Saturday, April 24, 2010

The Philadelphia Experiment



The Philadelphia Experiment is one of those movies a sort of remember from my youth. I remember it starred the dude from Eddie and the Cruisers and a navy ship that disappears but that was about it.



So I was happy to see it appear in my latest bundle of dvd's from Anchor Bay Entertainment as part of the Alternate Realities line.



The movie is based around the legend of the USS Eldridge, a navel ship that supposedly was used for experiments to cloak it from radar. These experiments went awry and people were fused to the ship, missing, etc etc.



No, it didn't really happen, there is a ton of evidence to contradict this story.



But it got turned into an awesomely cheesy sci-fi movie.



David Herdeg (played by Michael Pare the aforementioned Eddie and the Cruisers guy) and Jim Parker are sailors assigned to the Eldridge during the Philadelphia Experiment. The ship not only goes invisible to radar but disappears, needless to say the sailors on the ship itself go a little nuts. Jim and David think the ship is going to explode and jump off, straight into a time tunnel!



They reappear in the future, a helicopter chases them straight towards an electric fence, which Jimmy grabs on to, gets electrocuted and in something that makes no sense, an electric bolt shoots from the fence and blows up the helicopter.



We then go through typical time travel shtick; they find a German beer bottle and wonder if they lost WW2, find a Coke can and marvel at the lightness of the can.



In the meantime, a whole town in the present has disappeared.



Are they connected?



Are you high? Of course it is!



The Philadelphia Experiment is one of those 80's sci-fi movies that's very 80's but still somewhat enjoyable. The DVD presentation has a crisp picture and sound to it that kind of surprised me. Clean picture and 5.1 surround. There are virtually no extras on this disk and it should be noted that re-issue of the disk from a few years back with different packaging.



If you've never seen it before and like a bit of 80's cheese with your time travel, definitely worth a rent or a buy.



The Philadelphia Experiment is available on DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment

No comments: