It only took Hollywood a little under 20 years to forget the fiasco that was the major box office flop Meteor (1979 / trailer), the film that basically killed the trash-film institution that was the original American International Pictures. Thus, 1998 suddenly saw the release of two big budget meteor-heading-for-Earth films, Paramount's Deep Impact (1998 / trailer) and Michael Bay's inordinately cheesy Armageddon (1998 / trailer) — not to mention this low budget, direct-to-video flick here, Judgment Day, from Cinetel Films, that mover-and-shaker firm [Not!] that brought us masterpieces like Vampirella (1996), Camel Spiders (2012), and more. In best mockbuster fashion, Cinetel saddled the movie with a name that could only make one think of that far better Arnie film (trailer) from 1991, but at least the title Judgment Day does indeed have a link to the actual content of their film (unlike, say, such films as Asylum's mockbuster dud, Transmorphers [2007]).
Trailer to
Judgment Day:
The plot of Judgment Day, in short: a big meteor is heading for Earth and the anti-meteor project Linebacker, run by the President's old college roommate Dick (milquetoasty character actor David Wells of Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990 / trailer), Progeny (1998), the unjustly obscure Ladies Club (1986 / trailer) and so much more), doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to being able to destroy it. So, time to get Dr David Corbett (Linden Ashby of Night Angel (1990 / trailer], Wild Things 2 (2004 / trailer], and Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough (2005 / trailer]) and quickly revive his Thor project. Darn! The charismatic religious leader Thomas Payne (Mario Van Peebles, still looking very much one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" [1991]) is convinced that the meteor is God's plan, so he and his followers kidnap Dr Corbett, which leads the military brass in charge to pull in FBI agent Jeanine Tyrell (Suzy Amis) to find Corbett any way she can. She, in turn, pulls in jailbird Matthew Reese (Ice-T of Tank Girl [1995], 3000 Miles to Graceland [2001], Tara [1991] and Leprechaun 5: In the Hood [2000 / trailer]) to help. Can they find Corbett and avert Armageddon Judgment Day?
In itself, the basic narrative behind Judgment Day's deadly-meteor-dooming-Earth plot is neither far-fetched nor that bad. Anyone who doesn't believe that dinos and Adam & Eve inhabited the planet at the same time knows that happenstancial global genocide from space is a possibility, even if you don't look up. Likewise, anyone following the slow but deadly rise of the Christian Theocracy in the USA (and the current state of the Republican party, not to mention the anti-democratic MAGA believers) should have little problem in accepting the idea that Christian fanatics are secretly (or not too secretly) embedded within our government — or, for that matter, that there might be a powerful Christian leader (or Republican congressperson or Supreme Court judge) who would see a deadly meteor as part of God's work and the intended harbinger of the Armageddon and Judgment Day. As such, the two basic plot concepts lend themselves well to being combined into a possible thriller or action flick, which is what screenwriter "William Carson" tries to do in this flick.
Unluckily, scriptwriter "William Carson", better known as the highly prolific B-, C-, D- and Z-film director, scriptwriter, and producer Fred Olen Ray (the man behind, among innumerable films, Biohazard [1985] and Venomous [2001]), flubs things up again (as so often) by taking a workable idea and promptly adding such a huge plot hole that were the script cheese, it would be Swiss No-Cheese-Left. Namely: if Payne the Religious Fanatic truly wanted to stop Corbett the Scientist from stopping "God's plan", he would simply shoot the scientist dead — like Payne does everyone else — instead of kidnapping Corbett and keeping him alive in a locked cell.
Of course, there wouldn't be much action and quasi-buddy-movie stuff if narrative logic were taken seriously in Judgment Day, but the previously mentioned narrative flaw is really too big to overlook — but one does, because one does not watch movies like Judgment Day expecting intelligence or care; one watches them for the fun of it, for the laughs, for the explosions, and the gunplay. And the film has all three, as in that typically less-than-logical scene in which Payne shows up at a trailer where Tyrell and Reese are questioning a lead and first shoots the trailer to pieces with machine guns (hitting everything but Tyrell and Reese) before obliterating it with a grenade launcher. (Logic says: grenade launcher first ensures no one escapes.)
The flick is the sophomore directorial project of former actor John Terlesky — his short list of acting projects include some noteworthy films, including Chopping Mall (1986 / trailer, with Dick Miller), The Naked Cage (1987 / trailer), Deathstalker II (1988 / trailer), and the contemporary "nudie-cutie western" Hard Bounty (1995 / trailer) — who segued from acting in "bad" movies to directing low-budget trash action like this D2V flick to a highly successful and busy career as a TV director. Put the blame on Judgment Day's budget, maybe, but this science-fiction "action" flick reveals a slight predisposition to a career outside of feature films: we might be prejudiced, but we do feel that anyone who cannot shoot cops flying through the sky, due to an action-scene explosion, without them looking like keystone cops who just jumped on a hidden trampoline, is just not really ready for the big screen.
Additional pet peeve: twice in the film's story development, the narrative advancement relies on turncoats, both within the contingent of fanatics and within the government, and one can see miles in advance that those characters will do what they eventually do (and, of course, pay for it with their lives). True believers don't turn at the drop of a hat, so the "turncoating" lacks the verisimilitude required to stop it from coming across like cheap and easy plot expediency. That flaw, like the script in general, is possibly hard to truly get mad about seeing who wrote the movie — Fred Olan Ray was/is possibly never ready for the big screen, which is why he never has and never will reach it.
In the end, Judgment Day is a pretty run-of-the-mill action film but makes for a painless waste of time. The cheesily fun opening in "Peru" in Judgment Day is sort of fun, as are a variety of South Central-set confrontations — Coolio (1 Aug 1963 – 28 Sept 2022) even shows up long enough to look mean and not really advance the plot before an inglorious end. None of the actors really shine in their roles, but none of them are truly terrible either, though Suzy Amis is somewhat uneven and at times even seems somewhat embarrassed for being there. (It is not all that hard to believe that her realizing that her future as an "actor" would probably be doomed to D2V films like this one actually led to her direct and subsequent retirement.) Van Peebles, on the other hand, is so casual and natural and self-assured and BBC-manly that he actually manages to exude a sense of threatening fanaticism doing nothing. He was and is an actor that truly should have had bigger and more mainstream success than he did or now has.
The religious angle is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Judgement Day, arguably even percipient now that the US faces the real anti-democratic threat of organized Evangelist and Christian right-wingers who believe in "freedom" and "democracy" about as much as ISIS militants do. But Judgment Day is hardly a film with a hidden message, it is a turn-off-your-brain-at-the-door, generic, low-budget trash project with a few good explosions and shootouts, a few laughs both intentional and unintentional, a dearth of breastage or nudity, and an almost anticlimactic end due to the slightly unexciting staging of the final showdown. Painless, in other words, but hardly a must-see.
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