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happyTopic: Fan Review of Antibody
Antibody Trailer
Source: Picture Gallery by Lycos
I watched the movie "Antibody" recently and found it very entertaining. I enjoyed the plot. The movie starred Lance Henriksen with his co-star Robin Givens. Loyal fans and admirers of Lance Henriksen will not be disappointed. The movie is not considered "horror". If you are looking for horror choose another movie with Lance Henriksen. However, if you are looking for a movie with a scientific yet believable twist, I suggest this movie. It was enjoyable to watch Lance playing such an active role. By Lafemmenikita07
Additional Reviews Include the Artistry of Lance Henriksen in your World
DVD Review | Antibody
Written by: Kage Alan
Film Rating: B
DVD Special Features: N/A
I remember seeing commercials for this made-for-TV movie on the Sci-Fi channel and really wanting to catch it. Unfortunately, wanting to see it and remembering what night it’s on are two completely different things. How different? Think Martha Stewart and Mother Theresa. Unfortunately, since I no longer watch the Sci-Fi channel nor officially support anything they do ever since they screwed over the cast, crew and fans of “Farscape” by canceling them at the last possible second, I never caught another viewing of “Antibody”. Well, thank goodness for DVD releases because now I can watch it without giving the Sci-Fi Channel two hours of my viewing time.
Dr. Richard Gaynes (Lance Henriksen, “Mimic: Sentinel”) is a top-notch bomb defuser for the FBI, only he seems to have met his match when he orders the killing of a terrorist being held at the airport who happens to be holding the trigger. As soon as the villain’s pulse stops, the bomb goes off. Oops. Guess who the scapegoat is? A year later, Gaynes finds himself in Germany running his own security company. Unfortunately, he can’t even seem to do that very well and another terrorist saunters right on in and attempts to hold the country hostage.
Yes, there’s another bomb, only this one is big enough to lay waste to everything for close to fifty miles and leave enough radioactive fallout to last a solid six years. The catch? The trigger is inside the terrorist and killing him will set it off. It doesn’t take long before the terrorist is subdued (though kept alive) and Gaynes is brought in by some scientists for a desperate mission. He’s about to be shrunk down, sent in with a team lead by Dr. Rachel Saverini (Robin Givens, “Boomerang”) in an experimental craft and forced to fend off the body’s defenses in order to locate the trigger and disarm it. Whew!
One of the main attractions to watching this film is the special effects, which are pretty sweet in some sequences. Unfortunately, it does not a successful movie make. The saving grace here is Lance Henriksen. Despite supporting roles in films like “Mangler 2”, Henriksen proves once again that the man can helm an average film and make it something a little extra special. Even Givens does what she can despite being given stilted dialogue and a cast of supporting players who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag. Director Christian McIntire is smart enough to understand the material is so-so and instead lets his lead actors do what they do best; chew up the screen. I can respect that!
First Look Home Entertainment has released “Antibody” in a very nice looking Full Screen transfer. Since this was made-for-TV, I’m assuming this is the correct aspect ratio. Video quality is quite nice and the audio matches. Okay, I even liked the theme music. It must have reminded me of something from the 80s. As for extras, there’s a trailer. Too bad McIntire didn’t do a commentary for this because I would have loved to have heard what it was like putting the project together. It looks like the cast had a ton of fun.
“Antibody” is one of those rare films where it shouldn’t have worked, that the special effects were the only reason to watch it, but somehow you end up far more entertained than you have any right to be. Okay, more than I had any right to be. It was fun and I really enjoyed it, especially Henriksen.
Another Review
"Antibody, one of the first UFO films I?ve seen in a while it seems like yesterday that they were making half the movies I ended up watching proves a pleasingly decent low-budget riff on 1966's Fantastic Voyage*. In that film, a medical team (including Stephen "The Oscar" Boyd, Raquel Welch and a typically squirrelly Donald Pleasance) are miniaturized and sent, via an equally wee sub, into the bloodstream of a defecting Russian scientist, following an assassination attempt. Their mission was to find and eradicate a potentially fatal blood clot. I am assuming the line in the film's trailer, included on the DVD, which has the announcer noting, "Now a group of scientists must make an incredible journey inside the human body," is meant to be winking allusion to the movie's predecessor. Here Lance Henriksen and Robin Givens lead a similarly miniaturized and equipped team who are also injected into a human body. Their mission is to search out and disarm a nano-detonator lodged in the body of a grievously wounded Russian terrorist. Should the man die before they do so, the detonator will trigger a massive nuclear blast that will kill millions and render much of Europe unlivable for years to come. We open with a rather nifty credit sequence featuring flashcuts of CGI animations of the human body and a nice, driving score. This is the kind of thing you like to see in these movies, a bit of style in those areas that don't require a lot of money to be effective. The film proper begins outside the Russian embassy in Washington, as FBI bomb expert Richard Haynes (Henriksen) arrives to disarm a bomb found in the building?s basement. After some stuff meant to establish his credentials as a Guy Who Knows What He's Doing, he looks over the device until interrupted by a phone call. An armed Russian national has been cornered in the airport, and is waving around both a gun and what appears to be a detonator. Haynes gives the order to have the man shot down. However, this event appears to trigger the bomb, which kills a number of police officers and destroys the embassy building.
