It always bothered me that The Last Starfighter was never that big a smash among the youth of 1984.

My family never went to the movies when I was a kid, so when it was originally released, I had to make do with the novelization I picked up at a Scholastic Book Fair. I read the tome cover to cover for months until it finally premiered on HBO, fully living up to — and surpassing — my juvenile imagination. (I felt the same way about SpaceCamp, but that’s a different story.)

Teenager Alex (Lance Guest) spends most of his days pushing off his girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart), to play the only video game at the trailer park, Starfighter. When he finally beats the game, a DeLorean-style space car swoops down and takes him to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to fight evil aliens intent on universal domination.

This movie had everything that would give a kid stuck in a small Texas town some hope to one day escape. Of course, being so young, I didn’t leave for many years, happy enough to just watch this movie for the time being. But, every time I passed the Space Invaders machine in the local diner, that didn’t mean I didn’t give it my damnedest, quarter after quarter, just in case.

Watching the movie some 30-plus years later, that same feeling of astral escape is still present, with believable performances from both Guest and Stewart. And, upon this recent viewing, I was surprised to see Dan O’Herlihy — he of Halloween III, RoboCop and The Whoopee Boys fame — underneath all that makeup as the friendly reptilian navigator Grig.

And while I have come to realize no distant extraterrestrial races have put an arcade game in an inconspicuous spot for intergalactic enlistment as a star warrior, if I see one, I always stop to give it the once-over, because you never know. —Louis Fowler

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For her 17 years of life, Chance Sinclair (Avery Konrad, 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown) has believed she carries a birth defect that requires daily blood transfusions and causes skin tumors when exposed to direct sunlight. You and I and every movie watcher in history know better, of course: She’s a vampire!

Soon she’ll learn the truth: Her parents are vampires, too, as is her little sister, Luck. In fact, her ice-queen mother, June (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina matriarch Annette Reilly), is attempting to wrest control of the House of Sinclair from June’s own father, August (Timothy V. Murphy, MacGruber). Since he’s not going down without a fight, June plots to give it, by hiring a chef (Jerry Maguire kid Jonathan Lipnicki, all grown up) whose culinary skills are matched by his autism, to cater the clan’s annual dinner and garnish August’s steak crostini with poisonous sprouts.

That’s where Broil suddenly — and oddly — decides to change protagonists, pushing all of its chips to the chef. While the shift is abrupt, it’s the least of Broil’s missteps. Deeply ensnared in the who-cares dynamics of sexy-vampire-dynasty politics and all its splinter groups, the second film from Edward Drake (2012’s Animals) is highly reminiscent of the bloodsucking brothers and sisters in the undemanding The Hamiltons and its undemanded sequel, The Thompsons, whose characters I also found incredibly grating — and they weren’t named after months of the year or synonyms for “happenstance.”

Among this cast, the Juliette Lewis-esque Konrad makes a big impression in being vacuous. Her idea of emoting is widening her eyes to maximum pupilage, so it’s something of a relief when Drake rewards more screen time to Reilly, Lipnicki and a whole dining room table of Sinclairs with napkins draped over their heads while a purple orb manifests between them. Believe it or not, Lipnicki marks Broil’s one true surprise. I haven’t seen him onscreen since his aforementioned debut precociously spouting fun facts about the weight of the human head to Tom Cruise, but somewhere in between playing The Little Vampire and preparing a feast for a full-grown family of them, he learned how to deliver an adult performance.

Unfortunately, his goodwill is baked into a flavorless batch of Twilight over easy. Like a live-action adaptation paperback of paranormal fantasy puffery — Broil even comes with chapter headings, as if its scale is epic — the movie looks great, but as my dad always warned, looks aren’t everything.

Or was that my mom? —Rod Lott

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Before 2020, science-fiction films about apocalyptic pandemics and other deadly diseases felt fantastically on par with speculative stories featuring invading aliens or murderous cyborgs. But now, it seems as though they’ve become the scariest of science fact.

