THE PRESENCE
Starring six-time Oscar nominee Kathy Ireland

  There's no excuse in this day and age for a horror(-ish) movie to get a PG.  Sure, backintheday before PG-13's, a PG was just one step away from an R, and there were some comparatively nasty PG's back then.  Remember when a PG movie could actually get away with nudity? (ah, The Beastmaster.  How many adolescent whack-off sessions did Tanya Roberts' lagoon scene inspire?)

But no, this is 1999, and this movie is 1992.  Made for NBC as Danger Island (apparently a pilot for a never-to-be series), I guess a PG is inevitable.  And yeah, it sucks.  It sucks as bad as just about anything I've ever seen.

The first thing we see is a shot of some tropical beach, and a title that reads (man, get this): "SMALL COUNTRY, ONE THOUSAND MILES WEST OF THE ISLAND".  There are so many levels on which this sounds totally stupid, I wouldn't even know where to begin.  There's a photo shoot for swimsuit models, one of which is an intellectual played by Kathy Ireland.  You can tell she's an intellectual because she's reading The Tempest, although I do have to dock some IQ points for her blathering about how her horoscope says that her life's going to take a new direction.  Then a civil war breaks out and everybody's herded into a plane to leave.  (For no apparent reason, one army guy pulls out his gun, turns around, and cries out "That's gunfire, man!" despite the fact that after three close listens, I couldn't hear any guns at all.)  Caught in a storm, the plane unfortunately crashes right into the sea.

Oh, this crash is quite the turd to behold.  If the model used for the plane was any larger than six inches long, I'll shave my back and floss with what comes off.  It's not a very convincing model, either ? you know how they say that in storms, planes get batted about like a child's toy?  Well, what we have here is a child's toy.  Besides, you can see the little stick used to support the model.

The dialogue during the crash is remarkable as well.  A sobbing mother says to her child "I just wanted to tell you that I...I know I've been busy, too busy lately, and whatever happens..." and the kid says "I love you too mom!"

So they crash, about half of them presumably die, and the other half we next see adrift in the lifeboat, where we get a look at just how many of these disaster-movie cliché characters we have.  Let's see, we have the model (no, not the model plane), the guy who MIGHT get to sleep with the model (but probably not in this PG movie), the dashing captain, the troubled kid, the smart kid (both kids are computer hackers), the scientist, the panicky idiot, the concerned mom, the rich asshole...I could go on.

The drift their way to a "deserted" island where sound effects from The Evil Dead stalk their feet underwater as they push the lifeboat ashore.  They try to make do with their newfound island paradise (bring on the "everybody dives into the lagoon" scene - Greg Lougainis has nothing to fear from Kathy Ireland), the underwater Evil Dead sounds stalking them all the while.  Then they stumble across an abandoned lab (they can tell when it was abandoned because of the convenient tear-off calendar on the wall), and then those pesky Evil Dead sounds attack, and people mutate into freaks, fruit turns into slimy blue crap, and bad, bad music plays.

Folks, this movie easily the worst I've seen this year, and I saw Necropolis and Wild, Wild West just in the past few months.  It's hard to imagine what more could be added to make this movie worse.  It's all already here.  It's 1992, so you can bet that there'll be a morph.  A monster is fended off with a fire extinguisher.  There's even a scene where the survivors are captured by natives, taken to the chief, and put through the indignity of trying to explain in pantomime that they're friendly.

The plot's pretty much what you'd expect, making no sense at all because the writer optimistically supposed that a full-fledged series might come of this.  One guy has mental flashes of what happened at the lab which comes dangerously close to "psychic link" crap.  Would you believe that the little girl (Nikki Cox) was engaged to Bobcat Goldthwait?  Jeez, he likes 'em young.

Even the sets suck - check out that "elevator", which is clearly just another room, sharing one continuous floor with the room we're viewing from.

So, you might be wondering, is there anything, anything good at all I can say about this movie?  Well, it has Beth Toussaint, who played Tasha Yar's terrorist sister on Star Trek.  But she sucks here too.  Yessir, what we have here is a rare example of pure crap.  You don't see it in its pure state that often.  But it's here.

Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace; it's hard to believe a movie this bad could come from a John Carpenter protégé, but there you go.

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