Le chemin de la destruction

On a large oil rig platform, worth $14 million, many important people work. Attractive investigative reporter Danica McKellar (as Katherine Stern) is there, looking to prove oil companies dump chemical wastes. She is close to cracking the case when a horrible incident releases a black fuzz. The black fuzz begins killing workers and triggers a fire. Although she is hit hard on the forehead by a hook, Ms. McKellar is one of the few survivors. In the hospital with a white bandage on her forehead, McKellar realizes the black fuzz was a shady incident; it soon becomes a huge black cloud. Due to being so smart, McKellar is now hunted by oil executives...

McKellar escapes from the hospital and seeks help from attractive blond Chris Pratt (as Nathan S. McCain). The duo must try to escape from the clutches of oil executive David Keith (as Roy Stark) and save the world from the black cloud, which is causing weather to run amok all over the planet. Director Stephen Furst (as Louie Myman) serves double duty as Mr. Pratt's unlikely playboy pal. Direction and quick editing provide a little TV Movie excitement during the times when our heroine is on the run, but the nasty cloud is not exciting. There isn't much you can do when your monster special effects are a fuzzy black cloud and a shaky camera.

*** Path of Destruction (9/24/05) Stephen Furst ~ Danica McKellar, Chris Pratt, David Keith, Stephen Furst

I have to wonder if the people that produced this movie, were the same ones that made Steven Segal's "On Deadly Ground." Neither group seems capable of reading a map. They manage to "crunch" the 700 miles from Palmer, Alaska to Juneau, Alaska down to an afternoon drive -- and got there driving! At one point, the protagonists say they are "a few miles outside of Juneau." Cute trick; Juneau is landlocked!! There are only two ways in, by boat or plane. Driving there is not a possibility. And I am not going to even get into the numerous other areas involving locations that showed the makers of this movie never bothered to do their homework.

Poor acting, mediocre CGI and technical ignorance abound in this time filler. Some of the plot points don't hold up to even the barest scrutiny. They draft a bimbo reporter to serve as bombardier when they have an entire base of Air Force personnel to pick from? They push for an EMP bomb over a nuclear blast (the biggest EMP bomb there is, BTW) because radiation is too non-directional like shotgun pellets? Dental braces attract lightning? Come on. And why are molecular disassemblers causing storms and hail anyway? Even the bad acting and video game quality CGI could be tolerated with a little technical competence. The underlying concept is OK but the execution is pretty bad. Trying to guess which eastern European country is substituting for Alaska (and the winner is...... Bulgaria!) was fun. And David Keith and Stephen Furst chew the scenery in amusing if one-note performances. Any time you can completely and totally describe a character with two words, like horny yokel or corporate greedhead, you're in trouble.

I've watched worse, though. And can't David Keith get any better roles than these second rate Sci-fi channel crapfests? Every month he's in at least one (two this month) of these celluloid WMD's. He used to be somebody. Maybe he figured, "Hell, I'm already in Bulgaria filming Epoch 2, I'll just knock another one off while I'm over here". Maybe the beer's cheap. Who knows.

Although it looks like he did only 2 or 3 days of work on this utter shlockfest of a Sci-Fi Channel piece of junk, poor David Keith has his name attached to this garbage. At least he's working and drawing a check, but it's a long way from the Brubaker days ...

This sci-fi mess should be required viewing for all films students: as an example of what a film looks like when things go completely wrong. The production design is all but nonexistent, the direction is sloppy and terrible at the same time, the acting is as bad as it gets, and the script sounds like an 11th grade English class did it as a week-long project, an hour at a time over five days.

I'm still waiting for the David Keith / Keith David co-starrer. These are two good actors when they get good material, and they've suffered long enough in the B-movie realm. Tarantino, are you listening?

Most of what I was going to say has already been covered repeatedly. I just had to add the on the nose scenes were too much to bear. For example, a dad trying to get his two sons into nature while they ignored him and played computer games. Seriously you just plonked that there like that without even trying? "Hey we need a hackneyed cliché for this scene do we have any of those in stock?" Lets not try to set a scene, lets just straight up tell the viewer like we're the narrator in a kids play.

The bad acting, slow deliberate actions and blurting stuff out, it was a waste of time that only Danica made bearable.