Escape Velocity Reviews

It's the year 2047, and Nash (Peter Outerbridge) and several fellow convicts have engineered a prison escape in a mini-spacecraft equipped with suspended animation sleep-pods. While his cronies hibernate, Nash attaches their stolen ship onto a larger one belonging to a scientific research crew, which rescues him. The chief scientist is Billie (Wendy Crewson), a workaholic mother, whose estranged teenaged daughter Veronica (Michelle Beaudoin) resents the efforts of her stepdad Cal (Patrick Bergin) to resolve the mother-daughter rift. Sensing the dynamics immediately, Nash makes a play for Veronica who's really just a frightened schoolgirl underneath her provocative exterior. The good guys are soon threatened by a red mass from without and menaced by Nash from within. After launching the meddling Cal into space, Nash chains up Billie and Veronica. When Billie extricates herself, Nash pursues her, but she manages to re-route the ship in Cal's direction. Meanwhile, Nash slips away and awakens his not-so-merry band of criminals, hoping to seize control of the larger ship before Cal's return. It's LOST IN SPACE with psychosexual overtones that are so unoriginal, you'll long for the good ol' days of ray guns and genital-less robots. Among the script's unanswered questions are why Nash waits so long to unleash his cellmates. Perhaps it's because the director can't handle camera set-ups involving more than two actors at a time, or maybe the producers couldn't afford to pay the full cast for more than few days. In any event, with barely enough plot for a short film, this threadbare sci-fi actioner pads itself out with hide-and-seek shenanigans, doling out too much sexual cruelty and not enough suspense