User Reviews

Former CIA rocket scientist turned antique weapons expert Maurice Hunter & his daughter Nadia have uncovered the resting place of the Tesla Death Ray device, reputed to use human brain waves to unleash enough power to destroy a small country. After dealing with a group of treacherous guides, they book passage on a private jet filled with C-grade celebrities heading to Canada. But on the way, the plane is intercepted by a larger jet with terrorists attempting to steal the Tesla weapon, aided by Julian Beck, an arms dealer who is on the chartered flight. The passengers fight back, taking down Beck & his goons while the other jet is accidentally destroyed by a mishandled bomb. Damaged in the confrontation, the passenger jet is forced to crash land in the Rocky Mountains. The surviving passengers split up – one group staying inside the fuselage for help to arrive, led by Maurice, while the other half head out to trek to civilisation. Maurice gets Nadia to head out on her own in order to reach the meeting point where a pair of CIA agents are waiting for them. Beck, meanwhile, has survived & secretly heads out to track Nadia down & steal the weapon. As night falls on the crash site, a large bear is seen near the site, hungry for human meat.

I have never seen a director as arrogant, dishonest & incompetent as Jim Wynorski. This C-grade hack from the Roger Corman stable has made more than dozens of cheap B-films, none of which managed to get more than a certain low score on the IMDb. There is a reason for this – Wynorski doesn't have any idea on how to make a good film. Don't get me wrong – Wynorski did make a couple of semi-watchable genre films in the past (the 1980s sci-fi slasher Chopping Mall & the 1997 cheapie Storm Trooper were passable enough) – but most of the time he fails to even get the basic things right. Trouble is, his films look well-polished on a technical level but that is where his limited skill ends. The problem with Wynorski's directing is that to disguise the ultra-low budgets he works with, he steals footage from other, bigger-budgeted films in order to make his films look better. At first glance it looks okay but when you realise that most of the big action & effects set-pieces are actually from recycled footage stolen from other films, that sinking feeling in your stomach returns with a vengeance.

With Crash Point Zero, Wynorski & his usual hatchet-scribe Steve Latshaw (a guy who cannot write a decent script to save his life & who probably stole elements of this script from other sources judging by the slightly better quality of the script for this one since I have seen Latshaw's other scripts & they are utterly pathetic) make a mediocre thriller filled with footage from Cliffhanger & other films that I cannot identify but am certain have been plundered by this insidious duo. The story is cobbled together from various low-grade ideas but given a certain cynicism that makes the whole thing look like a bad joke. Why are a bunch of American reality show stars, novelists & other C-grade celebrities doing together on a plane from Siberia? If the Tesla device can be tracked by a Geiger counter & is releasing massive amounts of radiation, then why are people still standing alive after spending a lot of time with the weapon in close proximity? And how does the CIA manage to keep track on the weapon's whereabouts by trawling Internet conspiracy theory websites? There are also the little things, like the simple fact that any Counterstrike fan will recognise that the machine pistols the terrorists use are actually Steyr SPP semi-automatic pistols (a copy of the Counterstrike weapon, the Steyr TMP – you know, the machine pistol with the silencer) & are NOT automatic, despite being fired by the baddies with automatic gunfire dubbed over on the soundtrack. Some of the stunts are so obviously fake that you'll be groaning in disbelief.

The acting is slightly harder to take pot-shots at since everybody gives the production just the right tone of sarcasm & cynicism to make the grade. Treat Williams, a stand-up comedian who has plenty of experience in cheap action B-fodder such as this, gives a mediocre performance, giving the impression he'd rather be anywhere else & his constant smart-alec remarks in the film really do him no favours.

i work as a translator for a local TV station. since it's local, it's criminally underfunded. but it has a program to run. translated, that means it's buying a lot of cheap B-movies. so in my "line of duty", i'm forced to watch a lot of crap. and i mean A LOT. more than anyone who has a choice ever had to. "crash point zero" was one such example. and oh my god, where do you begin? the other reviewers broke it down pretty accurately: from borrowing unused and differently textured shots from other movies (ed wood would've been proud!), to characters driving three (THREE!) distinct cars (one of them blue, two of them red) within a single scene, to the laughable and meaningless dialog, HORRENDOUS acting, and an all-around stench of amateur pointlessness. the list of examples of sheer stupidity in this flick would be higher than burj dubai! i guess 99% of what little budget they had went into the last-scene explosion (the only semi-decent thing in this abomination of a movie) to the detriment of everything else. really, some of this stuff is simply beyond words and has to be seen to be believed. what's astonishing is a feeling that the crew (well, at least most of them - some "actors" have that "what the f*ck am i doing here? hope nobody i know sees this" look on their face) labor under the illusion that they're creating a serious and suspenseful thriller, and obviously take it all very seriously, which is just amazing. i mean, there's nothing wrong in a B-flick that's aware of its "B-ness" and shamelessly flaunts it, but a deluded B-flick that thinks it's something more than it is is just pathetic. granted there are even worse, cheaper and misguidedly serious movies than this ("hyper sonic", for example), this still pretty much redefines the term "a B-movie". if you're done watching your paint dry, rent this and be amazed. really, it's quite a feat.

