Tuesday, February 16, 2021

TERMINAL FORCE (1995) * ½

After a long, slow moving opening credits sequence (that’s only there to help pad out the running time), the plot begins.  Resistance fighters lose a battle to the evil Kyla (Richard Moll) who steals their sacred crystal.  With his dying breath, the resistance leader tells his sister (Brigitte Nielsen) that another crystal resides on Earth.  She beams herself down and tries to find it with the help of a nerdy archeologist (John H. Brennan) who just so happens to be on the run from the Mob.

This cheap looking sci-fi action flick steals ideas (and dialogue) from Star Wars and The Terminator.  The special effects are mostly terrible, but I did like the bit where the little kid morphs into a stop-motion assassination droid.  Once the action switches over to Earth, things get rather dire rather quickly.  There’s just too many subplots that gum up the works and get in the way of the main story.  The scenes involving the pair of detectives, played by Roger Aaron (Action Jackson) Brown and Cindy (Tron) Morgan, eats up a lot of screen time, and all the stuff with the mobsters was totally unnecessary.

Nielsen does as well as can be expected with the material she’s been given.  She looks good wearing her leather space garb (one character says she looks like Barbarella), but unfortunately, she is saddled with an annoying and wimpy archeologist sidekick who brings the whole movie down.  I usually like Moll when he’s playing the villain in cheesy sci-fi junk like this, but he’s pretty uninspired here.  Sporting long hair and a beard and wearing an armored cloak, he looks like a biker who works part time at Medieval Times. 

Director William Mesa provided special effects for Army of Darkness (which explains the random appearance by Sam Raimi as a sniveling, cowardly resistance fighter) and later directed the Mark Dacascos flick, DNA.

AKA:  Galaxis.  AKA:  Starforce.  AKA:  Final Force.  AKA:  Galactic Force.  AKA:  Star Crystal.

1 comment: