Super Tanker

After watching this movie, I would have to say that I would much rather watch this than to watch some of the newer blockbuster movies coming out these days (such as Madame Web), and this movie will get much more replay value for me than half of the nonsense on streaming services. True the CGI effects are cheap, the story is horribly written, the dialog is cheesy, and the characters are pure trope... but there is a balance of action and drama, and the soundtrack is fairly decent for a B movie. Yes this is a B movie, but it never claims to be more. Compared to the garbage out there these days that claim to be A movies and even claim to be GROUNDBREAKING, this movie does everything is promises to do and even a little more, so it has value in my book.

SUPER TANKER has to be the worst SyFy Channel-funded movie ever. Even the title is boring. This is the pits, worse even than all the dodgy disaster movies they make and the monster flicks combined. The plot involves some nuclear cloud that has the power to form and destroy whatever it comes into contact with, and there's a lot of stuff on ships with various officious types ranting and struggling to prevent a disaster and to cover the whole thing up before anybody finds out.

The film's leads are vacuous and wooden and the whole thing is only notable for the familiar actors they've roped into appearing; David Schofield and Ben Cross must have been really hard up to agree to star in this nonsense. The special effects of the cloud are just about adequate but the various CGI ships and helicopters are appalling indeed. I like the way the scriptwriter plays casual racism for laughs, nice touch there bud. Just kidding...SUPER TANKER is a real mess and has no redeeming features whatsoever.

Listen, not good. However, relatively speaking and compared to other films of this ilk, it isn't absolutely atrocious.

'Super Tanker' has a silly premise which isn't grounded in any way, I was never on a level other than fantasy - these films need to feel believable, this doesn't. The cinematography and dialogue is very poor, as are the terrible special effects.

The characters lack major development, though in fairness one or two have a background story at least. Still, most are badly written, especially Jacky Woo's Jackie; whose broken English is made fun of at least six times, that's lazy 'comedy'.

The editing and direction isn't great either, with a few scenes missing a conclusion; namely in the third act, one with Robert (Ben Cross) and one with Capt. Spyrou (Velizar Binev). Those two, Cross and Binev, are probably the best actors on display... not that that's high praise necessarily.

As noted at the top, I'm not definitively sure how or why but I actually come away from watching this feeling alright about it. It's clearly low budget and has all the hallmarks of a cheap production from companies like The Asylum etc., but it would be a lie to say I hated it.

I should have expected this, knowing SyFy's overall track record, which is a sprinkle of tolerable movies amidst a sea of awful and bottom-of-the-barrel ones. I can describe Super Tanker in several words and phrases, and super isn't one of them. More like hilariously awful and bottom-of-the-barrel. Is it the worst SyFy movie? Not quite, with Titanic II and Quantum Apocalypse. But it is down there in the bottom 10, maybe even bottom 5.

Actually, I would go as far to say that Super Tanker is one of the worst films I have seen in a while, making atrocities like 2010: Moby Dick, Camel Spiders, Almighty Thor, Dinocroc vs SuperGator AVH: Alien vs Hunter and Battle of Los Angeles Best Picture worthy in comparison.

Super Tanker, like a lot of SyFy's output looks really cheap. The scenery and settings have a really dull look to them, the costumes do look like they had been retrieved from a dressing up box and the effects are some of the most slapdash and inconsistent I've seen. Add to that, a really disjointed, predictable and sluggishly paced story, the cheesiest dialogue I have seen from any movie in the past three months, repetitive stock footage and clichés enough to fill a 500-1000 page novel and you have a film that is just as disastrous and the characters', none of which you care for by the end of the day, predicaments.

But I can't not mention the acting, which is either overdone(the admiral) or non-existent(the leads), even from the bikini clad girls. All in all, if I could rewrite the title I would call it Awful Stinker, it's that bad. 0/10 Bethany Cox

Usually only I am to blame for our "B" movie choices. My wife rolls her eyes at the latest turkey I have wasted time and hard-earned money on, but this one was her idea! It really is surely one of the most preposterously bad movies ever made in the hallowed annals of bad movies. It starts out well enough, a meteor falls to earth somewhere and scientists extract "dark matter" from it. It's downhill on a roller coaster from there.

Several of the cast have a reasonable pedigree, they don't look as if they are desperate to get in any movies going. So I can't see why they bothered to show up for this dud. To be fair, some of them did their best with the atrocious script and ludicrous "psudo science" (if that's what it was) The scene where they were all frantically tapping away on their laptops trying to "reconfigure a blank install" or whatever they called it had all the tension of three friends sitting in an internet café. When one of them announced "I can't hold it much longer, we're losing field integrity," I briefly recalled the original Star Trek and half fancied Scotty should make an appearance "The engines canna take much more, Cap'n" but that would have been too much to wish for.

The characters were mostly clichés. The Chinese man, played by someone called Jacky Woo, isn't even listed on the IMDb entry for cast (probably a wise career move on his part) His English was incomprehensible to anyone other than his two team mates, and the running gag of having the head of the military unit ask "What the hell did he just say?" was funny once, but got tired with over use.

Don't worry, I won't give away the "plot" (was there one?) The super tanker in the title seemed to have been mainly stock footage with a few scenes that my wife swears were shot with a plastic model floating in a large tank.

Even so, I laughed my head off throughout and enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way. Oh, and my wife? She slept from the first appearance of the "death cloud" until the end.