I’d heard about Nukie over 10 years ago when Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones bluntly and forthrightly declared “Nukie” to be THE worst movie he’d ever seen…not one of the worst, THE. worst…and that guys seen some shit in his time. So I took his word for it. A few years later Red Letter Media began hoarding copies of it and being incredibly coy around exactly what their stance on the film was. I took this as a decent sign that this film was something special. Something that would REALLY test my metal. And…as GOD is my witness…I sat through this entire movie. And all I could really think as the credits rolled was “Welp…That was 95 minutes.”
Y’see; what we have here with Nukie can only be described as a time sink, it’s about 95 minutes of barely incoherent and repetitive nothingness just sort of…oozing out of the screen one happenstance after another. I don’t know if I’m blowing some big cottage industry secret here when I say that no. Nukie isnt that bad, “Lets Ruin Dads Day” is bad, “Nutbag” is bad, “Camp Blood” is bad. Nukie is not bad. It’s fucking boring!…but it’s not bad. Because of this, explaining the plot is going to be a bit more condensed than usual, mainly because theres SO much repetition that I might as well just write one scene and then copy paste it a few times if I wanna go down the “Full breakdown” route. So heres the basic gist.
Nukie opens in possibly the most underwhelming way imaginable…with this obviously being an E.T knock off, generally the idea is you warm your cast up to the aliens, maybe set the scene first then slowly reveal and introduce them. NOT HERE! Instead we just flat out introduce Nukie and Miko, two brothers who’re just palling around and having a ball in the one place that hasnt been corrupted by capitalism…SPACE!. The pair get a little too wild and free and accidentally fly too close to the planet earth, getting pulled in by the planets gravity and losing track of each other in the process, Miko ends up crash landing in America and Nukie ends up wiping out in central africa.
Due to the amount of radiation the pair give off while in “flying mode” their presence sets off every aviation and federal agency alarm going and almost immediately Miko is captured by the authorities and taken to a laboratory who want to experiment on him to find out more about extraterrestrial life. Nukie meanwhile wakes up in a savannah and spends a frankly obscene amount of time wandering around the plaines shouting Mikos name and trying to talk to Giraffes and Zebras. While this is going on the scientists tranquillise Miko and begin their experimentation, Nukie tries to telepathically connect with Miko, but Miko is drugged up and incredibly weak and doesn’t know where he is.
After a time Miko is well enough to tell Nukie that he’s in America…But Nukie doesnt know where or what an America is!, so he cant really do anything, instead he complains that he doesnt like the dark, tries to sleep and then complains that he doesnt like the sun. meanwhile the scientists have locked on to Nukies radiation signal and they decide to put one of their best scientists on the case, Dr. Eric Harvey with the mission of seeing if any alien tech crashed to earth and to try and capture Nukie and bring him back.
We then cut back to Nukie who is STILL wandering around this fucking Savannah, and he briefly meets two young twin boys called Tucki and Tiko. Things don’t quite go to plan however as they’re instantly terrified of the sentient little woeful looking bollock (and understandably so!) While Nukie is mid introduction, the pair flee and make each other promise to never speak of the encounter again. So! Nuki pillocks about in the savannah for a bit more, Miko gets tortured by the malicious and border sociopathic Dr. Glynn, Nukie falls asleep again, we BRIEFLY get introduced to a nun by the name of Sister Anne who tells us that Dr. Eric is on his way (we havent actually seen him up to this point) Nukie wakes up and immediately starts bumbling about AGAIN. And we have at least 1 solid minute where Miko just shouts “NUKIIIEEEEEEEEE” over and over again. And I need to make it clear right here, that this is what the writer and director THOUGHT would be an acceptable first act for a childrens movie…Im not kidding, that’s the first 30ish minutes of this movie.
