Abraxas - O Guardião do Futuro

This film is so awful - anyone with a good sense of humor MUST see it. I laughed more in this movie than any intentional comedy I've seen in years. Atrocious dialogue. Strange, creepy scenarios featuring Jesse Ventura and a mute little boy that were supposed to be emotional and touching but seemed to accidentally imply some kind of molestation. Random lines about the "comater" and the "anti-life equation," which are never explained. Attempted humor that is so not funny it's hilarious. Extremely painful soundtrack. A desperate Jim Belushi cameo with a progression of dialogue that ends up making no sense.

Everyone must see this movie. Show your friends. Besides Joseph Merhi's "Mayhem," this is the funniest terrible movie I've ever seen.

Wow, this film is good! Jesse the Body! Space! Aliens punching and kicking! Boy! I have no idea what is happening at any point in this film! At one point Abraxas removes his shirt and tells a small boy a tender story! I hated that part! And Abraxas also sticks his head out of a lake and yells for forty five minutes! What else happens? Oh yeah, he like gets out of a car and says he has to find the bad guy, and it's so funny but it's really hard to explain why. Sorry, I'm not doing a very good job. But see this movie! Please!

OK. Nobody in their right mind could have expected much from this movie. But even though I knew Jesse Ventura was the headliner and that the budget was low, I didn't expect this film to be as bad as it was. The most glaring problem, surprisingly, isn't the acting. It's the sound. Ventura enunciates so poorly that it is easy to miss half of his lines (not that it matters in terms of moving the "plot" forward), and the sound itself is reminiscent of 16mm home movies. Expanding on the awfulness of the recording quality is one of the worst background soundtracks I have ever been forced to endure. Improvisational jazz, a U2-clone new wave band, and what sounds like a 12 year old with a Casio keyboard are randomly applied to the scenes in a manner reminiscent of the classically awful soundtrack of Manos: Hands of Fate. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/usercomments?start=10

Ventura and his arch-enemy (Sven Thorsen playing a cross between Grizzly Adams and Arnold Schwarzeneggar) don't bother with facial expressions, changes in pitch or intonation, This is probably a good thing, because the rest of the cast is actually passable. James Belushi's cameo is the highlight of the film. His scene is really quite funny, and placed well in the film, since it is likely to bring some viewers back from the brink of suicide. Damian Lee has a remarkable repertoire of poorly made extremely low budget films, and Abraxas is, amazingly, one of his better efforts.

The "plot" consists of two super-beings, one a rogue and the other a kind of intergalactic super-cop, who have arrived on earth. The rogue immaculately conceives with a human in order to spawn "the com leader" (At least I think that's what they call it - the sound is so bad that even after hearing this about 50 times in various accents, I still don't know what was being said). The com leader is a little boy who has the ability, when upset, to light fires and "spontaneously combust". Remarkably, the writers do not seem to have been aware that this phrase connotes self-immolation, not destructive potential. Abraxas' job is to stop the rogue, and to kill the 'com leader'. The Com Leader's mother is played by Marjorie Bransfield (the class of the acting talent here), and she appeals to Abraxas' super-humanity in an effort to save her son.

Predictable is too subtle. This film is frankly obvious from beginning to end. I can't recommend it to any but the most disciplined bad movie watcher.

The overall story is not dreadful, but it plays along as if a 10-year-old wrote it. Combine that with sub-sub-par acting, minimal (at best) effects work (someone had a lot of fun with gasoline explosions), and a soundtrack that sounds like it came straight from a bad '70s porn flick, and you end up with "Abraxas." There are a few funny parts, though. One was Jim Belushi playing a principal named "Latimer." That was his character's name (and position) in his earlier movie, "The Principal." The other was a character saying "a parsec is not an acceptable unit of time measurement on Earth." Obviously, a nod to the infamous "Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs" line from Star Wars. Overall, if you don't *have* to see Abraxas, don't.

Pitifully bad direction and a story that borrows liberally from "The Terminator" and "Firestarter", producing a hybrid that is strictly second-rate. Ventura and Throsen do make a fun pairing, though, but there are too many anticlimactic fight scenes between them; Ventura is a galaxy cop and Thrsen is his renegade ex-partner out to figure out the secret to "anti-life", whatever that is.

A forgettable film that poses as science fiction but is really about big sweaty guys fighting in poorly staged battle royales (in Sam Peckinpah-style slow motion, no less). To be avoided by even the B-movie fan in search of derisive laughter.