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14 reviews in total

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
12 Big Reasons to See DARK UNIVERSE, 31 December 2002
Author: kefkajr from Everglades

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

SPOILERS!

1) The stupidest looking monster you may ever see 2) Pair of boobies shown just to keep your attention 3) Killer armadillo...in a swamp? 4) Laughable effects 5) Orange stuff that kills 6) Award-winning performances by Joe Estevez and others 7) Finale that takes a jab at the infamous ending of STAR CRYSTAL 8) Nature documentary footage galore 9) Humorous use of blood/gore 10) An astronaut that is apparently unaffected by gravity and doesn't wear a space suit of any kind 11) Fred Olen Ray, Steve Latshaw, and Jim Wynorski all in the same opening credits...now we know we're in for a treat 12) Another pair of boobies shown for little reason

Well, this is what I call a "crap classic" and it's such a prime example, I just couldn't write a conventional review. If you're a fan of bad movies get ready for the ride of your life.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A cinematic black hole from which there is no escape, 27 April 2006

Author: Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

You know a film is basically destined to stink worse than dirty old socks when the eternally quality-impaired Fred Olen Ray and the comparably talent-barren Jim Wynorski are listed as executive producers (worse yet, Ray also co-wrote the "original" story!), longtime hack actor Steve Barkett receives special guest star billing for his quick pre-credits appearance as a doomed astronaut and Martin Sheen's terminally drab, anything but a chip off the ol' block brother Joe Estevez is the closet thing to a name actor in the entire cast. The horrendously derivative rag-bag premise writes a paltry check that the feeble film itself doesn't even come close to cashing: A huge, fanged, drooling dinosaurian beastie stows away on a spaceship which crash-lands in the dense, verdant, real ferny and swampy Florida bayou. Said bulky ugly creature proceeds to munch on lots of folks, causes several local animals to transform into murderous mutants (the ferocious killer puppet armadillo is pretty laughable) and even makes similarly infected humans metamorphosize into your standard blank-eyed, pasty-faced lethal zomboid ghouls.

Steve Latshaw's flaccid direction fails to inject any sense of style or vigor into Pat Moran's threadbare script, which in turn serves as a horrible catalog of every last error one could possibly find in The Bad Movie Book of Serious Cinematic Sins. Said sins include a numbing surplus of dreary chitchat, painfully stilted dialogue (among the choice clunky lines are "I like to watch the news sometimes, but Tom he calls it propaganda" and "This boy scout isn't going to help us find anything"), too much meandering around the woods in circles filler nonsense, a grave lack of any inspired or interesting individual flourishes, a poky stab at narrative thrust and, perhaps the picture's grossest, most unforgivable mistake of all, an insipid assortment of tiresomely one-note stereotypical characters (feisty go-getter female reporter, pompous fat jerk scientist, arrogant macho dude trial guide, meek, skinny nerdy brainiac, shady, double-tongued corporate head and so on). The uniformly flat acting, Maxwell J. Beck's primitive cinematography (the laborious fade-outs and clumsy creature on the prowl POV shots are especially shoddy), cheesy computer morphing f/x, the hokey-looking, pitifully unconvincing monster and Jeffrey Walton's droning, insufferably overwrought score definitely don't help matters any as well. Only some welcome gratuitous nudity (ravishing brunette Blake Pickett in particular makes for a pleasingly ample eyeful sans shirt) and a clever Hitchcock-style cameo by Sunshine State B-movie institution William Grefe as a photo on a dresser effectively detract from the otherwise overwhelmingly substantial tedium and ineptitude that's in alarming abundance in this truly wretched dreck.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Monster in the marsh, 2 May 2003
Author: Dr. Gore (drgore@hotmail.com) from Los Angeles, California

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*

A spaceship crashes in Florida. Apparently the astronaut on board went through a bad batch of the "Dark Universe" and is now a giant alien slug head. A bunch of people head out into the swamp to check it out. Alien kills some of them. Some other stuff happens.

