Tanker

I watched this so you don't have to! Stumbled upon this amazing film tonight, and - what a treat! It is the most incredibly bad film I've seen in a long time. I found a steaming pile of Hollywood offal that makes you wonder whether studios are running off tax deductions alone.

It comes complete with just awful computer graphics, repeated pentagon stock footage and an appalling textbook plot. The scenes which were so badly stitched together, the noses were removed from faces with no bother to replace them... It had husky voiced commanders evil villainous admirals, innocent children crouching in paradise as the giant cloud causes the city to explode... and tough guys who won't give up. Oh, and the bird.

Even the bikini babes were C grade in this film. I just can't express how bad this film is. It could almost be a comedy if it weren't so poorly put together. I was laughing at the beginning, but dry reaching by the end. I was gasping for it like a drowning person running out of air. 1 out of 10.

SUPER TANKER has to be the worst SyFy Channel-funded movie ever. Even the title is boring. This is the pits, worse even than all the dodgy disaster movies they make and the monster flicks combined. The plot involves some nuclear cloud that has the power to form and destroy whatever it comes into contact with, and there's a lot of stuff on ships with various officious types ranting and struggling to prevent a disaster and to cover the whole thing up before anybody finds out.

The film's leads are vacuous and wooden and the whole thing is only notable for the familiar actors they've roped into appearing; David Schofield and Ben Cross must have been really hard up to agree to star in this nonsense. The special effects of the cloud are just about adequate but the various CGI ships and helicopters are appalling indeed. I like the way the scriptwriter plays casual racism for laughs, nice touch there bud. Just kidding...SUPER TANKER is a real mess and has no redeeming features whatsoever.

I don't understand the super-negative reviews here. I didn't find it to be the worst thing I've seen and I have seen plenty. Granted, the story is like a disaster template that basically the producers just change the issue and the venue, but the characters are basically the same type. In this case, stupid military types, a married couple that separate over some issue and then make up, then some heroic action that saves the world. You pretty much know how it will end, so you go along for the journey for entertainment. So Super Tanker wasn't all that bad, nor all that good, just average fare you might expect if you find this on YouTube.

Usually only I am to blame for our "B" movie choices. My wife rolls her eyes at the latest turkey I have wasted time and hard-earned money on, but this one was her idea! It really is surely one of the most preposterously bad movies ever made in the hallowed annals of bad movies. It starts out well enough, a meteor falls to earth somewhere and scientists extract "dark matter" from it. It's downhill on a roller coaster from there.

Several of the cast have a reasonable pedigree, they don't look as if they are desperate to get in any movies going. So I can't see why they bothered to show up for this dud. To be fair, some of them did their best with the atrocious script and ludicrous "psudo science" (if that's what it was) The scene where they were all frantically tapping away on their laptops trying to "reconfigure a blank install" or whatever they called it had all the tension of three friends sitting in an internet café. When one of them announced "I can't hold it much longer, we're losing field integrity," I briefly recalled the original Star Trek and half fancied Scotty should make an appearance "The engines canna take much more, Cap'n" but that would have been too much to wish for.

The characters were mostly clichés. The Chinese man, played by someone called Jacky Woo, isn't even listed on the IMDb entry for cast (probably a wise career move on his part) His English was incomprehensible to anyone other than his two team mates, and the running gag of having the head of the military unit ask "What the hell did he just say?" was funny once, but got tired with over use.

Don't worry, I won't give away the "plot" (was there one?) The super tanker in the title seemed to have been mainly stock footage with a few scenes that my wife swears were shot with a plastic model floating in a large tank.

Even so, I laughed my head off throughout and enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way. Oh, and my wife? She slept from the first appearance of the "death cloud" until the end.

As someone who loves Sci-Fi and who doesn't much care for the Sci-Fy channel's TV movies, I was very impressed to have my expectations upgraded slightly watching this film. The CG was certainly tolerable, acting considerably above what I expected, minus a few instances, and the music tracks were surprisingly well done to fit the scenes. Even the dialog was delivered believably in most instances. After having watched nearly 4-5 movies a week for almost 30 years I DO often judge books by their cover (Release information, budget and reviews included) when it comes to movies. Especially since IMDb came into existence. I gave it a 5 only because I remained interested the entire time and was actually surprised that I wasn't able to fully predict certain outcomes of various scenes.

It's not a smashing success but at least it doesn't insult your intelligence, make you squirm with eye-rolling incredulity, or bore you to the point of angry disinterest. It may be a 'B' film, yet it stands high on the shoulders of what is most often produced by the Sci-Fy channel. I would honestly recommend it for a rainy day.