The Faculty

Back in the 1990s, Kevin Williamson probably did more than anyone to bring horror movies back to popularity. The writer who was best known as the creator of the angsty teen drama Dawson’s Creek also created the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises, making slasher movies hip for Generation X. In 1998, he turned his formula to a re-visioning of the alien body-snatching subgenre, with The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn).

In a typical high school in Ohio, we find a fairly standard collection of students. There is Delilah the mean girl (Jordana Brewster), Zeke the slacker drug dealer (Josh Hartnett), Stokes the goth girl everyone thinks is gay (Clea Duvall), Stan the jock who wants to be known for more than his physical skills (Shawn Hatosy), and Casey the hopeless geek (Frodo Elijah Woods). We are introduced to each in short illustrative vignettes, most notably a group of students picking up Casey and slamming him crotch-first into a flag pole, over and over. As a confirmed hobbit-hater, I approve of this. The kids have little in common except the usual teenager’s belief that adults are aliens. In this case, they’re right.

Starting with the teachers, people are taken over and controlled by alien entities that love water and conformity. Our gang of misfits are the only ones who tumble to the truth before it’s too late, and it is up to them to stop the alien takeover. They have two advantages. Stokes is a science fiction reader, so she knows they only have to find the alien queen and kill her to end the reign of terror. They have a weapon when they discover Zeke’s homemade speed is lethal to the invaders (Nerdism: Zeke says his power works against the water-based aliens because it is a diuretic. I think he means it is a dessicant, because it doesn’t give the ETs an uncontrollable urge to pee.).

This is not a terribly well-regarded movie. Robert Rodriguez has mostly disavowed it, saying he only did it to learn how to work with CGI and to satisfy a contractual obligation. It is the only one of his movies without his distinctive special features on the home video release, and has little of his individual style. It currently has just a 6.3/10 rating on imdb.com.

Still, I love this movie. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and try to be something it’s not. It is, I think, a lot of fun. Williamson was the first screenwriter to write a slasher movie where the characters realize they are in a slasher movie, and here, thanks to the character of Stokes, they are aware of the science fictional precedents. Stokes quotes Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, even getting the name right on the later. Curiously, she doesn’t mention John Carpenter’s version of The Thing, but that maybe because The Faculty steals/pays homage to it so directly. For instance, when our heroic band decides to test themselves to see if any of them are aliens, it is virtually the same scene as the test sequence from The Thing, right down to the couch and the revealed alien crashing through a wall to get outside.

If this sort of a thing interests you and you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to give The Faculty a try. If you are a political conservative, you will probably be delighted when Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the eye. (In the interest of political balance, liberals should watch Anaconda, where Jon Voight gets eaten by a snake.
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The police say they have some questions for Bill O'Reilly

Skyline

Not the famous brand of Chili in Cincinnati. Not the small northern Alabama town where everyone seems to hate each other. This is Skyline the movie.

By far, the easiest type of movie to review is one that is completely awful. The jokes basically write themselves. It’s also easy enough to rave about a movie you love. The hardest movie to review, in my opinion, is one that you never form a strong opinion about and neither like it well enough to particularly recommend it or hate it enough to mock it. This is also Skyline the movie.

An artist named Jarrod (Eric Balfour from Haven and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and his girlfriend Elaine arrive in Los Angeles for a birthday party for Jarrod’s best friend Terry (Donald Faison from Scrubs). Terry has hit it big, and wants Jarrod to move from New York to work for him. We are treated to a dullish party where we learn Elaine is pregnant and doesn’t want to move, Terry is cheating on his wife with his personal assistant, and the building super objects to loud music. It’s a very special episode of Party of Five. If you’ve ever watched one of those TV shows about angst-ridden yuppies and wished aliens would invade and kill them all, this might be your kind of movie, because Jarrod and Elaine have arrived in L.A. just in time for a big alien invasion.

Alien spacecraft descend and produce bright lights. If you look at them, you become all veiny and are drawn into the light and sucked up into the spacecraft, no doubt for a nefarious purpose. The military is no match for the alien menace, and soon Jarrod, Elaine, Terry, and company are attempting to survive the attack and get the hell out of town.

The obvious connection to be made here is Cloverfield, a similar and better movie about a group of affluent young things trying to survive horror. In both movies, the main characters (and the viewers) never get the full story about what is going on, and seem to be a side story to the main action. In this one, the characters seem a little less sympathetic, and the ending tends toward the confusing side.

More interesting than the movie itself is the back story of how it came to be made. The co-directors are successful in the field of computer-generated special effects and self-financed the production, spending $500,000 to shoot the live action before adding $10,000,000 of special effects in post. (The movie was shot in one of the co-directors condominium building). It does look great.

I suppose this is one of those films that should be seen by viewers who love alien invasion films, a group of which I am a member. A sequel has been rumored to be in the works since this came out, but has not yet materialized.

It will clear up. Just give it time.

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The Thing (2011)

It's not human. Yet.

Like a lot of horror fans, I have a special place in my evil heart for the 1982 version of The Thing directed by John Carpenter. It’s probably my favorite horror film, and there are a lot of people who agree with me, it seems. That’s quite an achievement for a movie that was critically reviled and a commercial dud upon its theatrical release, but home video has been very good to it.

