Starforce (2000)

Big fan of Amy Weber

Not a big budget movie but overall very well done. Great choice in actors. Amy Weber is dead gorgeous, and a perfect fit for her part.

Looking forward to more of your movies. August 26, 2006

Starforce...our motto is Duty Unto Death! (DUD? Yep...)

"A warrior and a beautiful ex-convict are left to fight the galaxy's most fearsome commandos in an alien wasteland." This is the plot outline for Starforce (2000) as listed on the Internet Movie Database...sounds kinda cool, doesn't it? Well, having just watched the movie, there's about four things wrong with the statement listed above...the warrior is more like a 2nd rate pilot in training, the beautiful ex-convict was beautiful, but didn't become an ex-convict until the end of the film, the galaxy's most fearsome commandos were anything but, and the alien wasteland looked a lot like some desert area in southern California...directed by Tony Kandah (L.A. Wars) and Cary Howe (666: The Demon Child), the film stars models turned actors Michael Bergin (Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding) and Amy Weber (Art House). Also appearing is Andy Garrison (The Postman), Nicholas Worth (Swamp Thing, Hell Comes to Frogtown), and Vernon Wells, whom many may remember from his first, real screen role as the psychotic biker Wez, a character that ushered in the fad of wearing chaps without pants, in The Road Warrior (1981).

The story begins with CGI spaceships attacking a colony, and a young boy, orphaned after his mother is killed, is adopted by a member of the Starforce, which is some sort of specialized military group of genetically grown super soldiers, only they're not really that super (here's something strange...wouldn't you think if you were going to genetically grow some super soldiers, you'd remove the trait that causes receding hairlines? Just a thought...). The boy, name Zed, grows into a man (Bergin), and with the aid of his surrogate father, becomes a member of Starforce (who's equipment looks much like that one would use in a paintball tournament), but is looked down on by his peers due to the fact he was born of woman, and not grown from a test tube. Anyway, after he graduates, he's sent on a mission to a remote mining planet called Osmar, but after a CGI malfunction, his ship crashes and he meets up with Dahlia (Weber), and discovers the colonists are really convicts sent there to work off their sentences, and also that he's a pawn in a much larger conspiracy, one that may end up not only killing everyone on Osmar, but tearing apart the Starforce itself...at least that's the nonsense they tried to push off one me...

Starforce has the appearance of a movie made for the Sci-Fi channel, but after seeing the lameness of the end result, they optioned not to show it (which means it would have to be really, really, really bad)...I will say the cinematography wasn't that bad, and the CGI work decent for a low rent production, but the real hurting comes in the form of the story, the script, and the acting. If you were to remove all the nonsense from the plot, strip it down to its' essence, you'd have about a twenty minute film. There was so much useless filler in between the plot points that it only served to bore me silly. I loved the fact that the other members of the Starforce group were all supposed to be created genetically superior...superior to what? They had some muscles, but they were all imbeciles with lousy attitudes...I think it's high past time to clean that genetic gene pool. As far as the script...well, its' feeble-mindedness and predictability was only highlighted by moments of sheer idiocy...but then this matched the performances by the actors in the film. Bergin is certainly an attractive man, and he actually didn't seem that bad, but that was only because I was comparing him to his co-star Ms. Weber, who was truly awful. Weber is really hot and infinitely cute, but a few months (or years) of acting classes wouldn't hurt her...I had originally thought she was wearing a padded bra during the film, but an inside source told me she had just gotten some work done (if you know what I mean, and I think you do), and chose to go sans a bra altogether, wanting to showing off her new yam yams (it must have been chilly during shooting, as often we're graced with t-shirt protuberances in the chestal area...seemed like she was always pointing somewhere). If this is the best these two have, they should really reconsider returning to modeling, and leave the acting to the professionals, of which there were a couple on hand, but they seemed more intent on picking up a check rather than doing a good job. Maybe they just understood the craptacular nature of the film and rode it out. As I mentioned the special effects weren't all that bad, for a low rent production, but who in the heck designed the space ships? They sure didn't look like anything that was meant to fly, much less fly in outer space. And here's something nick picky...don't you think it would be suitable to wear a helmet when flying a small spacecraft? Especially since you're not strapped into the seat? Obviously a helmet wouldn't do squat if your ship was blown up, but it might save your noggin if the ride got a little bumpy. Near the end of the film our heroes are confronted by a giant space ship, much like the Star Destroyers from the Star Wars films, you know, the ones that had thousands of crewmembers? Well, here, the heavy duty ship had a total of two crew members, and a captain...not only that, but the ginormous vessel could turn on a dime...you know, I generally try not to get too picky about minor faults or flaws within a film, as I don't feel I'm that retentive, but when a movie adopts shoddiness as its' milieu (a fancy way of saying the totality of one's surroundings), it's asking for the audience to tear it apart.

The wide screen print on this DVD looks better than I would have thought, and the dialogue is pretty clear, when it's not being over-powered by the musical score (which was actually pretty good). There are some special features like Spanish subtitles (no English ones), bios and filmogrpahies, and three trailers including one for this film, and two other stinkers called Terminal Error (2002) and Black River (2001), based on a story by Dean Koontz.

Cookieman108
February 13, 2005

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