Gather round! You can watch your career nosedive with this flick!

I wanted to love Star Runners. It has a lot of potential to be a wonderful, riotous good time. It obviously took its inspiration from Firefly/Serenity, Starship Troopers, and even a little The Fifth Element. Problem is it didn’t run with the blatant ripoffs, and tried to pretend it had an original idea. That only works when you have an original idea. When someone can point at the screen and dissect the movie into categories based on what film it was ripping off, you don’t have an original idea.

What frustrates the holy heck out of me is Star Runners could still have been saved. If they’d embraced the cheese factor (which was evident in the movies that obviously inspired it) and went for laughs, I would have been a happy camper. Instead the writers got all serious with political intrigue and character self-sacrifices and genocidal atrocities. Even that would have been alright if they’d not taken so much time to setup this up as a ‘buddy’ movie, promising a rollicking good time as the main characters get captured by the government, and then sent on a covert mission to retrieve a mysterious crate. Naturally they open the crate to find a frozen, naked, woman inside who wakes up with no memory. We’ve been introduced to a couple of interesting secondary characters in the middle of a space bar that is blatantly a pale ripoff of Star Wars‘ Mos Eisley. We should be in for a ton of fun as the trio of characters make a run for it.

Nope. It gets all serious after that with just a few one liners here and there to break up the monotony. And it is monotonous. We get a space pursuit through a wormhole into uncharted space, a crash landing, tiresome arguments among the survivors, a mysterious abandoned base that the survivors realize was populated by their kind, and then bugs. Lots of giant bugs. While interesting on the surface, as the movie progresses it’s all ‘by the numbers’ and I kept checking how much time was left in the movie.

One thing that wasn’t wrong with this movie was the acting talent. We have Connor Trinneer playing the would-be swashbuckling captain, Ty. He waffles between playing by the rules, breaking them as is convenient. He’s charming and likable, which is good since he’s the main character. Then we get a horribly wasted James Kyson Lee from Heroes fame. He’s the sidekick, basically, and is portrayed as a smart guy, but with a few gaps in the common sense area. He’s the funny guy who points out the obvious. There’s also relative newcomers, Aja Evans and Toni Trucks. Aja Evans plays the tough girl who is stuck with our wayward gaggle of people after they crash land. She has more to her than meets the eye, and when we learn her real role, it’s one of the few interesting twists in the whole affair. Toni Trucks plays the ‘Leeloo’/'River’ sort of character, the gal who was frozen, wakes up with no memory, but oh, she’s really special, and not just because our heroes see her naked. Toni does alright with this character, but a better actress could have made her shine despite this script. The rest of the supporting cast at least add positives to this mess, but it’s just not enough to save it for me. Not even my favorite bit actor, Todd Jensen, lifted my spirits enough to say ‘Well, maybe it’s not that bad…’, because, well, it was that bad.

For a throwaway movie this is at least watchable, especially if you go into it knowing it’s going to be a mish mosh of other movies you’ve watched, and probably loved. But when it’s all over, you’re going to feel a strong urge to watch some quality sci fi, maybe pulling out Star Wars or even Spaceballs, because Star Runners is a train wreck that will linger in your consciousness, and make you doubt that good sci fi ever existed.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, Aja Evans, b-movie, Connor Trinneer, Firefly, Heroes, James Kyson Lee, Serenity, space bugs, Star Runners, Starship Troopers, The Fifth Element, Todd Jensen, Toni Trucks

I would have loved it if it weren't just another stupid zombie flick...

Campy dialogue. Ridiculous plot. Absolutely no scientific validity to things like launching yourself into the air with a bazooka and surviving, let alone being able to fire a machine gun attached to a stump of a leg. There was tons of things about this movie I really liked, even loved. Yet I didn’t love it. In fact, I was glad to finally have it be over. And why? Because it was another stupid, lazy zombie flick.