I had mixed feelings when it was announced that a prequel was being made. The 1982 version was a masterpiece of paranoid, claustrophobic horror, and it was difficult to see how it could be matched. Still, there was always the sense we had seen the middle of the story, and didn’t know exactly what had happened before the infected dog reached Outpost 31, or anything about what happened after the ‘82 movie ended. I was pretty eager to see it but it met with a similar fate as the first one, with a poor box office and terrible reviews, and it disappeared from local theaters quickly. I had to wait until the blu ray was released to see it.

As you probably know, the movie shows us what happened in the Norwegian camp before Carpenter’s version. A group of Norwegian scientists working in the Antarctic discover an alien spacecraft frozen in the ice, and, more ominously, a life form frozen nearby. The head of the expedition, Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) calls in a paleontologist, Kate Loyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to help study it, keeping the discovery secret from the larger world from the time being. As you can guess, the thing in the ice isn’t nearly as dead as the scientists think, and it wakes up, breaks free of the ice, and, to quote the ’82 movie, is “weird and pissed off.” Soon the human numbers begin to shrink, and they discover what the scientists of Outpost 31 did/will: the creature can devour and replicate any living thing. Once this realization is reached, the survivors become locked in a struggle not simply to live, but to keep the thing from reaching the rest of Earth.

The filmmakers were in a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t situation with this movie. If their version was too close to the Carpenter film, they would get savaged for copying the “beloved” classic. If they made it too different, they wouldn’t be true to the source material. I really don’t think there is anything that could have been done to satisfy the true fanboys. They did try to protect the earlier film as much as possible. The studio originally wanted to do a full-fledged remake, but the producers and director (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.) argued the ’82 version was too good, and swayed them to a prequel instead. The prior film was praised for its use of practical effects, so the effects were practical wherever possible, with some CGI enhancement. Instead of the somber mood of the Carpenter version, this is a more action-oriented film, and Winstead’s character owes more to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley than Kurt Russell’s MacReady.

So, is it any good? I think so, yes. It isn’t as good as the 1982 movie, but almost no horror films are, in my opinion. It does manage to pay careful homage to the first film while presenting something new. The alien in this one is more given to overt attacks on humans rather than the stealth we have previously seen, but that is logically explained as it learning to be a little more cautious after being set on fire a few times. A new test is devised to determine that some people aren’t the thing, which is low-tech and fairly clever. The cast acquit themselves well, and the ending, although pre-ordained, is clever. If you measure the movie in your mind against the version you love, it will probably come up short, but if you approach it with an open mind, I think it will be enjoyable. I’m looking forward to watching the two movies together to see how it works as a double feature.

I do think many of the characters could have been developed further. Other than Loyd, Halvorson and the helicopter pilot Carter (Joel Edgerton), most the characters are just meat for the grinder. Halvorson also comes across as a bit of a stock scientist villain. Winstead was criticized by a lot of reviewers, but I think she does a good job of portraying the outsider in the camp who has to take over in a crisis because no one else can.

I’ll address a couple of the message board concerns from before the movie’s release. A lot of fans of the first were upset that two women are in the cast of the new version, whereas the first movie is generally believed to have an all-male cast (it doesn’t, but most people don’t get it). I can’t help with that, since fear of a vagina is a matter for psychiatrists. If you are one of these, you may be comforted by the fact that Halvorson treats Loyd and the other female scientist like dirt. There was also quite a bit of noise from the “remakes are bad and ruin the first movie” crowd. I’ll just point out that Carpenter’s film was a remake of the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, and leave it at that.
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Priest

While I am pretty much up for any horror/supernatural/sci-fi movie that comes down the pike (as a casual perusal of this blog will attest), my beautiful wife is a little more discriminating. She likes some movies you wouldn’t guess in a million years (John Carpenter’s The Thing) but nothing will tempt her to watch most horror flicks (anything where someone has a knife or other sharp object). So, when something in the genre catches her interest, I make sure we see it. Which brings us to Priest.

Based on a Japanese graphic novel, Priest is set in an alternate reality where humans have been at war with vampires for centuries. The vampires here are more creature-like than human, although they do keep a few human familiars, who seem to have some sort of derived power themselves. After all the fighting, the humans, led by a theocratic, rigid Church, got the upper hand by creating an army of warriors called Priests, who are easily distinguishable by a tattoo of a cross that runs from their forehead down the bridge of their nose. The Priests turn the tide, and the few surviving vampires are driven onto reservations. We see one of the last battles of the war as the main character, Priest (Paul Bettany), enters a large hive of vampires, and sees his best friend, Black Hat (Karl Urban), carried away after an ambush. The authors did not seem to waste a lot of time working on names for the characters. Anyway, they win the war, everybody moves to heavily fortified, massively polluted cities, the Church disbands the Priests and limits their power lest they become a threat to their authority, and everyone settles down to a grim lifeless existence.

