DigitalRevenantX7 In 1965, US Air Force Captain Jack Grayson & his squadron are flying over the Bermuda Triangle when they encounter a massive alien spaceship. They engage the craft but Grayson is shot down. In the present day, the wreckage of Grayson's plane is found & shipped back home. When his son, Dallas, who is a Naval Commander with duties in Intelligence, tries to visit the wreckage, he is denied entry by Colonel Rosewater, a covert ops soldier. But somehow a pair of UFO nuts steal the truck containing the find & attempt to escape. They are killed by Rosewater & Dallas narrowly saves his father's plane from destruction. Back home, his cancer-stricken daughter Lisa is being visited by a mysterious alien woman who has been treating her illness & training her how to use her genetic ability to teleport objects across vast distances. Dallas is unaware of this but when Rosewater & his goons snatch Lisa & nearly kill him, Dallas is contacted by the woman. Calling herself Angel, she reveals herself to be an alien operative who has watched over the family for generations. Together they attempt to rescue Lisa from the Black Ops team that took her, as well as trying to stop Rosewater & his army of assassins from killing them in the process.Richard Pepin & Joseph Merhi formed PM Entertainment in the early 1990s. First an independent production company with little stature despite Merhi's previous experience as a low-budget action director with films like The Glass Jungle, they had an unexpected success when one of their ultra-cheap action thrillers, CIA: Codename Alexa, became a surprise hit on cable TV when one of its stars, O.J. Simpson, was put on trial in the now legendary murders of his wife & her lover. The film's notoriety, plus the cult success of Pepin's own directorial effort, the Terminator templater CYBER TRACKER, put PM on the map & gave them the ability to turn PM into the major player of the DTV action market in the 1990s.In addition to producing all of their studio's films, Pepin & Merhi took a tag team approach to directing as well. They picked some films & split the workload between themselves, with Merhi directing some action films while Pepin would handle the sci-fi themed ones. Pepin's films in particular would become minor cult classics due to their love of massive shootouts, brutal action sequences & in particular the "Pepin flip" where a vehicle would smash into another vehicle, fly over it & flip over in mid-flight while the impacted vehicle would explode in a massive fireball (The Sender has two of these).As for The Sender, Pepin has been starting to wind down the care that he had given his earlier films & quality has started to slide. The action scenes in The Sender are not as spectacular as previous Pepin films & are not as brutal either. But Pepin has compensated somewhat by adding more dialogue. This would not have been bad if the story was fully fleshed out instead of being haphazardly plotted – there is no sense to the various covert ops teams working on secret projects, UFO sightings, the apparently genetically obtained ability of Michael Madsen's young daughter to teleport objects across vast distances or even the involvement of the ethereal female alien who can shapeshift & also teleport but not as well as her human friend. And almost no mention or even exposition relating the UFO nuts who break into the hangar & steal the plane wreckage (or at least attempt to). The result is a B-grade genre actioner that has some reasonable action scenes & okay effects but a badly-written script & poor plotting. And the sudden return of Madsen's father at the end as a sort of happy ending is kind of stupid.

pwhen I can't remember why I started watching this movie, but some where during it I lost the will to live! It may have been during the appalling car chase sequences, you have to watch it to see just how bad they are. Can someone tell Hollywood that a Porche 911 will be way faster than a GMC truck on a country road, on any road. It may have been the terrible special effects, even for a low budget movie they were poor, leftovers from the 1970's possibly. The dialogue was trite, the story line infantile, face it there's good sci-fi and not so good sci-fi but this is bargain basement sci-fi. The support cast, Steven Williams was totally unconvincing, R. Lee Ermey was hamming it up with abandon, Dyan Cannon was on auto pilot, of the support Robert Vaughn was the best but then he was pretty much playing Robert Vaughn. Of the leads Shelli Lether looked to be an eye candy distraction and little else and Michael Madsen most of the time looked embarrassed, as he delivered his dialogue with a look of a man who's agent had signed him up for this. All in all, I saw it for free on a satellite movie channel and felt cheated.

junk-monkey This isn't the worst movie I have watched this year - but pretty close.Totally moronic "entertainment".Stupidities include our hero shooting the air hoses on the back of a truck to de-couple the trailer - huh? How is cutting the air to the brakes going to make the tractor unit and the flatbed part company?There is a prolonged fight on the back of a (not very) speeding flatbed truck in which our hero (played by Michael Madsen) is punched in the face several times and doesn't loose his sunglasses. Most people's glasses will fall off if they sneeze too hard. This guy's must have been stapled to his head, or maybe nailed - because Madsen's performance makes the hero look like a potato faced plank of wood. He reacts to everything that happens to him and around him with a blank non-reaction that is incredible to watch. During the course of the movie this guy's daughter is kidnapped, his house blown up, he's shot three times in the chest, resurrected by an shape-shifting alien, told his daughter is capable of interstellar travel by thought alone, he sees innocent members of the public gunned down, is nearly killed several times, sees old friends betray him and then get killed in front of him, kills many many people with an endlessly self-reloading hand gun and throughout all this mayhem and carnage, wanders around looking like he is suffering from constipation. Nothing seems to surprise, shock, baffle, or amaze him. Nothing registers but blank bovine stupidity. The only time he becomes at all animated is during one of the interminable car chase sequences when one of the bad guy's endless supply of black vans explodes right in front of him. Woooohoooo! Mongo like car crash!The ending is horrendously overlong and Michael Madsen's acting at the sight of his supposedly long dead father is a wonder to behold. His character has been supposedly obsessed by his father's death and when he, miraculously, gets to meet him, what does he do? Sort of grunts a bit and looks even more constipated than normal for a moment then sends his daughter over: "Go meet your grandfather" He doesn't even take his fecking sunglasses off!I had previously thought Sterling Hayden was the worst actor in the history of ever (apart from me) but on the strength of this movie alone his position has been usurped by Madsen. At least you could hear what Hayden said. His lines may have been delivered like the mail but at least they were delivered and not mumbled into the top of his shirt.Though, having said all that, the best bit of bad acting in this film comes pretty early on from someone else, Steven Williams as the evil Lockwood. Lockwood is asked a question by his evil underling and does some quick thinking. You can tell he is doing some quick thinking because his eyes quickly move from side to side like he's watching an off-screen ping-pong game.I wish I had been watching it with him and not this piece of sh!t. (The music is awful as well).

Lexuses71 This was an intriguing movie from PM Entertainment. I personally like Michael Madsen. He has that comical way of looking at someone sideways like the doggies in commercials when a human does something stupid. I also really like R.Lee Emory. This guy is your resident slickster/quasi-military hardass/part-time mercenary (just like the part he played in "On Deadly Ground). He's always hard-core and looks crazy.Plot was derivative (as other viewers pointed out), but the chases and scenes inside the alien spacecraft were not bad at all. Especially for a flick of this type. The actress portraying the alien was very pretty. Seen her before but don't remember where. Stephen Williams was over the top, with his white hair and eyebrows.Another viewer commented that no one seemed freaked out over the alien presence. A valid point that dilutes the story a bit. Especialy Madsen. And that's what makes him a Grade A "Straight To cable" guy! Just too cool!