Sci Fi Cinema: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

By Jason Haskins

After the dismal efforts of the first Star Trek film in 1979, Gene Roddenberry was taken off as executive producer and forced to sit idly while others stirred the pot for a change. In doing so they created perhaps the best known Star Trek movie and easily the highest regarded one in the history of the franchise. This is 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Crapsterpieces: Phantoms (1998)

By Paco McCullough

(Author's Note- Today's my 21st birthday, so I'm gonna keep this column short and snarky as I want to go do stuff)

Phantoms stars two of cinema's greatest actors of all time: Peter O'Toole (Lawrence of Arabia) and Ben Affleck (Reindeer Games, Paycheck, Daredevil, Pearl Harbor) in an adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel. As Koontz is the greatest living writer of our generation, how can this film be anything but a masterpiece?

Attack the Block (2011) Review

By Jason Haskins

Attack the Block is the little film that could—the Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead)-produced film that has been making tons of waves overseas that has just hit our shores in limited release. Hyped as the best lower-budget sci-fi film since 2009’s District 9, Attack the Block has been getting widespread acclaim for its monstrously fun laughs and thrills, but is it worth your attention?

Another Take: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) Review

By Jason Haskins

Believe it or not it’s been 10 long years since the last Planet of the Apes movie…remember the one Tim Burton directed starring Mark Wahlberg? Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan, either. After that terrible release I was very skeptical on what direction the series was going to go from there. I mean, the Apes movies have been a fun little science fiction detour for years (none coming close to the finesse of the original, of course). This summer we see the release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes—the inevitable prequel to the series. The big question on everyone’s minds is whether it’s good or bad.

Cult Films: They Live (1988)

By Jason Haskins

Imagine finding a pair of sunglasses which revealed that a large portion of the population are actually aliens in disguise and the subliminal messages they've been hosting in all of our advertisements. That's what happens to the main character played by Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's They Live: A vagrant construction worker comes across a group of people trying to spread the word that the world is being controlled by an alien intelligence disguised as humans.

Crapsterpieces: Dreamcatcher

By Paco McCullough


Dreamcatcher is a bizarre film. Why so many talented people got together to work on a film about ass aliens defies all explanation. The creative team involved was behind some of my favorite films, including The Empire Strikes Back, on of the best movies ever made. The key actors are some of the most underrated actors of our era. Why did they all get together to make this mess of a movie?

Planet of the Apes (2001)

By Jason Haskins

The original Planet of the Apes was released in 1968 and starred sir Charlton Heston. Not only was it received well for its intriguing sci-fi/fantasy story based on the book by Pierre Boulle and co-adapted by Rod Serling, it won achievements in makeup effects (for the apes) and made back its budget five-fold. The impact is still around today where we have heaps of sequels strewn everywhere, but in this author's lovely opinion nothing matches the sheer awesomeness and freshness of the original film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) Review

By Tanner McCullough

I was leery when another Planet of the Apes movie was announced. After the debacle that was Tim Burton’s remake, a large part of me wanted filmmakers and the major studios to leave the franchise alone. Boy, am I glad to be wrong. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a great movie for fans of the franchise. Though for the most part the questions it answers were fine left unanswered, it is great to watch the first steps of our ape overlords.

Another Take: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

By Jason Haskins

On paper, or at least in my head, the concept of mixing cowboys and aliens is an awesome one. Some may scoff at the title of the film, but it literally explains everything you need to know about this movie. Daniel Craig plays a bandit cowboy who wakes up in the desert without his memory, but with a weird contraption on his wrist that turns out to be a weapon of some kind.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) Review

By Tanner McCullough

Daniel Craig wakes up in the middle of the desert with no idea who or where he is and a mysterious bracelet attached to his arm. After being confronted by a group of bounty hunters, he is able to quickly dispatch all of them, without knowing why he is so good. Craig rides into the town of Absolution, where he soon meets a preacher (Clancy Brown) with a quick draw and a heart of gold, a timid doctor (Sam Rockwell) who is tired of being picked on, a strong woman with a mysterious past (Olivia Wilde) and the Dollarhydes. The Dollarhydes are the ranching family who own Absolution. They’re led by curt patriarch Woodrow, though our first experience with them is the reckless son, Percy (Paul Dano). Within minutes Craig is wanted (it turns out he’s a train robber named Jake Lonergan). If this all sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is.