I just can’t get into zombie movies. They bore me to tears, and make me feel ripped off. There’s no real thought put into a zombie movie. Gas, toxic chemical, weird voodoo or something of that sort is turning people into flesh eating, mindless fiends that are only stoppable by cutting them to pieces, shooting them to pieces, or otherwise reducing them to goo. If you get bit, you’ll become one, too. Mankind is doomed. Whatever.

There’s no cool villain to root against. Often we get pointless deaths just to provoke some kind of a reaction from the audience. Barring that, the movie relies on lots of splatter to get a reaction. I’ll give Planet Terror nods to that. There is plenty of gore for the sake of gore, which is another lazy fallback that makes me yawn.

This movie frustrated me to no end because it has cheese all over it. A go go dancer calls herself Cherry Darling and wants to be a stand up comic, yet gets insulted when people point out her name sounds like a stripper. Then when she loses a leg she cries “How am I going to be a stand up comedian now?” That’s just beautiful! Then as she’s walking around with the leg from a table as a prosthetic, the renegade soldier ordering her around calls her “Peg.” Priceless! There is a ton of cornball dialogue and character interaction that make me laugh, but then it all went to rot when I had to deal with the damn zombie/people turning into zombie scenes.

Plus, the story drags. Maybe it flowed better in the shortened double feature version, but the full length just keeps going and going and going with lots of diversionary scenes with secondary characters just meant to fill up time. Yes, they’re interesting, but the movie could have been over at least half an hour earlier, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I do appreciate the uniqueness of how this movie blends 70’s stylings with modern. The costumes are full-on 70’s, the cars are sweet classics, but then we have people text messaging all over the place. It gives the whole thing a surreal feel. The addition of little details like “missing reels” and the simulation of old projector film adds to the right atmosphere.

The cast all do great in their roles, no matter how scattered and small they may have been. Naturally Rose McGowan steals the show, between being “I can’t help but hate her” beautiful, and having the right delivery for her cheesy, cheesy lines, and being able to shoot at people with her leg and make it look believable. There are tons of cameos, as well, including Bruce Willis and Quentin Tarantino.

If this just wasn’t a zombie and gore for the sake of gore story, I would be a happy camper. However, it is a zombie and gore for the sake of gore story, so no matter how many cheap laughs it gave me, Planet Terror will never be a movie I watch again, let alone own. If you love Robert Rodriguez movies and zombies and gore, you’re in for a treat. If you’re like me and demand a little bit more from your cheese, you’ll be disappointed, and a little nauseated.

Tags: gore for the sake of gore, Grindhouse Presents Planet Terror, movie review, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, zombie movie, zombies

Not intended to endorse usage of any brand of furnace...

To paraphrase Denis Leary, Furnace didn’t warm the cockles of my heart, or even the sub-cockle region. It made me jump a couple of times with cheap tricks, showed some gruesome burns, and left me a bit confused at what story it wanted to tell.

I knew I was in trouble when it said it was based on a true story. That usually means, at least in this genre, some lazy writing and an over-reliance on gore, or other sensationalist distractions from lack of plot or direction. Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as I expected, and didn’t have anywhere near as much gore as I anticipated, but they threw in a lot of fire and smoke hoping you wouldn’t notice that the characters were directionless, and the plot meandered the chalk outline drawn around the body of what should have been a solid story.

It starts off with a man driving home with his thumb missing, a bandage around the bloody stump. He walks into his house where his lovely young wife is waiting to celebrate their anniversary. He goes into the bathroom without saying a word to her, has some flashbacks, and then, bang! He shoots himself dead.

Back to the prison where the guards are monitoring prisoners doing excavation work for some inexplicable reason. There’s some spooky stuff, and another death, and you start thinking maybe things will begin to make sense. Meanwhile Detective Michael Turner, played be Michael Paré is investigating the suicide of the what turns out to be a prison guard, flirts with the coroner who will be investigating other mysterious prison deaths, and reveals that he’s full of all sorts of angst over the death of his own family. There is some fun dialogue at the precinct, I’ll give the movie that much, but there’s not enough of it to sustain me.

