IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 21 minutes, rated an astonishing 6.2 by 42 cast members.
Genre: Sy Fy, incredulity
Verdict: [Gasp!] ‘Corner Gas’ it is not.
A skilled veteran is recruited for one last mission. Heard that one before, Rambo? This Rambino is overweight, with combo mullet-mohawk hair, slurs, slovenly, and waddles. He is the man for the job!
He blasts off from planet somewhere that looks just like Ontario to Earth in a CGI-take to capture the science experiment gone wrong which is wandering around the Pre-Cambrian Shield (look it up) looking for a pizza place. Instead he finds idiots.
It is hard to go on because the fraternity brothers interrupted my study of this celluloid with their demands for the remoter to change channels. I had to hold them off with one hand and that limited the note-taking.
The back story is that presiding genius Erica Benedikty made a six-minute project called ‘Phobe’ in a media studies course (which has much to answer for). She parlayed that into a feature-length script and found a backer to invest, sit down, $500,000 dollars of some sort, American, Canadian, Hong Kong, Liberian, Namibian, New Zealand, Singaporean, Taiwan, who knows. Full marks for initiative.
Erica became producer as well as writer and set to work. With a hangover the putative investor woke up and pulled out, but she went ahead, adding director to her list of credits, on the Niagara Peninsula at St Catherines and transformed it into a community project. Everything was done by amateurs. Again full marks, this time for persistence.
The result is several steps below the worst of Roger Corman. Who would have thought that possible?
The lines are delivered flat. The scenes are in private homes, an empty high school hallway, public sidewalks, and — the most interesting — a steel mill.
The femme fatale that Rambino has to rescue from Phobe (on whom more in a moment) is Chubby, slow-witted, and out waddles him. Phobe wears platform shoes inside boots to elevate him, three layers of hunter’s camouflage over a parka to give him bulk, and an arc welder’s face mask to make him, well, look like a hockey goalie.
In the end after a mano-à-mano struggle at the steel mill where miraculously Chubby knows how to operate all the heavy equipment, ah huh, Rambino and Phobe bond. Together they turn on the evil scientists who Xenoed Phobe and zero them.
The list of credits is torn straight from the St. Catherine’s telephone book and just about as long. After this the Ontario Provincial Police impounded Erica’s director’s chair for her own safety.
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