Brilliant and touching

As Good As It Gets

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH is another stinker from The Asylum released to cash in on the success of the Hollywood film of the same name. This one bears no relation to the Jules Verne story and instead involves a bunch of modern-day characters who accidentally travel to the middle of the Earth, which looks remarkably like the kind of open countryside that often stands in for alien or fantasy terrain in Asylum movies. While there, they get pursued by a CGI dinosaur and emote and scream a lot. The film is a bog-standard cheapie, make with little in the way of technical prowess or skill, content instead to go through the motions throughout.

Even below the typical level of Sci-Fi channel stuff. Most of these movies you can laugh at, but this thing barely achieves even camp-level status. It has next to nothing to do with the Jules Verne work, only rips off and defames the title. In fact, everything in this movie is ripped off from somebody else's ideas. The $7 budget used in this film was only enough to hire some Drama 101 students from a local middle-school. A rag-tag group of Xena-wanna-be's are supposed to go to Germany in a covert mission, using some sort of teleportation device. Would you believe it doesn't work right? Well, they don't materialize inside of solid rock like this movie's writers did; instead, they end up in a south Pacific tropical island paradise. It's the home to a few CGI dinosaurs that actually appear occasionally, usually to roar. There's other Skull island type grotesque creatures scaring our heroines, too.The group of stereotypes--I mean soldiers include Vilma Dinkley. She examines a pebble, and immediately knows they're 600 kilometers below the surface, under magma. You heard that right: under magma. There's a bully cat-fighter girl, a Barbie cutout doll, and their Camp Fire girls troop leader--I mean, captain. They all look like refugees from an Annette and Frankie beach musical. Scenes involving the tunneling vehicle are even sillier. The scientist and the army guy ride around through magma like they do it every day, making one-liners. The machine emerges from a magma chamber into the Hawaiian set, and shows no signs of even being warm. No smoke, ash, discoloration--nothing.If somebody sells the DVD of this at a yard sale for 25 cents, it's price gouging.

For a bunch of professional female soldiers these were less qualified than a bunch of Playboy Bunnies. The acting was as awful, as well as the special effects.The technical advisers were probably recruited from the fourth grade of an elementary school. For a place where light came from an evenly illuminated sky the shadows were remarkably sharp. The effects of the vastly increased atmospheric pressure that would be encountered were non-existent. These are only a couple of the technical problems. I think I have seen worse movies but the only one comes to mind was Killer Klowns from Outer Space.This movie has absolutely no similarity to other movies of the same name although some of them were a bit lacking.

First, a single-word summary-- Unwatchable.As I watched this film, I couldn't shake the impression that this may have been some group's first attempt at making a movie, with actors, crew, and technicians who are still learning their craft. The premise is intriguing, but of all the attempts to bring Jules Verne's 1864 novel to the screen, this one may be the worst of the lot. I am as willing as anyone to suspend my disbelief and hang on for the ride, if the story is well-told; but the wooden acting, preposterous dialog, cheesy special-effects, and overall lack of focus and discipline added up to a rather grueling hour and a half, that felt like six hours. If they were still making episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, this turkey would be ripe for a good basting.