Mercifully a BIT more happens in the 2nd act…but only a little bit more mind…As, for some reason that the film doesn’t entirely explain, Nukie ends up buried alive and his rising out of the dirt (and possibly him hearing Mikos pained screams) triggers a freak storm to blow through a nearby missionary station and a small African village. And if youuuuuuuuuuuuu can believe it, this is going to pretty much be the main thrust of the film from here on in. So in relatively quick succession, it’s revealed that Sister Anne and her security partner have a pet Chimpanzee that can telepathically communicate and is a bit of an annoying arsehole THEN it’s revealed that despite not being able to talk to Rhinos, Giraffes and Zebras, Nukie CAN telepathically communicate with Monkeys. He meets a troupe of monkeys just…doing their thing. And after speaking to them for a bit about trying to find “America” the Monkeys suggest that Nukie visit “Charlie” Sister Annes Chimp in the nearby village.
Shortly after this, two hunters from the village try to kill Nukie, and he responds by paralyzing one of them. The other hunter drags his friend back to the village but noone can help. Meanwhile, after a frankly obscene amount of time Dr. Eric FINALLY touches down at the village and is almost immediately told to head home by Sister Anne, it’s later revealed that the village has got a bit of a crisis of faith going on at the minute, the sister arrived and managed to convert the village from their old traditions of sacrifice to christianity and with some recent plights hitting the village, along with the recent freak storms and paralyzed hunters, she REALLY doesnt want some American flyboy dropping in to tell the village potentially lethal aliens are wandering about the plains.
While this is going on, Nukie makes it to the village and links in with Charlie…who doesnt tell him anything new and is an annoying arsehole. The pair destroy a storeroom and Nukie flees the scene, eventually meeting back up with the twins again, who are being attacked by a Lioness. Nukie knocks the Lioness out cold and the boys once again try to run away. But this time, they kind of accept that Nukie’s probably actually kind of alright. And…as an aside because I need to fit this bit in somewhere, after the lioness attack, we then cut back to Miko who just flat out walks out of his testing chamber, goes up to the scientists super advanced computer and just starts screwing around with it, The computer plays a hypnosis programme that knocks Miko out as apparently…its an evil supercomputer for some reason?
Anyway; there then follows a BEYOND long winded sequence in which Nukie uses a radio to call back to the village where Charlie picks up and fills him in on the situation, the pair swap information and…well…long story short Nukie steals Dr. Erics Helicopter, nearly destroys the village with it, before crashing it just outside and fleeing the scene. Miko meanwhile wakes up from his hypnosis and just. Rewires the evil computer to instead make it his best friend. And it works. The pair trade some information and the next day when the scientists come in to check on things, they find Miko asleep at the computer and the machine talking about the joys of friendship and love.
After a time, Nukie heads back to the village to try to apologise for destroying the expensive helicopter and almost immediately gets jumped by the village, an elongated comedy chase scene ensues in which Nukie and the twins are captured. At this point too theres a brief scene where one of the scientists called Pamela begs Dr Glynn to stop the experiments which gets met with a rather blunt “hmm…no.” and then! It’s sacrifice time! As Nukie is sent to be “Wicker manned” and the twins, who are being tried for having hung around with a supposed “Demon” are cast out of the village for what they’ve done. Leading to a confrontation between the leader of the village and Sister Anne who’s appalled with the situation and debates the leader over moral choices.
After only a short time of being kicked out of the village, the twins see a bright light in the sky which turns out to be Nukie! Yes somehow he escaped being roasted alive and to celebrate he gives the boys a toasty fire and they all swap stories about their lives before bed. Nukie also reveals that he’s got to find Miko soon as, if he doesnt, he’ll become too weak to leave the planet. It’s at this point Nukie decides to give us an inexplicable extended dance break. He then drugs the children and falls asleep himself.
While Nukie heads back to the village AGAIN to cause carnage, Miko continues to develop the super computer, who renames itself “Eddie” and confesses his feelings for Pamela and after a HELL of a lot of seizure inducing footage, the lead scientist and possible boss of the company comes in and asks what on EARTH is going on. And Miko and Eddie basically lobotomise the lead scientist, turning him from a moody miser into a fun time happy clown of a man…oh, and that’s permanent by the way!