It doesn’t help that Jenny McShane (the wooden actress from Shark Attack 3) plays the prison psychologist, and does it with the same quality of acting that lands her roles like Shark Attack 3. She ends up being the convenient ‘love interest’ (a.k.a. ‘convenient person to have sex with when the script calls for your character to be all sensitive and vulnerable about his past’) to Michael Paré’s character. Considering how much chemistry he had with the coroner, and how interested his character was in the coroner, this made absolutely no sense in the story, and felt as forced as most of Jenny’s lines sounded.

The storyline of the prison was at least easy enough to follow. The original warden was a cruel, sick bastard with a thing for little girls. A simpleminded man walked in on the warden right after he accidentally knocked the child to the ground, unconscious, blood streaming from a wound on her head. The warden scared the poor man into helping him dispose of of what he believed to be her dead body, and only until she’d been placed in the furnace and it had been turned on did she wake up and start screaming. The warden tells the simple man he’s to blame, but somehow gets himself caught up in the flames and dies, as well, leaving only the simple man to know the truth. This man goes to prison for the death of the warden, and becomes the resident wacko. The old furnace is walled up for years, and then for some reason is being opened back up. The girl’s remains are discovered during the investigation of the deaths of the prisoners and guard.

This could have been a nice, creepy ghost story with an ending that makes things right for the poor child and the evil warden. It veers off course trying to endear us to the detective, interest us in the psychiatrist, and make us jump with weird camera angles and shadows rushing past the camera. The ending just drags on and on, and could have done without the requisite prison riot setup. Instead of going for atmospheric and brooding, Furnace just went for the easy scare, and the boring waste of my time.

Tags: based on a true story, Furnace, ghost story, Jenny McShane, Michael Pare, Tom Sizemore

This is what Thor SHOULD look like...

[caption id="attachment_1068" align="alignnone" width="95" caption="This is NOT Thor!"][/caption]

When I think of Thor, I think of a strapping Viking who laughs in the face of danger, has a lust for life, and is generally a bad ass worthy of wielding a gift from the gods. Instead we get a young, chubby-cheeked whelp who hurts his knee when he swings his sword at an enemy and misses, and then hobbles around nursing it, who whines about how he can’t possibly be destined for the heroic things he sees in his visions, and makes me want to send him to his room until he can be a big boy and not cry about everything.

Okay, I exaggerate, but this is not the Thor I expected. They make sure you never see him without lots of fur and armor, because I suspect he’s as physically unfit as his chipmunk cheeks make me think. Okay, he’s supposed to be a young Thor. He’s still learning, he’s not a leader yet, and he definitely hasn’t obtained the Hammer Of The Gods. But that shouldn’t mean he can’t be an impressive specimen of a Viking, that he shouldn’t have command presence, and that he shouldn’t be able to shake off bumping his knee without making a show of it. I don’t know how Zachery Ty Bryan (formerly of Home Improvement) got the part, but he doesn’t fit, and it ruined what little else this movie had going for it.

The whole plot is convoluted, as well. It’s like they started off with one idea, then decided, no, that won’t work, let’s make it be this, instead, but don’t bother rewriting anything, just zig instead of zagging. And then they did it again about two thirds of the way into the movie. So by the end I just summoned up my own Norse heritage as a call for strength, and suffered through what should have so very, very cool.

The story starts off with a group of Vikings landing at what they believe to be undiscovered land. Shortly in a wolf monster takes one of their crew who went scouting with Thor. They venture deeper in, all the while discussing various visions that Freya, the wife of the leader, sees. They also put up with Thor nearly fainting when he starts seeing visions of a great warrior wielding a mighty hammer. Then they discover survivors in a cabin who tell of more wolf people, and beg they leave this place. Instead of taking that as sound advice, our Viking group sets off to find their missing comrade. That’s when the wolf men start picking them off more quickly. Somewhere along the line we discover the wolf men are really shapeshifters, minions of Loki, and that Loki guards The Hammer, which was used to slay his brother, a serpent demon, so long ago. After a betrayal you could see coming a mile away, and a predictable character death, we’re introduced to another mysterious survivor, Vali, that we never learn the purpose of. Is he there to take The Hammer? Is he there to help? Or was he just an extra character thrown in because they ran out of ideas? By the end I didn’t care, other than it was over.

