Tanker

I watched this so you don't have to! Stumbled upon this amazing film tonight, and - what a treat! It is the most incredibly bad film I've seen in a long time. I found a steaming pile of Hollywood offal that makes you wonder whether studios are running off tax deductions alone.

It comes complete with just awful computer graphics, repeated pentagon stock footage and an appalling textbook plot. The scenes which were so badly stitched together, the noses were removed from faces with no bother to replace them... It had husky voiced commanders evil villainous admirals, innocent children crouching in paradise as the giant cloud causes the city to explode... and tough guys who won't give up. Oh, and the bird.

Even the bikini babes were C grade in this film. I just can't express how bad this film is. It could almost be a comedy if it weren't so poorly put together. I was laughing at the beginning, but dry reaching by the end. I was gasping for it like a drowning person running out of air. 1 out of 10.

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.

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.

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.

I should have expected this, knowing SyFy's overall track record, which is a sprinkle of tolerable movies amidst a sea of awful and bottom-of-the-barrel ones. I can describe Super Tanker in several words and phrases, and super isn't one of them. More like hilariously awful and bottom-of-the-barrel. Is it the worst SyFy movie? Not quite, with Titanic II and Quantum Apocalypse. But it is down there in the bottom 10, maybe even bottom 5.

Actually, I would go as far to say that Super Tanker is one of the worst films I have seen in a while, making atrocities like 2010: Moby Dick, Camel Spiders, Almighty Thor, Dinocroc vs SuperGator AVH: Alien vs Hunter and Battle of Los Angeles Best Picture worthy in comparison.

Super Tanker, like a lot of SyFy's output looks really cheap. The scenery and settings have a really dull look to them, the costumes do look like they had been retrieved from a dressing up box and the effects are some of the most slapdash and inconsistent I've seen. Add to that, a really disjointed, predictable and sluggishly paced story, the cheesiest dialogue I have seen from any movie in the past three months, repetitive stock footage and clichés enough to fill a 500-1000 page novel and you have a film that is just as disastrous and the characters', none of which you care for by the end of the day, predicaments.

But I can't not mention the acting, which is either overdone(the admiral) or non-existent(the leads), even from the bikini clad girls. All in all, if I could rewrite the title I would call it Awful Stinker, it's that bad. 0/10 Bethany Cox