BBC’s Doctor Who program was still in its sophomore season when the not-yet-iconic character leapt to the big screen. Whereas William Hartnell essayed the stuffy title role on the telly, Dr. Who and the Daleks got name value with Peter Cushing. It also gained one other out-of-this-world asset: color!

Dr. Who’s just hanging at the house with granddaughters Susan (Roberta Tovey, The Beast in the Cellar) and Barbara (Jennie Linden, Old Dracula) when the latter’s new beau arrives. His name is Ian (Roy Castle, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) and he’s one clumsy suitor. As Dr. Who shows off his Tardis (a fancy term for a garage-cum-time machine) and its hodgepodge of bleep-de-boop machinery to the lad, Ian pratfalls onto the big, red button that sends the foursome to an undetermined point in space.

They emerge on a planet with a petrified forest and loads of radiation. They’re also stuck until Dr. Who can locate enough mercury to refill some sparkle baton on the Tardis wall. Venturing toward the nearest building, which resembles a tribute to geometry, they run afoul of the Daleks. To non-nerds, those are cyborgs on rollers with voices that sound like speaking into an oscillating fan, but only. One. Syllable. At. A. Time.

Our human heroes subdue a Dalek by covering its eyehole with a clump of breakfast pudding. Meanwhile, little Susan’s sent on some godforsaken errand to score drugs. (Yes, to cure radiation sickness, but it’s fun to leave that detail out.) What follows would become part and parcel for a great many sci-fi TV series, like CBS’ short-lived Planet of the Apes: Encountering someone who’ll help you out. In this case, that’s the Thals, a race of humanoids distinguishable for their close-cropped haircuts, costuming you might find in an Andy Milligan production, and eye shadow so heavy and lid-consuming, Sophie Ellis-Bextor would be green-glittered with envy.

Regrettably, aside from those primary colors and the set for the Daleks’ lair, little is cinematic about the doctor’s first of two adventures that kids have to leave the house to catch. Not even genre god Cushing’s stumbling-buffoonery take is worth the trouble. It’s a wholly inoffensive confection, best consumed as Saturday-matinee fare. Just grab your nearest time machine. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Although the zombie craze lie dormant from, go figure, oversaturation, that message never made it to the producers of The Walking Dead (seven separate series, guys?) or overseas. Particularly to South Korea, where Yeon Sang-ho keeps the undead movies alive. Colony marks the gifted director’s fourth such feature, but the first to exist outside his 10-year-old Train to Busan franchise. 

Inside a Seoul skyscraper, disgruntled scientist Dr. Suh Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) commits an act of bioterrorism at his former employer’s annual conference: unleashing a zombie-outbreak virus, and he’s the human vaccine. Rude, but at least the doctor has the courtesy to give 911 a heads-up! 

Like a disaster spectacular in its 1970s heyday, Yeon (The Ugly) throws together a mishmash of personalities — tortured academics, vacationing siblings, millennial scumbags — who must work together to find their way to the roof for rescue. Naturally, teamwork is an alien concept to most, but hey, somebody’s gotta get zom-mobbed.  

Making Colony somewhat unique is our villain’s control over the horde via hive mind or collective intelligence; they share and exchange information through pheromones, requiring a network of mucus. This is why the tower hallways grow so gooey, they look like they harbor a sinus infection. To the movie’s credit, this isn’t some gimmick or MacGuffin. Seriously, name one other movie where slime mold research dictates plotting. 

In conjunction, these zombies evolve as the minutes tick by. They scurry and skitter on all fours like dogs, then graduate to head-butting glass and running, before climbing on one another like ants to form a more formidable foe. Whenever they communicate, their heads amusingly pop up and out, looking like the poster art for Scanners.

Once more, Yeon handles the high-scale, high-stakes action really well. Even with his script concerned with a madman’s desire for a populace reinvention, Colony is, all told, ultimately more conventional than the lightning strike that is the original Busan. This one bolts with a rip-roaring first hour before hitting a wall of repetition. Scenes begin to parrot the one before it, halting an otherwise consistent level of energy. At 122 minutes, it’s almost as if Yeon wanted the running time to match the building’s stories. If that weren’t merely hypothetical, finding a site with 30 fewer floors would rid the bloat and get to the hard-charging vehicular pursuit sequence sooner. 

Just not at the sacrifice of the laboratory’s zombie monkeys, please. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 28.

When an apartment building goes up in flames, bystander Eddy Kay (Michael Biehn, The Abyss) runs inside to save a woman and her baby. There’s only one problem: Eddy Kay is thought to be dead!

Okay, there’s a second problem: Shadowy agents keep trying to kill Eddy. If he’s not being hit by a van, he’s attacked in his sleep by a knife-wielding intruder. (Two of his would-be assassins are played by The Last Boy Scout’s Billy Blanks and pro boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, which would absolutely intimidate me; a third is played by Watchers II’s leggy, never-more-scorching Tracy Scoggins, which would absolutely arouse me and put my guard down.)

But why aim to eradicate a simple watch repairman? Heck, Eddy’s practically a kid since he rides his bike everywhere, collects jigsaw puzzles, eats PB&J for lunch and showers with garden shears — children still do that, right?  When Eddy starts having weird visions in which he utters “I don’t have eggs, only sausages” in Hungarian, psychoanalyst Dr. Anna Nolmar (Patsy Kensit, Lethal Weapon 2) wonders if he’s having memory problems. Eddy disagrees:

“I’ve got a really good memory. I’ve always prided myself on that. I can remember, like, the smallest details of my childhood and my friends, their names. I used to have a friend named Kevin Richards. We used to call him Kevvy. We used to get into trouble together, play sports.” 

