THE BLACK HOLE - Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Disney's THE BLACK HOLE - Down the Drain - Originally published 12/13/99


A black hole is a gravitational phenomenon so dense that nothing -- including light -- can escape it. Disney's 1979 sci-fi offering The Black Hole is much the same thing.

Hoping to cash in on Star Wars mania, Walt Disney must have thawed out for a few minutes and instructed his studio to make a really big budget sci-fi movie.

Unfortunately he went back into the freezer before giving anyone the slightest idea of how to go about it. So they therefore proceeded anyhow and made The Black Hole.

Of course, they knew they'd need a really young fresh cast for such a movie to succeed, but they never really got around to it, so they just rounded up the ones that were hanging around that day and came up with Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux, (pronounced Muuumuuux), Joseph Bottoms, and of course the swirling deadly gravity mass itself... That's right, Ernest Borgnine!

Basically it's the story of a madman, Dr Reinhardt (Schell), who lives on his giant spaceship with only some robots for companions. Some meddling kids show up and upset his plans for evil. There's a lot of talking, some menacing robots, talking, then talking, a big rolling fireball, some more talking and then nothing happens. Oh and there's something about a black hole, which actually looks more like a teal-blue bathtub drain.

The special effects aren't all that special and Dr. Reinhardt's spaceship looks like a giant greenhouse. The heroes' robot V.I.N.CENT, voiced by Roddy McDowell, looks like it's made of Tinkertoys and Tupperware pans...not that there's anything wrong with that. The movie also features a musical score that with give you motion sickness. Like most poorly conceived sci-fi movies, the ending is aggressively vague.

Real black holes suck in all matter which falls into their gravitational pull. Disney's, The Black Hole sucked up about 90 minutes of my life, in fact it just plain sucked!

WING COMMANDER - Some movies should have a reset button.

WING COMMANDER (the movie, not the game) Originally published 12/6/99


Video games based on movies are nothing new. I'd venture to say that nearly every successful sci-fi or action movie of the last 20 years has had a video game of some sort based on it. But in this case the game came first, which is a bad idea to say the least.

You see video games are basically point, shoot, score. Wing Commander, the movie, has less plot than that.

Wing Commander is the story of Lt. Christopher "Maverick" Blair (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Lt. Thomas "Maniac" Marshall (Matthew Lillard) who are both fighter pilots in a war against the Kilrathi, an alien race of big ugly cat-people. Blair is something of an outcast because he is half "pilgrim", a race of unpopular outcasts. There are of course the predictable clashes between Blair and everyone else due to this fact as everyone questions his loyalties. Also as in most films, David Warner shows up and then not much happens.

The special effects aren't bad, but they can't make up for the utter lack of interest you'll have in all the characters in this movie. The ending is predictable as Blair must prove himself to everyone in order to save the earth from the cat-people.

By the way, Wing Commander the video game starred Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill, guess he was too busy to star in the movie version.

To make matters worse I returned the tape late to BLOCKBUSTER, which means I had to pay extra to view it. BAH!