The graphics of the wolf men at least were decent. There wasn’t a lot of gore for the sake of gore. And the main representative of Loki’s minions does the whole evil and manipulative thing with a lot of style, and is probably the only character I liked. She delivered her lines with a passable accent, but didn’t overdo it, and wields her twin blades in the inevitable fight scene with surviving Viking warrior women with panache. Sadly I can’t locate any information about her character on this movie’s IMDB page.

There are too many problems with Thor: Hammer Of The Gods to make it passable, even by my standards. Between the lazy, wandering plot, the dialogue relying on tons of ‘By Odin’s Beard!’ and other such stereotypical Viking-expected exclamations, and the mostly lackluster acting, it’s boring at best. If they’d stuck to one storyline that would have helped. If they’d cast the lead properly, and not given us a Thor that just needs a hug, that would have been even better.

Tags: Home Improvement, Loki, Norse Mythology, Odin, painful test of endurance, Thor, Thor Hammer Of The Gods, Thor just needs a hug, Vikings, Zachery Ty Bryan

The most lukewarm movie about heat you'll ever see...

Meltdown: Days Of Destruction is a disaster flick that follows pretty much every formula, including ones that make it bland, predictable, and completely forgettable. Poor Casper Van Dien is the lead in this endurance test, and while he’s still got that certain something that makes me watch him, it’s not enough to carry the heavy load of a plodding, hackneyed plot.

He plays a cop with an ex-girlfriend who didn’t bother to tell him he was a father until his little girl (now eighteen) was five and already hating him. He also has a current girlfriend who’s there just as a placeholder while the world falls apart and everyone realizes how important family is. The daughter naturally has an ex-con boyfriend a little too old for her, bringing down the ire of mom and dad, and gives us trite conflict that all resolves neatly.

We meet a scientist at the beginning who gives lots of dire warnings about how we really shouldn’t be firing rockets at asteroids in space. Seems like solid advice, which comes to fruition when the asteroid breaks into three pieces, and the largest one skips across the Earth’s atmosphere like a rock on a lake. The scientist turns out to be the brother of the new girlfriend, and so they all end up tagging along together.

There’s a lot of useless setup to show what a good cop Van Dien’s character is, which is all for naught as chaos ensues. Two days into the crisis the government lets the public in on the secret that yeah, the temperature is rising, and guess what? It’s going to keep rising, and we’re all gonna die. Let the riots and the looting begin!

For some reason everyone is trying to get to the airport, even though it’s clear that vehicles aren’t doing well in the heat, and are, well, blowing up. But these supposedly smart people are convinced an airplane landing at a specified time will get them all safely to the North Pole. Okaay… Why not? It’s not like there’s any logic to the rest of the movie.

Because they ran out of plot points in the middle of the movie, a dirty cop conveniently stumbles across the group, and kidnaps the brother, since the brother is the key to getting on the plane. We get gun battles, lots of scenes showing how cruel we are to each other in a crisis, unless you’re the lead characters in a disaster movie, and road warrior style retro-fittings of refrigeration units on cars in less time that it took to get my oil changed last month. We also have to put up with lots of discussion about everyone’s feelings, which made me feel slightly naseous.

To save you the terrible headache and craving for whiskey, I will now provide ending spoilers. You have been warned, and I emphasize I am doing this to help you, not hurt you.

