When originally released, Deep Impact was, arguably, the better of the two killer-space-rock movies released that summer, the other being the Michael Bay-directed Armageddon.

But now, 20 years later, viewed through the stinging eyes of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become a once-hopeful film of a government that knows what it’s doing, a president who actually cares about people, and the world coming together in solidarity to defeat a deadly threat from outer space.

How times have changed.

In this 1998 disaster film, the comet is accidentally discovered by teenager Elijah Wood, then passed on to astronomer Charles Martin Smith, who is accidentally run off the road and killed in a fiery explosion. A year later, this rock — dubbed ELE, for extinction-level event — is discovered accidentally by Téa Leoni, back when America accidentally gave her a career.

As President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman) soothes the nation with those dulcet, proto-Obama tones, a group of astronauts with the unlikely names of Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall), Oren Monash (Ron Eldard) and Dr. Gus Partenza (Jon Favreau) look to blow up the thing with nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, Wood marries his 15-year-old girlfriend (Leelee Sobieski).

When I originally viewed this in the theater, I was a bit bummed by how little destruction there actually was. But, watching it now, I’m actually impressed by the amount of scientific planning — fake or not — that went into the months of prepping before the actual aerial collision, and I believe that’s mostly thanks to director Mimi Leder and writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin.

So while Earth might not be affected by a comet the size of New York City anytime soon — dear God, I sure hope not — while under quarantine we can at least, collectively, watch this slow-burn sci-fi flick and dream about better times when the total immolation of our planet was the only thing we had to worry about. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

From Emilio Vieyra, director of The Curious Dr. Humpp, comes the arguably more bizarre Argentinian tale Stay Tuned for Terror, aka Strange Invasion, in which an entire town’s television sets suddenly go on the fritz. It all happens in Clearview — subtle, Señor Vieyra — where every channel of every TV starts broadcasting only a ’round-the-clock hypnotic pattern of waves, baffling authorities.

This is immediately met with the urgency of government response, shouting over the phone, screeching brakes, nosy reporters and fully suited men problem-solving in a board room as if this were Apollo 13 and not just housewives crying in vain, “Gimme my stories!”

Because children have no taste and will watch anything, Clearview’s kids remain transfixed by the signal, which renders them glassy-eyed and cataleptic — basically, the most emotionless kids this side of Midwich. Remove them from their perch in front of the tube and they fall ill and throw tantrums, much like today’s tots when the Wi-Fi signal goes down. As doctors and other experts theorize the signal’s origin and purpose, prepare to hear “diathermic” so often, you could make a drinking game out of it.

Unlike its cathode-ray threat, Stay Tuned for Terror is harmless speculative fiction, more fun in concept than in execution. Written by Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein, the duo behind Paul Bartel’s wonderfully warped Private Parts, the pic grows as repetitive as the Liberty Mutual jingle, but at 71 minutes, is mercifully brief. The message is perfectly simple; the meaning is clear: TV is a drug, so please, for the love of God and country, patronize the cinema. —Rod Lott

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The paranoiac thriller Freaks — at least at first — has a wonderfully dark idea: A maniacally intense father (the disheveled Emile Hirsch) is keeping his small daughter (the mostly irritating Lexy Kolker) from going outside of their house, mostly for fear that the world will consider her a “freak” and imprison her inside a mountain compound.

As creepy neighbors — usually armed with melty ice cream cones — prowl around her house, it’s easy to think that Dad might be on to something here. But when her ice cream salesman grandfather (a wizened Bruce Dern) shows up, that’s when we learn the truth about the world — it’s some kind of a cheap superhero thing — and it’s really hard to care about any of it anymore.

The “freaks” tend to bleed from their eyes while displaying very cost-effective powers like super-speed, disappearing and telling people what to do, with a killer task force assigned to keep them under control and imprisoned, even though it’s apparently one officer and a hard-nosed agent (Grace Park).

The film was obviously made to cash in on the crop of recent superhero movies — mostly of the mutant variety — which I can understand, but as long as Marvel and DC are pumping these things out on a regular basis, why even bother? Why choose store-brand cereal if you can afford Froot Loops? Why choose Freaks when you can choose X-Men: Dark Phoenix?

Okay, bad example. —Louis Fowler

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If Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the grandaddy of UFO films — and it is — John Coats’ Foes is the step-grandson who belongs to the daughter who got disowned after she got pregnant — the second time, at church camp. But, hey, doesn’t the kid deserve a birthday card at the very least, with or without an enclosed George Washington?

So let us acknowledge Foes. The sci-fi obscurity was written and directed by Coats, in his only work in those roles to date, more or less as an effects showcase. Today, he’s an Emmy-winning effects artist, so as a calling card, it’s obviously successful. For all its ingenuity of depicting flying saucers for next to nothing, however, the film narratively proves to be one tough sit.

At an island lighthouse, a couple (Coats and Jane Wiley) watches in awe as a shiny, silver disc hovers and moves overhead. Meanwhile, at a NORAD command center, Macdonald Carey (Summer of Fear) does a lot of consulting (and, in close up, a little trembling) with a U.S. Air Force general (Jerry Hardin, aka Deep Throat of TV’s The X-Files).

Matte-shot manna, the dead-sober Foes is easy to admire, in an Equinox-y way of not letting one’s imagination be limited by funds, as much as possible. Even if that means your trippy 2001-esque sequence can only be achieved by having your cast members bounce around on a trampoline. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When Terminator: Dark Fate was released last year, it was met with unbridled hatred from conservatives, which I mostly chocked up to it being a movie featuring three women in the lead roles. Having just seen it though, their hatred of this franchise is more apparent than even that: It casts Latino actors Natalia Reyes as the savior of humanity and Gabriel Luna as its destroyer.

That being said, with a decidedly death-dealing tone toward immigration and their paid foot soldiers, Dark Fate was one of the better science-fiction films of 2019.

With each Terminator film veering off into a new timeline of sorts — it really makes sense if you let it — this one takes place in an alternate present where, a short time after T2, John Connor (Edward Furlong) is blown away by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) while on a tropical beach vacation. This gives a returning Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) a new purpose, as you could guess.

Meanwhile, Skynet never happened, but a different form of AI, known as the Legion, took its place instead, offering up a new Judgment Day of killer cyborgs warring against surviving humans, many of whom become augmented soldiers. One of them, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), travels back in time to protect Mexican factory worker Dani (Reyes) against a newer Terminator menace (Luna) known as a REV-9.

There’s plenty of what we’ve come to expect from Terminator flicks, including explosive set pieces, constant authority slashings and naked time travelers — as well as a returning Schwarzenegger — that runs this engine well, with the innovation of Deadpool’s Tim Miller behind the camera and a story by returning creator Harlan Ellison James Cameron.

But, you know, the scene where the Terminator does in about 40 or 50 immigration officials … it’s hard to not cheer for that. No MAGA here, ese.
—Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.