(aka, Nightworld: Survivor)
[Spoilers ahead!]
UPN.
Remember them?
I suppose more of you might remember Star Trek: Voyager, which was the cornerstone for their attempt to build a Fifth Network — and their strange mystery/adventure show Nowhere Man still has a culty following. Of course, they weren’t the only ones trying to set up Network 5 at the time (and, no, we never got all the way up to 23), and none of them were particularly successful in the end. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise as you couldn’t watch UPN or The WB or any of the even smaller ones in a lot of markets. Or they only had an hour or two of programming a night and ran at strange times.
But, thanks to their connections to Paramount, UPN got a lot of new TV movies, including an impressive number of science fiction films.
Which were a lot like those put out by the Sci Fi Network: cheap and generally unimpressive.
In fact, many of them, like Survivor, would end up on the Sci Fi Network.
Six of these films were made by the same producers and released as an “anthology” series called “Nightworld.” This explains the alternate title this film goes by at times, but as far as I know the films didn’t have a shared framing story or any other real connection.
Now this is one of those films which will remind you of a lot of other science fiction films you’ve seen as it hits a lot of familiar points along the way. We’ve got a high-tech drilling rig in Alaska, which is drilling deeper than anyone has before, and it accidentally releases a horrible creature which then proceeds to kill everyone.
As I was writing this it suddenly occurred to me that this reminded me of the urban legends about the Kolo Superdeep Borehole in Siberia accidentally drilling its way into hell: those of you who’ve read my review of Superdeep may recall that one version of the tale was relocated to Alaska. I suspect it may have been an influence, even if this time around it was an alien spaceship which has been there for a very long time.
As I said, this is a very familiar sort of story so it should come as no shock that it had something to do with the origins of life on Earth, and of man.
I can’t say this is one of my favorite plot twists in science fiction, although it is a rather old one, and you can point at movies like Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth and 2001 which used it well. However, Survivor‘s version is at least an interesting variation, as the aliens are farmers, and we’re their crop.
Mind you, finding out that we’re all just E.T.’s prize Herefords doesn’t seem to disturb most of the characters, who spout some talk about evolution and are just fine with this.
Right.
Despite the Arctic setting, most of the film is set in the usual industrial setting — in this case, a water treatment plant in Ontario. The High-Tech drilling rig is huge, with a maze of pipes and tunnels deep underground, and the creature hunts them down one by one and dissects them.
The creature itself is a man in a suit and is actually quite good. It looks big and powerful — and moves with a certain grace. Which is something most cheap man-in-a-suit monsters fail to achieve. We only get a quick glimpse of the spaceship at the beginning, and fortunately it is a quick glimpse as it is a low resolution early digital effect spaceship and quite shiny.
Greg Evigan of BJ and the Bear fame stars, and is adequate. However, David Hewlett, who appeared in so many of Vincenzo Natali’s films and in Stargate: Atlantis, has a nice supporting role. He’s one of those reliable character actors who can be counted on to give a good performance, and he doesn’t disappoint here (even if he isn’t as creepy and intense as he was in Cypher).
All in all, Survivor is a competently made and moderately amusing sort of film, a B-Movie with a solid cast, a pretty good monster, and a nicely realized setting (and yes, we do get to see a bit of the harsh arctic wilderness surrounding the rig).
So once again we’re in B-Movie territory, but don’t worry, it will work nicely for a Midnight movie marathon as long as you don’t ask too much of it.
Just make sure you have plenty of popcorn.
rivets on the poster 
2 thoughts on “Survivor (1999)”