Top Line (1988)

Sorry, this movie sucks

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This sadly neglected film from 1988 really deserves more attention from aficionados of so-bad-it's-good movies. It might have been a merely incompetent mash-up of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone (mainly realized in a cover image that occurs nowhere in the film)), and The Terminator (no, really).. However, the last half hour is so bad it elevates the film to a higher lower bad movie level. It stars reputable B-list Italian actor Franco Nero and a host of unknowns in a story involves discovery of ancient artifacts in Colombia that indicate extraterrestrial contact. There are a few boobs briefly shown and gore is nearly nonextenet, but it's a good bad movie for the time it was made. I recommend being drunk or high or both before you watch it.

Sadly, this was a good story with a fairly decent cast which was spoiled by a bad director & bad screenwriter. This movie focuses all of its energy on the worst scenes. Starting off with a drunken has-been schlock writer hitting up everyone for money. A boring start to put everyone to sleep.Then his finding a truly unbelievable unrealistic unremarkable unidentifiable UFO with a human ship inside a jungle mountain cave. If I had not read the plot & comments, I never would have known that was a UFO with a sea vessel. You could not tell either by looking at it. What the heck was the point of putting a 500 year old sea vessel on the UF0? Other than to say it was a ship lost between Panama & Spain 500 years earlier. Surely a better way to establish timeline than that. It just created an unrecognizable conglomeration which the audience could not decipher and was not on the screen long enough to identify... even using freeze frame. The only time you get to see what the UF0 looked like was a pottery model of it at the very end.3/4 of this movie deteriorates into nonstop, shoot-em-up Matlock chase scenes where every ridiculous global gov't organization hunts them down. One boring chase scenario after another. They never explained how anyone knew he had seen the UFO in order to be waiting to kill him upon his hotel arrival immediately following his discovery. They should have inserted a phone call prior to his arrival to establish a reason he was being pursued. Again, only the plot description & reviews clarified what was occurring. It certainly wasn't clear in the film. Apparently, this director thought an entire movie of shooting chase scenes could appeal to an audience. But wasted all of his opportunity money scenes.They dubbed George Kennedy's voice with someone else. Even his laugh. What kind of moron would replace George Kennedy's distinctive, award winning, recognizable voice? That would be as logical as hiding Miss Universe under a paper bag.The slimy faced cyborg scenes with ooze & dangling eye were ridiculously laughable.While a lot of filming time went into morphing his wife into an alien, it was poorly done, unrealistic effects in the dark and the voice was so distorted you could barely understand it. Not to mention the alien body did not sell the perception of being believable as human impostors... much less as his own wife. This should have been a money scene & highlight of the film which came across as a wet claymation, poor mans puppeteer fiasco with nearly unintelligible audio.They also missed the opportunity to see inside the UFO & unnecessarily screwed it up further by needlessly adding an earth sea ship in the same mountain cave as if they had both been manually stuffed inside an unbelievable location... rather than finding a lone UFO in a more rational discovery location.The premise might have been more believable if more of the film had been spent on the aliens & their agenda with a more believable alien physique & appearance from better spent effects & makeup companies. It was clear the crew was hired by nepotism rather than talent.The entire movie was poorly directed, poorly executed & poorly scripted. It missed every opportunity to utilize talent & significant plot opportunities and wasted the film on cheap chase scenes, shootings, drunken lothario scenes & ruined potential good scenes with bad makeup, bad effects, bad writing & bad directing.Not worth watching unless you want to see the story butchered by bad direction & effects.

A washed-up writer ventures into the Colombian jungle in search of gold. He gets much more than he bargained for, however, when he discovers a 15th century Spanish galleon located inside an alien spaceship, which in turn is inside a mountain! His discovery isn't universally popular, though, and it leads him to be pursued by Neo-Nazis and other shady characters out to kill him.The above synopsis really makes Top Line sound considerably better than it actually is. The ideas are much greater than the execution. It's a silly story but that often results in entertainment on the screen. At best, this one only achieves this fairly sporadically. With scenes involving the galleon, the cyborg and the alien being the best. For the most part it's a mediocre thriller though. The main fault most probably has to be levelled at the direction which is lacking in any proper focus. It does have some half-way decent make-up effects during the cyborg and alien scenes but maybe it could have done with more. It stars the reliable pairing of Franco Nero as the writer and George Kennedy as a Nazi leader; the latter is dubbed with a strange accent.

Maybe I sound a little crazy here, but I actually think that bottom-of-the-barrel Italian schlock-fest Top Line bears quite a few similarities to major studio, big-budget blockbuster Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: like Spielberg's film it is a jungle adventure that veers clumsily into sci-fi territory, the shoe-horning in of some silly space nonsense resulting in a series of truly dumb sequences that beggar belief (although, as daft as things get, there's still nothing quite as moronic as Crystal Skull's 'nuke the fridge' scene).Franco Nero plays Angelo, a washed-up writer living in Cartagena, Colombia (shades of Romancing the Stone), whose search for conquistador gold leads him to a mountain cave where he uncovers a 500 year-old Spanish galleon—inside a frickin' U.F.O. of all places!!!. This bizarre discovery brings him to the attention of various organisations who want to silence him before he can tell his story: an antiquities dealer (George Kennedy) tries to run him down in a cactus patch; he's the hapless passenger in the back of a chicken truck driven along a perilous mountain road by drunken Colombian farmers; a killer cyborg with a melted face (Rodrigo Obregón) tries to terminate him; and his ex-wife (Mary Stavin) turns out to be a flesh-eating extra-terrestrial, one of a race of aliens that have integrated themselves into human society with a view to taking over the planet.With all of this lunacy going on, Top Line could have been a classic of trash cinema, but Nello Rossati's haphazard narrative and flat direction, plus a lot of dull dialogue, means that the film is rarely as much fun as it sounds. Some fairly decent make-up effects (the cyborg and the alien are effective for the budget) and a touch of gratuitous nudity ensure that total boredom never completely sets in, but those tempted by the film's delightfully bonkers moments should be prepared for a large helping of boredom to go with the unintentional hilarity.