PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 532

Trancers 5 starts off with a 6 minute recap of Trancers 4. There's no reason for that time wasting bit of film, other than to pad out the 72:29 minute running time. The movie came out in 1994, same as the 4th film. That's Full Moon for ya, as time goes on Full Moon gets worse and worse at making good movies. The even sadder thing, this movie was shot back to back with Trancers 4. Peter David is the script writer and David Nutter is the director.

 Jack Deth is still fighting the Trancers in the other dimension. Tim Thomerson plays Jack for one last time. He won't be in the 6th movie, in 2006 he would play Jack Deth once more in a cameo in Evil Bong. Sadly that's a crappy movie.

Caliban, the villain from the 4th movie, returns from the dead. He goes after Jack Deth. Jack blunders around and eventually has to fight himself. He's easy to defeat. Jack gets a chance to travel through time with a special diamond. Caliban grabs the diamond and locks Jack up. Jack escapes but only before Caliban sticks an arrow in him. Jack grabs the diamond and time travels. He arrives back in future LA with the son of Caliban. His wound is gone and the movie ends.

It seems even poorer than the last one. I'll be hard pressed to watch more than the first couple of the series again.

Trancers 6 came out in 2002 and was direct to video. The screenplay is by Gene Yarbrough ( C Courtney Joyner) and Jay Woelfel is the director. Tim Thomerson does appear in some clips on a computer screen. They were cut from other Trancers films.

Jack is transferred to LA of 2022 and he arrives in the body of his daughter. An evil woman is making more trancers and sending them out to kill. Then the evil gal's henchmen kills them with hot dogs. Turns out evil gal is working another scumbag.  Jack has to put a stop to their plans.

It's not as good as any of the previous films in the series. I'm also less likely to watch it again. At least I can say I've seen the whole series. How sad is that?

Science Fiction Sunday 522

Today I watched the two part film Dark Planet and Dark Planet: Rebellion. The first part came out in 2008 and the second part came out the year after. It's a Russian production and the Wikipedia says it's the most expensive Russian science fiction film. It's barely made back it's $36 million cost. It's directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk and the screenplay is by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko and Eduard Volodarskiy. The movie is based on a novel called Prisoners Of Power by the Strugatsky Brothers.

It's about a guy from Earth who gets stranded on another planet. They've got a military dictatorship going on and our alien gets drafted into the army. He eventually topples the government. It reminds me of the kind of story that used to appear in SF mags and novels of the 50s. One guy brings down a crappy bunch of dictators. That sort of thing.

I enjoyed it and even at 215 minutes it still manages to move along fairly well. There's always something going on and there's plenty of big sets and nice props. The action is pretty good too. I'm not going to bother with a DVD. There isn't one out here in the US, I saw it on Amazon Prime, but there is one in the UK.

Science Fiction Sunday 510

I watched the Outpost trilogy today. I had seen the first one but I see it was back in 2011. I hardly remember anything about it, corridors and snarling Nazi zombies mostly. Since I haven't seen the rest I decided to watch all three in one go. They're mostly horror but there's SF at their core, in that they deal with the outcome of scientific experiments by the Nazis to make super soldiers, AKA zombies. There a small number of films in that genre. All three films are made in Scotland but set in some unnamed Eastern Block country.

Outpost 2008 Directed by Steve Barker, screenplay by Rae Brunton, story by Rae Brunton, Kieran Parker and Steve Barker. They turned in a decent script, wrote some interesting enough characters and a good villain.

Ray Stevenson is an old mercenary who gets hired by Julian Wadham to guard him on a trip into a bad area. They make it to the entrance of an underground bunker without any trouble but once they get there things go bad pretty much right away. One guy gets shot by someone in the woods. Inside the bunker they get the generator working and turn on the lights. It turns out that the bunker was home to Nazi experiments during WW2. Julian is looking for a device the Nazis left behind. Sadly, their presence has activated the dead Nazis. One by one the men get cut down as they battle the snarlin' Nazi zombies. Their relief is too far out to save them.

I think it's the best of the trio. I give it high marks for the cast lead by Ray Stevenson. He often gets these tough guy roles and he does really well in them. In Outpost he's backed up by a good cast of people that I don't really know. Michael Smiley had been in a couple of movies that I had seen but I didn't remember him in either. No matter, they all do a good job on their characters.

