Michael Vickerman Movies
After a meteor shower streaks through the Milky Way, a brown dwarf with heavy gravitational pull crashes on the moon, causing the lunar body to change its orbit and head straight toward Earth on a deadly collision course. With less than 40 days to restore the moon's orbit, scientists Alex Kittner (David James Elliott), Maddie Rhodes (Natasha Henstridge), and Roland Emerson (Benjamin Sadler) are in a desperate race against time to launch a lunar mission that will save both planets from mutual destruction. James Cromwell and Steven Culp co-star. ~ All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- David James Elliott, Natasha Henstridge, (more)
D.B. Sweeney stars in the made-for-TV Superfire as disgraced airplane pilot James Merrick. Hoping to compensate for a past misdeed which cost several lives, Merrick volunteers to help fight not one but two raging forest fires which threaten to destroy an isolated Oregon community. Though the story was clearly a retread of such earlier "smoke-eating" adventure films as Red Skies of Montana, the aerial photography and special effects are first-rate throughout. Representing the first professional collaboration between best-selling authors (and brothers) Richard Preston Jr. and Douglas Preston, Superfire made its ABC network bow with surprisingly little fanfare on April 20, 2002. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- D.B. Sweeney
- 2001
In this made-for-cable action-drama, Oliver Sloan (Parker Stevenson) is the son of a Las Vegas resort magnate whose showplace hotel has just been given its grand re-opening. However, Sloan's board of directors is not happy with the hotel's profitability, and he knows he's about to be replaced. One evening, a fire breaks out on the 20th floor of the hotel; it soon becomes evident that the sprinkler systems in the hotel are not working, and Sloan begins to suspect that the fire did not happen by accident. Meanwhile, a number of guests are trapped as the fire rages out of control, including Jim (Meat Loaf), an engineer working for the hotel who tries to figure out a route to safety for himself and the guests, and Evans (William McNamara), a TV reporter who begins broadcasting live from the burning building. Trapped also features Callum Keith Rennie and Suki Kaiser. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Parker Stevenson, Meat Loaf, (more)
- 1998
Ever since the 1950s, the area around the city of Springfield, Illinois has been plagued by mysterious 3-day abductions, with the victims returning just as quickly as they disappeared, seemingly none the worse for wear. In truth, however, these victims have been harvest by aliens, who, using implants on their human prey, are laying the groundwork for a mass takeover of the world once those implants are activated. But the only person who has an inkling of what is really going on is police detective Sam Adams (Christopher Meloni), a local "character" whom no one takes seriously. Things begin to intensify when Sam investigates the case of a local six-year-old girl who has undergone a sudden change of personality. Dabney Coleman and Chad Lowe play key roles in this made-for-TV derivation of the old favorite Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Target Earth originally aired February 5, 1998, on ABC. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
A children's fantasy adventure, Warriors of Virtue features five superheroes, dressed in kangaroo-like outfits, who are known as the Roos. The Roos inhabit a magical underground world which is threatened by the foppish villain Komodo (Angus Macfayden), who is mining a life-enhancing mineral from the River of Life. Ryan Jeffers (Mario Yedidia) arrives in this fantasy world unexpectedly, after taking a dare from a bully to walk across a whirlpool in an underground sewer. Ryan has with him an ancient Chinese manuscript, the Tao, given to him by a mystical cook in a Chinese restaurant, Ming (Dennis Dun), before Ryan was suddenly sucked into the nether world. The Tao contains secrets coveted both by Komodo and by Master Chung (Chao-Li Chi), an ancient guru who rules the Roos' kingdom. But only Ryan can read the manuscript. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Angus MacFadyen, Mario Yedidia, (more)
John Larkin (Timothy Hutton would seem to have the ideal life: A great job, a beautiful home, a happy marriage. Nonetheless, John has always been nagged by the feeling that "something is missing." The truth of this suspicion is violently driven home when John is inexplicably kidnapped from his home in the middle of the night by two sinister strangers. Managing to escape, John makes his way back to his wife (Suzy Amis--only to find out that she's not his wife at all, but instead a doctor for a top-secret government agency. Laboriously putting the pieces together, John realizes that he has never truly existed as a human being since he was nearly killed in a car crash: Instead, he is a semi-android, his brain implanted with false and misleading memories--all part of a master scheme to transform him into a "perfect" government assassin! Not dissimilar to such theatrical technothrillers as Total Recall, the made-for-TV Dead By Midnight (you'll have to see the film to understand the title's grim significance) was first aired by ABC on November 23, 1997. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