At the end we get more gun battles, the North Pole-bound plane exploding in mid-air (which we don’t get to see because they used up their budget on something, we just don’t know what), and a completely ludicrous self-healing of the earth’s orbit. It was mentioned earlier that the earth could just realign itself in a few days, and we’d know because it would start raining. So of course after the bad guy is dead, the dad and the new boyfriend have bonded over shooting people, the old girlfriend and the old boyfriend get back together leaving the new girlfriend to step aside all noble like because ‘they belong together’, and remaining bad guys have scampered off, what do you suppose happens now?

What’s that sound? Oooh, oooh, oooh! It’s rain! Rain! Our crops are saved! Although not really because they neatly skip over how much the world has gone to hell in a hand basket and the worst is probably still to come as everyone tries to rebuild and grab power and fight over the limited resources left behind.

But it’s all okay. Something good does come out of it. The movie is over, and we never, ever have to watch it again.

Tags: action flick, asteroids hitting the earth, b-movie, Casper Van Dien, disaster movie, Meltdown Days Of Destruction, painful test of endurance

Get him! He might star in a sequel!

This. Was. Terrible. Point, shoot, bang, it needs to be dead. Please, please, please to the powers that be out there, do not make a sequel like you set up for. It’s not worth it. This first film wasn’t worth it. I understand you were just trying to trick people into watching your movie first by rushing it to completion and releasing it before the big blockbuster, I Am Legend. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? You’ve inflicted enough pain on my tender psyche.

Why did I even bother to watch I Am Omega? I knew it was going to be a zombie flick, and I’ve never enjoyed zombie flicks. But I thought, maybe with the obvious plot lifting of The Omega Man and The Last Man On Earth and I Am Legend that they could cobble something together that would keep me interested. Instead, it just proves that I still haven’t acquired a taste for zombies, and that no one bothered to try to tell a story here.

It starts off with a lot of promise, with Mark Dacascos playing Renchard, presumably the last living soul. Through some unobtrusive flashbacks we learn he lost his wife and child to the virus and resulting zombie overflow. He eats his meals with a mannequin for company, pays cash to corpses when he takes their beer, and has a very intricate security system to fend off attacks. He’s also going a wee bit nuts, and plays it well. Sadly, this isn’t enough to hold up the story, and I found myself checking how much time was left less than thirty minutes into it.

Somehow his computer still works and connects well enough to the internet to receive incoming video. We see that there is at least one survivor in the middle of New York City, and she wants him to come get her. He wisely decides he’s better off holed up where he’s at, especially since he’s wired the city to blow up, and ignores her.

Enter two psychotic soldiers in a dirty white van. They ask him to help them rescue the girl, because her blood has the anti-virus to save humanity. When he still says no, they insist by blowing up his house. So off they go to rescue the damsel. They don’t get far before their stupidity kills one of them off, and the survivor of the pair won’t leave the body to continue the mission. Renchard has to go in alone to get the girl.

It gets more ludicrous and confusing from there. The writers just throw in more zombies, cars that won’t start, a girl with an oddly superior attitude for someone getting rescued from zombies, and the surviving solider going more than a little over the cuckoo’s nest, all in the name of stretching this painful test of endurance out to the requisite time requirement.

At another point I swear Renchard is going zombie, because they show him getting scratched, and then he gets shot. Almost immediately they put on a thick layer of pale makeup on him, and do weird camera angles. As he fights off the now bad-guy soldier they continue to flash on him as if he were using zombie strength. Then after all that, nothing. This may sound like a spoiler, but seriously, I’m saving you a good ninety minutes of pain by letting you know upfront that Renchard won’t go ‘native’ at the end. Perhaps knowing that you won’t feel the compulsion to waste time on this.

This movie has the same intellectually degenerating impact as chugging one of those huge 40 ounce bottles of Olde English from back in your college days. You’ll end up feeling about as queasy and guilty the morning after, too.

Tags: god awful, I Am Legend, Last Man On Earth, Mark Dacascos, Omega Man, painful test of endurance, zombies

No one in their right mind wants to be king of this...