Most of the movie is set in the underground bunker that the Nazis built. It's a all concrete, corridors and rust. And Nazi zombies. They did well making those sets and all the props. The make up is pretty darn good. I like that the story moves along at a nice pace, there's good action scenes and plenty of other stuff going on. Now I've seen this twice and I'd still watch it again. I gave it a 6 on the IMDb, it's not quite a 7 for me.

Outpost: Black Sun 2012 Steve Barker directed and co-wrote the script with Rae Brunton. The movie starts soon after the first.

Catherine Steadman plays a Nazi hunter like her dead father. She's on the search for a scientist named Klausener. She finds one of his old Nazi pals and after interrogating him to a heart attack she gets a clue and a ring with wings. In an area near the bunker she runs into Richard Coyle, they get intercepted by a small group of soldiers. The couple prove to be somewhat useful to them and they all wind up at the bunker. As you might guess, those Nazis are still there. They're still dead and they're even more active than before.

I didn't find this quite as entertaining as the last. It's still entertaining enough, there's plenty of running about, yelling and Nazi zombie killing. I wasn't quite as impressed by the super fast cutting of the shaky cam footage shot for the fight scenes. That got tiring pretty fast for me. Some of the CGI additions to the scenes aren't quite as good as you might hope. I only gave it a 5 in the end but I'd still watch it again.

Outpost: Rise Of The Spetsnaz 2013 Kieran Parker takes the director's chair for the third film and Rae Brunton is the script writer. This film is a prequel, set in 1945, to the first two films. It pits the Russian Spetsnaz forces against the Nazis.

A team of Spetsnaz soldiers cross paths with the German's from the bunker in the first movie. The German's pick up soldiers and peasants from the area to experiment on. We finally get to see more of the facility and how the experiments are going. Not so good, most of the test cases explode from the injection of serum and the rays of the machine from the first two movies.

I enjoyed it and I thought it was about as good as the second movie. I gave it a 5 on the IMDb. I thought Kieran did a pretty good job for his first movie. He hasn't directed any more but he continues to produce movies. I liked the characters and the script was good. The story moved along OK. I'll watch it again someday.

Ice Spiders 2007

Here's another low-budget SyFy Channel TV movie. Ice Spiders is from 2007 and it's about some giant spiders attacking the people at a ski resort. The spiders come from a research facility. They escaped and ate the scientists. Deserves them right, making giant spiders have been a stupid idea for centuries. Then it's chase, leap and chomp until the spiders are killed. Or are they? Who gives a shit. I didn't, it's below average and I shouldn't have bothered.

Multi Feature - Ghost House Underground

Multi Feature is another 4 pack of horror movies under the Ghost House Underground banner. I had forgotten that it was Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert behind those movies. For some reason I can't find a copy of the cover on the internet. I had to scan it.

I couldn't find a copy of the DVD on Amazon or eBay. I got this one from a recent trip to Half Price Books. I hit their clearance a good number of times a week. There's usually something for the consumer with dubious taste. One of the nice things about this set is the films are each on their own side of a two sided disc. I'd prefer to have them on a single disc but this is fine. At least they aren't all on one disc.

The Offspring is a 2009 film that was based on a novel by Jack Ketchum. In fact, Jack wrote the screenplay which Andrew van den Houten directed. The premise is some lighthouse keeper's children went feral. This was over 100 years ago and now the descendants are nomadic cannibals. They're back in the area they went through some years before. The local cops have a cannibal murder and they go ask Art Hindle for some advice. It's a slaughter fest until the end of the movie. Nearly everyone dies. Not as bad as some of the other movies on the disc, it's still barely a 4 for me.

Seventh Moon is shakycamed so close to the action that it's often out of focus and blurry. This can't be a choice of the film  makers, can it? Yes, it's some artsy fartsy bullshit that I for one could certainly do without, especially since it goes on through the whole movie. It's also dark much of the time. Really I don't know that they didn't just shake some sticks in a bush, I can't tell if there's anyone there or not. Amy Smart is in the film but there's nothing special about that. It's got a surprisingly high 4.7, I gave it a 1. Not worth a look.

The Children is a 2008 British film about some diseased children that kill many of their parents. The parents are useless and easily slaughtered. They had no defense against - children. It's also annoyingly filmed, there are so many scenes where they tease you then don't deliver anything. I wanted to sic some of those children on the film makers. Really, the only thing I liked about the movie was the snow. The English countryside is pretty when there's a blanket of snow. Most places are.