It’s here that we find ourselves on to the 3rd act, as one of the twins gets bitten by a poisonous king cobra and Eric and the Corporal head out to rescue the twins on the orders of Sister Anne, a race against time ensues to get the them back to the village for treatment. And when the Corporal manages to find and tranq Nukie and the sister begins to suspect foul play, the twins are left to find each other, free Nukie, defeat the corporal, clear their names, get Nukie to America, find Miko, shut down the evil scientists and get the pair off this hell hole of a rock. I’m not kidding, it’s almost like they forgot their movie had to have a point right up until around 20 minutes off the end. In a frankly fractious finale where they, rather than trying to resolve the narrative thread at a reasonable rate instead go for the “cramming shrapnel pieces of plot right into a tightest closing point of this thing and hoping they can cram enough to pass with the audience”. Will Nukie and Miko be reunited?, will Dr Eric actually have a point? And will the twins get their names cleared? If you enjoy watching paint dry, then you‘ll love finding out when watching…Nukie.
And my god this script is like a tapeworm. It just goes ON and ON and ON with very little pleasure to be had for anyone involved with it. I can quite honestly say that this is one of the most broken scripts I’ve sat through…quite possibly ever. Right off the bat, the scene ordering is a total mess, key examples being the ENTIRE of Dr. Erics plotline, which is totally bewildering. They mention he’s involved near the opening of the film, there’s a glimpse of his helicopter about 20-30 minutes in, and then seemingly he arrives, looks around a bit, speaks to sister Anne, gets his Helicopter destroyed, fixes his Helicopter, leaves, comes back, leaves again, comes back again and then leaves again. That’s it. That’s his whole plot, he’s supposed to be our alien napper for the movie and he spends more time fixing his Helicopter than he does looking for Nukie!
Situations will regularly be spoken about out loud by the cast and then replayed beat for beat in literally the next scene, but the way the scenes play out make it look like the latter scene is fresh information to the audience. Like; There’s TONS of examples of characters physically saying “Well I sure hope this thing doesnt happen!” followed immediately in the next scene with the same characters saying “Oh no! That thing we don’t want to happen is happening! We didnt want this to happen!” as if it’s the first time they’ve said it.
The amount of repetition is a joke, when I say that the first 30 minutes of this film is Miko getting tortured in a lab and Nukie pissing about in a field with accompanying dialogue which is AT LEAST 60% Just Nukie and Miko shouting each others names over and over again. I’m not exaggerating…that’s the movie, and even in the 2nd and 3rd act when more elements get introduced…that’s STILL fundamentally the movie in a nutshell, pissing about in a field or a lab shouting each other’s names. And because it’s so repetitive and structurally unstable, even the weird and interesting bits like the talking chimpanzee, the helicopter crash, the weird Nukie Dance sequence, the bit where he teaches one of the twins to fly. All that nonsense just gets drained of it’s bizarreness almost entirely, because you cant focus on the weirdness because your too busy trying to figure out which way is “up” with this thing.
What I will say is they have at least managed to stick to a rigid 3 act structure. Those gear changes clunk rather tonedeafly, but there is an unmistakable shift in tone when this thing transitions between its acts. But…honestly; even with the act structure, this is still a movie that’s pretty much entirely made up of padding with about 12 minutes of movie sprinkled in throughout…it’s almost completely aimless. You could honestly take the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes, slam them together and you wouldn’t lose a single bit of the main story as a result. Its incoherent to the point that I had to rewind, pause, and even read up externally on exactly what was *supposed* to be happening in this thing, it’s that messy. And this noxious combination of incoherence and boredom left me with a film that struggled to hold my interest and when it did pull me in, struggled even harder to keep it.