It's eventually determined that the man at the airport had been implanted with a nano-sized detonator, one that was designed to trigger the bomb when he died. Given the spectacular nature of the results, an official scapegoat is required. Haynes quickly finds himself out of work. A year later, Haynes is living in Germany, heading up a successful high-tech security firm. He's providing the security for a conference on nano-technology that's drawing several of the world's most important scientists, as well as the German Chancellor. Unfortunately, Russian terrorists infiltrate the conference and kill several attendees. The rest are held as hostages. (I couldn't quite follow what their cause was. The group is described as "right-wing" of course and the head terrorist at one point starts ranting about a "New World Order," but their actual motives remains tenuous at best.) After publicly offing the German Chancellor, the head terrorist warns that he too sports a nano-detonator, one that will destroy Munich should he die. In the end, the authorities risk a raid, but the head terrorist ends up being shot by one of his own men. It's determined that the wounds will undoubtedly prove fatal, and in short order. Luckily, nano-expert Dr. Theodore Birhill has been heading up a secret project on miniaturizing people down to a microscopic size. With time against them, he shrinks Gaynes and a small team headed up by scientist Dr. Rachel Saverini (Robin Givens!) and injects them into the body to find and disarm the detonator. However, the team is not only against the clock, but must survive the human body?s defensive mechanisms, including the blob-like "whites," or white blood cells. In the end, Antibody is most interesting (admittedly, to an extraordinarily narrow segment of the public) as evidence that that the folks at UFO are gradually getting a handle on this movie thing. The most obvious advantage the film possesses is the presence of Lance Henriksen as its leading man. While I still tend to wince at seeing such a fine actor reduced to taking parts in DTV junk like this, at least the picture gives him a decent showcase. Too often he appears in near-cameo roles in even cheaper productions, and usually, of course, as a villain.
Henriksen is an interesting actor. Unlike many of his B-movie star peers and predecessors, he's not prone to hamming it up. Instead, he remains a minimalist actor, but one who manages to project a very credible intelligence and authority even in patently ridiculous circumstances. Given the script deficiencies generally inherent in these productions, such an actor is downright invaluable. The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to awful. Robin Givens fails to embarrass herself as the de riouger beauteous scientist, but doesn't exactly set the screen afire either. (Of course, given the kind of shooting schedules these things tend to have, you wouldn't really expect her to.) Some might find her character's ready acceptance of the markedly older Henriksen as a romantic partner problematic. However, since he makes every other male in the cast look positively lifeless in comparison, I had no difficulty in this department. UFO vet William Zabke, star of Python and Python II, is a solid actor relagated to a truly pointless supporting role. He's also victimized by his inability to provide in any halfway convincing fashion the German accent his part requires. If I hadn't seen him in other movies, I probably wouldn't have suspected him of being capable of better work. At the lowest end of the spectrum, meanwhile, is the Romanian actor who plays the lead terrorist. One assumes he received a bonus every time he bugged his eyes out for Eeee-vil emphasis. It's no doubt for the best that he doesn?t have any face-to-face time with Henriksen, whose traditionally expert underplaying would have made the guy's performance look even more ludicrous. The physical production is comparatively impressive. There are still times when one become aware of the fact that the actors are on some rather economical sets' the elevator whose low door forces the actors to bend down in order to enter and exit it being an example?but on the whole these are at least good enough that they don?t draw attention to themselves. The most prominent sign of a higher budget, at least by UFO standards, is the generous amount of CGI. Unsurprisingly, all the action inside the body is computer animated, and it's actually pretty decent. It was probably an advantage that the entire sequences were animated, rather than involving CGI effects placed into and purportedly interacting with real-life settings and actors, as in the studio's myriad giant animal pictures.