Dear god, this isn’t even worth the $7.98 price tag I see at Amazon. Supposedly based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, The Lost World, it introduces a giant gorilla right off the bat, which apparently isn’t even in the book. It at least looks cool, but the glimpses we get of the furry guy are few and far between, and pretty cheap CGI, even for a B-movie of this ‘caliber.’

They twist the story around by having planes crash land like flies hitting a bug zapper as soon as they enter the air space. In the original tale people arrive there quite deliberately, and are able to leave. In this ‘adaptation’ rescue planes crash as well, you know, to add insult to injury. Radio equipment is stripped out of fuselage by the natives, presumably by other survivors trying to get out of this movie, er, off the island. So there’s basically no escape, even at the very end. Truly, you feel sorry for those that make it out alive, because that means there may be a sequel.

We’re promised dinosaurs and giant spiders and giant scorpions, and we do eventually get them. However we have to sit through a lot of setup to make sure we, as an audience, understand that this plane has crashed on this island, lots of people are hurt, but about half of them are willing to venture over the hill and into the jungle to search for the other half of their plane. Oh, and there’s disagreement about that, but it doesn’t amount to more than surly looks. And when we do finally get spiders, it’s a little CGI and a lot of rubber puppets getting thrown around. It should have been funny, but the film has such a heavy overtone that the potential is lost.

Funny thing about this jungle world is that we only see spiders in one area, killer vines in another area, and giant scorpions in another. Realistically there should have been these critters all over the place waiting to take advantage of a huge cast of easy snacks. And if the Queen Of Cheese is using the word ‘realistically’ in a criticism of a movie, that should give you an idea of how boring and clunky this sucker was that I found myself distracted by such concerns.

There are previous crash survivors on the island who have naturally developed their own primitive, savage society, complete with a language that they must have created for whatever reason, but we don’t know why, or care. They paint themselves black and white, strategically wear strips of linen, and all have perfectly straight, white teeth after eating who knows what with limited hygiene resources. They still speak English when they feel like it, but that’s only long enough to let one of the wives hit on Bruce Boxleitner’s character. This tribe also grabs the newest crash survivors and apparently sacrifice the half that stayed behind with the first piece of the plane, because you only see them get herded off, never to be seen again. Lucky them. The other half that ventured into the jungle must wait it out until the bitter end, like the viewer.

As is often the case in badly done bad movies of this ilk, the cast is horribly wasted. The four main characters reprising a version of Doyle’s creations all do well with the little they’re given, and have decent chemistry between each other. You actually hope they all make it out alive so they can go beat the living crap out of their agents for putting their name up for this. Especially Bruce Boxleitner who deserves so much better than this (and especially better than a Transmorphers 2 for god’s sake). Sadly, I must put him in my You Poor Bastard category.

This should have been awesome, cheesy, and loads of fun. Instead it felt a little like Lost mixed with King Kong mixed with all of those reality shows where everyone yells at everyone else, then cries about it, then form alliances to push the other team off the island. Instead we get clunky script, dialogue, special effects, storyline, and none of the requisite cheese factor that should have gone with it. This was a complete waste of time. You have been warned.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, action movie, Bruce Boxleitner, creature feature, giant gorilla, god awful, Jeff Denton, King Of The Lost World, painful test of endurance, Rhett Giles, Sarah Lieving, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Transmorphers 2, You Poor Bastard

We have yet another movie aired under a different name than it was produced as. In this case it is Sea Beast which was originally entitled, of all things, Troglodyte. Sea Beast is a much better title, but not enough to make this anything worth sitting through a second airing. It wasn’t really worth the first airing, either, but I digress.

The story is based in a fishing town where the fishing just ain’t as good as it used to be, and sailors are dying on a particular captain’s crew more frequently than others. It doesn’t help that some of the sailors are also seeing giant sea monsters hiding in the waves in stormy ocean waters. The opening sequence has promise by giving you a glimpse of the giant beastie, and shots of a smaller version of it hitching a ride on one of the lifeboats back to shore. However, the story gets bogged down in details about the main character’s financial woes, personal loss, and general ‘down and out’-ittude.

