ORBzine - 2000.04 Cinema Movie Reviews

ORBzine - Movie Reviews April 2000

Lake Placid

Once you know that this film was written by TV supremo David E. Kelley [writer/producer of Ally McBeal] then everything about it makes sense. Bridget Fonda plays a ditzy, skinny little Ally McBeal type - totally at odds with her usual take-charge kind of role. Apparently Fonda was Kelley's original choice to play McBeal, and judging by this she would have been competent in the role.
Bill Pullman [Independance Day] and Oliver Platt [ Bicentennial Man ] are in the same job as Ms Fonda - tracking down a giant man-eating crocodile that has been discovered in the lake of the title. The celebrity guest-star is Betty White from Golden Girls, who has a totally hilarious cameo!
The good guys are camped out beside the lake, along with the sheriff and his crew. The deputies include, of course, a token black guy and a token female.
The first full-on view of the beast is a real shock - totally out of the blue, unlike a similar scene in Deep Blue Sea
The film is about 90 mins long - it seems to go on forever, but once it's over you realise there was actually very little to it.

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Galaxy Quest

This film rips the piss out of Star Trek and the Trekkies.
Tim Allen [the voice of Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story ] is a take on William Shatner; he plays an actor who played a Kirk-esque character in a Trek-type 1970s TV show called Galaxy Quest. Unlike Shatner, however, Allen's character is really shocked when he finds out that everyone thinks he's an arrogant loser.
Sigourney Weaver stars as a blonde actress who plays the crew's token bimbo. No doubt she was picked for the part because the Producers wanted a big-name star billed for the movie. The blonde wig and wonderbra take 20 years off her age!
Alan Rickman is the Spock of the crew. The image of a typical Shakespearean actor, he continually moans about how he did so much arty work and all he is remembered for is a trashy TV show.
Now their TV careers are well and truly over, the crew earn a living doing Conventions and the like for all kinds of oddball fans. Not for the first time, Allen gets taken for a ride by a group of these fans, who take him to their replica of the Galaxy Quest starship.
However, these fans are REAL aliens who think the show was historical records of real-life events! They have built a life-size, fully working version of the Galaxy Quest space-ship and need Allen's crew to operate it against a genuine alien menace.
A nice touch: Rickman's makeup disentigrates at the mission transpires, as does Weaver's costume.