No, not the sci-fi adventure Disney adventure from back when Disney didn’t also own Star Wars.
No, not the classic pinball table by Gottlieb.
Just another SYFY disaster movie for TV. Not be confused with another sci-fi movie from 2016 that’s also called Black Hole.. when it’s not sold as Quantum Voyage.
Plot centers about an incident with Saint Loui’s supercollider, which results in a black hole that feeds on electrical energy, and it expands as a creature that came out from it goes in search of more energy around the city, with the potential of eventually absorbing the nation or the entire world at large. A troubled quantum physicist is called back to action to understand what went wrong and how to solve the problem before the army is forced to nuke the black hole as a last resort.
I will take advantage of the fact there’s really not much to say about the plot of this movie (i could have said the same in other occasions, but it’s good opportunity and i’m using it) to clarify i don’t write reviews of movie like these just to bash them or to shit on the people making these. I do them because i figure that i can get something out of it (not just “content”), and i do like watching this type of movies regardless, it should be abudantly clear by now. I give every movie a chance, regardless, but i would be lying if i went into a movie like this with high expectations.
That said, if anything The Black Hole sticks to “B-movie for TV” tradition, as in we have some of “old” recognizable actors in here to play the leading character and give the movie some marketing value, in this case Jude Nelson (The Breakfast Club, Suddendly Susan, St. Elmo’s Fire), Kristy Swanson (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Phantom from 1996, Hot Shots, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and David Selby (Falcon Crest, The Social Network, the Dark Shadows tv series).
Do they sleepwalk their way through this one, as many actors have done in SYFY films?
Not quite, they clearly known no one’s getting an Oscar for this movie, but they do offer fairly solid performances, and the movie… is alright for a TV movie from Nu Image.
Sure, the special effects are cheap, they are, but there’s more budget to go around than expected, and yes, the fact that the army even so slightly considered dropping a nuclear bomb into a black hole should tell you this movie isn’t…… exactly meant as a realistic disaster drama, i’m not even sure how much of the science is correct. I’m not quantum psysicist, just a hunch it’s not 100 % on the level.
But i’ll concede this one of those B-grade disaster movies that actually tries to do its best with the material and budget at hand, instead of not bothering because it’s a SYFY Tv movie, who cares, thankfully that isn’t the attitude here, and while you really won’t be that invested in the characters or the plot, the narrative moves along at a good pace, direction is ok and there is enough stuff getting destroyed or things happening. It will kill 90 minutes without incite annoyed groaning, at least the script avoids the grating antagonism between scientists and army men to generate cheap conflict.
It’s not good, but it’s not offensive or worth the enraged scathing low review scores on IMDB. If you think this is “1/10 material”, you really haven’t seen the truly bad ones.
Far from it.
This one is from director Tibor Takàcs, best known for his cult horror movie The Gate (less its sequel, The Gate II: Trespassers), but also the 1996’s Sabrina The Teenage Witch movie, which lead to the TV series most people born in the 90s are familiar with, and one of the best tv puppets ever. He still does the occasional B-movie monster movie for TV, and Christmas flicks, just short of going full modern day David Coteau with his “A Talking [noun]?!” family films about animals.
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