Unfortunately once the "thriller" part of the plot kicks into gear, Page settles back into some rote developments. Of course they are, and we know it, that's the whole point! An intelligent weather system that kills with lightning! Like a terrestrial downsize of Fred Hoyle's classic SF novel The Black Cloud, and excellent thriller grist. The men have succeeded in a way they could never imagine. Once those super duper lasers fire things get weird. This opening third is the strongest part of the novel, covering the buildup, execution, and immediate aftermath of "Operation Windowpane," an almost-real life attempt at creating a death beam. Before any thunderbolts and lightning crash, however, Page has us backed into a corner with dread, the creeping fear that something is going wrong and it's beyond any of us to stop. Sigmet Active was perhaps a tougher candidate for a low budget quickie adaptation, dealing as it does with the entirety of "the weather" striking back at man, instead of gimmicked beetles.
Īuthor Thomas Page is perhaps best known for his 1973 novel The Hephaestus Plague, a disaster epic with the deliciously twisted threat of flaming beetles from beneath the earth! This work was adapted toot sweet by exploitation legend William Castle under the shameless, moronically Hollywood-ized title Bug. maybe not the most finessed tag line, but you get where this is going. They've gathered on Itrek Island, a miserable patch of hell in the South Pacific, and we're at X minus 45 hours until they sound the trumps of doom. The planners? Croft, Tregaskis, Malone and more, a disparate group of desperate losers handpicked by the military because they have no where else to go and no one who would miss them if something goes wrong. The plan? Punch a hole through the ozone layer with some super lasers, and see what happens. He knows we brought him here to kill him."Ĭroft's reflecting on Lancelot the lab monkey, one of the doomed voyagers on board the decommissioned Knoxville, chosen as a floating test site for some super science shenanigans. "Croft combed his fingers through his white scraggly beard.
0 kommentar(er)