The Thaw is about the lack of snow. It's the only movie of this lot that I had seen before and it's much better than the other three. The thawing icecap uncovers some deadly shit and the bug that gets free does a really good job killing you. That's some horror show right there. There's plenty going on in the story and the scenery in British Columbia does well for the Yukon. I'll keep the set because of this one movie. It's good enough for another look down the line.

100 Million BC 2008

I noticed that 100 Million BC had Michael Gross in it and ordered it from Netflix. Turns out it's a film produced by The Asylum. It's about what happened during the Philadelphia Experiment. Some guys went back in time and got stranded. Later some more guys go back in time and rescue some of the original guys. Then some of those guys are eaten by a T-Rex who manages to get through the portal. If you have a portal through time, you should keep that shit shut, that's just some common sense. One thing you can learn from the movies? Time travel is dangerous. Sadly there isn't much joy for me here. The CGI dinos are so-so, nothing as good as on the poster. Pays for not doing my research, huh. It gets a well deserved 2.4 on the IMDb. No reason to watch it.

Friday Night Movies 697

Another Wolfcop is a 2017 sequel to the 2014 Wolfcop. It's the further adventures of a cop who's a werewolf. It's written and directed by Lowell Dean, who directed 13 Eerie and Wolfcop. I liked both enough to purchase them. Lowell has a new post apocalypse movie coming out. SuperGrid was shot in and around Regina Saskatchewan, and parts of the film are shot in a former Sears warehouse. It has some of the same actors that are in the Wolfcop movies.

Leo Fafard plays Wolfcop, Lou Garou when he's not all that hairy. The lady is Amy Matysio, she plays Sergeant Tina, she knows Lou is werewolf from the last movie. She's trying to cover for him and keep the rookies from finding out their Sergeant is also a werewolf. It's tough living a lie. Tina's been in a lot of TV shows and movies. She was in three episodes of Corner Gas, one of my favorite Canadian TV shows. Lou was in Corner Gas: The Movie, he played a werewolf in a fantasy scene.

That's Lou and Serena Miller, who plays Kat, and below is Yannick Bisson. Some might have seen Yannick's internationally acclaimed Canadian TV show Murdock Mysteries. I know I have. Here he gets to play the villain and swear, who wouldn't like that. Yannick's got a plan to release a horde of shape shifters on the world and he's picked Lou's town to fuck up. Lou's gonna fight back, and lucky for him, he's got some help from Sergeant Tina, Deputy Daisy, the late Willie Higgins and his sister Kat.

Lucky for the town's people, the villains prove to be easily killable. It made me laugh once in a while, it's got some gore, there's some action and goofy stuff going on. I could see buying this to watch again.

Beyond Re-Animator came out back in 2003 and it's the second sequel to Re-Animator. It's directed by Brian Yuzna and the script is by Xavier Berraondo and Jose Manuel Gomez.

Jeffrey Combs returns as Herbert West, the mad scientist in all his glory. At the start of the movie his glory is short lived as he's arrested and sent to prison. Thirteen years later the brother of one of Herbert's victims has grown up. He'd seen his sister die and did nothing to stop the infected man from killing her. He saw West in the police car and at the same time found a syringe of West's re-animation formula. Thirteen years later he's a doctor and he tracked West to the prison. His arrival will bring about the apocalypse to that institution. It's a good reminder to slow the fuck down on that obsessive kind of behavior.

It's been a while since I saw the movie, which for some reason is listed in my Watched Movies List as having first seen in 2015. I would have thought it was earlier than that.  That's when I gave it a 6 on the IMDb. I just downloaded the 2515 ratings I have given and sorted them by title. I had very few ratings at the beginning, I started in 2005 but it picks up after 2008. You can have a look at all the ratings I've given by downloading the Excel file below. No Excel, No Lookie.

Download IMDb Ratings 8-18-18

I still enjoyed the movie, and while it isn't quite as good as it's predecessors, I should pick up a copy.I didn't care that much for the young doctor who's obsessed with Herbert West. He's just an idiot, obsessed with all the wrong things. If only he'd have picked up a chair and bashed that infected guy, so many wouldn't have died.

