Upon its dismal original release, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin was positioned to be a Star Wars for the next generation, which, of course, it wasn’t. But, for cartoon nerds whose first love was weirdly cheap French animation — think Fantastic Planet — but needed a wholly North American story they could glom on to, I guess this flick will do just fine.

Orin is a slave working in the coal crystal mines and before he can say “Lord, I am so tired … how long can this go on?” he finds a glowing laser-sword — a light-saber, if you will — in the dirt. Before he can toss it out, a little wizard pops out of the handle and tells him he’s his people’s only hope. This all sound somewhat familiar yet?

Filled with plenty of misplaced promise, he takes on a couple of robots and their laser-whips, escaping his nightmarish hellhole to the mildly bad-dreamish surface world filled with swamp-monsters, man-droids and a supposedly cool Han Solo-type that suggestively calls Orin “my little water-snake” in between making out with a sex robot that I’m pretty sure was on the cover of Aerosmith’s Just Push Play.

They go on various adventures, visiting dumb planets and fighting stupid aliens, all in an effort to take down the dastardly overlord Zygon. I’m not giving anything away to say that they do, but it’s all still nowhere near as pseudo-exciting at George Lucas’ sci-fi spree; with the further adventures of Anakin Skywalker — whizzer! — and gang still a good 15 or so years away, I guess Starchaser was the best you could do for swashbuckling adventure in 1985.

Directed by Steven Hahn, this film is probably more famous for spending about 17 days in the theaters, when it was quickly pulled by distributor Atlantic Releasing after making only $3.3 million. But, somewhere out there, the dream for a live-action Starchaser is alive, when Rilean Picture announced one is coming in March.

Of 2012, that is. —Louis Fowler

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While minding his own business, peeping on the mostly willing girl across the street, young Mike (Edward Furlong) gets a call from his generic horndog buddy — probably named Doozer or something equally dumb — telling him about this great new video game he’s reading about in the latest issue of Fangoria, because every little bit helps, right guys?

The video game is called Brainscan and it promises to be the most immersive experience in horror gaming on your 16 32 64-bit system and, at the very least, it’ll let Frank Langella enter your subconscious, as he is wont to do. Mike plays the game and finds himself in a first-person world of murder and madness as whomever he kills in the game, is found dead in real life. Bummer, dude.

Beyond the silliness of the game itself, the movie Brainscan goes one better by introducing the wholly grating boogeyman known as the Trickster, a horrific sprite from the video game world (?) here to convince Mike to kill himself while eating all of his well-stocked stash of junk food. With a stretched-out face and a shocking-red faux-hawk, it’s very easy to see why T. Ryder Smith isn’t at very many horror conventions signing copies of the movie poster handed to him by pudgy Trickster clones.

Although many of you younglings might not remember it, Brainscan comes from a time long ago and far away when Furlong was the affable-enough boy-king of the first-run genre picture, riding somewhat high after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But, sadly, too many silly scripts like Pet Sematary Two and this techno-trash caused his star to extinguish faster than a cigarette under Furlong’s well-worn Doc Martens boot heel.

Even worse, by the time this picture was out in theaters, the technology was already practically outdated, no matter how many cool-ish gadgets and Aerosmith posters director John Flynn (Rolling Thunder) threw on the screen. And even though the CGI was getting technically better, the actualized concept of virtual reality and cyberspace were still the thing of badly rendered William Gibson novels and horribly cartoonish Thomas Dolby screensavers.

Despite those winning attributes, realistically Brainscan isn’t even nostalgically good for the time, leading most viewers to check their futuristic Apple Watches and Fitbits to see how much time is left on the thing. To be fair, however, this flick does make a rather unwatchable double feature with Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War if you truly hate yourself.

Or you can just take a nap. Whatever.   —Louis Fowler

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“What the hell is this?”

That’s probably what acclaimed author Ray Bradbury said, concurrently spitting grape soda out of his nose, when watching a cowboy-suited Darren McGavin on the run from a group of Man Who Fell to Earth rejects, as I did, too.

Taking a handful of stories from Bradbury’s collection of the same name was a highly ambitious project, one that was probably a little too big for the dreams of director Michael Anderson (Millennium) and star Rock Hudson (Avalanche), but they gave it their made-for-TV all and delivered The Martian Chronicles, a cinematic oddity which includes, yes, Darren McGavin (Billy Madison) running around Mars while dressed as a flashy cowboy.

Originally broadcast in three long, excruciating parts, the first night’s section deals with the landing and subsequent explorations of Mars and how Martians, for really no good reason at all, like to elaborately screw with our puny human brains. Examples of this include astronaut Nicholas Hammond (The Black Cobra 2) finding his Illinois childhood home on the red planet and astro-nut Bernie Casey (Never Say Never Again) grabbing an alien gun (for lack of a better term) and proclaiming himself as the second coming of the Martians. Or something to that effect.

Meanwhile, Hudson looks on coolly as the greatest astronaut who’s ever lived.

In part two, we find former astronaut McGavin opening up a Wild West-themed diner, promising to serve hot dogs and chili at 1970s prices to all the future immigrants. (Where and how he got these wieners and sauce is never explained, but I would’ve liked an explanation.) Sadly, no one ever comes to said eatery except for an alien offering him a deed to a portion of Martian land, whom McGavin promptly shoots. All this is done in a sparkly, spangly cowboy outfit, mind you.

Meanwhile, Hudson looks on coolly as the planet Earth explodes into nothingness.

