Antibody (2002)

Lance Henriksen is a talented action movie actor who has appeared in some of the most successful movies of all time (Aliens, Terminator) as well as putting in a memorable performance in vampire classic “Near Dark”. It is therefore tragic that his career is reduced to appearing in straight-to-video nonsense like this. Impressively Antibody is a film so obscure that no pictures of it seem to exist on the Internet when I originally wrote this review, although I did find one after when looking for a DVD link.

The premise is a blatant rip-off of Innerspace, with a second-rate terrorist sub-plot tacked on. Dr Richard Gayens (Lance Henriksen) is an anti-terrorism expert who is called in to deal with a group of terrorists who take a German politician hostage. The police decide to make a raid to try and take out the terrorists, however the terrorist leader had the cunning idea of placing a bomb trigger inside his body, so if he is killed a nuclear bomb will explode destroying a European city. After he is fatally wounded in the shoot-out the only way to stop the bomb exploding is for Lance and a specially selected team of incompetents to go through a miniaturisation device that places them inside in a small craft that will swim through the terrorist's bloodstream in an Innerspace fashion.

The premise is a blatant rip-off of Innerspace's plot, and although the terrorist angle is a novel addition it isn’t a particularly good one. The science is very, very poor even by b-movie standards and the attempts at dramatic situations as the craft encounters problems are just ludicrously derivative b-movie nonsense. The first part of the film is not too bad, the terrorists are convincingly ruthless and there are a couple of half-decent action scenes. However, once we get on the science-fiction section the film gets increasingly incompetent.

Lance looks a bit bored but is still the best actor in the film by a mile, his sidekicks are annoying and amateurish and they're landed with some quite dire dialogue. There's also some cheap-looking special effects to contend with, and inevitably incompetent directing.

In summary, a very poor science fiction movie, whose only notable feature is rip-offing a slightly obscure film as opposed to going for the more familiar sub-genre of Aliens-ripoffs.

Rating : 3 / 10

Click here to buy the DVD at Amazon.co.uk (it's a region 1 DVD by the way).

All content ©2003 William Marnoch.

Comments? Agree/Disagree with the Reviews? Suggestions? Random Ramblings? Whatever you might want to say, feel free to e-mail me at william@wmarnoch.freeserve.co.uk .