On a closing note, the dialogue too is just ATROCIOUS. As mentioned at LEAST 60% of the dialogue is just Nukie and Miko either shouting each others names or chatting absolute bollocks to each other. And the rest of the script reads like someone threw a slice of emmental cheese at a dictionary and then wrote down the words that showed up in the holes. It’s inconsistent,stilted and filled with lines that shouldnt have made it out of the draft edit. In many cases entire conversations happen in this that add NOTHING to the thrust of the main plot and are just…BEYOND confusing.
This is in my opinion, without hyperbole,one of the worst scripts I’ve ever covered on the channel, if not THE worst script I’ve covered on the channel. Not because it’s enjoyably bad, not because it’s insufferably bad. It won’t test your metal, it won’t make you laugh, it’s just a clear example of someone out of the depth, doing something they’re clearly not comfortable doing. And as a result its beneath amateurish,It’s convoluted, long winded, boring, drab and dull and genuinely not worth the 95(ish) minutes you need to sit through it to find that out.
The script was written by Ben Taylor and co written and co directed by Sias Odendaal. Sias came up with the initial plot beats and Ben then took that pitch and expanded it into the full screenplay. Ben has 17 writing credits with his last being in 2006 and unsurprisingly you’ll be stunned to learn this was Ben’s first feature writing credit. Which, does explain a lot…(he had a single writing credit for 1 episode of a kids TV show prior to this) I’d say this is probably his most infamous credit, but he also seems quite well known for a movie called “In the Flesh”.
As for Sias? He has 6 directing credits, mostly for films that, other than a title, have ZERO information attached to them…like, literally; the title and the year is all we have. Nukie was his final directing credit and he hasn’t been seen in the industry since 1996. The film was also co-directed by Michael Pakleppa, he has 8 directing credits and, to be honest, Nukie is probably his best known work from what I can see…
On the direction front, im going to approach this from three different criteria, It’s ability to standout as a work that has these directors unique marks, their ability to take all of the technical elements of this film and tie them together effectively, AND the ability to help guide the cast through the film and deliver a great performance that works with the technical elements in a wonderful form of synergy.
In terms of it being a standout work that’s defined by its creators. I don’t even have to pause to think about it, this film is about as distinct as it can possibly be, it’s completely and totally unhinged, and I am by NO means saying that this is a creatively astute work, honestly it’s an absolute mess. But, there would be NO mistaking this as anything other than “Nukie” (a genre unto itself). So in that regard, I’d give it a somewhat sarcastic soft pass. In terms of their ability to tie all the technical elements together effectively, it’s a BIG fail in my opinion. NOTHING holds together on this movie, they had 7 editors working on this thing at any one time in order to try and get it finished and it STILL ended up being an incoherent wreck. The soundtrack doesnt compliment the visuals, the audio quality is inaudible at times and the editing doesn’t work with the cine or cast direction resulting in a totally knotted production that’s just ludicrous honestly.
I suppose a broad way to answer this is “Does it work as a kids film?” given that thats literally it’s reason to exist. It must surely at least maintain a spirit and flow that this is supposed to be a gentle, and maybe even amusing film for children to enjoy?…well no, it starts off with strong intentions, but at some point along the way while shooting this movie, the idea that it was a kids film just kind of…got lost and instead it seemingly just became about shooting the script verbatim, for better or worse. With mostly catastrophic results.
Finally; is the direction able to at least enthuse the best out of the performers? Well..given the main cast members here include a rubber bollock who’s mouth cant move, a group of scientists who seem to have basically been all given one characters dialogue to fight over and a dr who’s supposed to be a main character but ends up being talked about more than he’s actually IN the film. I’m going to lean towards them not quite grasping how to direct their cast members. Now that’s not to say it’s all bad, I actually, genuinely think the twins they got for this film do a more than decent job and work a good range, which must have had some director involvement. But outside of them…well…yeah…its another swing and a miss I feel. So overall? Not a good look for the direction honestly…
From a cine perspective. This film could realistically be used as an act of terrorism, literally; it’s so full of unexpected strobe lights, rapid cuts and flashing imagery that, to anyone not expecting it, this could cause some VERY serious harm. Shots have reasonable enough composition, it’s not a pretty film by any stretch, but there’s some depth of field here and there and they do seem to at least understand basic framing rules (for the most part…when it suits them) The biggest issue with the cine really is how its been assembled in the edit. Because what they’ve done to this film can only really be described as “they’ve minced it” they’ve done to it what is done to a steak to make hamburgers.
