December 1, 2002

The Surge

The Surge is a teen movie with a difference. Instead of thrashing out yet another comedy, tragedy, or action flick focusing on teens, the makers have placed their bets on a sci-fi/thriller.

Reese Hauser (Mathew Scollon) plays a guy with a shady past who has just relocated to a new area. Being a misfit, he cannot make any friends. Zack Bainbridge (Edward DeRuiter) comes forward with his sister Ashley Bainbridge (Melissa Renie Martin) and friend Phoebe Lewis (Alice Frank), social outcasts in their own right, to befriend him. Zack also reveals a secret place that is a source of untapped and incredible energy. With some experimentation, these four people transform themselves into super-heroes on campus. Zack can read people’s minds, Ashley can force people to do whatever she says and Phoebe can transport objects using telekinesis. Reese is the most formidable among them as he can heel any wound!

At first, the group has fun and enjoys their newfound powers. However, they slowly discover the dark side of being so powerful as one of them becomes greedy and plans to eliminate the rest of them to become the most powerful. A bloody battle of survival thus ensues between the four. Definitely a teen flick that keeps you on the edge. —Jawad Daud

Ghost Ship

Halloween movie Ghost ship is reasonably scary but there isn’t much of a plot to it, and the acting isn’t that outstanding either. A mysterious ship is seen just off the coast and Desmond Harrington, playing a pilot, decides to check it out to see if any money can be made through it. He recruits a salvage crew made up of all sorts of odd balls led by Captain Murphy (Gabriel Byrne). The crew thinks the ship holds some kind of illegal cargo that could translate into some quick bucks for them, but when they board the ship, they are greeted by ghosts. The ship has actually been missing for about half a century, when something really sinister happened on it. Since then, whoever boards it is captured by an evil force and becomes one of the ship’s ghosts.

The rest of the story focuses on whether the evil entity on board will be able to overtake its latest visitors, or will the visitors be able to escape from it alive. Since trying to scare people and appearing to act scared doesn’t really require many acting skills, the film’s cast doesn’t really display much talent. Ghost ship isn’t worth watching over a weekend night, or any night for that matter. —Eddie

Half Past Dead

A threadbare retread of Steven Seagal’s Under Siege, the unfortunately named Half Past Dead again finds the actor’s stock character, an enigmatic slab with an exotic name (here, car thief Sascha Petrosevitch) called on to single-handedly right a world gone wrong. Except that this time, surrounded by the sort of young black talent that’s meant to furnish white guys a patina of cool, Seagal ends up being less of an action hero than simply missing in action.

Shortly after the FBI nabs Sascha and his cohort (rapper Ja Rule), the two are sent to the “new” Alcatraz, where they’re promptly swept up in violent intrigue. The day the pair lands on the Rock, a heavily armed gang storms the prison in hopes of extracting lucrative information from a condemned prisoner. Snapping and swirling their black dusters, the crew is led by a prison insider (Morris Chestnut), who divides his time baiting a female judge and leading his crew back and forth over the same three sets, sometimes in slow motion.

Working from his own script, director Don Michael Paul has made the sort of mindless trash-action picture that ends up going straight to video in the US and clogging foreign screens. Absent one original moment and bathed in de rigueur steel blue punctuated by sporadic bursts of flaming orange, the movie is notable only for its creative approach to Seagal’s bulky gracelessness: Not since Apocalypse Now has a film gone to such lengths to hide what its star looks like. —Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.