If you look hard enough on the internet, it transpires it's actually pretty easy to find full length movies from low budget or copycat studios like The Asylum e.t.c which is great news for people like me who watch this kind of stuff, or terrible news for people like me who force themselves to sit through this crap... So I'd like to welcome what will become a monthly feature to the Popcorn blog; where once a month I will pick some random film from an archive of potentially 1000's to post about here! Yay for us! I think. Our maiden voyage on this journey is Nostradamus, a turn of the millennium film from *checks notes* Regent Entertainment.
Michael Nostrand (Rob Estes) is a homicide Detective investigating a seemingly random murder of a man found burnt to a cinder when he gets caught up with an old partner from the FBI, Lucy Hudson (Joely Fisher) who informs him she has been investigating similar murders for years now; victims always burnt to ashes, all with no motive whatsoever. Whilst investigating the latest murder, Michael manages to shoot and kill the long red haired man carrying out the crimes and for some reason, when receiving his ring from evidence, tries it on and is teleported to 16th Century France where Garamond (Fintan McKeown); a time travelling monk who stole plans for a time machine from the Vatican and Leonardo Di Vinci, has been instructing his army of followers; the Sixth Order, to meticulously erase people from history to swing the balance of Armageddon in favour of Satan. Whilst in the 1536, Michael discovers he is in fact Nostradamus... and that the last person on Garmond's list is his partner, Lucy. Sent back... or.. forward... to his own time, Michael manages to track Lucy down and eventually convinces her that she needs to be protected. Meanwhile Garmond's followers have been sent forward in time (complete with super high powered automatic firepower!) tasked with tracking down both Michael and Lucy and killing them, and they track the pair to an abandoned... warehouse? And after a gun fight Michael manages to kill all three of them, but Garamond has followed them there too! He takes Lucy prisoner but not before Michael cuts off his hand, severing his ties to the ring and to the time machine and reducing him to dust. Fast forward some time and Michael returns, complete with dodgy bowl cut and goatee beard, to warn Lucy that the Sixth Order has risen again and that there is a new list! And the pair ride off together to protect the first victim. And oh god please don't let there be a sequel.
I just want to take a minute to untangle the central plot line of this movie for you; Michel de Nostredame, famous French Astrologer and proclaimed Seer was in fact a time travelling American Detective who got stuck in 1536 and stayed there to help fellow Astrologer; La Font from preventing the forces of evil bringing about Armageddon... It's fair to say that there's a good helping of suspension of reality with this movie. They took some fag packet knowledge of Nostradamus and Les Prophéties and basically used it as the central plot line for an action movie about time travelling killers. I mean, I've watched Sci Fi films about giant snakes, alien recovery crews and whatever the fuck Alone in the Dark was about and in comparison, the central plot lines of those movies were more believable than this. When I was much younger, I got quite into Nostradamus (hence my reason for choosing this movie when I spotted it) and I actually have a copy of Les Prophéties translated into English. It's a beefy ol' book, taking up a sizeable chunk of my bookcase and that's because Nostradamus wrote a whole lot of prophecies, and whether or not you believe he was a Seer (I don't think this is really the place to debate that) the point is that he was, is, essentially a renowned Historical figure. It takes a hell of balls and a hell of a lot of creative licence to run with that and go: "no, actually, let's make it so that the Detective actually is Nostradamus" what a load of bum gravy.
So we've established that the plot is complete nonsense, but I will give the film it's due for actually going there. I fully expected this to end with Michael and Lucy tracking down the killer, it ending and there being some ambiguity about whether or not he was a time traveller, whether her not Nostradamus was guiding them to the truth e.t.c. but no, this film just went; fuck that. And went full on balls to the wall. There's time travel, monks with long hair and semi-automatic weaponry, the protagonist becoming Nostradamus, a completely un-necessary protracted snog scene at the end between Michael and Lucy, they went all in with the ridiculousness, no half measures!
The acting was pretty much average across the board here, very much act by numbers, and in doing so it translated into above average delivery, Rob Estes went into this looking very wooden and one dimensional but in the second half of the film pulled it back and actually wasn't quite so bad, I felt like everybody was acting out their parts to nearly almost the height of their ability, and their ability was passable, but there was a real sense of overacting for dramatic effect at points coming from both Rob Estes, Joely Fisher and some of the supporting roles really. There is cringey dialogue, cheesy jokes and trailerbait lines aplenty but not at the same levels of ridiculousness as the core plot developments. I think they would need to shout their lines in operatic verse to get even close to that... but anyway. Aside from that, despite having 'low budget' painted all over it like a panda-car the movie was actually shot fairly well, edited fairly well and paced itself competently enough. The soundtrack was fairly neutral, fairly standard stuff. It's clear that at least enough care and attention went into this to produce a competent, on par movie and there was no quick and dirty shortcuts taken. There were instances where some of the special effects were... eyebrow raising, but otherwise everything production-wise was pretty much acceptable enough.
I feel we are at the beginning of what is going to be a central theme with these kind of movies; otherwise competent and passable enough productions with completely, bafflingly unbelievable over-the-top plots portrayed through some questionable acting. And Nostradamus fitted that pigeon hole quite nicely. It's 1 hour, 23 minutes development of a completely unbelievable premise fleshed out nicely by some entertaining set pieces. But throughout the whole thing there is the nagging feeling that you are watching quite a bad movie. And I was. To be honest. 1 out of 5.
