THE APOCALYPSE (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

You know, I can live with a low-budget film that has characters behave like idiots, as long as it's diverting to look at. But when the look of the film is repulsive, that's another thing entirely.

Curiously, the writer credited with THE APOCALPYSE co-wrote, in the previous year, a serviceable space-adventurer in TIMELOCK, which even shares some similarities to the later film in featuring what I called a "tough girl/weak guy teamup." But TIMELOCK also had a different director, which may be the reason the look of that film didn't bug me. It's one thing to stage the whole film in a series of grey-metal corridors that are supposed to be the insides of space vessels. But does every actor in the film have to be wearing brown, black and white garments?

The setup: The Agamemnon, a ship carrying a cargo of unstable materials, is taken over by an insane computer hacker named Goad (Laura San Giacomo). After causing the deaths of the crew, she sets the ship on a collision course with Earth and records, for a non-existent posterity, a series of password requests for anyone who might want to override the ship's course, all of which messages are quotes from Shakespeare. Then I guess she offs herself, since she's never seen except as a computer-representation.

On Future-Earth, cargo pilot J.T. Wayne (Sandra Bernhard) is drinking at a bar, wanting to be left alone for some unspecified reason. Bartender Lennon (Cameron Dye) makes some overtures about wanting a berth on her next run, and she shoots him down. Another barfly spills a drink near Wayne and she slugs him, obliging the bartender to shoot her down, with an entirely modern-looking stun-gun. 

An associate named Noel bails Wayne out of jail and talks her into captaining a salvage mission to reclaim the supposedly dead vessel Agamemnon. For some reason Noel wants Bartender Lennon to go along; I never figured out why, unless it's because it was in the script. Not only does Wayne have to tolerate this exigency, Noel informs her that the only other crewmen he can get are associated with Wayne's former boyfriend Vendler (Frank Zagarino). Wayne accepts this condition even though, as she'll later reveal to Lennon, she knows Vendler's a rotter and his crewpeople are likely to be rotters too.

Sure enough, once the salvage ship nears the Agamemnon-- everyone still unaware of the ship's pre-set course-- Vendler and his buddies take over the ship and kill everyone not on their side. Wayne and Lennon manage to avoid the assault and keep clear for a while, and in the meantime Vendler's crew boards the death-ship. Vendler's computer-tech interacts with the ship's computer and starts trying to work his way through the password-challenges, which depend on the programmer's knowledge of Shakespeare. (These sequences provide the film's only moderate entertainment.)

Eventually, the programmer finds out that he can't crack the computer's override protection and tells Vendler that they have to leave the ship before it collides with Earth. And here's the film's really stupid part: the obsessed villain won't let his own crew save their lives, and most of the other henchpeople follow his lead. In fact, Vendler beats up a blonde henchwoman-- his new girlfriend-- when she defies him, and then lets one of the other henchwomen kill her. At least in TIMELOCK, the villains, a bunch of prison escapees, were seeking freedom at any cost.

Lennon, to his credit, does prove useful to Captain Wayne a few times, so he's not a complete weakling. But the funniest scene in the movie takes place after Vendler captures the duo and locks them in what looks more like a lion's cage than a brig. Knowing that Vendler will get ticked off by seeing Wayne have sex, the two heroes pretend to be humping-- though neither of them takes any clothes off, particularly where it would be absolutely necessary to do so.

The funny scenes are too few and far between to dispel the boredom though. Dye and Zagarino are competent in their roles, but Bernhard is one of those performers who's totally unable to play roles not set in her own timeframe. Arguably she's even harder to watch in this role than the ugly attire and scenery, even though she tries to put a certain gusto into her part. I assume the film went straight to home video, because I can't imagine anyone trying to make patrons pay for this mediocrity.