The script is a hit-and-miss affair, although a bit more lively than those of many earlier UFO efforts. Again, though, it's immeasurably helped by Henriksen, who manages to make the material seem less dubious than it actually is. Also, when the film isn't given to lame repartee and one-liners, it can occasionally be affecting. Right on schedule, for instance, one of the mini-sub characters makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the others. I won't say I burst into tears of grief over said demise, but the scene worked better than I had been expecting. I also really, really liked the fact that none of the good guy characters turned out to be gasp, shock a terrorist mole. This kind of extraneous bad-guyism is depressingly standard in these films, and indeed, occurred in Fantastic Voyage. I admit to spending the entire film tensing for such a revelation, and appreciated being wrong in this instance. UFO so far has been best known for their presumably successful series of giant killer animal/reptile/bug movies. Therefore it's probably not much of a surprise that the micro-nauts finds themselves besieged not only by the protoplasmic white blood cells, but also by microscopic but comparatively gigantic blood-sucking mites. Such a beastie is featured on the DVD box art, apparently in an effort to attract the company's normal consumers. On the whole, however, the screenplay evinces the problematic qualities of most of the studio's fare. One can't really complain about the ridiculousness of the film's central concept, because if it bothers you that much you wouldn't be watching the film. Perhaps wisely, the script quickly glosses over the science behind the smallifying process. However, it's so brusque in this regard that it's somewhat comical. In fact, they entirely skip over Dr. Bickell's explaining the miniaturization thing to Gaynes. Instead, we come in at the end as he rather vaguely notes, "It was always a simple matter of molecular compression. Once I cracked the formula, the practical application was a fairly simple matter." The physical action stuff is both poorly written and clumsily staged. It's obvious, for instance, that were to view Gaynes as a highly competent professional. Despite this, the terrorists get into the conference, the one supposedly secured by Gaynes' highly elite firm, by dressing themselves as caterers and proceeding directly to the facility's kitchen. Needless to say, this doesn't exactly burnish our Hero's credentials as a savvy operator.
Later, much time before the raid is spent warning that the head terrorist will try to kill himself and hence set off the bomb at the first sign of trouble. The attack then commences, and the guy is caught unharmed (at least at first), but only after he would have been able to kill himself a dozen times over. If you look closely, you can actually see him holding his pistol to his head for a good thirty seconds or more before they manage to disarm him. One bit that kept throwing me was that, after the terrorists detailed the nuclear bomb thing and slaughtered the German Chancellor on television, they kept arguing over whether the public at large should be informed of the situation and evacuated. Even given the counterintuitive paucity of reporters on hand at the conference, and even if the TV report for some reason hadn't gone out live, the idea that all this could be kept from the public remained farcical. Even so, no doubt the biggest groan the film evokes occurs during the climax. Despite going into near-death cardiac arrest about three times during the proceedings, at the end the terrorist magically revives enough to grab a weapon and threaten the cast. (Oops, sorry.) Presumably the filmmakers thought it would be anti-climatic to just let the guy die from his wounds, but his sudden resurrection is more than a little risible. Despite a fairly short running time of about ninety minutes, and generally solid pacing, the script also tends to introduce characters who really don't have much relevance to the plot. Otto really doesn't serve much purpose here and neither does Gaynes' daughter. The most egregiously pointless character, however, is one of your standard Venal Reporters. She's introduced as having unfairly maligned Gaynes following the Washington bombing, has a rather prominent amount of screentime during the hostage situation, and then disappears. I realize they needed to drag things out until they got to the miniaturization stuff, but they probably could have handled this aspect better. If I were able to correct one common trait of the studio's product, it would be to outlaw the attempts at "Hasta La Vista"-type one-liners the characters inevitably spout following what should be solemn moments of horror and/or violence. I realize this has been standard action movie material since the 80s, but it's also something that should have been retired long ago. The film shoots itself in the foot when it goes out of its way to remind you that you're watching a movie, which is the primary effect of the tiresomely witless quips.
By the way, a nod of Jabootu's horns to Marty McKee for pointing this one out to me. Marty is well known to the more hardcore B-movie buffs as a moderator for the invaluable Mobius Home Video Forum, an Internet discussion board covering genre films in all their varieties, with an emphasis on their appearances on DVD and video. This is an essential resource for any self-respecting fan of cult movies, and you should really check it out if you haven't before.
Summary: Better than average DTV fare."
