Star Runners (2009 TV Movie)
5/10
Pretty disappointing overall
20 September 2012
While attempting to transport a mysterious shipment out of a quarantined zone, two smugglers learn that the planet they're on is infested with a race of vicious insects and must band together with a small band of survivors to leave the area alive.

While this one wasn't truly terrible, this one was a pretty huge disappointment. Among the few positives here is the few times this one lets loose and features some rather enjoyable action scenes here that do come up at regular enough intervals to make an impact. The early space chase as the ship's maneuver around looking for an escape before hyper-speeding away into deep space gets this going nicely, the early explorations of the facility revealing the remains of the facility crew left behind and the resulting discovery of the insects at the early stages of their arrival, the main attack scene in the facility where the creatures come swarming in from everywhere and major gunfights are undertaken in every direction as it forces them into the underground tunnels which is a fantastic action scene on it's own that finally leads into the surface attacks which is all plenty of fun throughout here bringing in some generally enjoyable action scenes. The big final encounter here, which is the charging assault into the secondary facility where the huge mother-bug comes out from the hill-side while their gunfights out in the fields leads to some wholly fun times as the massive swarms and gun-battles gives it a rather frenetic feel. While there is some innovative ways to deal with them and they do look pretty convincing in execution due to their lack of screen-time, the fact remains that as a horror film, this one fails miserably, especially since this one could've been a golden opportunity for some cheesy fun but instead turned into a rather dull and completely science-fiction centered story that didn't have as much emphasis on the horror that it should've. The sci-fi elements are brought to the forefront here with the early half focusing on their predicament with the military and generally a chance to show off the different technology of the time period which dominates the whole first part of the film before it tends to spend the majority of the time on the woman and her mysterious powers, really wiping the bug attacks down to such a minimum that it severely damages the pacing of the film for such an inconsequential area. Had it concentrated more on the giant bugs crawling around instead of treating them as a nuisance to hold off their escapes then it might've been more of a factor in the finale rather than being settled twenty minutes before and having that time get tied up in resolving the sci-fi story which truly shows where the true intent of the film lies. That ties into the main story lines and twists as well which puts way more emphasis on these issues than it does on giving the creatures any kind of special attention, which really lowers this one. The attacks are also just lame, as there's hardly any gore and tends to write itself with the utterly ridiculous CGI that's featured in these films which follows the standard methods of really ridiculous and near-atrocious levels of CGI featured. There was some solid points here, but as it stands there's still too many flaws to overcome.

Rated R: Violence, Language and Brief Nudity
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