You’d think that after such a dark revelation, things would get a little more entertaining, but instead we find an old man and his robot wife and daughter making dinner and looking to the stars while a lovelorn Christopher Connolly (Hawmps!) flies a foot-pedaled aircraft around the planet, only to find an insanely grating Bernadette Peters, practicing for her upcoming role in Heartbeeps, no doubt.

Meanwhile, Hudson looks on coolly as the temporal gates collide and time becomes a figment of our imaginations.

With workmanlike direction from Anderson, he seemed to forget all the tenuous life lessons he learned on Logan’s Run and made the most by-the-book miniseries possible, all the while barely covering the book. Well, except for that one scene where Darren McGavin goes bonkers dressed a cowboy, which is kind of the worst story in the book, but hilarious on the screen. He should have gotten his own series after that.  —Louis Fowler

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After all the carnage and tragedy that befell so many humans in the events of 2015’s Jurassic World, not to mention three previous adventures, one would think the last thing those survivors would do is go back to that island. Yet that is exactly what they do in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, for a reason returning screenwriters Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly do not work hard enough to sell credibly: because 11 species of dinosaurs need to be saved from extinction before an about-to-blow volcano covers Isla Nebula with a thick sheen of lava.

So off go former theme-park exec Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard, Spider-Man 3) and velociraptor whisperer Owen (Chris Pratt, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), back to the island that very nearly — and often! — served as their gravesite. This time, Claire brings two millennials from her new PETA-esque dino-protection nonprofit: a sassy “paleoveterinarian” (Daniella Pineda, TV’s The Detour) and a systems analyst (Justice Smith, Paper Towns) whose scaredy-cat act gets really old really fast.

Escorting them is a military team whose crusty leader, Wheatley (Ted Levine, The Silence of the Lambs), wields a pair of pliers to extract a tooth from each dinosaur they capture, so you know how that’s gonna turn out. His well-armed crew is tasked with shipping the prehistoric creatures to the palatial estate of infirm philanthropist Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell, Species II) for safekeeping, but Wheatley and Lockwood’s right-hand man (a wonderfully slimy Rafe Spall, Prometheus) have other, more personally lucrative ideas.

Although the back half of Fallen Kingdom taking place within the Lockwood mansion is unique to the five-film franchise, Jurassic-newbie director J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage) fails to spatially orientate the grounds to a level of layout that could foster and support suspense among audiences. Where and from what distance predator and prey exist is any viewer’s guess, yet also inconsequential, because any time Claire and Owen back themselves in a corner – metaphorical or otherwise — and face certain doom, Trevorrow and Connolly simply pilfer their cop-out climax from the previous sequel … and Bayona lets them, each and every time. It’s a lazy play on the page, and even more so on the screen.

Sloppy, choppy and as tired as the tranquilizers shot throughout, Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom simply goes through the motions, never fully engaging. Toward the end, the film grows as silly as Godzilla on Monster Island, then concludes with a frustrating cocktease of a coda that all but guarantees the worst minute of the next Jurassic movie will be of greater quality than this one’s best. As it stands (read: without tumble gymnastics), Fallen Kingdom is a virtual remake of 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, no longer the lone disappointment in the Steven Spielberg-produced series — a feat that took 21 years, give or take 65 million. —Rod Lott

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As the titular superhero of Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman becomes to a generation of children what Christopher Reeve’s revelatory performance as/in Superman became to mine: an instant icon. Making this one all the more remarkable is that while the red-caped son of Krypton already had embodied truth, justice and the American way through decades of comic books, serials, TV shows and the like, Black Panther prowled about the pages of Marvel Comics in relative obscurity.

No more! This cool cat has been unleashed.

Inheriting the role of king of the African nation Wakanda, T’Challa (Boseman, Gods of Egypt) also inherits his late father’s secret identity as his people’s masked protector. Wakanda is masked as well — a village whose advanced technology and vast riches of vibranium (you know, that metal that powers a fellow Avenger’s shield) are hidden under a literal veil that, to an outsider’s naked eye, makes it appear Third World.

Such wonderful toys equip and enable T’Challa to be more than mere superhero — he’s the 007 of the Eastern Hemisphere! With his kid sister (scene-stealing Letitia Wright, Ready Player One) as his personal Q, T’Challa needs all the help he can get as a figure from his unknowing past (Michael B. Jordan, 2015’s less-than-Fantastic Four) attempts to take over the throne, by any means necessary.

While Black Panther’s rapturous success with audiences and critics is not at all surprising, the movie is overpraised. That’s hardly a knock on the film, because it’s still rousing entertainment for most of its two-plus hours. Much as he resuscitated the ailing Rocky franchise with the Oscar-nominated Creed, director Ryan Coogler usurps expectations by leaning heavily into James Bond’s territory. The movie belongs as much to the gadget-gotten spy genre as it does to the sci-fi adventure brand of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, standing on its own while making a snug fit into the MCU’s pre-existing serialized world.

The movie’s mere MCU-ness causes the most problems, with the usual overstuffed finale of foregone conclusions. Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole, however, have a greater hold on their ensemble cast, giving so many talented people — Sterling K. Brown, Martin Freeman, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker — a chance to act, rather than simply collect a nice paycheck. Special praise is reserved for Danai Gurira (My Soul to Take) and Florence Kasumba (Wonder Woman) as T’Challa’s spear-armed bodyguards; they roar and resonate so loudly, they deserve a vehicle all their own. —Rod Lott

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