Priest’s brother, sister-in-law (Priest’s old flame) and niece (or is she?) are working out in the middle of a wasteland, prospecting for something or other when the vampires stage a surprise attack. The adults are killed, and the girl is taken prisoner. The young girl’s boyfriend (Cam Gigandet), who is too old for her, frankly, tells Priest he’s going after her. Although the Church tries to stop this, saying the vampires are no longer a threat, Priest goes anyway, eventually joined by Priestess (Maggie Q). I told you they didn’t waste a lot of time on names, although, disappointingly, Gigandet’s character is named Hicks, not Sidekick. Much fighting ensues, and Priest is shocked to discover who is leading the vampires, although if you hang around with a guy named Black Hat, you shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Was the movie any good? It’s a little hard to say. It’s certainly no Citizen Kane, but anyone who goes to see a vampire/apocalyptic/martial arts movie and expects to see Citizen Kane probably has something wrong with them. I was reasonably entertained, in a watch-the-good-guys-kick-the-bad-guys way. The plot, as you have probably noticed, is more or less the same as the classic western The Searchers, which seems a good source of material to use, but it definitely could have done with more character development. Bettany is a good actor, although he persists in choosing these dour, emotionless roles. I also like Karl Urban a lot, but he is under-utilized to the point of well, pointlessness here.

In closing, if it looks like something you’d enjoy, you probably will, although it won’t change your life. The director and star are the same as for 2009’s Legion, so this may be an ongoing working partnership.
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Invasion

“It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.” – Bob Dylan

In the case of William Meikle’s (The Amulet) Invasion, it’s more of a green rain (or snow), but it is pretty hard on those on whom it falls anyway.

On a winter day in the Canadian Maritimes, a strange snow starts to fall. It is green, for one thing, but more ominously, has an acidic effect on anything living on which it falls. People, dogs, plants, all are dissolved by contact with the eerie precipitation. The only people who survive are those who have immediate access to shelter, and the phenomenon is not localized, but is spread all over the east coast, and elsewhere in the world. Civilization begins to collapse under the onslaught, and it gets worse. Alien organisms begin to grow in the biological sludge left behind, and the survivors soon learn this is the precursor to a full-fledged alien invasion.

The story follows Alice, a biologist who gives some of the scientific exposition for the benefit of the readers and John Hiscock (I realize this is a real name of a real person, but I could hear Beavis and Butthead going “heh, heh” in my head every time I read it.), a survivalist and unlikely hero. Alice has a psychic ability to resist the invaders. They manage to find each other and join the military in a desperate attempt to stop the onslaught.

The whole thing has a 50s sci-fi movie feel, and the obvious point of reference is John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi disaster novel The Day of the Triffids, the most famous alien plant invasion story. The author does a good job of keeping the action moving. I could quibble about some minor details that are wrong, mostly military related (no one in the American military, Army or Navy, has held five star rank since Omar Bradley died, for instance) but I won’t. Although I guess I just did. There does seem to be too much story for the relatively short length (it’s more a novella than a full novel) and both Alice’s powers and the appearance of the professor are a bit deus ex machina.

The good far outweighs the minor problems, however. This is meant to be a fast-paced action piece, and I enjoyed it. It isn’t the deep sort of thing you read to reveal some existential truth about your life, but how often do you want to read something like that anyway? Invasion is available as an e-book or as an archaic tree-killing print edition.
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The Andromeda Strain (2008)

I’m a fan of Robert Wise’ 1971 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel The Andromeda Strain. Although not free from scientific errors, I do like its basic message that when the world is threatened, the smart educated people are the ones who will save it – Kids, stay in school! – and the “ticking clock” finale is very suspenseful. So, it took me three years to watch the 2008 mini-series remake, since I figured it would be an inferior copy of the original. I needn’t have worried, since the new version uses only the basic setup from the original and then wildly diverges from the original. On the other hand, I didn’t miss anything, because this is quite a mess.

A pair of necking teenagers in rural Utah are interrupted by a crashing satellite. Unfortunately, this guy isn’t like every other teenage boy in existence, who would have ignored a nuclear explosion if he had a chance to get lucky. Instead, he stops the love-making to load the satellite in his truck (it isn’t explained how he managed to pick it up) and takes it to town, where the fire chief opens it. Everybody in town dies. Kids, in addition to staying in school, have sex instead of monkeying with crashed extraterrestrial objects. You’ll ruin fewer lives.

This triggers a “wildfire” alert – a possible runaway biological contagion. A team of scientists trained (debatable) to handle this is gathered and taken to an isolated facility. This is one of the better moments in the original film, when there is a knock at the original Jeremy Stone’s (Arthur Hill) house, and an army officer says “We have a wildfire.” The look on Hill’s face shows how terrifying the words are. In the remake, Jeremy Stone is played by Benjamin Bratt, and his Stone, given the same notification, has a hard time ending an argument with his wife to pay attention.