Review of Antibody & Others by Ken Begg at Video Cheese
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quizzical
I have read a lot of comments about Lance Henriksen and a style or approach to acting called "Method Acting"? Please share your comments regarding what "Method Acting" means. By Lafemmenikita07
With all the sophisticated ways to store data and information existing today and yet to be created our history in cinema will be a collective blend of all sorts of entertainment for generations. When I was young, I knew if a movie had Vincent Price in it the movie was going to be something worthy to be watched. Well, today a version of the mastery of Vincent Price can be found in the numerous works of Lance Henriksen. When Lance is involved in a project loyal Lance fans and admirers can rest assured that it will be a performance worthy of our time. Indeed Lance Henriksen will be remembered as one of the legendary actors of the caliber of Vincent Price. By Lafemmenikita07
Lance Henriksen to the rescue in this one! If it weren't for Lance Henriksen's portrayal of Emil Fouchon and the numerous action scenes in this movie it would not have been worth the "watch". I must admit, I am a Van Damme fan because of his action scenes. They excite me! However, it was the performance of Lance Henriksen that causes the excitement in this movie. This movie displayed one of the more enjoyable performances of Lance Henriksen's range and depth of artistry of a colorful yet somewhat dark character in such a manner that you can't help but like the bad guy. "Hard Target" stars Jean-Claude Van Damme with John Woo directing. It also stars Yancy Butler, whom I have enjoyed watching in some of her other projects especially the television series, "Witchblade". I may have started watching the movie to see Van Damme's fighting scenes; however, I ended up being swept away with the command performance of the colorful character of Emil Fouchon played by Lance Henriksen. In my opinion, Lance's performance along with the various types of action scenes made the film entertaining. By Lafemmenikita07
second short film by Director, Richard Gibson from Australia. Having won a number of international and local awards, including the Best of the Fest Award at the 9th Annual Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, the short film has earned a prestigious endorsement from Amnesty International.
Rang worked with Gibson to embrace the full gamut of imaging technology. "Film technology and its chemical process will always be present for the best shooting results", says Rang. "But it's the tools we use in tandem with film that can generate a desired visual effect and give us the best of both worlds". Rang chose KODAK EXR 50D 5245 for exteriors sequences and KODAK VISION2 500T 5218 for night and interior scenes. "We supplemented our stock with KODAK VISION 250D 5246 for the dusk sequences. The flashback home movies of the family were shot on a hand cranked 16mm Bolex with KODAK Ektachrome 400, developed in a standard negative bath which gave us a lovely grainy old world home movies feeling."
not sure
In my opinion, Lance Henriksen is one of the most versatile actors alive today with a remarkable career spanning over 25 years. I would like to see the executives of major production companies, directors, writers, and whomever else involved in the process provide Lance with a script that pulls in all he has to offer “plus some.” Lance has talent that far exceeds the scripts that are offered to him. In other words, lets think "outside the box or paradigm" and give Lance or should I say take a chance or gamble and give Lance a script and a superb supporting cast and make a movie that is not Sci-fi, Horror, Monsters, Blood and Guts, etc. Lance Henriksen was great in "The Last Cowboy" and "Into the West". In addition, those were movies children can watch. I want my daughter to become familiar with Lance Henriksen's work; however, she is only 9 years old. Besides Disney, just how many Tarzan movies are you going to make? (Rhetorial Question) Sure, horror opportunities pays the bills and supports Lance's family. There is no greater honor then to take care of one's family and self. So please do not take me the wrong way. Besides it keeps the horror fans happy. It's just that I would like to see Lance become full circle on the "big screen" as he is in life and show the audience acts of love for a spouse or girlfriend, children, and most of all a job other than a villain, vampire, nut, or crazy cop. Give Lance a role with a character that has a job with problems most of us can relate to in lieu of all these Monsters, Aliens, the Devil and PumpkinHead again. I want to see genuine passionate lovemaking, tender moments shared with other love ones such as children, parents and/or patients. I would like to see Lance portray a more kinder and gentler character but strong and persevering. A multidimensional character is "real life" and representative of the majority of us. A character that experiences an array of emotions that we all have experienced in most of our lives at one time or another including loss of a friend or colleague are the type of movies that are Academy Award and/or Oscar nominated movie candidates because they can appeal to the mass population if brilliantly performed. I want Lance to be provided the opportunity for a different dramatic role that has the audience laughing, crying, cheering, and scared, etc. In addition, I would like to see this happen for an actor that the audience would not expect and let Lance have some creative control and "blow" the audience away with his talent until almost everybody is talking about: "Did you see Lance Henriksen’s latest movie?" "I didn't know he could play those type of parts". And please provide a moderate to large budget. I have been watching films and television for a long time and I am tired of the same "stars" getting those types of roles. I believe Lance has earned his "shot" at a project like this and the time is now. Take a chance like the cable stations do and the European film market. A lot of the movies made for cable and foreign television rocks!!! My friends and co-workers plan their schedule to watch these types of shows on cable and/or satellite. In addition, the acting is superb and they are mostly actors I do not recognize. Nevertheless they are good and I have not heard of the actors; however, I bet money on it that I know them now. Everybody is talking about how our world has changed well what about American filmmakers becoming "gusty" as European filmmakers are for films shown in other countries. I just want the world to stop typecasting Lance Henriksen. Open more doors for Lance and you will not be disappointed. Lance could play a lawyer, doctor, teacher, professor, or whatever. I am not the screenwriter. However, I believe I have said enough so that somebody can grasp the concept and develop it. However please not some "not off" remake. By Lafemmenikita07
