Habitat

Never mind the guilty fact that i actually sat through the entire film, this was basically the worst movie i have ever seen. It it pretty much on par with Ridley Scott's LEGEND which was a fantasy stinker as well. They tried to save HABITAT with nudity, swearing, and teen angst. I thought it must have been an 80's film, set in the future, because it was such weird stuff. The costumes are reminiscent of some bad 80's drama, and the silver space suits belonged in a family channel robot movie. Shame on 1997 for releasing that garbage. As a point of reference: other films that came out in 1997 include Boogie Nights, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Life is Beautiful. Watch Habitat for kicks but don't expect to like it.

It's sometime in the near future when the ozone layer has been completely deleted, most animal species and nearly all vegetation have been destroyed and people can't go out in the sunlight without covering due to the UV rays. A small family move into a new town where the mad scientist father, working on "accelerated evolution," has an accident with the chemicals and ends up dissolving into a swarm of "elements" and turning their home into a virtual rain forest.

The teen son (Balthazar Getty) is immune to the radiation thanks to his parent's experiments and has some problems at school with bullies after falling for an independent-minded blonde cutie (Laura Harris, who's great). Eventually the house, itself a living being, fights back when misunderstanding townspeople invade. Alice Krige is perfect as a sexy, offbeat mother with wild flowing hair and long gowns and Kenneth Welsh scores as an obnoxious high school boxing coach.

Long lost director Rene Daalder, pretty much absent from the directors chair since his 1976 cult hit MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH, has crafted a very entertaining sci-fi film with a literate, funny, offbeat and intelligent script with a good, non-preachy environmental protection messages and some neat FX work.

This movie had some great ideas, but unfortunately the way it was made ... no, it is not boring, but it is not enough entertaining either - remote comes handy at many parts. Reading other comments I noticed with surprise how many people liked Alice Krige's performance. To me it was pathetic and pretentious at best. She plays her role with so much "sweetness" that any normal personal may literally throw up at the end of the movie like after eating few boxes of chocolates and drinking few cans of super-sweetened condensed milk. Both taste great in little doses, overdose end ups with vomits, and so is Alice Krige's performance here. However there is an instant cure for it, kind of vaccine - also contained within this movie as well ;-) Perhaps it is not "performance", I don't dare to call it that much, but lets just say that the extended scenes and closeups of nude Laura Elisabeth Harris, proudly showing off her nice, natural pair of breathing devices - they really made up for the damages done by Krige!(I dont want my post to be taken down in any near future for using anatomically correct - but politically incorrect - words like "bre_st", "ti_s" etc). So: if youre a straight male - rent it! Your eyes will enjoy Harris in her prime. And if youre a female - you may actually Balthazar Getty in his prime, or you may even like Krige's role...

My rating: 6/10 (solely for showing Laura Harris' great stuff in this movie).

Based on the promotional picture with the tag line "Welcome to a living Hell" you might be led to believe this is a horror. Don't be fooled. Habitat is a science fiction/thriller movie and much more like an Outer Limits story than a Dead Zone one. The story is one we have heard before: "We are killing Mother Earth". Hank Symes (Tcheky Karyo) has radical plans to put an end to this destruction. His plans "accidentily" include his family. This was not a box office hit. It is not a faced paced action movie like Running Man or Total Recall. It is a movie trying to highlight an underlying issue. It is very enjoyable. The acting is mostly solid with very good performances by the older performers. The story moves along quite well and the special effect are believable with some "Hollow Man"-like tricks. Habitat does contain some nude scenes, mostly topless, and some swearing. This is mostly not out of place or out of character but does limit the audience the movie's message could have reached. The movie carries a message that we all should start taking notice of. Overall an enjoyable movie for me and that is why a 7 out of 10.

Right off the bat it must be said that 'Habitat' is very poorly directed film, and as bad as the direction is the script (by Director Rene Daalder) is even worse. The script is so utterly derivative and over the top ridiculous that it's amazing the typewriter it was conceived on didn't explode in shame. It also contains some of the most astonishingly bad dialogue in recent years (The line "It's you isn't it? You're that one potato" deserves it's place in the bad dialogue hall of fame).

The special effects are equally poor, most of the time looking like something out of a bad 1980's Duran Duran video...And then there's the performances.

The term 'almost universally bad' springs to mind here. Balthazar Getty, Alice Krige and Chris Heyerdahl all act like they're in a coma, but compared to the rest of the cast thats a good thing. The rest of the cast ranger from truly bad (Bruce Mackay, Kris Holdenreid) to unbelievably irritating (Kenneth Welsh, Katherine Trowell, and Tcheky Karyo, who seems to have forgotten how to act altogether). In fact the only passable performance comes from Laura Harris, but even that's far from good.

Not even so bad it's good, this is a painful experience to watch and is utter crud even for the most ardent (or hard up) sci-fi fan. Stupid in the extreme, this has absolutely nothing to recommend it other than a little exploitative nudity (and if you're truly that desperate rent a porno or a Troma film instead) this is the type of film making that makes Ed Wood seem like a genius in comparison. 99 minutes of your life that you will never get back, this is the very definition of a terrible film. Avoid (and thank me later).