The rest of the team consists of surgeon Angela Noyce (Christa Miller), epidemiologist Charlene Barton (Viola Davis), former biological weapons maker for the Chinese government (!) Tsi Chou (Daniel Dae Kim) and Army doctor Bill Keane (Rick Schroeder). Keane is chosen as the “Odd Man” of the group. Since he is unmarried and has no children, psychologists believe he will be able to destroy the facility and kill everyone in it if the contagion gets out of control, since he has no emotional attachments. The psychologists have overlooked that Keane is unmarried because he’s gay, and gays can form emotional attachments. (If Michelle Bachmann reads this blog, I’m going to get an angry comment on that.) Keane is also put there to “counter” Stone by General Mancheck (Andre Braugher) who seems to have his own agenda. Or maybe not, it’s hard to tell. There is also an investigative journalist (Eric McCormack), fresh from rehab, trying to expose the story. Stone keeps him apprised of developments by telephone, security meaning something different in this universe.

Here’s where the plot diverges most of all. The satellite brought back a virus not from deep space, but from the future, sent by our future selves because they could not find a cure. Uh-huh. The expanded length is accounted for by a convoluted subplot about shadowy figures in the government working against the researchers to preserve the virus. They kill everyone who thwarts their sinister scheme and are led by the National Security Advisor, who has no apparent motivation for his actions, with the possible exception of quitting smoking. He’s just Evil, dammit! The President is shown as a bit of a doofus, who is determined to do the right thing, until the end of the movie, where he does the exact wrong thing, despite ample evidence to go the other way. No explanation given. The movie ends in an ontological paradox, in case your head needs to explode.

I’m not going to go into the myriad scientific errors, except to state the crack team shows no real skill or knowledge in dealing with the situation. They don’t even solve it in the end, the answer is given to them from another source. Benjamin Bratt looks more like an action hero than a cerebral scientist, and neither do the rest of the cast, with the possible exception of Kim. The original used actors who looked like scientists, and was better for it. The character of Keane vacillates wildly, from complete jerk to relative nice guy, as does General Manchek. The suspenseful finale is changed into shots of Bratt climbing a pipe, with a ludicrous thrown thumb (!) for unintentional laughter. There is also a last-minute betrayal by one of the researchers which leads to the needless deaths of two of the others, although she is forgiven enough to be seen mourning at their funeral in the end.

Watch the slightly dated original, if the topic interests you, and hope if there is an actual outbreak of deadly plague, the team fighting it is a little more on the ball.
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Cowboys & Aliens

Another slightly dated movie review; however, in this case, you probably haven’t seen Cowboys & Aliens yet, since not that many people did. This might be the best sci-fi/western hybrid movie ever made, since the only other one I can think of is Oblivion, which was not a high point of cinema, despite the presence of George Takei. That is assuming you don’t count Firefly/Serenity, which is science fiction with western themes rather than a western with science fiction themes. Confusing enough?

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert, with no memory, a wound in his side and a strange metal device strapped to his wrist. He doesn’t remember his name, but he does know he is a badass, since he dispatches four desperadoes on the 10 o’clock train to Boot Hill. (Westerns bring this sort of thing out in me.) With newly acquired horses, weapons and clothes, he makes his way to the nearby town of Absolution. This turns out to be a bad choice, since Absolution is controlled by rich rancher and former Army Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) – and Lonergan robbed a stagecoach of money belonging to Dolarhyde. An encounter with Dolarhyde’s dimwitted jerk of a son (Paul Dano) lands both Lonergan and the son in jail, but not before Lonergan meets the enigmatic Ella (Olivia Wilde).

To this point, the movie hasn’t been that different from a traditional western, but then alien space craft start buzzing the town and abducting the townsfolk. Lonergan discovers his bracelet can fire energy blasts that can shoot down the alien aircraft, and he and Dolarhyde lead a posse in pursuit of the aliens, in order to recover the abductees.

All of this is not nearly as much fun as it sounds. Despite the title, the story is played deadly serious, and could have used more humor. Craig and Ford are playing the same character – the gruff tough guy with a secret good streak – and there needed to be more contrast for them to play off each other. The story also leaves no western trope untouched. In addition to the posse, Lonergan and Dolarhyde recruit Lonergan’s old criminal gang (in a scene reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and an Apache tribe (after a spirit ceremony, reminiscent of almost every bad modern western). The chase after the aliens seems to take place in real time, and the movie slows down just when it needs to speed up.

The aliens have an improbable reason for coming to Earth and abducting yokels. Worst of all, when it comes time for the climactic battle between our heroes and the aliens, the aliens fight with their bare hands, completely nude. Space dudes! You have the technology to travel between the stars, beam up precious metals and create wrist-blasters. You should use that know-how on the guys with six-guns and bows & arrows. I suppose they are related to the ETs from Signs. It is also stated the aliens can’t see well in daylight (this is mentioned, but has absolutely no bearing on the plot in any way) but choose to come out of their dark tunnels to fight the heroes in sunlight.

The cast does the best they can with the limitations of the script. (Harrison Ford said when he read the script he “didn’t get it.” I feel your pain, Mr. Ford.) Craig makes a surprisingly good western hero, and I can’t help but think it would have been a better movie if the filmmakers had created a straight western, leaving out the sci-fi elements. There is a fairly impressive supporting cast, with Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Walton Goggins. It is a particular crime that Carradine and Goggins weren’t given more to do.