Well, in that case …

Don’t judge Timebomb by that rudimentary dialogue. Created at the height of Hollywood’s home-video premieres by Israeli writer/director Avi Nesher (Tales from the Crypt Presents: Ritual), the sci-fi conspiracy thriller is honestly four-fifths stellar, exhibiting a heavy, heady streak of Philip K. Dick-level paranoia. In fact, it’s embedded with enough shared elements to resemble Total Recall, but on a remembered-for-wholesale budget (hence the studio backlot’s less-than-towering inferno).

Luckily, Nesher isn’t parsimonious with the slam-bang. The movie’s imaginative set pieces are well-executed, from a 3 a.m. assault on a mental institution to a daylight shootout in an L.A. porno theater. That the latter occurs while porn star Victoria Paris (Miracle on 69th Street) feigns pleasure from the big screen has to be a joke on Nesher’s part.

I know for sure it is when Eddy and Dr. Anna, on the run and en route to Mexico, stop for cash at an ATM and the supposedly intelligent doc waits for a receipt. “Fuck the receipt!” Eddy yells. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In a setup that in no way makes me think of the globe’s current overreaction to error-prone AI, the creator of the I-500 surveillance computer system is under serious pressure to rush his supposed technical marvel to the marketplace. No matter how often Ed (Gary Day, Death Warmed Up) tells corporate his prototype isn’t ready, the head honchos don’t listen because, duh, money.

Yet the I-500 really be buggin’. It forces Ed’s car off the road, paralyzing him below the waist and rendering him wheelchair-bound. Ed’s bosses kindly respond with a demand to finish the project by month’s end. To decrease distraction, they set him up in a swanky, 10th-floor apartment.

An Aussie omelet of elements from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out and Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed, writer/director Mark Egerton’s Crosstalk trips over its own plotting, uncertain of which track to take. The I-500 appears to continue trying to ixnay Ed, yet the creator also uses his creation to spy on a female neighbor — and hopefully solve what he assumes to be her murder by her philandering spouse (John Ewart, Razorback). You’ll never hear “insinkerator” more than within the film’s compact 83 minutes.

In some ways, this jumbled, two-left-feet approach resembles the indecisive, often contradictory visuals. After all, residents of the fancy high-rise reach their floors via an elevator that looks more like a shipping container for human trafficking. Not like the apartment interiors are much more pleasing with design that mimics two schools: New Orleans bordello and Atari-age science museum.

The much-hyped I-500 should knock our socks off, yet it’s an instantly dated, dual-reel mainframe spittin’ ones and zeros while taking up the space of a theater concession stand. I swear one of its monitors is devoted to generating nothing but digital Spirographs. Not even the sudden appearance of a disembodied head in a washer makes Crosstalk worth booting up. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

While people re-evaluate their opinions of Masters of the Universe due to the new movie, I’ve always liked the property on-whole — not just the 1987 filmic adaptation, but the cartoons and toy line, too.

That being said, it’s been around 40 years since I last saw the movie, on broadcast television one afternoon because my parents wouldn’t pay for first-run movies, dollar movies, premium cable or, even worse, basic cable. Yeah, for many years, we were a broadcast-only family and, consequently, I missed out of most of the MOTU studio Cannon Group filmography. Chuck Norris be damned!

I remember it being “all right” for what it was. Which was okay, because most adaptations at the time were very fast and loose and needed serious legroom to stretch out their fantastical concepts. You dealt with it. In preparation for the 2026 remake, I rewatched the original and, I gotta say, with all the limitations like budget constraints and unworkable screenplay, it’s actually pretty good for what it was.

The movie starts with a Superman-like title crawl that prepares us for Skeletor (Frank Langella) and his baddies to take the mythical wasteland of Eternia. The only thing that can stop them is a cadre of cannon-fodder soldiers, allies like Teela and Man-at-Arms, and, of course, muscular himbo He-Man (Dolph Lundgren).

During the battle, they find li’l Gwildor (li’l Billy Barty) and his fantastical tool to travel though strange dimensions and the like. With Skeletor on their brawny tails, they go through the machine and accidently find themselves in … a fried-chicken restaurant in Anytown, U.S.A.

Here is where most people have a problem with the movie: He-Man is given a backseat to his own movie to Courteney Cox and her boring boyfriend and their relationship problems, most of which stem from her wanting to leave to the big city after the death of her parents.

During a tearful moment at their grave, Courteney and said boyfriend find the dimension-hopping instrument and naturally decide it’s a new Japanese synthesizer to fiddle with. This sends out a beacon to He-Man, but also to Skeletor, sadly. Monitored chaos ensues, with Skeletor marching down city streets as he gives He-Man laser-lashes on his bare bottom. Or something like that.

The movie doesn’t really break new cinematic ground, but the characterizations of both He-Man and Skeletor are virtually spot-on. I like these characters and even though the costumes aren’t exactly right, they work. Even Teela, Man-at-Arms, Evil Lyn and the barrage of low-rent, bargain-basement, completely original villains (like Lizard Man, Eyepatch Man and Guy with Old Lady Hair) are fine for the material. Even li’l Gwildor.

No, the movie’s real problem is this: It’s soooooooo boring.

The characters — especially the humans — have no depth or meaning. Truthfully, I would have been good with the earthbound story if they had given us more than two dead parents, a depressive complex and a bucket of chicken to go.

I assume the new Masters of the Universe movie helps alleviate that, but surprisingly, it’s not doing well with movie critics or movie fans, with most saying it’s too faithful to the toys and cartoons.

By the power of Grayskull, what more do you want from me, Hollywood? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.