The characters are plentiful, but none stand out as colorful enough to keep the story afloat. Poor Corin Nemec is looking haggard and thin-haired, but he does try his best to portray a father trying to make enough money to send his spoiled snot of a daughter to college. He’s really the only sympathetic character in the mess, and it’s just sad, not endearing. The rest you either say ‘Finally!’ or just shrug when they get picked off by the rapidly multiplying critters.

The critters are at least interesting. They start off small, grow quickly, are amphibious, and are so good at camouflage as to be invisible. They also spit a lovely green goo at their victims, which paralyzes them so they can be eaten alive with nary a scream. They look like a cross between what the Loch Ness Monster might look like, and a lot of Discovery Channel sea dinosaur creations.

We get a lot of CGI of the beasties, but the storyline is so weak I kept drifting off to flashbacks of the movie Snakehead Terror, because there were so many similarities. Idyllic lakeside setting, vicious, rapidly multiplying killer sea creature, teenagers going off alone to an island cabin only to be set upon and picked off by the beasties surrounding them. Irritating daughter that should get killed off if there were any justice in the B-movie world, yet lives to scream about her friends getting eaten. They even have a similar use of electricity to kill off a whole bunch of the monsters at once.

There’s not much to commend this to anything other than the huge pile of ‘Eh, I watched it and survived. What’s next?‘ pile. It’s watchable, but boring. There’s too many entrails for my taste which translates to ‘We don’t have enough dialogue other than screaming to make this stretch to 90 minutes.’ It was a waste of a couple of hours of an afternoon, but didn’t provide any giggle factor, and definitely not enough cheese. If you want to enjoy something cheesy that has sea monsters, try The Beast, Octopus, or Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep. Any of the aforementioned may not be classics, but at least they have the requisite cheese and giggle factor that makes a bad movie enjoyable.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, b-movie, Corin Nemec, creature feature, Sea Beast, Troglodyte

a.k.a. This Movie Vs Anything Watchable

I truly am a masochist. I should have turned this thing off after the first five minutes. However, I kept hoping beyond hope that maybe there’d be some great one-liners among the listless dialogue, funny moments mixed in with the cloddish violence, or something original scrambling to the surface of the bubbling crock of crap blatantly ripped off from the Alien Vs. Predator franchise. I was wrong.

I also kept watching for the train wreck factor of William “I was The Greatest American Hero” Katt trying to keep his career alive. His IMDB page is full of listings, but not of anything I’ve heard of, or care to. Then there was DeeDee Pfeiffer, who annoyed me so much in another atrocity, Journey To The Center Of The Earth. At least she wasn’t wearing glasses in this one, but she still ended up all fidgety towards the end, making me wonder if she’s trying to be cute and perky, or if she has a medical condition that needs to be addressed.

There’s a lot of other characters in this, and some were mercifully picked off quickly by the alien that morphs into half spider. Others had to endure almost to the end, and one can only hope that their first stop on the way home from the set was to meet with their agent so they could fire them.

The whole movie is so unoriginal that watching it made my eyes glaze over at a few points. Of course that could also have been the weird orange filter they filmed everything with. Were they trying to give it a desert look? A toxic look? Or were they hoping washing out all the color would make your eyes lose focus and not notice how bad the movie really is?

It starts off with a reporter jogging down a road only to be picked up by the local sheriff off on a domestic disturbance call. While they’re chit chatting they see something fall from the sky and crash conveniently where they’re headed. The characters immediately come across an alien that decides it needs to kill everything that moves. The reporter survives and ends up dragging a whiny young girl looking for her mother back to his place. She snoops in his bathroom and realizes he’s a failed writer and starts yelling at him about possibly wanting to write a story about her tragedy. Then they go into town where more people yell at him, and then decide they need to work together, and then decide that they need to head to a local hunter, and then bicker pointlessly some more, and basically make me want them to all die, and die now.