All in all, Cowboys & Aliens is more interesting to consider as the movie it might have been than it is to watch the movie that was made.
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Super 8

I’m trying to get back to regular posting (yeah, I know, you’ve heard that one before) so I’m throwing out some of the stuff I failed to post earlier. The first up is a now-dated review of Super 8, which I saw on its release weekend. Most of the pre-release hype for Super 8 was centered on the (somewhat predictable) mystery as to the cause of the problems for the small town in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, and don’t want the mystery spoiled, I advise you to stop reading now. Although if you haven’t seen it yet, I doubt you really care that much.

In the summer of 1979 in the small town of Lillian, Ohio, a young boy named Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is making an amateur zombie movie with his friends. This is therapy of sorts for Joe, since earlier in the year his mother died in an industrial accident, and he has a difficult relationship with his distant father (Kyle Chandler). Sneaking away to shoot some night footage, two important things happen for Joe: he connects with the film’s leading lady Alice (Elle Fanning), who happens to be the daughter of the man indirectly responsible for his mother’s death, and the young Eisensteins witness a shocking train derailment. They also see something apparently escape from the wreckage.

Soon the Air Force, presented as the true villains of the movie, is swarming over the town, people are disappearing, and property is being destroyed. It seems the mystery train was carrying an alien taken from the wreckage of a crashed spacecraft, which has been tortured for years by the Air Force, and now is trying to put its ship back together to go home, all the while enjoying a steady diet of Ohioan tartare. Will the alien return home? Will Joe re-connect with his dad? Will he find first love with Alice? Will the gang finish their zombie movie? Super 8 was produced by Steven Spielberg, which should give you the answer to all those questions.

I enjoyed the movie well enough, but I didn’t love it. It is too much a cobbled together collection of themes from other movies (Spielberg’s E.T. and The Goonies, director J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield) to stand on its own, and there are too many inconsistencies in the script, with too many of the themes underdeveloped. Part of the movie’s arc is supposed to be Joe coming to grips with his mother’s death (a locket is used for symbolism), but frankly, he already seems to be handling it pretty well. Four months after the event, the 12-year-old is just a little blue. His relationship with his father is only shallowly explored. Is dad distant because of the shock of his wife’s death, or has he always been that way? Closure to this is found when dad realizes he doesn’t want his only child to be eaten by a monster, which seems like a low bar of parental responsibility.

There’s also the issue of the creature. We are supposed to root for the alien, since it just wants to go home, but it’s eating people. Not just evil Air Force personnel, who no doubt deserve it, but innocent townsfolk. Yes, it is misunderstood and has been treated badly, but is that any excuse for it to eat the nice lady next door or the guy working at the 7-11? I think the alien is from the wrong movie.

The young filmmakers are supposed to be the ensemble focal point of the movie, I think, but they are mostly unrealized. They are archetypes, the fat kid, the small kid with ADD, the kid with a weak stomach, etc. Other than the director of the movie, who is something of an ass, none of the group is developed at all, and except for Joe and Alice, they all disappear when it is time for the movie’s climax.

Abrams meant this movie to be an homage to his idol Spielberg, and it more or less succeeds. All of the typical Spielberg beats are here: A boy with issues with his father, a mawkish sentimentality, an idealized view of early teens. Unfortunately, these are mostly flaws here.

There were some good things. The train wreck is exciting, Kyle Chandler is always an engaging actor, and Elle Fanning is a revelation, showing real talent in her scenes for the movie-within-the-movie. But overall, Super 8 is a movie that falls apart if you stop to think about it.
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Interplanetary

I’m not a zombie guy, but back in 2009 I loved the zombie-comedy Hide and Creep, produced here in my own state. I thought the low budget film was a cut above the unending crowd of movies produced about the walking dead, and it made me eager to see the production team’s follow up, the sci-fi/horror/comedy Interplanetary. If I paid attention, I would have noticed it came out a while back. Better late than never, though, I ordered a copy (you can get it through Amazon) and watched it with my usual critical eye.

In the not too distant future, a small group of people man (and woman) a small base on Mars. Rather than the usual military and scientist types you see in this sort of thing, these characters are more the Office Space type. They are working for a faceless corporation at jobs that seem to bore them, more interested in office affairs or placating their boss than grand exploration. Their mundane lives are interrupted when first a fossil of ancient Martian life is discovered (the reaction is not joy at discovery, but “I’m gonna be rich!”) and immediately thereafter, intruders show up to kill them. There is also a secret lab, with strange monsters created therein.

I thought it probably wasn’t quite as funny as Hide and Creep, but I did enjoy it a lot, but anyone watching this needs to understand a couple of things up front. First off, this is truly a low budget film. You couldn’t hire a single Nav’ii from Avatar for the total budget here, so if you are expecting a mind blowing visual feast, disappointment awaits (although the film makers did make the movie look like Mars, or at least what I imagine Mars looks like). Secondly, this is a retro movie. It is spaced based sci fi as it would have been imagined in the 1950s, with clunky equipment and obsolete looking devices. (Think of movies like It! – The Terror from Beyond Space, a movie that scared the wits out of me as a kid as a touchstone.)