Almost every single sequence has at least one example of undercutting the scene, cutting the scene too late, putting WAY too many shots into a sequence creating something disorienting, or assembling the scenes in what clearly must be the wrong order in places due to continuity issues. We may never know if a recut version of this healmed by someone who understood basic editing rules would have treated the cine more fairly. As it stands all I can say really is the shots I saw were okay, but the presentation, to me?, was abysmal. Like seeing a battered flower propped up in a spent soda bottle filled with piss.
There are no good performances in this movie barring the twins who do a decent job, I don’t talk about child actors, but with Nukie we’re well into bizarro world so fuck it, they’re the best part of this thing. Everyone else is shite.
And finally! The soundtrack! Its not half bad! It sounds a smidge on the cheap side but it’s better than a lot of scores we’ve covered this season, it’s just such a shame it’s absolutely not designed with a family movie in mind. At times this sounds like an art house piece, at times it sounds like a straight sci-fi horror movie score. Its not bad, but it’s totally not fit for purpose and the editing on it is SUPER weird. With the score just, crashing in and out of the film everytime they remember that having your film play out in silence when their ISNT dramatic tension, is a bad thing. Couple that with the aforementioned poor on set audio recording, with muffled voices, unclear dialogue and on set noise scattered throughout and it really is just a totally poor show…in my opinion I hasten to add.
Nukie was released as a big box ex-rental VHS tape in the UK in 1988 by 20.20 Vision, why they bothered to licence this thing when their books contained hits such as “Bill and Teds Bogus Journey” and “Bram Stokers Dracula” I have NO idea. That being said, they also distributed “Robot in the Family” over here…so…I don’t know who they had working in their Licensing department back in the day, but I want to buy them a good curry and a bad pint. And…other than that and a laserdisc release in 1989, thats it! It never got a retail home video release, and no company has been brave enough to test a DVD or Bluray release of this thing on the open market, and with good reason! I have seen a number of bootleg copies of this film floating around on DVD and their *MAY* possibly be a european DVD release that was official. But theres so many bootlegs of this film for sale, it’s honestly quite hard to say…it’ll happen inevitably at some point…may GOD have mercy on us all…
I waited well over a decade to check out Nukie, after having it labelled as one of the worst movies ever by SO many of my esteemed colleagues, I feel now, having actually seen it somewhat underwhelmed. I wanted to hate this thing, I REALLY wanted to be able to come to this review impassioned! Hell; even if I couldnt be mad at it, it would have at least been nice to be able to come here with a bit of a jaw dropped “What the FUCK!?” style breakdown…but the reality is, this probably isnt even in the top 5 worst movies i’ve reviewed on this channel. Let Alone the worst movie of all time. What this is, is just a fairly repetitious, fairly boring, border irritating watch written by two people who had almost no experience writing. The direction and cine are questionable, but probably could be somewhat fixable had they not hired 7 different editors to try and salvage the thing. Even then though, that still wouldn’t fix the fact there’s only 12 minutes worth of actual plot development here…but it’d almost certainly make it a lot more tolerable.
This isnt a terse warning not to watch Nukie, if your curious, go watch it. This is a tired warning not to watch Nukie. Its a truly hollow experience that I’ll probably end up using more as reference materials from now on than anything else…that and the novelty value of owning a slightly soiled Nukie is inherently amusing to me…Its just a quite boring, heavily padded, badly put together film that doesnt deserve anger…it deserves abandonment.
TYTD Reviews 