Orion's Key (1996)
1/10
Badness beyond a joke
10 August 2006
Warning: Spoilers
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.
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