Meatball Machine 2005

Meatball Machine is a Japanese live action tentacle movie. It's all gooey and disgusting so some should like it. The rest is all yakkin' and furtive looks with a side of body modification. Not my cup of tea and I found it less than interesting despite the constant barrage of gore. Some days I feel wanting to watch all the SF movies out there is a chore not a pleasure. Maybe I should stick to watching everything before the turn of the century. I'd certainly enjoy watching a lot of those movies over, not this one.

Science Fiction Sunday 502

I had some tedious fare to start the day. Raptor Island is about what you'd expect to find on the SciFi channel back in 2004. It's a made for TV movie so don't expect much by way of good CGI. Some Navy Seals are on a mission, the baddies gets away in a boat, the seals chase him to a tiny island with it's own smokin' volcano. From the title you can probably guess that this is where those raptors are and you'd be right. They're a low res menace that can stand up to the soldiers without much trouble. The humans find a Chinese plane, stuffed with broken caskets of radioactive material, that had crashed some time in the past. The Seals speculate that the radioactive material had seeped into the ground and made the raptors come alive somehow. Glad that sort of shit doesn't really happen. Now the critters are  chomping the humans. There's some gabbin' as the film makers try to shoe horn in some character development but the movie is mostly running through forests, climbing rocks and spelunking caves. There's a lot of gun fire but neither the baddies or the Seals can seem to hit much of anything. Most everyone gets picked off before the rescue helicopter gets there. Of course, it arrives just as the volcano starts blasting. Luckily, some of the raptors swim off into the sunset. Not so good, as you can imagine, and one I won't bother watching again.

The 9th Life Of Louis Drax is a 2016 thriller that's only SF element is the doctor and the boy's mental connection. And I'm stretching it. Louis is a kid who's supposed to be accident prone. His latest accident has put him in the hospital in a coma. His mental connection to the doctor, achieved through the EKG machine and the doctor's meditation, brings to light the real reason that Louis had a fall off a cliff. Once you get past that silly story element the rest of the story is just ferreting out an awful person. It's all rather dire, I didn't care much for it at all.

I did like War For The Planet Of The Apes. It was certainly more entertaining than today's first two choices. It came out in 2017 and it's pretty much one big battle. Caesar vs Woody Harrelson. The CGI apes and such have improved over the previous films and I liked them. In fact I'm rooting for the apes. I also like Steve Zahn as Bad Ape. I bought the Blu-rays of the original 5 films and plan to watch those at some point. I just haven't gotten to them yet. I enjoyed them when I saw them in the theater when they came out. I haven't seen them since the days of VHS.

Science Fiction Sunday 494

The Man From Earth is a 2007 film that was written by the late Jerome Bixby. It's directed by Richard Schenkman. Jerome wrote some good books and a several good TV programs in the past. He died in 1998. The last thing I saw by Richard was his abysmal Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies for The Asylum back in 2012. This movie is about a college professor who tells his friends and colleagues that he's a 14,000 year old caveman who used to be Christ. One of them dies and it turns out to be his son. I'm not as excited by the movie as most of the viewers. I see there's a sequel but I doubt that I'll bother.

Biohazard: The Alien Force is a 1994 film by Steve Latshaw, he directed and co-wrote the movie with Patrick Moran. A company has created a mutant that escapes. It likes killing and gets right on the job. We follow a guy with white pants and a reporter who's investigating the company. There's plenty of running around and sneaking about but none of it's all that good.

Dark Universe is a 1993 Steve Latshaw film. An astronaut returns to Earth and turns into a monster. There's plenty of running about in the Florida Everglades but not much else that was that entertaining.

The Visitor From Planet Omnicrom is a 2013 SF comedy by writer Bill Lynn and director Mike Donahue. It stars Inge Jaklyn who was in In Like Flint back in the 60s. She's Frieda, a retired lady who's been stuck in her house for the last 20 years. Her son is a loser. R Daniel Long is Yorkie, an alien who's been sent to earth to destroy our vegetation. He crashes his space bike in the alley behind Inge's house and he asks her if he can stay there while he fixes his bike. They become friends and Yorkie abandons his planet's plans to destroy Earth after having Frieda's Eggplant Parmesan. Then Frieda and Yorkie travel to Omnicrom and stir things up there. It was pretty much fun from beginning to end. Certainly it was more entertaining than all the other movies today.