Videogame Bits: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

By Terry Cleveland

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is set in a barren wasteland: the post-apocalyptic aftermath of an alien meteor that struck the planet forty years ago. We then meet Dr Aki Ross (voiced by Ming Na) who is studying the aliens (called phantoms) who instantly suck the life-force out of any living thing they come into contact with. Dr. Ross is searching for spirits to put together to make a neutral “spirit wave” to rid the planet of the phantoms. She then teams up with a group of soldiers voiced by Alec Baldwin, Steve Bucemi, Ving Rames, and Peri Gilpin to help stop the invasion and restore life to the planet.

Cult Films: Event Horizon (1997)

By Jason Haskins

Event Horizon was a movie that has, more or less, been forgotten from public consciousness since its released back in 1997. Is it deserved? While most would write this off as another bad sci-fi movie from the nineties, it's surprising to note that it actually holds up fairly well and is quite entertaining for what it tries to do. It's not necessarily an original Event, per se, but it's familiarity is strangely comfortable.

Crapsterpieces: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) is a film about a gang of alien clowns that fly around in a circus tent UFO, shoot deadly popcorn from ray guns, and wrap their victims in cotton candy. They land in a small town and it’s up to a cop, a couple college students, and two brothers who sell ice cream to stop them. If this sounds like something you’d like, you probably will. Conversely, if this sounds like something you’d hate, you probably will.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

By Jason Haskins

In the latest Transformers film, the follow-up to 2009’s disastrous Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay tries to make a movie to end a trilogy on—and what a way to go out! The last fifty minutes of the movie are full of robotic bedlam of epic proportions with explosions, robot-to-robot combat, and other ridiculous CGI stunts to make Transformer nerds crumble in delight.

The basic premise is that the space race of the sixties was put into effect because of an alien craft that landed on the moon, which the Autobots (good guys) and the Decepticons (bad guys) are both after. Apparently the craft holds key Transformers weaponry. This leads to young Sam Witwicky’s involvement years later after the events of the first two films where he finds himself unused by the government and feeling like a nobody now that no one needs him anymore. It doesn’t stay that way for long as a conspiracy plops itself literally into his lap and he learns of the human involvement in one of the greatest threats in all of mankind. Will the Autobots be able to stop the Decepticons’ biggest and baddest plot?!

It all boils down to my complete and utter disinterest in the plot. At the end of the day all I saw were a ton of special effects and over-acting and ridiculous Michael Bay elements, which completely muted whatever type of drama was being created. If I was a fan of Transformers it’s possible I would have found this more interesting. The movie does suffer from the third-times-the-charm where they tried to pump up everything full of steroids to blast the previous two films out of the water and they certainly do that…but to mixed results.

The only thing I dug about this movie were the visuals. I saw the film in 3D ($12 bucks I’m not sitting on anymore) and it definitely added to the experience. Things looked vibrant and the action looked pretty intense. The CGI was mostly incredible with some really interesting action scenes of Chicago being invaded by the Decepticons and an all-out war between the good guys and the bad guys. I particularly dug a scene involving a tumbling building with LeBeouf’s character inside it.

LeBeouf actually does a decent job as being the everyman here who’s charming and actually quite funny in the movie. Megan Fox has been booted from the series after calling Bay a Nazi prompting producer Steven Spielberg to give her the Schindler’s Fist of firings and has been replaced with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who is really stunning. That’s all she really is, as her character could have been completely omitted from the film without altering anything. Other supporting characters include Frances ‘donchaknow’ McDormand as a no-bullshit government suit, Patrick Dempsey as a little rascal, John Malkovich as Witwicky’s boss, and the epic return of Tyrese Gibson for the African-American perspective.