This was a typically lame B sci-fi movie. The only thing that mildly amused me was near the end:

*SPOILER ON ENDING*

So a woman is hanging out in a grass hut (?) and the alien pops his head in through the wall. We get to watch his alien head squirm around for a good thirty seconds. No other parts of the alien are visible. Just his head. Was he stuck? If he could bash his head in, why couldn't he just worm the rest of his slug body in? I'm guessing he couldn't because there was nothing else to him but his head. The rest of the alien body would have been too expensive to build. While he's stuck, the woman comes up with a plan to kill him using a previously unknown ally prevalent in the swamp environment: Marsh gas. She uses a flare gun to ignite the marsh gas to kill the beast. If marsh gas is flammable, why didn't she go up in flames too? Was it just flammable around the alien's slug head? Was his head dipped in gasoline? Am I thinking about it too much?

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
this was a movie?, 23 December 2002
Author: sketchy (j6524@hotmail.com) from pembroke, massachusetts.

this stunk. It is about a group of really wretched actors being killed by a alien after a space ship crashes. After the first 3 minutes, you will recognize this as a Fred Olen Ray movie. The creature effects are OK, but pretty much your post-ALIEN rip-off. The sound and picture quality is terrible, and the script screams mediocre. Awful.

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Steve Latshaw's Dark Universe, 29 May 2002

Author: Charles Tatum from North Dakota

I always worry when I see Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray collaborating on a film project together.

The story is simple, and has been done to death. A space shuttle crashes back to earth when the lone astronaut aboard flies through a mysterious cloud and becomes a monster alien.

Scientists and a plucky TV reporter try to find the crash site in a Florida swamp and are slowly attacked by the alien/astronaut. People die...

Let me start with the cast. The swamp guide, played by the unfortunately named Bently Tittle, is terrible. While most of the cast was written badly, Tittle (tee-hee) is the worst. His swamp guide has a giant chip on his shoulder for no other reason than the writers could not think of any way for him to be interesting. The plucky TV reporter and Tittle's (tee-hee) girlfriend have gratuitous topless scenes that serve no purpose other than to keep you watching in case they strip again.

When the space shuttle is introduced in the beginning, the laughs begin as well. The shuttle is manned by one astronaut, apparently forgetting that there is no gravity in outer space. The ground crew consists of one person as well: Joe Estevez. He talks into a microphone and yells at the astronaut. Ignored by the Academy Awards yet again, Estevez' one claim to fame is that he sounds exactly like his grating know-it-all liberal poster boy brother Martin Sheen. After the shuttle crashes, Estevez sends the team into the swamp to find the shuttle. When the crash site is found, the director uses the old forced perspective by putting a model of the shuttle close to camera and actors in the background so the shuttle looks huge. This did not work in "Carnosaur" and does not work here. The swamp itself looks like the rough of a Florida golf course, or someone's backyard.

The killing of the monster, which looks like feces with teeth, is hilarious. You see, bullets cannot harm it, so Tittle's (tee-hee) plucky girlfriend fires flares at it, using the swamp gas to ignite the monster. Yes, that flammable swamp gas that haphazardly floats in the swamp air can kill. Never mind that fires are set all through this film, I guess swamp gas was not around then, even though they were deep in the swamp. One of the scientists, when analyzing some spores, finds out the monster has human DNA...I am no exobiologist like he is, but I did not know DNA testing facilities could fit in a backpack, especially one full of specimen jars and giant bottles of sulfuric acid.

The special effects look like they were done on someone's home computer, and Estevez was obviously filmed at a different time since all of his scenes feature just him alone.

"Dark Universe" is awful. There is not one good thing here, and it is not even funny on a "bad" level. Avoid it.

This is rated (R) for physical violence, gun violence, gore, profanity, some female nudity, and mild sexual content.

