Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, guys, I'm gonna be covering a sci-fi movie from 1991. That movie is "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe".
Now, I really don't know very much about this movie, other than what little information I found when I picked up a copy of this movie at one of my local video stores. And really, the only thing I know about this movie is that it stars Jesse "The Body" Ventura, who use to do commentary back in the 80's during the WWF days with Vince McMahon. I'm not sure if he will be able to carry this movie at all, but I'll find out eventually once I start watching this movie.
Other than that, guys, aside from that, and from this being a sci-fi film, I really don't know much else about it. I *could* read what's on the back of the DVD case for the plot synopsis, but I really don't want to do that here because I want to go into it as blind as possible. I'm hoping for it to at least be decent. I don't know if it's actually going to be any good, but it could somehow surprise me in a pleasant way. And the only way I'm gonna know that for sure is if I shut up and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe".
3 minutes later
So, guys, we barely just started this movie, and I call tell you two things right off the bat. One, the sound quality in this movie is dogshit. I could barely hear the opening dialogue from Jesse Ventura, and what little I did hear made absolutely no sense at all. Which brings me to the second point: The acting from Jesse Ventura is fucking terrible. This movie is off to a really bad start, and I have a feeling that I'm gonna be in for an hour and half of this shit. Yay...
8 minutes later
Oh, guess what, guys? Not only is the acting from Jesse Ventura completely robotic, but this other actor playing Secundus is just as bad, if not worse than Mr. Ventura. Great, so my theory, so far, is coming true, in which I have to deal with this shit acting for the rest of the movie. I may have bit off more than what I could chew, guys.
18 minutes later
I didn't think this was possible, guys. We're almost a half an hour in and I want to shut it off. This movie is so fucking boring that I can't bring myself to care about anything as to what's going on. Especially this fucking chase sequence between Abraxas and Secundus. It has been dragging on for what seems like an hour because the movie's pacing is so fucking bad! I want to hope that the next hour will change my tune about this movie, but I seriously don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.
4 minutes later
So, I just saw Secundus blow up this guy with his bare hands. And that probably would've looked really cool if the effects for it weren't cheap as hell. Seriously, guys, this movie was made on the ultra cheap. Which, for someone who normally enjoys B movies, that wouldn't have been a problem. But for this movie, I can't make an exception here. That kill looked horrible.
17 minutes later
All right, guys, I'm beginning to lose my patience with this movie, what with the horrible sound quality, the lifeless acting, and the story just not making any sense at all. If this movie doesn't do something interesting soon, I'm going to be very pissed on a level that I haven't been pissed in a long time. And that's saying a lot, considering all of the terrible movies I've seen this year, because at least some of those didn't piss me off unlike this movie currently is. Just, for the love of god, do something interesting, movie! Give me one thing that I can consider to be interesting. Is that too much to ask for?! I fear it may be, guys.
13 minutes later
So when Secundus got his bill, he eats the paper and says it's delicious. That's probably the closest thing that this movie has done in being funny. And yet, it still wasn't really that funny to begin with. It was just kind of stupid and pointless, really.
The Review
Well, guys, that was "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe", and thank fucking god it's over. I'm gonna shut this turd of a film off here...OK. Dear sweet heavenly Christ, where the fuck do I even begin here?! Well, I think it's easy to guess that this movie is fucking horrible. And it's not horrible on a so bad, it's good level. No, that would be an insult to movies I've seen this year that were so bad, it's good. This movie has so much wrong with it that I don't even know where to begin with this one.
You know what? Let's just start with one of the big problems that this movie has right off the bad. The sound quality in this movie is pure dogshit. From the very beginning of this film, we're being told a narration by Jesse Ventura, and you can barely hear what's going on because his dialogue is so damn quiet that it makes it to hard to hear what he's saying half the time. And in some rare cases, whenever he's finishing a line of dialogue, it almost sounds fucking muted, to a point where I'm not even sure if I can blame it on his soulless acting or the retarded monkey of a sound editor who couldn't even be bothered to try and fix the sound properly. I'm gonna lean on both sides of this because, one, Jesse Ventura isn't even trying in this movie, though I'll get to that later when I cover acting. And as for the sound quality itself, it's horrible from beginning to end, which makes this movie almost borderline unwatchable from that aspect alone.