A few blaring problems was the screenplay and the direction right off the bat. First of all, the flick is over two hours long and takes about forty-five minutes to really amp up towards anything and once everything does start happening it turns stupid very quick. Let me restate that and say the whole flick is sort of stupid. I mean, the premise is a little half-baked with the ultimate plan being very disappointing in the midst of all this epic ambition and chaos. Michael Bay definitely uses spectacle over substance and I won’t even say style as the majority of the movie is computer generated. The last thirty minutes were good, sure, but I was ready for it to be over three quarters of the way through the film. There’s only so much time I can commit to talking robots and bad dialogue.

Overall, this is a movie to be enjoyed by mainstream Summer audiences looking for explosions and lackluster stories. I’m not a big Transformers fan so I didn’t see what all the hoopla was about, but perhaps those in the know will dig it more than me. I will say that this is the best one of the whole series with some really cool action sequences and a more fun approach than anything they’ve done previously. However, at the end of the day I wish I had seen something else—and that’s how the cookie crumbles.

© Jason Haskins, 2011

2 out of 5 Stars

Crapsterpieces: Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988)

By Paco McCullough

Hell Comes to Frogtown is one of the most ridiculous movies I have ever seen. In it, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (They Live) plays a sex offender in a post-apocalyptic United States. Due to radioactive fallout, the majority of men are sterile. While Piper’s character, Sam Hell, is being interrogated, a government agency in charge of reproduction enters the room. They’ve discovered that Hell is the most fertile man on the planet. As such, the government has an offer for him- enter “Frogtown”, populated by freakish froglike mutants, and save a harem of fertile young women. After the women are saved, he is to impregnate them.
    Somewhat astonishingly, a movie with a premise this original is still rather boring. Piper’s boorish character lacks any real charm, instead just kind of being a dick. The process of infiltrating Frogtown is monotonous. Once the action begins, for the most part it is poorly directed and rather boring.
    Hell Comes To Frogtown recognizes its flaws, focusing instead on the bizarre humor of the premise. Everyone I know who has seen this film immediately thinks of the “Dance of the Three Snakes.” I won’t ruin it for those of you that haven’t seen it, but that scene alone is worth the price of a rental. Some of the other humor is not as successful- for instance, a frog women wants to sleep with Hell, but she’s ugly. Humor supposedly ensues.
    Overall, the film is only moderately entertaining. However, its bizarre premise and humor make it a must see if watching with a group of immature buddies. Beer is recommended.

Critical Scale: 2.5 out of 5

Crapsterpiece Scale: 4 out of 5

© Tanner McCullough, 2011

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) Review

By Paco McCullough

Sorry for the delay. Here is one of two Transformers reviews that we'll be posting in the next couple of days.

Transformers Dark Of The Moon is a bad movie. It is not a horrible film like its predecessor, but it’s also not in any way a good film. It is incredibly long, with most of the film being nothing more than filler. What doesn’t work as a 150 minute long film could have possibly worked as a 90 minute film.
    There are a few redeemable elements of Transformers. The visuals are uniformly impressive. Several actors I love are in this film for some reason. Amongst these: John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and John Turturro. These characters are wasted in meaningless supporting roles that just serve to further distract from the overall plot. While the cast and visuals are spectacular, it is not enough to save the movie.
    One of the most significant problems with Transformers is its running time. For a film that is ostensibly about robots fighting each other, there is a significant amount of time leveraged on unnecessary subplots that do nothing to drive the film forward. Because of this, the first hour and a half of the film are agonizingly slow. These subplots don’t help elevate any of the characters from their archetypes. We have the cranky boss, the average guy, the hot girlfriend, the tough marine, and several more. Most of these characters seem to exist more to stretch the runtime than for any real narrative reason.
    The climax, an epic showdown in Chicago, is about an hour long. For the first twenty minutes or so, it is exciting.  There’s only so many ways to show giant CGI robots fighting, and once that peak is reached, the action begins to feel quite repetitive.
    The whole film is a mess. Don’t waste your time.