While the beginning of Before the Fire hasn’t happened — yet — it’s easy to watch what’s going on and picture yourself in middle of trying to escape a large city under martial law and with all air travel shut down, only to escape to a small town where a group of right-wing hicks have taken over, shooting everyone not on their side.

That’s the basic idea of Fire and it mostly works, except for the characters and the actors playing them, all seemingly fresh from a CW casting call. Jenna Lyng Adams stars as Ava, an actress on a show about werewolf strippers. She, her blogger significant other (Jackson Davis) and his hunky brother (Ryan Vigilant) are all so pretty, it kind of sucks all power out of the well-coiffed proceedings.

Much like a vaccine for COVID, there needs to be a good movie made about a pandemic, but, sadly, Before the Fire just isn’t it. However, if we all survive this, it might make a good series to air after Riverdale. —Louis Fowler

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Dumb meatheads need superheroes too, I guess, and that’s pretty much why companies like Image Comics, Boom! Studios and, in the case of Bloodshot, Valiant Comics were created. With practically every title of theirs a four-color tribal tattoo on acid-free paper, that same illustrated idiocy has moved to the movie screen with the spectacularly stupid movie of the same name.

Human circumcised penis Vin Diesel is Ray Garrison, a former special-ops soldier who not only watches his wife murdered Anton Chigurh-style, but is shot in the head for his troubles. He wakes up to find that all of his blood has been replaced by nanobots and he is virtually indestructible. As his memory comes back to him, he escapes to track the killer down.

Repeat ad infinitum.

It turns out that the guy behind Rising Spirit Technologies, the company that keeps bringing Ray back, is a petty crybaby who is using Ray to settle his own personal scores. Of course, eventually Ray finds out about this and, in his gravelly sluggish way, doles out super-powered retribution that typically involves his face getting blasted off and slowly reassembled.

He’s called Bloodshot, we learn toward the end, because his eyes go bloodshot when he uses his regeneration powers, zoomed in on closely while fighting down the side of a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur.

From this brief description, the film might sound plenty entertaining; in reality, it’s mind-numbingly slow and, worse, brain-fryingly dumb. It reminds me of those terrible ’90s-era adaptations of indie comics like Spawn, minus the badly rendered computer demons, something that might have actually helped save this no-necked junk. —Louis Fowler

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Comic book movies are, for the most part, stupid. Sadly, as our society has become a bleak pit of absolute despair, so have the recent ultra-gritty four-color adaptations that have hit the screen. Those that, in the past, wallowed in their inherent camp were often mocked and relegated to various “worst movies” lists, with one of the most infamous being the comic-strip flick Flash Gordon.

Unfairly, I might add, because this Flash is a lot of fun, reminding us that comic books are supposed to be speculative blasts for kids instead of introspective dirges for grown-ups. As a childhood filmic obsession of mine, it’s really one of the few films that holds up — possibly better! — today.

As Earth comes under violent atmospheric attack — look out for the hot hail! — New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones) and travel agent Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) find themselves on a deco rocket piloted by supposed loon Dr. Zarkov (Topol), headed to the planet Mongo, the source of the recent cosmic disruptions.

The crew finds a highly stylized society of warmongers and slaves, led by the somewhat problematic Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow), a flamboyant despot with a taste for sadomasochism and broad Asian caricatures — something that the red, white and blue all-American Flash ain’t having no part of, befriending various races, including birdmen, arborists and so on, into defeating the merciless Ming.

The film is full of so many scenes of colorful camp that it’s amazing this never became the Rocky Horror of nerd culture, but it’s no surprise as the script was written by the great Lorenzo Semple Jr., one of the few screenwriters to truly get Batman, James Bond and Sheena. At least I think so.

Luckily, he got Flash, too: an affable Joe with only his athletic ability and charming demeanor to take down an evil empire. And let’s not forget the heart-pounding score by Queen, a soundtrack that would remain unrivaled until a few years later when they were assigned to compose the epic music for … wait for it … Highlander. —Louis Fowler

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