Termination Point

Seeing that this film was shot in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada and that's where Jason Priestley is from it seems as good a reason as any to shoot the thing. I'm betting Priestley was helping out the local film industry.

Priestley plays a government investigator trying to track down rogue scientist Lou Diamond Phillips who looks a bit Jerry Lewis in the Nutty Professor. He's developed a device that looks like a cellphone and it can take you out of time and space and put you between dimensions.

Which is what Phillips does when some military types send a couple of jet fighters to shoot the plane that he and Priestley's wife and daughter are on. The whole airline goes into a wormhole that threatens to destroy all life and the universe itself.

Usually these time travel films kind of fall short on recognized science and Termination Point is no exception. It's midpoint between a science fiction and a disaster film and doesn't succeed really as either.

Here's an ultra low-budget sci-fi thriller starring a couple of past-it actors and a plot augmented by some decidedly cheesy special effects. The narrative kicks off with a passenger plane disappearing mid-flight, and it soon transpires that it's been sucked into a wormhole and now exists in some timeless limbo.

Of course, some nefarious government guys are the ones responsible, and the film incorporates B-movie favourite Lou Diamond Phillips (A BETTER WAY TO DIE) as the crazy scientist who thought up the time-travelling contraption in the first place. The good news is that there's a hero on the scene, played with a distinct lack of relish by former heart-throb Jason Priestley (BEVERLY HILLS 90210).

Priestley's role consists of running around and shooting various bad guys, although the less said about his emoting the better. Half the film is set on the plane, and these moments have some of the natural tension of a hostage drama, but said tension is dissipated by a series of excruciatingly awful special effects which look like they belong in a Nintendo video game mid-1990s. Still, I preferred TERMINATION POINT to the mindless disaster flicks these studios normally churn out; at least it's a little more inventive than them.

It's certainly more entertaining and thought out than a lot of the sci-fi flicks that make it into theaters these days. It has a decent storyline and a proper sequence of events that's neither too complicated or confusing. Thus it doesn't require much thought, so it is like a light hearted sci-fi thriller. The acting was good, Jason Priestley does a very good job portraying his character, plus he looks good.The special effects were pretty amateur. You can tell that the helicopters are toys and all the lightening bolts are quite fake. However, that did not get in the way of enjoying the movie. It probably doesn't deserve the 7 I rated it but I wanted to almost neutralize all the terrible comments since there are far worse movies that make it to theaters which many people go see, and this one is actually pretty good. If someone wanted to watch it for the first time I'd probably see it with them again.

The plot: A teleportation device opens up a wormhole over California, threatening to suck in our entire universe.

Termination Point is a stupid movie, but it's not boring. A good argument could also be made that it's a bad movie, but I was still able to watch it to the end. I think that counts for something. Anyone who watches a TV movie starring Jason Priestley and Lou Diamond Phillips probably knows exactly what he or she is walking into, so I probably don't need to give any warnings about quality.

Essentially, this is a cheap, poorly acted TV movie, and any attempt to make sense of it is doomed to failure. Luckily, the technobabble is kept a minimum, though some of the scenes are a bit too long. If you've got a degree of patience for that sort of thing (and you're forgiving of cheesy plots), you might be able to wrest some entertainment from this movie.

Bad tech, bad acting, just plain bad. Budget was obviously too low for this ambitious project.