gratuitous bad internal clock, an exploding planet, gratuitous "Infinity's Fantasy Dream 8" commercial, some bullshit about time travel, a lame ass fist fight on a space ship, and a bunch of shit that's supposed to be important but clearly isn't because the movie makes no fucking sense.

Best lines: "Are you coming home, mama?," and "Never mess with a 33rd century girl."

Rating: .5/10

***

Well, I think that'll be it for this issue. Despite this week's choices, B-movies rule. Always remember that.

"Warbirds"

Jamie Elle Mann- Max West
Shauna Rappold- Betsy Quigley
David Jensen- Colonel Hamilton
Lucy Faust- Hoodsie Smith
Gizza Elizondo- Vicky Teeling
Stephanie Honore- Lana
Tohoru Masamune- Ozu
Jon McCarthy- Sgt. Murphy
Caleb Michaelson- Sgt. John Lee
Brian Krause- Jack Toller
Dennis Nguyen- Takashi
Directed by Kevin Gendreau
Screenplay by Kevin Gendreau, based on a story by Kevin Gendreau, Christian McIntire, John Terlesky, and Scott Wheeler
Distributed by the Sci Fi Channel
Rated TV-14
Runtime- 90 minutes
It'll probably be on Sci Fi again soon

"Battlespace"

Eve Connelly- Mara Shryyke
Blake Edgerton- Roj Ussal
Iva Franks Singer- The Watcher
Spencer Slasberg- Cyrano
Paul Darrow- Horondo the Computer
Directed by Neil Johnson
Screenplay by Neil Johnson
Distributed by Maverick Entertainment
Not rated
Runtime- 83 minutes
Buy it here (although for the life of me why the hell would you want to do that?)