Tanker

As someone who loves Sci-Fi and who doesn't much care for the Sci-Fy channel's TV movies, I was very impressed to have my expectations upgraded slightly watching this film. The CG was certainly tolerable, acting considerably above what I expected, minus a few instances, and the music tracks were surprisingly well done to fit the scenes. Even the dialog was delivered believably in most instances. After having watched nearly 4-5 movies a week for almost 30 years I DO often judge books by their cover (Release information, budget and reviews included) when it comes to movies. Especially since IMDb came into existence. I gave it a 5 only because I remained interested the entire time and was actually surprised that I wasn't able to fully predict certain outcomes of various scenes.

It's not a smashing success but at least it doesn't insult your intelligence, make you squirm with eye-rolling incredulity, or bore you to the point of angry disinterest. It may be a 'B' film, yet it stands high on the shoulders of what is most often produced by the Sci-Fy channel. I would honestly recommend it for a rainy day.

I'm a sucker for shlock Saturday afternoon rubbish, ask any of my friends, but this is the all time worst steaming pile of poo I have ever had to watch. Worse than write by numbers, this turkey isn't even a serious attempt at taking the mick for laughs. It's just plain awful.

I will ask a random question, why is it that the only way SyFy films ever solve anything is by throwing nukes at the anomaly? Saves yourself the trouble, if this is on and there is absolutely nothing else on, stick Rocky Horror on the DVD or maybe early Doctor Who, at least you'll be happy and confident you didn't have to suffer.

On the other hand, Super Tanker is also a great way to torture your enemies, so it's not a complete waste of time I guess.

Usually only I am to blame for our "B" movie choices. My wife rolls her eyes at the latest turkey I have wasted time and hard-earned money on, but this one was her idea! It really is surely one of the most preposterously bad movies ever made in the hallowed annals of bad movies. It starts out well enough, a meteor falls to earth somewhere and scientists extract "dark matter" from it. It's downhill on a roller coaster from there.

Several of the cast have a reasonable pedigree, they don't look as if they are desperate to get in any movies going. So I can't see why they bothered to show up for this dud. To be fair, some of them did their best with the atrocious script and ludicrous "psudo science" (if that's what it was) The scene where they were all frantically tapping away on their laptops trying to "reconfigure a blank install" or whatever they called it had all the tension of three friends sitting in an internet café. When one of them announced "I can't hold it much longer, we're losing field integrity," I briefly recalled the original Star Trek and half fancied Scotty should make an appearance "The engines canna take much more, Cap'n" but that would have been too much to wish for.

The characters were mostly clichés. The Chinese man, played by someone called Jacky Woo, isn't even listed on the IMDb entry for cast (probably a wise career move on his part) His English was incomprehensible to anyone other than his two team mates, and the running gag of having the head of the military unit ask "What the hell did he just say?" was funny once, but got tired with over use.

Don't worry, I won't give away the "plot" (was there one?) The super tanker in the title seemed to have been mainly stock footage with a few scenes that my wife swears were shot with a plastic model floating in a large tank.

Even so, I laughed my head off throughout and enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way. Oh, and my wife? She slept from the first appearance of the "death cloud" until the end.

Listen, not good. However, relatively speaking and compared to other films of this ilk, it isn't absolutely atrocious.

'Super Tanker' has a silly premise which isn't grounded in any way, I was never on a level other than fantasy - these films need to feel believable, this doesn't. The cinematography and dialogue is very poor, as are the terrible special effects.

The characters lack major development, though in fairness one or two have a background story at least. Still, most are badly written, especially Jacky Woo's Jackie; whose broken English is made fun of at least six times, that's lazy 'comedy'.

The editing and direction isn't great either, with a few scenes missing a conclusion; namely in the third act, one with Robert (Ben Cross) and one with Capt. Spyrou (Velizar Binev). Those two, Cross and Binev, are probably the best actors on display... not that that's high praise necessarily.

As noted at the top, I'm not definitively sure how or why but I actually come away from watching this feeling alright about it. It's clearly low budget and has all the hallmarks of a cheap production from companies like The Asylum etc., but it would be a lie to say I hated it.

After watching this movie, I would have to say that I would much rather watch this than to watch some of the newer blockbuster movies coming out these days (such as Madame Web), and this movie will get much more replay value for me than half of the nonsense on streaming services. True the CGI effects are cheap, the story is horribly written, the dialog is cheesy, and the characters are pure trope... but there is a balance of action and drama, and the soundtrack is fairly decent for a B movie. Yes this is a B movie, but it never claims to be more. Compared to the garbage out there these days that claim to be A movies and even claim to be GROUNDBREAKING, this movie does everything is promises to do and even a little more, so it has value in my book.