1.5 out of 5 stars

© Tanner McCullough, 2011

Alien Resurrection (1997) Review

 By Jason Haskins

This is what happens when the studio interferes with everything in the filmmaking process. Sure, they struck boldly with the Alien 3, which was easily the worst film of the franchise, but they happened to take interesting ideas and a script by Joss Whedon (of Firefly and Buffy fame) and the genius of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) diminishing all of the capacities that would've made the movie good.

Let's talk about the story.

After the ending of Alien 3 where series heroine Ellen Ripley (spoilers) throws herself into the flames so that her unborn alien child couldn't be born and so that The Company couldn't experiment on her, Ripley has been cloned! Huh. So, after eight cloning procedures one actually "revives" Ripley and she's born again 200 years after the events of the third film!

...with the alien embryo inside her (...?). The Company completes experiments to breed more of these aliens for government projects. Enter some space pirates and a whole mess in outer space where the aliens get out of their containment tanks with no one to save them and you have the plot of Alien: Resurrection where Ripley isn't really herself and must toy with whether she's alien or human. Huh.

Some of these ideas are pretty good. By that, I mean that some of the set-up works interestingly. Bringing The Company back to see where their experiments would go was interesting and I dug Brad Dourif (Chucky!) as the jerk scientist guy. There are a few cool action scenes such as an underwater escape with aliens trailing the ragged group like sharks. Granted, this part was fairly stupid and wasn't as thrilling as it could've been, but the possibilities were pretty cool.

Now for some of the ridiculous ideas. The whole cloning premise was so ridiculously stupid that I almost couldn't handle it. It was one of those factoids I must've blocked out from my consciousness because of how long it had been since I've seen this movie. Some of the foolish ideas presented included this relationship between Winona Ryder's character, Annalee, and Ripley.

The group of space pirates were walking clichés and there's one scene that was so effing ridiculous that I was frustrated--an act of sacrifice for no reason and could not have been explained. Then there's a basketball scene and some weird sexual stuff with Ripley and aliens and vulvas and a ton of weird imagery. The movie is strange; strange to the point--well, it was done by a Frenchman--but strange to the point where I couldn't tell whether I dug it or not. Ripley is simply crazy and not the same hero we grew to love in the first few films.

The ending of the film is definitely weird--alien baby, baby!

Now, you'd think that I wouldn't really dig this movie, but for some reason I did--and I can't really explain it. The direction isn't amazing--Jeunet's style didn't carry over into this flick, for some reason. If the movie had been more like The City of Lost Children with aliens I would've totally been on board, but he seemed restrained here and kept back from his full potential.

The movie is actually pretty fast paced (even the special edition of the movie, which is a tad bit longer) and keeps thing interesting by throwing in clichéd action scenes that are pretty good. Long gone are the horror factors, but the movie still delivers some pretty terrifying aliens full of slimy goodness we've always loved. The special effects were definitely an upgrade from the crap we saw in Alien 3 making the experience much better.

The acting is mostly what you'd expect from a film of this caliber, but offers some more interesting stuff than the previous film. Ron Perlman plays the typical macho guy, there's a disabled guy that's a lot of fun, and Michael Wincott has a small role--I'll watch anything this guy does. Winona Ryder was not on her A-game and seemed to sort of sleepwalk through the movie what with the bad lines written for her. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley was very weird and different. She was creepy and scary, but sort of hot in this weird way as her character embraced her sexuality in this movie instead of being this masculine hero the series built off her.

Alien: Resurrection (1997) wasn't terrible and was actually quite watchable. I think that it's much more interesting and more fun than the third film and at least tries to put forth some new ideas despite how bad most of them are. I wished that the script had gone in a different direction and had the aliens invade Earth, which would've been cool, or some of the ideas that were presented in earlier drafts of the script, but alas we are left with this cloning scenario that bugged me all the way through. This is a movie of give and take with a lot of things that tarnish the experience, but it's still just a mediocre watch for a rainy day and has actually stood up over the years surprisingly well.

3 out of 5 Stars

© Jason Haskins, 2011