WATCH NOW
Michael Nostrand, a Minneapolis police detective, is currently working on a case of multiple murders where the victims have been roasted alive. The murders appear to be linked, but at first glance, it seems there is no connection. As he investigates the crime scenes, he is continuously noticing a man with red sneakers and red hair. Meanwhile, he has a friend, Lucy Hudson, who acts as a federal bureau investigation officer and moreover possesses paranormal powers. In her own words, she states how he has importance which Michael hasn’t deduced himself. While tracking this information, she thinks this is all a scheme made by a man named Garamond. The man is known for going back to 1536 France with the use of a time machine in hopes for stirring an anatomical alignment with the stars which may lead to the biblical apocalypse. Somewhere in between everything, Michael encounters people who are adamant about his identity as the famous prophet Nostradamus.
Nostradamus, whose birth name was Michel de Nostradamic (1503-66), was a French doctor. He is mostly remembered for his prophecies contained in a series of cryptic quatrains. Over the centuries, these prophecies have been interpreted as foreshadowing events ranging from the Great Fire of England, Hitler, to the attacks of September 11. There are a great number of interpretations which took place out of Nostradamus’s prophecies concerning preexisting events. In subsequent years however, French researchers have painstakingly reviewed Nostradamus’s original writings as well the English versions of them arriving at the conclusion that the old interpretations stem from poor or deliberately flawed translations of the original text.
Nostradamus has been a particular subject of interest on screen with biopics such as the silent Nostradamus (1925) and the more modern one with Cheeky Kayo released in 1994. In addition, Orson Welles narrated the Nostradamus documentary titled The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981). Those interested in the genre have provided more detailed accounts. A prime example is The Man Without a Body (1957), which centers around the decapitated head of Nostradamus, in addition to the Mexican movie series starting with The Curse of Nostradamus (1961), which includes a vampire descendant of Nostradamus.
Like his previous work, this contemporary version of Nostradamus comes with a different kind of absurd story line. It consists of Satanists from the future attempting to instigate the apocalypse by sending non-human assassins into the present to murder key individuals before the new millennium. We also have Nostradamus, a modern police detective played by Rob Estes, who is assisted by a Clairvoyant FBI agent. Added to the mix are Da Vinci’s last hidden masterpiece and several missing books from the Bible. In one of the convoluted segments, he has his entire existence erased from the timeline before he breaks the rules of time travel and finds himself trapped in a scenario where he must explain why he does exist to his friends and co-workers.
All said and done, this particular film: Nostradamus, fails to capture the attention of its audience. Rather, a lot of the material seems to be constructed around a police officer hunting down a super villainous time traveling assassin, similar to a terminator setting. This approach tends to be more akin to supernatural action films like Chuck Norris’s Hellhounds, or even more so the minion which starred Dolphy Lundgren and depicted efforts to prevent the apocalypse before the start of the new millennium.
There are some viewpoints that seem to stretch the boundaries of credulity, such as how the murders are rationalized through a peculiar invert astrology reasoning “If you do away with certain individuals, you disrupt the configuration of planetary bodies.” Or how Rob Estes somehow becomes a time traveler in the year 1536 and just happens to step into Nostradamus’s life, where for some reason, his eidetic memory along with his future knowledge was used to explain all the prophecies of Nostradamus, quite conveniently disregarding the truth that the actual Nostradamus had a fairly well chronicled medical career along with university education before the year 1536.
Though it was stated in the title, Nostradamus does not come up until slightly after the 35 minute mark. Instead, we don’t have yet another film about the Biblical Apocalypse at the Millennium like The Minion and End of Days (1999), but one which seemingly was not released until after the millennium took place. One can only surmise what the reasons behind that where, but perhaps it is because people would have classified Nostradamus as such a nuts movie should rank extremely high in the list of probabilities.
Apart from Metal Messiah (1978), which is based on the story of a futuristic rock musician, director Tibor Takacs has made several pieces in the same genre. some of which are: The Gate (1987) and its sequel Gate II (1990), in which children unwittingly release a demonic force; I, Madman/Hardcover (1989), where a killer leaps from a book; Redline/Deathlike (1997), placed in a futuristic Russian; the Christmas movies Once Upon a Christmas (2000) and Twice Upon a Christmas (2001) that focus on Santa’s daughter; Rats (2003) about a psychiatric hospital populated by intelligent rodents; the B list monster flicks Mansueto (2005), Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006), Ice Spiders (2007), Mega Snake (2007), and Spiders (2013); The Black Hole (2006), a horrific take on a supermassive blackhole rampaging through St. Louis; and Meteor Storms (2010) and Destruction Los Angeles (2017), which both detail space disasters. The children’s horror flick Bunks (2013) and the action thriller Black Warrant (2022) also made his filmography.
To watch more movies like (Nostradamus (2000)) visit 123Movies.
Also Watch for more movies like:
