Michael Pare plays a spaceship officer trying to stop a killer--and save Earth from an asteroid while he's at it--in FALLING FIRE, a lackluster sci-fi video release that originally aired as an entry in Showtime's "Roger Corman Presents" series.
In the future, Daryl Boden (Michael Pare) is the First Officer on a space shuttle that's staging a series of explosions to destroy a massive asteroid heading for Earth. Boden suspects sabotage when some of his crew members begin to die one by one as a result of several freak accidents and he
eventually discovers that one of the crew, Rene (Zerha Leverman), is behind the treachery and has programmed the ship's computer to alter the course of the asteroid so that it will crash into Earth. Meanwhile, Boden's estranged wife Marilyn (Heidi Von Palleske), is a government agent on Earth
tracking a gang of eco-terrorists led by Lopez (Christian Vidosa). When Lopez is captured, Marilyn interrogates him, but his gang breaks him out and he takes Marilyn hostage to his headquarters, where he monitors the action on the shuttle via a satellite link and reveals that Rene is working for
him. After Boden kills Rene, Marilyn manages to shoot Lopez and communicate with Boden through the satellite. Boden is unable to override the ship's computer, but he successfully changes the trajectory of the asteroid by crashing into it with the ship, and he saves Earth from destruction.
Made in Canada, FALLING FIRE is as generic and derivative as its title, featuring lots of Canadian actors sitting in semifuturistic sets filled with multicolored computer control panels and spitting out lines like, "We have atmospheric rebound, sir" and "Instituting reactor diagnostic now, sir"
with utter seriousness. Always one to copy a trend with a quickie knock-off that actually beats its bigger-budgeted brethren to the market, Corman's obvious inspirations here are 1998's two blockbuster asteroid movies, DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON, but the film actually tries to copy the look of
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), with such familiar visuals as a videophone transmission from Boden's son, a monitor showing a surveillance camera's POV in the ship (a la HAL), and images of the tiny astronauts floating through the vastness of space while repairing the ship. The special effects are
uninspired, but competent in a low-tech way, utilizing miniature models to a great extent, but the story jumps from scene to scene and location to location without establishing a clear narrative line or even explaining what the characters are supposed to be doing, until the film is almost over.
Yet, as always, one has to give Corman his due for inventing some ingenious ways to insert the requisite gratuitous nudity: a flashback of Boden in bed with his wife, holographic images of strippers created by the ship's engineer, and a zero-gravity sex scene aboard the space shuttle that just
might be the first of its kind since Jane Fonda's famous striptease in BARBARELLA (1968). (Violence, profanity, nudity, sexual situations.) leave a comment