Bullet Points: Deadly Shift

Before I even hit play on 2008’s Deadly Shift there were some things I could ascertain about the movie by skimming its entry on IMDb…

• Deadly Shift is a TV movie directed by prolific B movie director, Fred Olen Ray (Cyberzone and Mach 2). Two red flags that Deadly Shift was going to be a low budget affair.
• The stars of Deadly Shift are the guy from The Nanny and the woman who played George Costanza’s girlfriend that could have passed for Jerry Seinfeld’s twin sister on Seinfeld. Two red flags that Deadly Shift may not be as action packed as I’d like.
• Last but not least was the biggest red flag of them all, the movie has a 2.7 rating on IMDb. This alone would turn off many from giving Deadly Shift a shot, but I went ahead and hit play anyway…

• The Premise: The Iranian government has obtained some nukes on the black market. After testing their newly acquired nuclear capabilities in an underground cavern, the world as we know it changes forever. The polarity of the North and South Poles is out of whack, birds are flying east instead of south, compasses aren’t worth a damn, transformers are sparking due to power surges, satellite communications are effected… the whole thing is eerily similar to a theory that David Terran (Charles Shaughnessy) wrote about in his best selling book.

• The Simple Life: David’s book may have been a hit with the general public, but the scientific community poo pooed his theories, which were based more on gut feeling than they were scientific fact. So David broke things off with his significant other Dr. Jenna Ward (Tracy Nelson), moved out of the city and basically left the outside world behind (with the exception of his father). But when the world starts acting crazy, David is not surprised that the outside world comes knocking on his door.
• The Government: General Railen (Beth Grant, Speed) has been tasked with trying to figure out what the hell is going on and what can be done to fix it and report it all back to the President of the United States. Railen’s first stop is NGDC (National Geophysical Data Center for those in the know). The head of the NGDC is Dr. Martin Ward (Jennas’s brother if you are keeping track) doesn’t have the answers that General Railen is looking for… you see Marty is more of a facts guy, but he knows a theory guy, his sister’s ex-lover, David Terran.

• The Mensa Meeting: Martin, Ralien and her military entourage pull up to David’s cabin and almost from the word go Martin and David do some big brain bickering. Eventually cooler heads prevail and they try to make sense out of what is going on in the world and the possible scenarios that the Earth is facing including some modern day plate tectonics action. This is about the time a world wide earthquake hits… 52 minutes in by my watch, we finally get some sort of action. Anyway, even after the tremors David isn’t all doom and gloom and theorizes that the Earth could self-correct and the worst case scenarios won’t happen, that is unless there’s another nuclear blast… like the one the stealth bomber enroute to Iran’s nuclear reactor might cause!! At this point Martin does a quick peace out once he realizes the end is truly near. Martin is heading to Los Angeles to be with his sister. David tags along… leaving a stunned General Railen to figure out what her next move will be.
• The Radiation: Dr. Jenna had been up to her eyebrows with her own challenges the entire film. Jenna works at the Rose Cancer Clinic and another one of the anomalies of this global crisis was that patients who had undergone chemotherapy treatment were all coming down with radiation sickness due. So in addition to power outages and earthquakes, Jenna also had a waiting room filled with very sick people that she was doing her best to treat. But even Jenna and her Hippocratic Oath eventually realize it is time to throw in the towel.

• The End of the World: At this point all of our key characters are together for the first time muddling their way through styrofoam rubble including General Railen, who has caught up with Martin and David, and has the bright idea that if she could send a teletype message to the President she could try to convince him to call off the bombing of Iran’s nuclear reactor.

Deadly Shift was in fact a low budget affair. The action level was also extremely low. And in my opinion Deadly Shift earned that low 2.7 IMDb rating. In fact, if you take the f out of Deadly Shift, you’d have a more accurate title.

Now before I get the f out of here, here are some Bonus Bullet Points…

• AKA: Deadly Shift is also known as Polar Opposites and by the extended title Ground Zero: The Deadly Shift.
• Missed Opportunity: General Railen spends most of the movie very confused, yet she never said the line “I’m going to need you to give that to me in layman’s terms”.
• Familiar Face: Tracy Nelson wasn’t the only Seinfeld alumnus in Deadly Shift. Lee Arenberg played the Secretary of Defense McNeil in Deadly Shift and in Seinfeld he played Kramer’s friend Mike Moffitt, who got in an argument with George Costanza over a parking space in one episode and had his thumbs broken by Jerry in another.
• Music By: Chuck Cirino did the music for Deadly Shift. This was not Chuck’s best work, nor did the movie deserve Chuck’s best work, plus everyone knows Chuck’s best work was Chopping Mall.
• Best Death: FBI Director Thompson is impaled during one of the many earthquakes in the film. We don’t see the impaling happen, but do see the aftermath.
• Alternative Ending: Apparently there are two cuts of Deadly Shift. There’s the one that I saw on Tubi that ended with David and Jenna having a romantic reunion. There is another where David and Martin share a kiss at the end of the film, which would explain why they were bickering like an old married couple and why David referred to his break up with Jenna as complicated.