In the 1970's, one sure way to tell that a movie was going to be cheesy junk was seeing the American International logo in the opening moments. You knew immediately you were in for cheese. And what a huge piece of cheese 1979's METEOR is!
A massive piece of rock is heading toward Earth. We know this because the film shows it flying through space every couple minutes, against cheap stars on cardboard and an annoying music score from Laurence Rosenthal, whose music ALWAYS sounds the same in films, but not in a good "Danny Elfman" kind of way.
Sean Connery is slumming and seems fairly uninterested as the man who created a missile defense system that's orbiting our planet. He's got to figure out a way to get those missiles turned away from Russia and toward the meteor.
This will involve him working with Brian Keith thinking he's in a comedy and dropping an F-bomb as the ONLY English word he says in the film as a Russian General.
Natalie Wood is his interpreter and a love interest for Connery. Martin Landau is a great actor but goes completely off the rails here as a US General, shouting and slobbering like Cujo in uniform.
Karl Malden runs the space program, Trevor Howard appears only on small monitors to announce the next pre-meteor rocks hitting the Earth and Henry Fonda looks bored as the President.
The special effects are horrible, but make for decent comedy.
The scene where they turn the missiles around on the American and Russian satellites is SO long and drawn out it makes Captain Kirk's circling of the Enterprise in "Star Trek The Motion Picture" look like the car chase in "Bullitt".
Fun in a really dumb, this-is-so-bad-its-funny way, METEOR is indeed a piece of cheese. That big smelly ten year old Limburger buried in the back of the shelf.
Anytime you make "Armageddon" look like a great film, you've got issues. We'll give this giant dog turd a D.
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