Primo esemplare

Ok, well, maybe it was! But don't be too hard on Mark Paul Gosselaar! He didn't do that bad of a job. I actually rented the movie because of him. I guess you would have to be a fan of his to enjoy the movie. It really dosen't make any sense. So, if you think he is cute, get it. I guess I am one of those people who actually liked Saved By The Bell. I like him as Zack better.

Young Mike Hillary dreams of fire which kills his mother. He starts sleeping in a bath even as a young man (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). He returns to his mother's home town and uncovers his secret origins with his superpower.

This is a mashup of various sci-fi premises. There is Firestarter, an X-Men, a Terminator, and a Close Encounter. All in all, it's a B-movie. It's not terrible. It tries but it doesn't have it.

Specimen, a direct-to-video science-fiction flick, is just about as terrible as you might guess. Mark-Paul Gosselaar (possibly one of the worst actors that have ever even made a film) plays a man who has always had a strange attraction to water and later finds out that he is the spawn of an alien and that another alien has come to Earth to kill him. Gosselaar--best known as Zack Morris on the terrible sitcom Saved by the Bell--is beyond terrible in a performance that makes Elizabeth Berkeley seem like the next Meryl Streep. (He is even worse in the even worse movie Dead Man on Campus).

This movie is a total waste of the thirty dollars it probably cost to make. Half a Star out of Four.

That was an hour and a half that I'll never get back. By the way, for a small town, that's one huge community centre. I was confused whether it was a school or community centre or a combination of both. Don't those kids belong in school?

This movie tried to be a combination of The Terminator, Firestarter and Starman, but woefully fell short of the level of intensity.

If you have nothing better to watch, or do, then sit back and watch, but don't expect to be thrilled. There's a reason this movie went straight to video. Mark-Paul must have been short of cash, because this role was beneath his talent.

I deliberately try and opt for a bad movie sometimes, just so that I can rag on it (I find doing so quite therapeutic), and Specimen bore all the hallmarks of a real stinker: a no-name TV director, Saved by the Bell's Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) in the lead, a dreadful DVD cover bearing the lousy tag-line 'Be very quiet... They might want you...'. But although the film is definitely a cheap piece of derivative cheeze, a mish-mash of ideas stolen from 'Firestarter', 'The Terminator' and a whole handful of other sci-fi films, it still managed to be slightly more fun than I had expected.

The film begins with a pre-credits sequence in which a young boy, Mike, somehow unwittingly causes fires in his sleep, resulting in the accidental death of his mother. That boy grows up to be Gosselaar, who—after the death of his grandmother—finds a box of his mother's belongings which leads him to her hometown in search of the identity of his father, and an answer to his uncontrollable pyrokinesis. All of this is handled pretty well by director John Bradshaw, and Gosselaar is actually decent; at this point, Specimen is shaping up to be a surprisingly classy flick.

And then 'The Terminator' arrives—or rather Eleven, an extraterrestrial in human guise (played by Doug O'Keefe, doing his best Schwarzeneggar), arrives—and the film becomes an unintentionally laughable mess. Eleven's mission is to find and destroy Mike, who is an alien/human hybrid, the result of his mother being abducted and impregnated by scientists from another world (and who can blame the naughty ETs? Mike's mother is played by the very probe-worthy Carmelina Lamanna, who flashes full-frontal during some flash-backs), but is thwarted by another alien named Sixty-six who happens to be Mike's father!

Matters get progressively sillier here on in, with the two aliens battling it out with each other while Mike tries to come to terms with his bizarre lineage and the fact that he might not be able to get it on with new girlfriend without causing her third degree burns. Expect a lot of pyrotechnics, a Terminator-style synth score, plenty of dreadful dialogue, no explanation as to why Eleven wants Mike dead, and an open ending that makes one wonder whether this was intended as a pilot for a TV series that (not surprisingly) never happened.