Meteor

Strictly for laughs, but it entertains so well on that basis. It's yet another rampaging rock from the cosmos, ready to blast us all.

A hodge-podge of "intertwining" human interest soap opera subplots parade by as the meteor inexorably wends its way towards the 3rd rock from the sun: 1) the physicist who's doing a Perils of Pauline impression. She's the key to survival or destruction, as she races the meteor to her goal. She's in and out of every life-or-death situation you can imagine, mostly contrived clichés that are so routine after a while they become ridiculous.

2) Army guys and scientists argue about how to use nukes. No comment necessary on this item; just have a good laugh. 3) There's a good cop and a bad cop running around trying to croak each other. It has absolutely nothing to do with the rogue meteor plot, and you keep wondering if this pointless side line will ever be tied in to what's going on.

Conveniently, there's always a dropped cell phone call. This happens so much you'll expect that cell-phone salesman guy with the horn rimmed glasses and 500 friends behind him to pop up out of the bushes. Nobody buys gas any more apparently, so every car in the movie runs out of gas in important situations (look for the character who notes the empty tank and then looks under the hood for some odd reason). Beware of meteor shards that zoom into nearby impact at just the right moment to drive the plot along. Scientific inaccuracies, as expected, are numerous.

At least it's as free as it is brainless. Plenty of fun, too.

I don't understand how so many proved actors could be associated with such an amateurish, embarrassingly bad show. I mean, this is "pre-Film School" amateur, not even "I graduated with a C-average from Film School" bad.

Really, how did Christopher Loyd, Billy Campbell, Jason Alexander, and Ernie Hudson get roped into this? Did they read the script? Did they miss the part that said, "Car runs out of gas. Smoke pours out of the engine."

It also occurred to me that one of the biggest downfalls of these cheesy mini-series is the music. I counted at one point, in a 30-second clip, they changed the music 4 times for painfully obvious cues: perky music for the teenager--cut to: hopeful music for the family--cut to: dark music for the meteors hurtling to earth--cut to: suspenseful music for the frustrated scientist. A touch of subtlety would do wonders for these horrific productions.

I thought the "Impact" mini-series was bad, but boy, this one made that look like pretentious art.

This is teeth-numbingly, mind-bendingly, I'd-rather-do-a-gym-workout while sitting-on-a-cheese-grater-all-day than-continue-watching-this-after-20-minutes bad. Don't get me wrong - I LIKE bad TV... But this is only about the 5th show, of I'll-guess-at-40,000 TV shows I've seen in my lifetime, that I've HAD TO turn off mid-way through, it's THAT awful. There's no acting, no storyline, no character development - just knee-jerk reactions of the cast to the script, apparently written on the back of an envelope while the writer was watching all the other meteor movies he could rent for ideas, squeezed into a half-price video store rental weekend. A BIG, BIG waste of time.

According to the "Full cast and crew" list, the "writer" is known primarily for "writing" the scripts for "WWF Smackdown" or whatever one calls that fake wrestling crap. It shows--absolutely no subtlety or depth, nothing original, cardboard characters, standard disaster-movie format (various soap-operas wrapped around a catastrophe), minimal science and generally speaking, nothing worth recommending. I'd give it one star, but some of the special effects were tolerable. Barely. So if you're bored--and boy, you'd have to be REALLY bored--go ahead and watch it. Drugs and booze might help, but you'd have to do dangerous levels to even come close to enjoying this gobbler...and then, you'd probably just fall asleep. Which might be best.

This is quite possibly the worst made for TV movie ever and I'm even throwing in some Lifetime movies to come up with that.

Yes it does have a good cast, but GOD, please write some decent dialog for them. And how can 1 plot point turn up over and over again. The vehicle running out of gas was used twice. The funniest part was the vehicle that ran out of gas and the next scene shows them with the hood up and the thing has overheated. I HATED how the transition animation kept being used to switch from location to location. I guess they had to eat up time to split this garbage over 2 nights.

Back to the cast: the "big name" actors did an okay job, but the new faces that were featured need to try to have themselves digitally removed if they want to continue with a career. Terrible acting and terrible dialog are a bad combination.

I could go on and on.