Craptastic Movies

I get, like, 76 channels. And usually, to quote Bruce Springsteen, nothing’s on. What is always on are lousy, straight-to-video movies. Movies that I rarely recognize, sometimes starring significant actors. Usually I watch a short chunk of these movies while channel surfing. Often these movies have great premises, but for whatever reason turned out poor, unpopular or both. Here are three:

The Trigger Effect: Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Shue in a kind-of-apocalyptic sociology study about desperation and that pyramid of needs thing.

Treed Murray: Nobody recognizable in this one (except Julian Richings in a homeless man cameo) An advertising executive, trapped in a tree by a gang of would-be muggers, manipulates them into fighting to save his life. Apparently it’s Canadian.

Hypercube, Cube 2: Eight strangers find themselves waking up in a strange cube-shaped room with no recollection of how they came to be there. Soon discovering that they’re in a strange fourth dimension where our laws of physics don’t apply, they have to unravel the secrets of the “hypercube” in order to survive. It’s wacky, also Canadian, and unquestionably has the cheapest set in film history.