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

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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

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Remember the first-act origin of Iron Man, where Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark builds a bulky metal outfit while being held prisoner in Afghanistan? Draw that section out to feature length, reduce the budget to equal a 12-year-old’s allowance and you have Exo Man, a superhero movie made the way they generally were in the 1970s: for prime-time network television.

As wealthy old white men are wont to do, Kermit Haas (José Ferrer, The Swarm) instructs his goons to rob a bank so he can’t be outbid in the upcoming auction of the Gutenberg Bible. At said bank is college professor and physicist Dr. Nicholas Conrad (David Ackroyd, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home), who jumps into action as a good Samaritan and catches a fleeing robber. Naturally, this puts Conrad on the radar of Haas’ right-hand man (The Incredible Hulk’s Jack Colvin in women’s sunglasses); in a subsequent skirmish, Conrad not only gets clobbered, but paralyzed below the waist.

Good thing the doc’s been experimenting on how to alter the structure of matter — or something like that. All that matters is he succeeds — depicted through the not-so-special effects of magnets under the table — which enables him to “walk” again. To justify the title, he constructs a protective suit that makes him look like an unholy blend of a Shop-Vac and Conky from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, then goes out at night to fight crime, one sloooooow and lumbering step at a time. His Kryptonite? Toppling over.

Like Iron Man, Exo Man gives us the claustrophobic, you-are-there shots of Conrad’s super-sweaty face within the unforgiving helmet. Whereas Tony Stark’s is top-o’-line and outfitted with a holographic dashboard, Conrad’s relies on switches and buttons, all marked using an old-school Dymo label maker (and one button misspelled as “MALFUNTION”). As an underdog of a telepic, Exo Man carries a similar ambling, DIY aesthetic and plays the material with utter sincerity. Shot as a pilot, it never went further than this and didn’t deserve to — unlike writer Martin Caidan and director Richard Irving’s previous team-up, The Six Million Dollar Man. —Rod Lott

Last weekend, while visiting my daughter at college, she asked if I had heard about the FBI study determining that the famous serial killers were all born under the zodiac signs of Sagittarius, Gemini or Virgo. I had to admit I had not … because, of course, it’s not true (God bless Snopes.com). Turns out, however, that’s more or less the concept at the core of The Astrologer, the ambitious, never ostentatious debut for filmmaker James Glickenhaus (The Exterminator).

Tuned to the frequency of The Final Conflict, the moody end-times piece operates on the idea that astrologer Alexei Abernal (Bob Byrd, meekness personified) has cracked the code of determining the “zodiacal potential” — better get comfy with hearing that phrase — of anyone in the world, simply by knowing one’s birthdate. This has enabled him to open the InterZod organization, secretly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to keep tabs on burgeoning evil ’round the globe.

That task is extra-critical now that a mere 10 days remain before the second coming of Christ, and Sequel Jesus is in a real My Two Dads sitch, in that he could be fathered by one good dude or one bad mofo. Falling into the latter camp: Kajerste (Mark Buntzman, Posse), a mystic Indian with formidable beware-the-stare powers.

If you’re hoping all that starts to make sense at some point, stop. It doesn’t. And that’s A-OK because Glickenhaus, in adapting his father-in-law’s novel, has layered so much mindfuckery into the mix that the science — pseudo it may be (and, oh, do it be!) — need not hold up in court. Watchers of The Astrologer can make an educated guess as to the 23andMe paternal ID revealed in the final seconds, yet also have no clue of what’s coming in each scene before then. For what is essentially an airport paperback of a motion picture, that’s a laudable achievement.

Glickenhaus overcomes the limitations of a five-figure budget with the simplest of solutions; it’s amazing what a few computer blips and photo-negative transitions can do for bizarro ambience, not to mention a score by The Terminator composer Brad Fiedel and some truly unsettling edits by Victor Zimet (The Sex O’Clock News). Only Glickenhaus’ actors let him down; Byrd hatched no other credits, but as Alexei’s incelibate wife, Playboy centerfold Monica Tidwell (1979’s Nocturna) at least exudes a freckle-faced charm.

The Astrologer is not to be confused with another movie with the same name from the following year. The Astrologer is to be confused with Suicide Cult, an alternate, nonsensical title. The Astrologer also features a groovy fondue pot with real zodiacal potential. —Rod Lott

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