Originally one-third of Miramax’s aborted sci-fi anthology Alien Love Triangle, director Gary Fleder’s Impostor clearly should have stayed that way instead of being expanded into a full-length movie. As a half-hour short (which the DVD allows you to see), it’s nice and compact in a perfectly acceptable Twilight Zone-ish way. But multiply that by three, and it only succeeds in not succeeding.
The elfin-faced Gary Sinise (TV’s CSI: NY) stars as Spencer, a weapons designer some 75 years into the future. One day at work, he’s arrested by military man Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio, Full Metal Jacket) and assumed to be an android with a bomb in his heart, intended to assassinate a government official.
So is he or isn’t he? Even Spence doesn’t know for sure, but he spends the rest of the movie running and trying to clear his name, making Impostor an uneasy mix of The Fugitive and Minority Report, which, like this, was based on a Philip K. Dick short story.
Somehow, the film seems to progress at half the speed of its on-the-lam main character. This is because it’s padded with repetitious scenes, needless subplots and just plain ol’ drawn-out sequences. Sinise’s miscasting doesn’t help matters; he’s about the most unappealing action hero modern cinema could think up. —Rod Lott
Tim Hensley’s 
The scenes Hensley illustrates are not iconic; they appear to be chosen as haphazardly (if “chosen” is the correct term) as the films, which range from highbrow to lowbrow, classic to trash, beloved to obscure, 
Leave it to schlock director Al Adamson (
The duo gets mixed up in a drug war too complicated for the film to adequately explain. Needless to say, the cop after them (Aldo Ray, 
A young boy is caught by his mom working on a nudie jigsaw puzzle. She threatens to burn all the porn she finds in his room and asks him to get a trash bag; he returns with an ax and chops her to pieces, digging out a saw for those extra-pesky bones. Then he returns to his puzzle.
Who’s the culprit? Is it the burly groundskeeper? The university’s anatomy professor? The mousy British dean? The killer is mostly cloaked in shadows or shot from the ankles down, yet the gore is indeed gory, with limbs and noggins lopped off before your very eyes. One girl pisses herself before her torso gets cut in two. Following each kill, the murderer retreats to adding more pieces of that nudie puzzle, working his way down from the top. (And here I was always taught to the do the borders first and work inward.)
Before he was the 
Corrupt is one of those psychological cat-and-mouse games where the tables are continually (but not surprisingly) being turned. Unfortunately, when the fortunes shift from Keitel’s character to Lydon’s, the movie grows tiresome (not to mention confusing, as their interaction borders on a homosexual relationship, as does the one between Keitel and his secret live-in cop roomie).