USA. 1998.
Crew
Director – John Terlesky, Screenplay – William Carson, Producers – Lisa Hansen & Paul Hertzberg, Photography – Maximo Munzi, Music – Joseph Stanley Williams, Visual Effects – Pop, Special Effects – Larry Roberts Special Effects (Supervisor – Larry Roberts), Production Design – John Larena. Production Company – CineTel Films.
Cast
Ice-T (Matthew Reese), Suzy Amis (Special Agent Jeanine Tyrell), Mario Van Peebles (Brother Thomas Payne), Linden Ashby (Dr David Corbett), Max Gail (General William Meech), Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Jr. (Brother Clarence), Coolio (Luther), Mark Deakins (Captain Douglas McNally), David Wells (Dr Richard Secor), James Eckhouse (Captain Tom Keller), Dartanyan Edmonds (Damon), Larry Poindexter (Jeff), Devika Parikh (Rhonda Reese), Shireen Crutchfield (Rachel)
Plot
A meteor fragment obliterates a village in Peru. Government scientists detect a meteor four miles wide on a collision course with Earth. To destroy it, they need to reactivate an orbiting defence weapon. To do this, they need the help of former government scientist Dr David Corbett who has retired to a teaching position. Just as agents go to pick Corbett up, he is snatched at gunpoint by members of The Taborites, a religious cult led by Thomas Payne. Believing that there is a leak within Defense Department circles, General Meech recruits FBI agent Jeanine Tyrell on an independent mission to find Corbett within three days. Jeanine takes the choice of having Matthew Reese, a convicted criminal who burns for revenge against Payne for killing his family, released from jail. Jeanine and Reese make an uneasy truce, tracking leads among Reese’s former associates in an effort to find Payne and rescue Corbett.
Judgment Day was one of the productions from CineTel Films, a company that has been producing horror and action films since the 1980s and are still at it. During this period, CineTel produced horror films such as 976-Evil (1988), Out of the Dark (1988), Vampirella (1996), Beyond Loch Ness (2008), Ogre (2008) and the remake of I Spit on Your Grave (2010), among others, while the 2010s saw a move to a series of low-budget disaster and killer shark films.
Judgment Day feels like an odd attempt to mash-up genres. It premiered on December 30, 1998, at the end of a year that had featured two big-budget asteroid/meteor collision films with Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), which had come out in respectively May and July of that year. Judgment Day feels exactly an Asylum mockbuster, a lower-budget film designed to capitalise on the success of those other high profile efforts.
At the same time, Judgment Day is also trying to be a ‘hood film. This is a genre that had emerged several years earlier with the popular hits of Boyz in the Hood (1991) and New Jack City (1991), the latter of which had been directed by Mario Van Peebles and co-starred Ice-T. These popularised a series of gritty African-American dramas set around life among gangs, drug dealing and petty crime, and produced a number of copies.
Judgment Day is an odd beast that seems to awkwardly try to marry these two very different genres of the ‘hood drama and the meteor collision film. With Mario Van Peebles directing, the ‘hood drama/cop story and action element tends to dominate. There are lots of urgent scenes based around following Ice-T’s underworld connections.
Apart from various interspersed scenes cutting back to the military dealing with the situation, the oncoming meteor drama gets short shrift. We get one cheap-looking scene at the start where a Peruvian village is wiped out by a fragment but there are none of the usual Disaster Movie scenes with people struggling against the threat. All that drives the plot is the pretext of rescuing abducted scientist Linden Ashby whose knowledge is needed to trigger the missile defence system. Also the doomsday Cult is awfully generic – just Mario Van Peebles standing around looking charismatic without any clear sense of what ideals the group believes or what attracts followers to them.
One of the things the film does well is in highlighting Suzy Amis. With tall thin figure and pale looks, Amis has a striking presence – none more so than early in the show when she demonstrates she is a total bad-ass and goes into action demolishing a room of tough guys with nothing more than a pen. Disappointingly for the promise she shows here, Judgment Day would be Amis’s last film – she subsequently married James Cameron after meeting him on the set of Titanic (1997) and dropped out of acting to play home with him. She is well paired with Ice-T who gives a solid performance.
Director John Terlesky made a number of other video-released genre films usually with an action bent that include the thriller The Pandora Project (1998), the apocalyptic Judgment Day (1999), the nuclear thriller Chain of Command (2000), the possession/action film Guardian (2001), the serial killer thriller Malevolent (2002), the monster/action film Cerberus (2005), the monster movie Fire Serpent (2007) and the psycho-thriller By Appointment Only (2009).
Trailer here