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3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
A special effects tour-de-force..., 30 July 1999
Author: Mr Parker (spookyscribe@yahoo.com) from New York City

Yeah. Right. This movie is right up there with Dusk til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money as one of the worst, if not the worst ever. I rented this one just to make fun of it and it's so difficult to watch that I didn't even bother. This shlock has absolutely no moment of saving grace. The creature on the box looks like a cross between Giger's Alien and Barney. This one is not even worth getting paid to see. You will feel cheap, insulted and even offended watching this chock. This movie isn't even funny. They show breasts for no purpose other than to give you something to hoot about. I've seen home movies that are better produced than this suckfest. Avoid at all costs, unless renting ultrastink garbage is your bag. This is definitely one for the MST3K crowd. Rating: zero out of *****.

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Our generation's Plan 9 From Outer Space. 'Nuff said., 23 November 2003
Author: Asesino_de_los_zombis from Bloomington, IL

This is the most horrific movie I've ever watched...and that's not a good thing. Ever since I saw this film's opening scene I instantly fell in love. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. It was a non-stop laugh riot. If this movie had been made as a spoof of B-movies I would have considered it the greatest spoof ever. Unfortunately, this was trying to be a serious sci-fi movie.

Dave's Completely Useless Rating (using the classic Leonard Maltin scale of BOMB to ****):

MAINSTREAM---BOMB

B-MOVIE LOVERS---****

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
This would never happen to NASA, 21 April 2007

Author: lordzedd-3 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Where to begin? The spores, to me, they never truly explain how the spores get into the shuttle. After all, a shuttle is space worthily, not allot of open vents to the outside like a car or airplane. But that's minor, you must suspend your disbelieve and go with the flow of the film. The creature is a cool alien like design with the orange spores covering it. The acting isn't exactly Oscar worthy and they do get repetitive on the accident ala INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. But again that's minor. This movie is crawling with pretty girls who stay in and out of clothing. So, there is that. A cool monster, there is that. An interesting if improbable plot, there is that. All and all, this movie has got a lot going for it. Fun, never dull and cool. If you want a realistic movie, then you probably will want to avoid DARK UNIVERSE, but if you want a fun monster romp with semi-dressed woman, then this is the movie for you. 8 STARS.

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
This Is Our Generation's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE!!!, 24 November 2003
Author: Asesino_de_los_zombis from Bloomington, IL

This movie makes Plan 9 look like a thrilling Oscar-worthy science-fiction film.

I caught this movie on Showtime awhile back and from my first glance at the beginning scene I instantly fell in love. This movie has EVERYTHING. A monster named Steve, carnivorous rubber armadillos and of course JOE ESTEVEZ, Martin Sheen's lesser known brother who starred in another frightful (in a bad way) film that was mocked on MST3K by the name of Soultaker (1990)...yes, it IS as bad as it sounds. Anyway, back to Dark Universe, I love this film for its ability to entertain. If they sold this as a spoof, it would've been hailed as one of the greatest ever, but what makes the movie even funnier---maybe even a bit more disturbing---is that they tried to make this an honest sci-fi movie.

Anyway, here is Dave's Completely Useless Rating:

MAINSTREAM AUDIENCES---BOMB

B-MOVIE FANS---****

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Cool box cover, bad movie, 17 July 2001
Author: aaronzombie (aaronzombie@aol.com) from Yucaipa, CA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It's hard to believe this film was made by some of the same people who would later make the underrated Jack-o, but it's true. First of all though, the movie itself isn't an Alien rip-off like it's said to be, but the alien himself sure is. Anyways, on to the review.

!!!POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!A space ship carrying an alien lands in the Florida swamps. A group of archeologists and a resident of the swamps search the area...BIG mistake!

Some enjoyable moments, a few likeable charecters, and nice scenery, but slow for the most part, bad dialogue, a mediocre plot, and laughable effects. ** out of *****.

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