[4] This ‘bad in a good way’ sci-fi/horror flick features a melting astronaut who must feed on human flesh to keep from becoming a puddle of goo. I’m all for melting people, but The Incredible Melting Man is too narrow in scope. The script strings together one ‘stalk n’ kill’ scene after another, with little attention to the naturally sympathetic plight of its title character. …
[4] Also known as Quartermass and the Pit, this subdued sci-fi flick centers around a famous scientist, Bernard Quartermass (Andrew Keir), who is called to London to investigate a mysterious object and the strange effect it has on anyone who gets near it. I usually enjoy Hammer Films, but this one nearly put me to sleep. There’s some payoff, and a nice bleak ending, but …
[7] Chappie starts out rough, juggling multiple storylines and shifting our character identification many times throughout the first 30 minutes, but once the title character is ‘born,’ the film gets more and more thematically compelling. Chappie is a robot designed to be a police officer (shades of RoboCop permeate in more ways than one), but just as he’s damaged and marked for destruction, his inventor (Slumdog …
[8] Dino DeLaurentiis foots the bill for this gravely ambitious film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel about the messianic rise of an off-lander who rallies a reclusive desert civilization in a fight against galactic takeover. Hot off The Elephant Man, David Lynch was chosen as director — a bold but inspired choice. And in the end, it’s Lynch’s style and aesthetic taste that …
[7] Director Ridley Scott returns to the Alien franchise in a movie that attempts to shed light on the mysteries of his original 1979 film. On one hand, I’m not a fan of exposing mysteries that have enraptured Alien fans for several decades. But if that has to be the mission, Prometheus is at least entertaining in its execution. Structurally, the film is almost a …
[4] As far as I could tell, Xtro is about a father who is abducted by aliens, then returned to his family as a strange alien-human hybrid. But I’m not sure. First, there’s a weird crabby-looking monster in the woods, then it rapes a woman, then the woman gives birth to a fully-grown man (the single reason to see this movie. The man begins to …
[4] Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star in this sci-fi thriller about astronauts who awaken from hypersleep with total memory loss. The filmmakers are hellbent on keeping everything mysterious to the very end: where are we? who are we? what are we doing? I’m all for a good mystery, but you have to give me something or someone to care about while you leave me …
[8] J.J. Abrams hands the reigns to director Justin Lin (director of several Fast and Furious movies), working from a script co-written by Scotty (Simon Pegg). The result? A damn solid entry in the Star Trek franchise, possibly the best of the three newest films. The plot involves your standard new bad guy (Idris Elba) trying to get his hands on a big, nasty weapon …
[4] The first Independence Day is one of those films that strikes just the right tone, something between earnest and goofy-as-hell, genuinely terrifying and gloriously indulgent. It was like the best possible kind of Irwin Allen disaster movie, where the spectacle was off-set by a charming ensemble of personalities and attitude was an acceptable replacement for character development. In all these regards, the sequel fails to …
[8] Looper is a mash-up of mobster movie and sci-fi time travel flick, but rather than getting caught up in its own clever twists on a (let’s face it) hackneyed sci-fi sub-genre, the movie is wisely more concerned with creating an emotionally gripping story. It moves and builds perfectly, dividing your empathy for its fully-fleshed characters in a story that shuns black and white to …
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