If those things don’t bother you, there’s plenty to enjoy here. I particularly liked the deadly cook, who turns out to be the action hero of the piece, at least for a while, and I thought the script was very intelligent underneath the goofiness. So support independent filmmaking and give Interplanetary (and Hide and Creep) a try.
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Sharktopus

I admit to having a tendency to enjoy, in a slightly guilty way, the low-budget monster movies found on the Syfy Channel. Movies like Wyvern, Fire Serpent, Supercroc, the immortal Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus…big creatures who like to eat people. Lately, having exhausting the conventional monsters of mythology and legend, Syfy has moved on to “mash-ups”, and the ultimate of these is the wonderfully named Sharktopus (I suppose the idea is a combination of a shark and an octopus is the most scary hybrid imaginable, although personally, I think the Octomom is scarier).

A creepy corporation has developed the half-shark, half octopus (it also has spines sticking out of its sides, so there may be a little porcupine in there as well) for the defense department as the “ultimate weapon” – against someone, I suppose. Maybe they want calamari that fights back. The beast is tested by Evil Navy Guy in a scene which consciously spoofs the opening of Jaws, with the deadly creature being controlled by a device belted loosely around its midriff. If you’re thinking “that belt is going to come off”, you’ve figured it out. The belt comes off, and the monster goes wild, killing anyone around the beach at PuertoVallarta. Apparently, this beach attracts stupid people, because no matter how many people meet gruesome deaths in plain view of the other beachgoers, no one thinks to go home and come back on a more sharktopus-free day. Pretty much everyone is attacked, and the viewers rooting interest briefly swings in favor of the monster when it kills a trio of jetskiers, who deserve what they get.

Corporate Guy is under pressure from Evil Navy Guy to get the sharktopus under control before the media gets the story, ignoring the presence of news crews and the frequent TV spots about the attacks. Apparently, it will mean disaster if the public learns of the sharktopus, since then everyone would know it was a Navy project. Because that’s so rational. Corporate Guy hires a sharktopus hunter, who, in a feeble attempt at a subplot, was once fired by the Corporate Guy for asking for a raise. The Fearless Sharktopus Hunter is offered $300,000 for the job (later upped to a cool million) because “only he can do the job.” His method consists of boating aimlessly around the monster’s feeding ground and shooting a machine gun at it when it shows up, a worse plan than it seems, since the sharktopus is bulletproof, due to the production company being unable to afford CGI bullet holes. It is also revealed the sharktopus (no matter how many times I type that, it is still a ridiculous word) can use it’s eight legs to leave the water and walk around on land hunting for prey, just like a real octopus. Or something.

Eventually, stuff blows up, the creature is killed, Corporate Guy bites it, and The Fearless Sharktopus Hunter falls in love with Corporate Guy’s daughter, because they are the only ones left.

I usually say to people who watch a movie like this and complain about bad acting, a dumb plot and cheap CGI “It’s called Sharktopus, what did you expect?” That’s still valid here, but this truly is an atrocious movie, even by the dubious standards of the SyFy Channel. There isn’t enough plot to sustain the length, and even at 80 minutes, it felt long. Eric Roberts was obviously brought in to add a little class and professionalism, but it made things worse, since having him in a scene just emphasized how bad his co-stars were. The romantic couple who were the more-or-less leads were grating, and should have ended up sharktopus food. A subplot about a TV newswoman only served to kill time and provide more bodies for the butcher’s bill. Also, if you are going to name a character Pez, you should have him decapitated, right. What a missed opportunity.

I’m afraid Sharktopus is a movie to miss, much like the Puerto Vallarta beaches in sharktopus season. It’s definitely no Mansquito.
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Who Goes There?

You can find out what I think of Rocket Ride Books' edition of John W. Campbell's classic sci-fi/horror novella "Who Goes There?" by clicking over to Horror World. While I'm at it, let me put in an unsolicited plug. The last two books I've reviewed for Horror World have been from Rocket Ride, and I've been very impressed with their quality and professionalism.
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Old Man's War

Recently, a little bored with reading the same old thing over and over again; I started reading science fiction again. I read sci-fi voraciously as a youngster, got into it again in a big way in the late 80s/early 90s, and read very little for the last fifteen plus years. There are a lot of advantages to this approach: you’ve let enough time pass you can go back and re-read old favorites, finding them somewhat fresh after so long, and there is sure to have been a lot of good books published while you were away.

I don’t intend to do any real reviews of the sci-fi I read. Other than a second major in mathematics, I don’t have any real scientific knowledge, and I don’t think I would grow as a person reading the comments explaining how I must be a complete moron because I incorrectly explained the formula to express a closed thermodynamic system. At least from the outside, the sci-fi community seems amazingly argumentative and devoted to feuds, often over the most trivial things. Science fiction writers and readers range from the obsessively politically correct to proudly politically insensitive, and are willing to write tens of thousands of words to fight over things you wouldn’t even notice, let alone hold a grudge over.

(My use of the term “sci-fi” in place of science fiction is enough to piss a large number of people off. I read a comment by a noted sci-fi author where he stated calling science fiction “sci-fi” was the same as calling a black person the “n-word.” Which is so ludicrous I had to use it, despite the knowledge it may be a provocation.)

