By Jared Curtis
SyFy movie gives afterlife bad name
The ambitious “Riverworld” (Sunday, 6 p.m., SyFy) almost reaches so-bad-it’s-good status. The four-hour TV movie has many of the hallmarks: a preposterous script that earnestly reaches for profundity; awful actors who seem to think they’ve been cast in a serious work of art; and a general misplaced sense of gravitas. But “Riverworld” falls just short of unintentionally hilarious, and that’s a sad place to be.
A heroic TV reporter (Tahmoh Penikett) and his friends are killed by a suicide bomber, landing in a mopey green-screen purgatory called Riverworld. They encounter people from across time, including Spanish conquistadors and medieval Japanese babes, all speaking the universal language: heavily accented English. The TV reporter is plagued by supernatural beings in not-quite-sinister-enough blue facepaint, along with a British archenemy named Richard Burton.(Sadly, Elizabeth Taylor never materializes.)
The characters spend much of their time pondering their status on the live-to-dead spectrum.
“If you feel pain,” says the medieval babe, “then you are alive.”
After watching four hours of “Riverworld,” I knew for certain that I was alive.
‘Patricia Cornwell’s The Front’
Saturday, 8 p.m. (Lifetime)
I sat down to watch “Patricia Cornwell’s The Front” with my wife, and we both got sucked into the mystery’s twisty-turny plot. A Boston district attorney (Andie MacDowell) seeks publicity by reopening an old murder case that possibly involves the Boston Strangler. She taps a hunky state investigator (Daniel Sunjata) and a pretty detective (Ashley Williams), who discover a sinister mime, an even more sinister Harvard student and an intense love-hate attraction to each other.
The filmmaking is more stylish than you’d expect in a Lifetime TV movie, and the story keeps you guessing. Bad characters turn good, good characters turn bad, and after about an hour I didn’t trust anybody. Including my wife. CV