Now if that doesn't make you interested in not watching this movie, I'm gonna tell you the next big problem this movie has, which is it's god awful pacing. To which I ask, what fucking pacing? This movie is slow as shit and doesn't even improve as it goes on. You're basically watching a movie that's supposedly an hour and a half long, but it really feels like it goes on for well over 2 hours. I'm not even kidding about that either. This movie is so fucking slow that, at some points, I was busy looking up stuff on my phone because there was nothing of interest happening in the movie. Which is a *really* bad sign because I've seen a lot of bad movies for this series and, regardless of whether I enjoyed them or not, I still at least make an effort to watch the whole thing before I start to do something else. Mainly write the reviews afterwards. But this movie made me so disinterested in which I just didn't want to continue watching it. And I can't shut it off because, as per the rules of Reaction & Review. I have to let the whole movie play itself out until I see credits rolling. I was so tempted to just shut it off early, because of how ungodly boring this film really is, but I still stuck it out, and I kinda regret it now because it's 90 fucking minutes that I'm never getting back from this awful film.
In fact, do you want to know how bad the pacing really is in this movie? Well, I'll tell you. See, apart from this film being really fucking boring, there are a multitude of scenes in this movie where it breaks the flow of whatever's supposed to be happening so that it can cut itself to something else that also isn't interesting. One example I can think of is when Abraxas is talking to Tommy about his relationship with Secundus, and almost in the middle of it, it cuts to something else completely random and nothing of value was actually gained from that next scene. It was just meant as filler so that this movie could pad itself out to it's 90 runtime. And yeah, so there's so much filler in this movie that you could cut out a good portion of it's fat and wouldn't be missing a thing. This film has some of the worst pacing I have seen in a long fucking time, and that's saying a lot, considering I've seen other films like "Spaced Invaders", which had horrible fucking pacing. And yet, somehow, "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe" was able to make "Spaced Invaders" pacing look like fucking Shakespeare in comparison, which I didn't even think was fucking possible. But this movie found a way to make that actually possible! Which is beyond terrifying, guys.
So now that I've gotten all that out of the way for it's big problems, what about the writing? Well, to put it simply, guys, there is no writing here. At least, not one that's interesting to follow anyways. The best I could pick up on is that our main character, Abraxas, is tasked to terminate a child-oh, my bad "comator", because Secundus, who Abraxas is also after, impregnated a human woman, which in turn gave birth to a child that has the power of the Anti-Life Equation, which is what Secundus is after. And if you're a DC Comics, the term "Anti-Life Equation" might sound very familiar to you because that's the very same thing that was lifted from a DC Comics villain known as Darkseid, who's whole purpose is to look for that very same thing. And if you're thinking that I'm stupid enough to compare a shitty villain like Secundus to fucking Darkseid, you have another thing coming, because I refuse to compare him to Darkseid. No, at worst, he's basically just a pathetic knock-off of the Terminator. And mind you, I'm one of the few people who doesn't give a shit about "The Terminator" series. So to have your villain be a fourth rate knock off of a character that I never cared about to begin with doesn't make your character appealing whatsoever.
And as for our other characters, well, really, guys, there's nothing much I can say about them. Why? Because none of these characters have any real development or personality that you can care about. You're not gonna care about Abraxas, because he's about as lifeless as main characters go. You're not gonna care about Sonia, because she's pretty much in the same boat as Abraxas. Not even Tommy, the kid who supposedly has the power to destroy the universe, is somebody that you're also not gonna really care about. Part of the reason is because he's mute throughout the entire movie. And the reason why that is because Abraxas feels that the kid doesn't know the potential power he has within him that could cause his power to be released. Which is honestly kind of a retarded reasoning because throughout the entire movie you *never* see him attempting to speak. If he had spoken once throughout the entire movie, and something actually happened, I could maybe buy this sort of argument. But no. He doesn't speak at all. Which is both a good and bad thing, the good being that this kid is spared from having any dialogue to work with in this awful movie. The bad, well, obviously, has to do with whatever potential power he has you that don't get to see much of. The closest is when a bully gets near him in the bathroom and he uses his powers to force him back a ways. That's it. Oh, and he also uses it to make another bully (or the same one, don't really care which) piss his pants. Oh, how *hilarious* that was suppose to be.
