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Someone has logically asked how as movie as bad as UFO: Target Earth could get financing. The answer may be that it was a college drama class production, one of those where everyone in it paid to be in it. Why else would college professors and a college graduate student be portrayed as so noble and wise? No one but themselves would think so. As someone who lived in a college town for 25 years, yours truly got to know them intimately. Literally, even dated a couple of the fem variety during desperate streaks. Never noticed any college professors having any of the aforementioned good qualities. The only things most college professors are good at is acting pompous, cussing, and consuming gargantuan quantities of alcoholic beverages. In the 1970's grad students were thought to be fonts of knowledge -- by themselves that is. They and their old drama class matron would make a movie like this.

The best thing about UFO: Target Earth is its title, which promises a good old alien invasion movie. Instead it delivers a boring, confused mishmash of UFO sighting lore, ESP pseudoscience, and New Age philosophy. Avoid this stinker of a movie. UFO: Target Earth is not even suitable for the most desperate of insomniacs. If watching this turkey is the only alternative to tossing and turning in bed, choose the tossing and turning.

It may not be fair to judge a television series by the first episode, but the first of the Doctor Blake Mysteries, Still Waters shows little promise. The series is supposedly set in the 1950's, but other than some old cars and blaring rock 'n' roll music, little is done to create the effect of the period. The exterior of the doctor's house looks like a 1980's style, and his own style is as politically correct as your most woodenly doctrinaire feminist school teacher. None of the actors, the director, or the script writers have any feel for the period.

Leading man Craig McLachlan in particular is not up to the role of Doctor Blake. He is supposed to be a WWII veteran, who was interned in a Japanese prison camp and has also suffered the loss of his wife and child in the war. But pretty boy, male model type McLachlan is simply too much the soft and comfortable looking Gen-X yuppie for us to believe he has ever had it rough. He doesn't really have much help the way his character is written. Doctor Blake is an insufferable prig, way ahead of his time and, oh, so superior to the other men of his association in his modernist views.. In fact the entire show is eaten up with socialist politically correct viewpoint. Director and writer should have heeded Louis B. Mayer's warning, "If you have a message, call Western Union."

The mystery itself is so elementary that even the greenest tyro at watching mysteries will easily deduce who done it. Especially since the culprit is broadly tar-brushed with the most one-dimensional unsympathetic treatment. Doctor Blake has only to be a little smarter than the dumbest of the cops to solve this one.

The Doctor Blake Mysteries: Still Waters is draggy, uninspired, sappy, heavy-handed, and unfaithful to its period setting, Only for the most desperate of insomniacs, zonked-out Gen-Xers, and brain-dead Millennials. Others should avoid it as if it were a kid with chicken pox.

It's hard to imagine a worse movie than Worriker: Turks & Caicos. It has replaced Mesa Of Lost Women (1953) (see my review) as the worst picture I have ever watched all the way to the bitter end. Admittedly I've been living a sheltered life by rarely ever watching a movie released after the early 1960's. While I have found most of the British and French televisions mysteries of the 'eighties and 'nineties very good, I wasn't prepared for how bad current movies can be.

Turks & Caicos is a two-hour exercise in boredom. Most of the running time is taken up by a gaggle of over-the-hill actors sitting around in a luxury hotel supposedly on a West Indies island just talking. Or better described as droning -- spilling out one long run of expository dialogue after another. Most of the time they face the camera rather than each other when talking. Perhaps this was to facilitate seeing the idiot cards they seemed to be reading their lines from. Millions of dollars and a number of moral issues are at stake in what they are droning on about, but no one ever shows any emotion. When they weren't babbling to each other, they were talking on the telephone. Is the modern generation so addicted to their cell phones they get a thrill just by watching someone in a movie using a phone? Praise God and pass the ranch dressing!

Bill Nighy is what passes as a leading man in this overpriced turkey. His leading lady Helena Bonham Carter was 47 at the filming date, but Nighy looks like her grandfather, poor old thing. He is supposed to appear the morally superior being in this silly overbaked, thrill-less political thriller because he looks sensitive-like around the eye wrinkles, and he buys lobsters for a little black kid. All tear ducts please squirt on cue!

The only reason I bought the Worriker miniseries with Turks & Caicos is that I once long ago spent a year and a month on Grand Turk Island and was hoping to see some familiar shots of the place. There were a couple of brief scenes of Nighy alone walking down a street that could have been at Grand Turk or elsewhere in the British West Indies. But mostly they just sat in chairs in the hotel that could have been anywhere, or on a beach that could have been anywhere. At least one beach scene had obvious back-projection suspiciously looking more like the English Chanel than West Indian waters..

Turks & Caicos Is poorly acted, prolix, humorless, and utterly boring. It lacks an intelligent story or even the slightest hint of dramatic engagement. Not a shred of wit can be dug out of the copious dialogue. This movie is a serious stinker. If you must watch a movie about a West Indies island, try King Of The Zombies (1941). It's not all that good either, but at least it is not pretentious like Turks & Caicos, and Mantan Moreland was at his worst a better actor than anyone in Turks and Caicos showed to be. Unless you derive a masochistic pleasure from being bored, avoid Turks & Caicos as you would swimming is shark-infested waters.