Savage Planet

I can't even go for a three! SciFi should be ashamed. This one's a stinker! Not just the effects (non-existant except for the deep space teleporter), but the acting (pitiful). May it never darken your TV set! 10 lines of comments, huh? Hmmm, well, the lead character, Cain, is the guy from The Dead Zone who Johnny Smith sees will cause a nuclear destruction of Washington, Greg Stilson. His acting skills were perhaps the best of the rest of the team, but that is really not saying anything! The opening scene of the LSD camera work while two people were swinging machetes was so predictable, it was ridiculous! "Gee, I didn't see you walking in front of me when I cut your hand off!" Sheesh! Well, that's 10 lines, about 8 lines too many! ;-)

We all know that a movie billed as a "SciFi Channel Original" is pretty much guaranteed to be terrible. But in a galaxy of terrible movies, this is about the worst I have seen. Worse than "The Bone Snatcher." Even worse than "Dog Soldiers." When I saw the ads for it, I thought it looked like it might be along the lines of "The Legacy of Heorot," an excellent Larry Niven sci-fi action adventure novel. Not even remotely like it, unfortunately.

Let's put it this way: No story. No acting. No production values. Not even any interesting action sequences. The only, and I must emphasize ONLY, thing that raises this from a 1 to a 2 is that Reagan Pasternak ("Allison") looks rather nice in a few scenes.

Hey, I knew it would be bad going in...but no way did I ever expect anything this bad.

I have watched large portions of this movie twice now, and am puzzling over what the purpose of it was. I mainly watched it because Lou D. Philips is listed in the cast, but as far as I could tell, he was nowhere to be found in it. Did I miss something? Otherwise, it has the world's worst cast of generic actors imaginable fighting big bears on a remote planet. Horrible. At one point early on, a woman runs away from one of these big bears and the folks back at camp stand and listen to her scream for help. Suddenly. her head comes rolling into the camp, right up to their feet. But the gal was supposedly quite a distance from camp by then, so all I can think is that bear must have one hell of an arm. I didn't even have to look to know this was a Canadian job. Everybody is doggoned serious. If it were a Hollywood hack job, it would at least be campy.

Now, given that this movie was made for the Sci-Fi Network (now the SyFy Network), and that I had previously seen a number of other movies made for this network - all of them being terrible - my expectations were very low when I sat down to watch "Savage Planet". But I was just *stunned* by how bad this Canadian-American co-production was. The special effects are some of the worst I've ever seen in a movie, using real cheap CGI that looks nothing like real life. But the movie also has a stupid script, with a story that just has the protagonists moving around for most of the movie, alien animal life that looks exactly like grizzly bears on earth (and apparently ONLY grizzly bears - no other animals are seen in the entire movie!) The actors apparently knew they were in a turkey, because no one even tries to give a good performance. I know that the movie might sound like some kind of a camp classic, but it is simply so bad it's bad. It actually makes some other SyFy network movies look decent by comparison!

A guy gets his hand cut off and falls down a hole into some goo and his arm regenerates in a really silly looking way. Then a bear murders him. This all happens in the first five minutes or so of movie, so i wouldn't really consider it to be a spoiler. As for the way that his hand grows back, lets just say it looks bad. And I mean, worse CGI than the cut scenes for the PC game Fallout, which came out in '97. Anyway I would honestly have to say that "Sabertooth" was a better movie.

Just think about that statement. If Sabertooth is better than your movie, WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOUR MOVIE?

I gave this movie a 3 because it had SOME funny parts, and i have certainly seen far worse, but they actually tried to give it a happy ending, which would lead me to believe that they were actually being serious about it. Actually being serious about a movie that is worse than Sabertooth? Big no-no.

Definitely watch this movie if you like seeing the same shot of a bear's face over and over again with people screaming in between zooming in and hardly any science fiction other than as a poorly designed plot device to put the main characters in an isolated environment with bears.