*Spoilers* (Not that there's much to spoil anyway)

These days, I'm unsure of what exactly the definition of a "B-movie" is. I've seen people refer to stuff by the Golan-Globus Cannon group as "B-movies" and straight to video stuff from the likes of PM Entertainment. Well, if you consider those as "B-movies", then we really have to bring up a new name for stuff like "Extreme Limits", or "Crash Point Zero" as it's listed as here. Since this is so far below your average straight to video actioner that it can barely even be called a movie.

Extreme Limits is basically just stock footage from Cliffhanger, Narrow Margin and Long Kiss Goodnight with some actors and actresses making a fool of themselves and laughably cheap sets in between. Trying to pursue something which isn't possible with the budget your using is not a good idea to begin with, but stealing stock footage from big studio productions is just lame in my opinion. Of course, if director Jim Wynorski was able make this footage blend with the new footage well and create an exciting movie around it then I wouldn't have too much to complain about, but it's the completely laughable and amatuerish way it's all tacked together which makes this so unintentionally entertaining to watch. While the new footage actually has a very clean and smooth look, the stock footage from Cliffhanger looks extremely fuzzy and grainy. Ditto with that from Narrow Margin. At one point, in the new footage there is fake snow and then it cuts to the stock footage where there is no snow. In another scene, Ava Fabian starts shooting into the air and then it cuts to an avalanche scene from Cliffhanger, supposedly triggered by her firing a few shots. But that's not nearly all. We have a chase scene involving a 4x4 (SUV for you Americans) being chased and shot at from a helicopter which I believe is from Narrow Margin. This randomly cuts between scenes of Julie St Claire and Treat Williams in a car with a blurred moving background. Now in that scene, you can clearly see there is a road behind them, yet the vehicle in the Narrow Margin footage is driving over rough terrain in the middle of a forest. But there's so much more. Another scene I laughed out loud during was when one of the characters is attacked by a bear early on. You see this guy in one cut, pretending to be scared. Then it cuts to extremely grainy stock footage that looks like it's been shot on VHS for a documentary on a of a bear roaring. It cuts back to this guy pretending to be scared, and then we get a distant shot of this guy supposedly being attacked behind trees. It's hard to put it into words, but this entire scene needs to be scene to be believed. Moving onto the climax which I believe comes from The Long Kiss Goodnight. This footage is the only stock footage which doesn't look fuzzy and grainy. But don't worry, Jim has made plenty of effort to make it gel together with the new footage as badly as possible. At one point we see a blue Ford Taurus from The Long Kiss Goodnight footage, then in the next cut of new footage, we see some square edged 80's car (Perhaps a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice). Then Julie St Claire steals an Oldsmobile Allero, which we're supposed to believe is the same car that drives away from the bridge explosion in the stock footage from Long Kiss Goodnight. But it again clearly isn't, as the one featured in the stock footage is clearly an older car, perhaps a Mercury Sable. It again shows Williams and St. Claire sitting in a static car with a fiery background.

And if you happen to get a hold of the DVD of this, the audio commentary is also a real hoot. It basically consists of Jim Wynorski revealing just what a mess it is while Julie St Claire giggles in the background. He comes clean that he got the footage from Cliffhanger in exchange for casting the wife of some guy who was "high up" in Sony for the movie. At one point, they even run out of things to say and Julie sparks up the conversation again with a giggle. During the aforementioned scene where there's fake snow in the new footage and none in the stock footage, Julie St. Claire points this out and it actually seems to be the first time the director himself notices this! He ends it by saying "We screwed up, yeah we screwed up, no excuses!". I could hardly agree more.

As for the performances, given with what they had to work with, it's rather hard to judge as no matter who was cast in this, it would be impossible to make anything out of it as these poor people had to constantly make belief they were actually part of the very obvious stock footage. Treat Williams has given reasonable performances in the other movies I've seen him in, so I think it's fair to say he deserves better than this. Julie St. Claire is absolutely gorgeous on the eyes and Lorissa McComas is rather nice also. Ava Fabian, the 80's Playboy icon is still looking good for her age. But that has nothing to do with how awful, or how laughable this whole movie is.

As for the plot, it's just basically ripped off from the movie it steals footage from, Cliffhanger. Except this time the bad guys are after a "secure shipment of the world's deadliest explosives" rather than cash. Throw in the extremely suspenseful cliche of a diabetic man trapped in the snow and we've got something really new!!

Having made it clear that it was the DVD of this I saw, you may be wondering why or how I got hold of it. Well I'll confess, I actually bought it for $3 while I was on holiday in San Francisco 2 weeks ago. $3 is less than the average rental fee from Blockbuster Video here in the UK, so having had the laugh this gave me, I feel absolutely no regret and I also recommend anyone who wants to see modern Ed Wood style filmmaking, if you come across this for a similar price, then make the purchase. It will make your day!

I also notice that Jim Wynorski has worked with Albert Pyun on something called "More Mercy". I really can't imagine how bad, or unintentionally hilarious that may be.

Extreme Limits:

Production values: 01/10

Plot: 01/10

Suspense: 01/10

Comedy value: 10/10

I also see no reason for this to have a USA R rating, as other than the occasional F word, the few original action scenes are so badly shot and so non violent that it deserves a PG-13 at the very highest.