But yeah, guys, the long story short version is that there is no interesting writing here at all. It doesn't make any sense, but then again, considering how the entire movie is boring as shit, it probably doesn't help the writing anyways when they couldn't even try to make a portion of it make sense to begin with. Now let's talk about the acting. Oh dear god, the acting...well, I would say that the acting is wooden from damn near the entire cast. The only exception I'm gonna give a pass to is the kid playing Tommy, mainly because he doesn't have any dialogue to work with. Jesse Ventura is probably the worst of the bunch because his performance is so robotic and lifeless. And I don't want to hear that his character is suppose to be robotic, because that, to me, is just an excuse to hide the fact that Jesse Ventura is not a good actor. At least, in this movie he's not. I'm sure he probably has other film credits in other movies that are hopefully better than whatever he did in this movie. Same goes for the actor playing Secundus, only with him, he's basically just a fourth rate knock-off of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In other words, he doesn't have any of the goofy charm that Arnold usually has whenever he's asked to act in a movie. I don't know if this is how he naturally acts or if he was just told to put on a Schwarzenegger accent because he was easy to make fun of and parody, but either way, it's terrible. And I sorta hope to never come across another movie where he's in something. Chances are pretty high on that, but we'll see regardless.
As for the rest of the acting, well, none of it is any good. In fact, I'm willing to bet that none of these actors have actually acted a day in their lives. Most of them were probably pulled off the street and asked if they wanted to be in a movie for a quick paycheck, and that's probably what happened. I could be wrong on that, but I'm still willing to bet on my hypothesis that none of these actors have ever actually acted before prior to this. And I'm sticking with that hypothesis until proven otherwise.
Special effects...well, I mentioned earlier that this film was made on the ultra cheap, and I'm not kidding about that either. The special effects in this movie are horrible. Most of it consists of either pyrotechnics or visual effects. And when it comes to the latter, the only kind of visual effects you see is electricity, which mainly comes in anytime Secundus is gripping someone's head and is "overloading" their brain, which causes them to explode and die. Which, again, probably would've looked really cool if we had to gotten to see that instead of just seeing another pyrotechnic going off. And speaking of, during the beginning of the movie, we get to see Secundus being hunted down by Abraxas and his crew, and you see them holding some kind of gun in their hands. And every time that they're about to fire their weapon, the camera will cut to *another* pyrotechnic explosion, giving off the illusion that they just fired their gun. Which means that this movie was so cheap that they couldn't afford to do a simple laser gun effect. At least, that's what I'm going to assume what they were suppose to be anyway, because I refuse to believe otherwise. So yes, the special effects here are horrible, and the costuming is cheap as shit. There is nothing here that I could say that is even a remote positive when it comes to special effects.
Camerawork here is passable at best. And other times, like when I brought up the whole lack of laser gun reasoning, it's terrible at worst. Lighting here is a mixed bag, and part of that has to do with the picture quality in this film. This movie looks as if it was taken from a VHS or Laserdisc and was put on DVD without cleaning up any of the footage. So whenever a scene happens during nighttime, it's gonna be a little difficult to see what's even going on because of the dark lighting here. Other times, it's just okay for what it is. Sound-mixing is garbage. As I've already mentioned earlier, we have dialogue that is sometimes almost muted or really quiet, and it's really terrible throughout the entire movie because the sound editor was too lazy to get off their asses and try and fix some of this shit before putting it out on home video. Music is also garbage, too. But then again, I can't remember a single thing when it comes to this film's music. So basically, guys, we have technical work that is below average at best. Which, combined with every other problem this movie has, that's not a good thing at all.
So I guess it goes without saying, guys, when all is said and done, can I recommend "Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe"? Take a fucking guess! Hell no! There is no fucking way I can actually recommend this film to anyone, unless you seriously want to riff on it with friends on a bad movie night. But then again, I could also just say go watch the Rifftrax commentary on YouTube. It's on there right now if you seriously want to watch it being riffed on by better riffers than me. But aside from that, you can avoid this movie at all costs. It seriously has nothing going for it by it's own standards. And even Jesse Ventura can't even save this movie because he fucking sucks at acting. I'm thankful that I didn't spend too much on this movie. I got it for less than $5 at one of my local video stores. But if I had paid more of it, I would've been seriously pissed off for wasting this much money on this movie. In fact, I'm still pissed that I wasted the few bucks on this film because I was actually rather curious about it. And well, curiosity remains a bitch. And I'll be thankful to never waste the time on this movie ever again. But now, I gotta watch something better. I think I'll just go watch my copy of "Tron". Because I need to watch a better sci-fi movie than the one I had to suffer through for about 90 minutes.
So anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.
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