Riddler’s Moon (1998)

(On TV, March 2001) Weak, slow-paced, cheap-looking made-for-TV film. Concerns a handicapped hero, a drunk father figure, a squeaky-voiced single mother (Kate Mulgrew, in-between Star Trek Voyager episodes), dumb rednecks and an extraterrestrial relic buried underground. If you fall asleep during the film, you’ll have the good fortune to miss the idiotic ending, where the rednecks help, the father-figure gets together with the single mother, the kid gets cured… oh, and everyone else’s memory gets erased for no good reason. Hm, now that you know the ending, there isn’t much point in seeing it, right? Combines fluffy science-fantasy with the low production values of a low-budged TV film to create the ultimate in cinematic irrelevance! On the other hand, it is one of the few rural SF stories I can recall. One point for originality.