There’s two aliens running around now, but they hint that maybe there’s more than one of the spider aliens, and that the other non-spider alien is protecting the humans, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because everyone is a target anyway, and if you get in the way of the other alien you’re going to be toast. The characters end up in tunnels, then split up, then more characters arrive to go on a quasi-paramilitary operation, and somehow the reporter and another character discover they like each other, and I just want the pain to stop, so I pour myself a tall glass of wine.

At the end the ‘good’ alien wins, I guess, and then returns to its ship to take off it’s helmet and reveal-dun dun dun dun!-he’s not so alien after all, and really was just out hunting, and is planning a new hunt. Dear god, that means there’s going to be a sequel, and it’ll probably have DeeDee Pfeiffer and William Katt reprise their roles, and DeeDee might end up so fidgety at the end of that one she’ll just be a blur on camera.

Unless you’re a masochist like me, don’t bother with this 84 minute piece of cinematic insult to all that should be cheesy and fun. Watch Alien Vs Predator instead, which is a masterpiece in comparison, or even better, skip the aliens premise and go for Boa Vs Python or Komodo Vs Cobra.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, Alien Vs Hunter, Alien Vs Predator, aliens, Boa Vs Python, DeeDee Pfeiffer, Greatest American Hero, Komodo Vs Dragon, painful test of endurance, William Katt

Leave him... His career is already dead.

In yet another installment of the Anaconda ’series’, we get more anacondas, and surprisingly a slightly better story. Not a good story, mind you, but better than the last one, whose only shining moment was when it cast David Hasselhoff.

Honestly I didn’t pay a lot of attention to this. It’s the same old same old of rich tycoon (played by John Rhys-Davies) trying to cheat death, so he finances gray-area science to alter DNA on blood orchids, inject it into anacondas, and create a serum intended to regenerate dying cells, and then the snakes escape (again), and he has to send in a team of killers to clean up the mess. This time around one of the characters from the last escapade survived and is trying to put a stop to it all. I say, bless her heart for trying, but there’s obviously going to be another sequel.

There are a ton of characters in this rendition, which is the only reason they could stretch the story out as long as they did. First is the ‘cleanup’ crew sent to track down the serum and the wayward survivor from the last movie. Then there’s the survivor from the last movie who runs into a kid hiking in the woods and ends up tagging along. Then there’s an expedition team out on a dig in the same area. Lots of people, lots of snake food. Not a lot of plot.

I think I liked Anacondas: Trail Of Blood better than the last one because there was less CGI-ed blood splurting everywhere. The gore was toned down, and the CGI on the snake was done with a little more realism. Okay, there was a part when the snake supposedly couldn’t catch two people running on foot, but was keeping up with a Jeep with the accelerator to the floor, and there was no David Hasselhoff, but that’s all water under the bridge.

Hey, maybe that will be the next Anaconda movie! Anacondas: Water Under The Bridge where a lonely troll who resides under a stone bridge in a peaceful forest befriends a bloodthirsty, genetically enhanced snake. In exchange for not becoming lunch (or dinner), the troll lures unsuspecting tourists to loiter at the top of the bridge so the anaconda can bite their heads off at its leisure. A local witch who lives in a nearby gingerbread house discovers the gruesome pact, but because of her own sordid past with eating children who gnawed on her windowsills, no one will believe her. It will be up to her to put an end to the diabolical scheme, armed only with giant gum drops, royal frosting, sharpened candy canes, and maybe a little black magic!…

Wow. I’d watch that. Maybe I can get a job writing Sci Fi ‘not so original’ movies…

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, Anacondas, Anacondas Offspring, Anacondas Trail Of Blood, b-movie, creature feature, Crystal Allen, david hasselhoff, John Rhys-Davies