Without going into detail, I do want to recommend sci-fi books from time to time, although anyone who reads the genre on a regular basis knows these books pretty well. With that in mind, I would like to whole-heartedly recommend John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. I just finished reading the first three books, Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. They are wonderful stuff, heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman, particularly the respective authors’ books Starship Troopers and The Forever War. They are military science fiction with a conscience and a surprising amount of humor, very well done, and I read through the three of them in just a couple of days. My only regret is I won’t get to read them again for the first time.
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Ghosts of Mars

John Carpenter is probably the most revered living directors working in the horror genre, yet a surprising number of his films were initially unsuccessful before becoming popular as “cult” classics. Movies like The Thing and Big Trouble In Little China flopped in the theaters, but found a place on home video, and are well regarded today. I had not watched his last release, Ghosts of Mars, since its initial release, and wondered if it, like the others, might have grown in stature in the years since.

The movie is set in 2176. Mars has been settled, and partially terraformed, with a more or less breathable atmosphere. Society has gone matriarchal for some unexplained reason, an interesting concept that is never really explored in the film. A group of police officers, led by Commander Helena Braddock (Pam Grier) is dispatched form Chryse, one of the major towns (I suppose) to a mining camp to pick up the notorious criminal “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube). Included in the team is the real star of the film, Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) and Sergeant Jericho Butler (Jason Statham, when he still had hair). They arrive at the camp to find everyone dead. It seems a dig has released the ghosts of ancient Martians, who have infected most of the locals, turning them into insane, self-mutilating killers. (It’s basically a zombie movie.) The police force will have to work with the criminals to survive.
Well, Ghosts of Mars really hasn’t improved with age. Sometimes movies simply don’t come together the way filmmakers wanted them to, and this is probably a good example.

There is a framing sequence to the story of Lt. Ballard testifying before a board of inquiry about what happened, and it doesn’t really work. The only purpose it serves is to let you know Ballard will be the only survivor, and that spoils a little of the suspense. It also means the bulk of the movie is told as a flashback, and any time something needs to be presented from the point-of-view of another character, it cuts back to the board room so Ballard can explain the sequence is based on what she was told by another character. That’s too clunky, and it makes for one of those flashback-within-a-flashback things that are so hard to pull off.

Special effects look fairly low budget, and they resort too often to the cheap shot of a stunt person jumping in front of an explosion to illustrate its force. This always looks ridiculous, and it’s done every time something blows up in the movie. A lot of things blow up in the movie. It looks like your kids playing on a trampoline, while you hurl grenades behind them.

The police/paramilitary force may be the worst cops ever shown on screen. If a bad guy flashes a knife, they instantly drop all their weapons, and then after they are disarmed and helpless, begin to bluster about how they don’t care if they die. That would be more effective done while they still had their guns, for your information. They also do nonsensical things to further the plot. The one hardened site in the camp is the police station, difficult to penetrate, with ammunition and other supplies inside. They abandon it not once but twice, so they can have running gun battles with the zombies/mutants/Martians. At one point, they set up a perfect kill chute, where the bad guys have to come at them no more than two at a time. They quickly retreat from that position, lest they kill all the bad guys and end the movie prematurely. Half the movie is spent with the characters trying to reach the train, so they can escape the camp. As soon as they reach it and are safely away, they decide they have to turn back.

The cast generally acquits themselves well, although there are some casting decisions that make you chuckle long after the fact. Statham was originally set to play Desolation Williams, but was switched to a lesser role since Ice Cube had more “star power.” Statham might have been better in the role, but that possible loss is balanced by Henstridge replacing the original lead Courtney Love, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.

The bare bones of the plot are basically a re-working of Carpenter’s first real success, Assault on Precinct 13, which itself was a re-do of Howard Hawks’ classic western Rio Bravo. (To make things more convoluted, Hawks more-or-less remade his film twice as well, with El Dorado and Rio Lobo.) Therefore, it is essentially a science fiction western, but whatever magic was present with Assault on Precinct 13 was not accessible here.

The biggest tragedy of Ghost of Mars is that Carpenter felt burnt out after making it, and it would be almost ten years before he directed his next film, the forthcoming move The Ward.
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Predators

The original Predator, released in 1987 and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is one of those movies whose fame has managed to outlive its decade. Still revered by its fans, it seemed ready-made for a successful franchise, but 1990’s Predator 2 was a disappointment, and the character remained dormant until brought back in Aliens vs. Predator (not as bad as its reputation, but still a little disappointing) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (It’s impossible to say too much about this one, since it was filmed with a total absence of light. I have no idea what happened in the movie, although I’ve seen it twice.). Various ideas have floated about reviving the titular monster, but none came to fruition, until this year’s Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators.

