Orion's Key (1997)

Great Film overall

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Fantastic

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A space ship lands in Africa and humanoids from it do something. 2963 years later (really) a pair of archaeologists discover an artifact that is a part of Orion's Key that somehow turns water (or something) into the elixir of life. An evil professor is after the elixir, a humanoid from the past seeks to defend it. Throw in an unwell boy and quirky local characters and you have mixed bag of a film that doesn't deliver in any way at all. The story is ungainly and confusing and what the last shot of the film is about, who knows?Jennifer MacDonald and Todd Jensen are the married archaeologists and they are quite annoying, behaving as no one in real life would ever do. It does have Frank Zagarino though, walking around looking menacing which Frank always does well but that is what he is mainly given to do. To the film's credit I did rather like the music score, thanks to Robert O. Ragland and it does have real explosions rather than false CGI ones we got in later years.Number four in the Shadowchaser series, it undoubtedly is the worst.

Dumb as hell. Stupid. A plot that's the same as a million other badly-made movies you wish you'd never watched. Someone nice finds something. Some one nasty wants it back. Someone else nasty also wants it to make themselves powerful. What makes this movie slightly different i suppose is that two nasty people each want what the nice person has found instead of one nasty person. I wasted an hour of my life watching this nonsense before i gave up. And it's racist: African people are either savages smeared in dust, lazy, or dependent upon westerners for their livelihoods. Don't bother watching this. It's rubbish.

Oh God! Where to start?Africa a couple of thousand years ago: Natives dance and beat drums. Aliens arrive in a huge disco-light and are greeted by the chief. The aliens present their half of a weird key and obtain something from a mysterious underground chamber. As they take off the ship is struck by lightning and crashes. Kaboom! Africa the present day: A husband wife archaeological team are digging the remains of an ancient hill top site. The husband is convinced aliens visited the place many years ago. The wife is sceptical. The husband goes to visit their photogenically dying son in hospital. The wife finds half of the the mysterious maguffin alien key. She faxes a scan of it to her evil boss (we know he's evil because he's got a beard) before driving to meet her husband. Deep underground in the remains of the space ship, one of the alien droids wakes up and sets off in pursuit - stopping only to learn English by reading the label on the bottom of a fax machine and donning a nifty flowing coat that just happens to be his size.Lady archaeologist is attacked by droid. Lady Archeolgist escapes. Lady archaeologist tries to deliver maguffin to Evil boss's henchman but sees droid and runs away. From here to end of movie car chases, guns, and explosions in random order until everyone ends up in another mysterious underground chamber just like the first one (they built a spare?) where the maguffin key thing turns sunlight and cave water into THE ELIXIR! More shooting. All the bad guys die. Alien droid finds his home planet is no more and gives THE ELIXIR to the archaeologists to cure their photogenically dying child. Roll Credits. Take DVD out of player. Throw DVD in dustbin. The End.Dumb dumb movie. Which is a pity. The camera work and locations were great, some of the acting was adequate. Someone spent some money on this. But the script? Oh so bad bad bad bad bad it was beyond a joke. No one could deliver that stuff.!Stupid unanswered questions include (amongst many many others):How did the lady archaeologist send the email? Every time she tried to call anyone local over the windup telephone we had an 'amusing' interlude with the ineffectual local operator, and her rustic plug and wire switchboard, yet emails zip across the world to evil masterminds in seconds, complete with colour graphics and computery pinging noises.How can hired killer goons miss EVERYTHING they shoot at even armed with automatic weapons? (Mild mannered archaeologists, on the other hand, can knock people dead from vast distances with one shot from vintage service revolvers they've just picked up.)How did an Alien race capable of interstellar travel manage to get anywhere with shuttle ships that fall out of the sky when struck by lightning? Normal commercial civil jets are usually struck about once a year, which amounts to about once every 3,000 flying hours, and will frequently trigger lightning by flying through clouds. Pretty dumb bunch of aliens. Very dumb movie. It lowered my IQ by several points.

I got this on a double-sided DVD with "Alien blood", despite this movie obviously having 100 times the budget of Alien blood, this is obviously the inferior film. There are some entirely idiotic moments here, the whole scene in the Market had me wanting to hammer the screen in, HOW can people just fail to communicate (the woman just runs away without saying anything to her husband!). And the guy they where going to give the 'artifact' to, honestly, what would you do if two people came to give you something then ran into a market. Would you assume they had just gone to buy some bottled water for the trip? or would you hunt them down and shoot them?. Then there is the dodgy 'Alien' robot who is just like the Terminator. And there was something about a life-preserving "Elixir" in there somewhere, but my mind had turned to mush by that point. Oh and the utterly stupid 'twist' ending that had me howling with laughter...