"Laserhawk" Is Great Space Opera

In general, movies on the Sci-Fi Channel tend to follow one simple formula: a group of people are stranded on an isolated spaceship/asteroid/space station and are besieged by either a monster or a bunch of bad guys. Every once in awhile, however, they do manage to find a little gem that might otherwise have gone unnoticed in the mass of big-budget, high-tech blockbusters.

Such a one is Laserhawk, a teen-oriented space opera that's not particularly original but still manages to be highly entertaining.

Some 250 million years ago, a space-ranging race called Aractoids planted the genetic seeds of life on Earth. They planned to return to use whatever has developed from it as a food source. Hot on their heels are three members of a benevolent race known as Xenons. A battle ensues, and the Xenon ship sustains damage that causes it to crash to the planet's surface. Its occupants escape as balls of light.

Many millennia later, a geeky teenager named Zach (Richter) fakes an alien contact to win his 15 minutes of fame and get a date with the local prom queen. Instead, he gets a visit from the U.S. Air Force, which is very interested in where he found the design for his alien spacecraft.

Zach gets some sympathy from a goth chick named Cara (Gallianos), who is also interested in his spaceship design. In her case, however, it's because it's identical to one in a series of comic books describing any alien invasion and written by one M. K. Ultra (Currie). After comparing notes, Zach and Cara discover they have a couple of things in common -- a childhood dream and a mysterious artifact they had when they woke up from it. They then discover that their two artifacts snap together snugly to form an obviously incomplete object.

A school bus containing the entire local high-school football team disappears, then turns up empty in the middle of the woods with no tire tracks to show how it got there. Zach and Cara decide it's time to pay M.K. Ultra a visit and find out if he, too, remembers a strange dream and has an odd keychain. They learn that he does, indeed, have the third part of the object, but neither it nor the ideas contained in the comic books are his. He got them from a guy named Bob (Hamill) whose current address is a nearby psychiatric institution. Bob, you see, is considered to be crazy because he insists the world is about to be invaded by Aractoids.

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