The movie opens with Royce (Adrien Brody) falling through the air. He has been thrown out of some sort of craft, and is saved by an automatic parachute (although the parachute opens low and slams him to the ground, which seems contradictory to their purpose). Royce is a mercenary (presumably) and he finds himself in the company of Nikolai, a Spetsnaz commando, Cuchillo (Danny Trejo), a member of the Zetas Mexican gang, Isabelle (Alice Braga), a CIA sniper (disregard what is said about her by Royce, he’s wrong), Stans (Walter Goggins, playing his usual racist redneck) and so on. All are obvious killers, except for Edwin (Topher Grace), who is a doctor and is presumably there to act as the group medic. It seems the deadliest of humans has been plucked from their world by the Predators and placed on a “game preserve” planet to be hunted by the Predators. This brings the story even closer to its original Most Dangerous Game antecedent. There are also other species from other worlds, but they barely figure into the story.

The seven surviving humans (one has an unfortunate parachute accident and does not live to take part) soon realize they are being hunted by the Predators and spend most of the movie trying to figure out how to fight back. There’s not much more of a plot than that; this is an action movie through-and-through. Complicating the situation somewhat is the presence of two distinctive (if you look closely) Predators, who apparently don’t like each other very much. I do wonder how a race that spends all its time trying to kill each other ever gain the technology to move about the universe so freely. There is a twist near the end which you may or may not find obvious, and the end sets up the possibility of a sequel, which Rodriguez has promised will be forthcoming.

My main reservation going in was Adrien Brody as a lead. He is a fine actor, but is better known and was seemingly better suited to playing more passive, intellectual roles. I was pleasantly surprised. Brody beefed himself up somewhat for the role, and talks in a lower, gruffer voice, and all in all, comes off well as a soldier for hire who is capable but interested mainly in saving his own skin. The rest of the cast is a bit stereotypical; one-note characters in the movie just so there would be someone to kill. The worst offender, the fault of the script, not the actor, is Nikolai. He is portrayed as an almost mindless brute with a machine gun. The Spetsnaz are the Russian Special Forces, and only take the best mental and physical candidates. It would have been a more interesting film, in my opinion, if Nikolai was the equal to Royce, perhaps pushing an alternative viewpoint, rather than having Royce as the Only Guy Who Knows What To Do. We also meet our old friend Exposition Guy (Lawrence Fishburne, in basically a cameo) in the middle of the movie, but since the only information he ha to dump is “the Predators want to kill you”, he doesn’t serve much of a purpose.

Incidentally, the filmmakers have stated this movie is a sequel to Predator and Predator 2, but not to the Alien vs. Predator films. Good call, although I would have pretended Predator 2 never existed, too.

So, is it worth seeing? I think so, as long as you know exactly what you are going to be watching. This is a simple movie of dangerous people being chased by alien monster who use advanced technology, just like the first movie, and in that it succeeds just fine. If you want something deeper, you probably wouldn’t choose this one anyway.
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R.I.P. John Steakley

The author of Vampire$ and Armor died last Saturday at age 59 of liver disease, according to the Dallas Morning News. He was less than prolific (publishing two novels and four short stories) but the quality of his work gained him an extensive fan base.
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New Apollo 18 Poster

Looks cool:.

Skyline Poster

I don't want to be overly optimistic, but this looks pretty good:



Opening November 12th.
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A Replay For Ben Affleck

According to a story on Deadline, Ben Affleck is considering an adaptation of Ken Grimwood's novel Replay as his next project. It's the story of a man who relives his life over and over, in steadily decreasing increments, and is a book I loved, so I'm stocked at the possibilities. I know it's fashionable to hate on Affleck*, but I've always found him a more-than-competent actor, and with Gone, Baby, Gone and The Town, an excellent director. Fingers crossed.

* I thought Affleck was the best of the three Jack Ryans, for his performance in The Sum Of All Fears. Yes , I know I'm in the minority. Liev Schrieber killed in that movie, too.
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The Prequel To the Thing

Bloody Disgusting has a look behind the scenes of the new prequel (as yet untitled) to John carpenter’s classic movie The Thing, due out next year. Since I love the first movie, I’ll be in a theater watching it, but I’m always skeptical of prequels, since their outcome is predestined to be the beginning of the first film, with a few exceptions. Still, we can hope for the best.
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Repo Men

Based on the novel Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia, Repo Men is set in a near future where the replacement of failing organs with mechanical parts has become commonplace. So much so, the company which sells the parts will gladly finance the equipment and procedure. If you fail to make payments, however, the company sends out Repo Men to take the organ back. They knock the client out with a tranquilizer and remove the part with a quick surgery. As you would imagine, few of the clients long survive the procedure, but the company is entirely within the law to do so.

Company boss Frank (the always brilliant Liev Schrieber) has two ace repo Men, Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker). They are old army buddies (from an unspecified war) and enjoy what they do, at least until Remy has an accident, and gets a mechanical heart of his own. Worse, he develops empathy for the clients, can no longer do his job, and soon becomes the target of repossession himself, with his old friend tabbed to do the honors.

The movie is a black comedy/satire, and probably would have benefited from a little more gallows humor. It drags a bit in the middle, but overall is a pretty entertaining movie. The cast is excellent, and do a good job of driving forward the plot. Leonardo DiCaprio was originally cast as Remy, and would probably have given the movie a higher profile, but Law does a perfectly good job in the role. There is a fair amount of gore during the organ removal sequences, and a fairly transparent twist, but I think most people who don’t mind seeing a little blood would be entertained.
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