Dark Universe (1993) Reviews

• This would never happen to NASA

  lordzedd-32007-04-21

  Where to begin? The spores, to me, they never truly explain how the spores get into the shuttle. After all, a shuttle is space worthily, not allot of open vents to the outside like a car or airplane. But that's minor, you must suspend your disbelieve and go with the flow of the film. The creature is a cool alien like design with the orange spores covering it. The acting isn't exactly Oscar worthy and they do get repetitive on the accident ala INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. But again that's minor. This movie is crawling with pretty girls who stay in and out of clothing. So, there is that. A cool monster, there is that. An interesting if improbable plot, there is that. All and all, this movie has got a lot going for it. Fun, never dull and cool. If you want a realistic movie, then you probably will want to avoid DARK UNIVERSE, but if you want a fun monster romp with semi-dressed woman, then this is the movie for you. 8 STARS.

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• A special effects tour-de-force...

  Mr Parker1999-07-30

  Yeah. Right. This movie is right up there with Dusk til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money as one of the worst, if not the worst ever. I rented this one just to make fun of it and it's so difficult to watch that I didn't even bother. This shlock has absolutely no moment of saving grace. The creature on the box looks like a cross between Giger's Alien and Barney. This one is not even worth getting paid to see. You will feel cheap, insulted and even offended watching this chock. This movie isn't even funny. They show breasts for no purpose other than to give you something to hoot about. I've seen home movies that are better produced than this suckfest. Avoid at all costs, unless renting ultrastink garbage is your bag. This is definitely one for the MST3K crowd. Rating: zero out of *****.

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• Only for the most die hard devotees of schlock.

  Hey_Sweden2016-12-30

  Admittedly, director Steve Latshaws' "Dark Universe" is miles away from being particularly "good", but this viewer found that he himself didn't altogether hate it. It's a passable (if uninspired) story. Its characters and cast are mostly nondescript, and the special effects are variable. They range from slick (the morphing) to incredibly crude (the main monster). The script by co-star Patrick Moran (who plays Carlson) does include some pretty silly lines. But when all was said and done, I did have some fun with this. Martin Sheens' somewhat less talented brother Joe Estevez plays the owner / operator of a Roger Corman version of N.A.S.A. On its way home, his first spacecraft, the Nautilus, flies through a cloud of alien spores, which infect the astronaut on board (Steve Barkett) and continue to infect Earth life once the ship crashes back onto our planet. A secretive team assigned to investigate the crash hires young Tom Hanning (Bently Tittle) as a guide. There's enough enjoyably icky stuff to make this amusing for some fans of the genre. The scenes with the monstrous Steve and a mutated armadillo generate only laughter due to the effects being so corny. The movie does have one thing going for it, at least: a decent music score by Jeffrey Walton. Some of the cast pulled double duty, but the most notable among them is actually a real legend, Florida based exploitation filmmaker William Grefe ("Sting of Death", "Stanley", etc.) who appears briefly as Hannings' father. Five out of 10.

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• A cinematic black hole from which there is no escape

  Woodyanders2006-04-27

  You know a film is basically destined to stink worse than dirty old socks when the eternally quality-impaired Fred Olen Ray and the comparably talent-barren Jim Wynorski are listed as executive producers (worse yet, Ray also co-wrote the "original" story!), longtime hack actor Steve Barkett receives special guest star billing for his quick pre-credits appearance as a doomed astronaut and Martin Sheen's terminally drab, anything but a chip off the ol' block brother Joe Estevez is the closet thing to a name actor in the entire cast. The horrendously derivative rag-bag premise writes a paltry check that the feeble film itself doesn't even come close to cashing: A huge, fanged, drooling dinosaurian beastie stows away on a spaceship which crash-lands in the dense, verdant, real ferny and swampy Florida bayou. Said bulky ugly creature proceeds to munch on lots of folks, causes several local animals to transform into murderous mutants (the ferocious killer puppet armadillo is pretty laughable) and even makes similarly infected humans metamorphosize into your standard blank-eyed, pasty-faced lethal zomboid ghouls. Steve Latshaw's flaccid direction fails to inject any sense of style or vigor into Pat Moran's threadbare script, which in turn serves as a horrible catalog of every last error one could possibly find in The Bad Movie Book of Serious Cinematic Sins. Said sins include a numbing surplus of dreary chitchat, painfully stilted dialogue (among the choice clunky lines are "I like to watch the news sometimes, but Tom he calls it propaganda" and "This boy scout isn't going to help us find anything"), too much meandering around the woods in circles filler nonsense, a grave lack of any inspired or interesting individual flourishes, a poky stab at narrative thrust and, perhaps the picture's grossest, most unforgivable mistake of all, an insipid assortment of tiresomely one-note stereotypical characters (feisty go-getter female reporter, pompous fat jerk scientist, arrogant macho dude trial guide, meek, skinny nerdy brainiac, shady, double-tongued corporate head and so on). The uniformly flat acting, Maxwell J. Beck's primitive cinematography (the laborious fade-outs and clumsy creature on the prowl POV shots are especially shoddy), cheesy computer morphing f/x, the hokey-looking, pitifully unconvincing monster and Jeffrey Walton's droning, insufferably overwrought score definitely don't help matters any as well. Only some welcome gratuitous nudity (ravishing brunette Blake Pickett in particular makes for a pleasingly ample eyeful sans shirt) and a clever Hitchcock-style cameo by Sunshine State B-movie institution William Grefe as a photo on a dresser effectively detract from the otherwise overwhelmingly substantial tedium and ineptitude that's in alarming abundance in this truly wretched dreck.

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• Monster in the marsh

  Dr. Gore2003-05-02

  *SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT* A spaceship crashes in Florida. Apparently the astronaut on board went through a bad batch of the "Dark Universe" and is now a giant alien slug head. A bunch of people head out into the swamp to check it out. Alien kills some of them. Some other stuff happens. This was a typically lame B sci-fi movie. The only thing that mildly amused me was near the end: *SPOILER ON ENDING* So a woman is hanging out in a grass hut (?) and the alien pops his head in through the wall. We get to watch his alien head squirm around for a good thirty seconds. No other parts of the alien are visible. Just his head. Was he stuck? If he could bash his head in, why couldn't he just worm the rest of his slug body in? I'm guessing he couldn't because there was nothing else to him but his head. The rest of the alien body would have been too expensive to build. While he's stuck, the woman comes up with a plan to kill him using a previously unknown ally prevalent in the swamp environment: Marsh gas. She uses a flare gun to ignite the marsh gas to kill the beast. If marsh gas is flammable, why didn't she go up in flames too? Was it just flammable around the alien's slug head? Was his head dipped in gasoline? Am I thinking about it too much?

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