Alongside Night

Alongside Night is a fast paced drama / action adventure with significant implications for our future. It's full of great actors and well directed. Instead of relying on special effects and chase scenes it has a well thought out plot structure. The characters are interesting and appealing. You really get invested in what is happening to them. It's based on a novel that came out in 1982, predicting the massive economic problems facing the world now and has been upgraded to fit in well with the present day, futurism that is coming true before our very eyes. I strongly suggest that you see this movie before reading the novel to avoid spoilers, but I read the book when it first came out and still found it entertaining, a damn good movie.

The Libertarian view of the future is explored in this film Alongside nights which shows the USA approximately 10 to 15 years from now where we have bankrupted ourselves and our citizens with worthless paper money. So when Pat Boone tells you to buy gold, you'd better rush out and get a hunk of that stuff, preferably in Krugerrand form.

Warning all of this impending calamity is Nobel Prize winning economist Kevin Sorbo who's seen as a threat to the government which is as full of intrigue as any government in the Mid East now. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is now our secret police and they keep a lot of their own secrets. No mention is made of the FBI, Secret Service or the CIA, wonder where they all went. Our Armed Forces are useless, they're actually unionized and on strike.

Sorbo's precocious kid Christian Kramme an economics major and guerrilla fighter is the key player in this film. This is one badly directed, badly acted film by some players like Star Trek Voyager refugees Tim Russ and Garrett Wang who've seen better days.

So folks, stockpile your weapons and get your Krugerrands while you may.

While I'm sure its target audience, those who are already familiar with the source material, will probably enjoy this movie, for those of us in the mainstream, the whole thing comes across as a poorly thought out political screed. There's unexplained jargon thrown around, massive plot holes (the economy has collapsed, yet Vegas is still full of green grass? One of the least hospitable environments for such?), and a general tedium. The whole thing is clearly aimed strictly at its believers, or maybe those involved were so close to the material that they couldn't see the problems. Sorbo is properly credited as a lead, not just a day or two of filming, but most of the acting is passable, at best. Apologies for the lack of details, but I saw this a few months ago, and the finer points have mercifully faded from memory.

One of the ten worst English speaking movies of all time. Strap a suspected terrorist in a chair to watch a loop of this movie and in between screams he/she will confess to John F. Kennedy's assassination or to being behind fluoridation of drinking water ... for the love of Allah, just please stop the torture. Alongside Night is a pure vanity project by the book's author J. Neil Schulman. There are Youtube videos by 12-year-old kids that have more professional production values than this movie. Heck, there are silent movies made 100 years ago that were more professionally produced. The book could have come to life in a captivating movie if Kevin Sorbo had been able to bring in the production team from his old Hercules TV series, and the script had been written and the movie directed by professionals who know how to capture and entertain an audience.

Jeez Louise, where do I even start? Calling this movie a "train wreck" would be an insult to train wrecks. I doubt any train wreck could ever be as abominable as this movie is. Heck, I would rather be in a train wreck than watch this again. I've seen better acting in home movies (better production values, too). The dialogue is laughably bad. The pace is leaden. It's so torturously slow that it makes The Blair Witch Project look like a Road Runner cartoon. On paper, it sounds like a "so-bad-it's-fun" movie, but it's not. It's really not.

Imagine watching a grainy recording of paint drying, played in super slow motion, narrated by Gilbert Gottfried. Imagine further that you are being tickle tortured, having toothpicks stuck under your fingernails, and having teeth extracted without anesthesia all at the same time. Imagine further still that you are being force fed the contents of a septic tank while all this is happening.

If you can imagine all of this, then you have a pretty good idea of what watching this is like.