Big Ass Spider! needs a lesson in basic punctuation. Its title includes an exclamation point that is not needed, yet excludes the hyphen that is. After all, this is a movie about a big-ass spider, not an ass spider that also is big. (I do not know what an ass spider is. Oh, if only a porn parody existed to explain it!)

As an L.A. exterminator named Alex, Greg Grunberg (TV’s Heroes) gets the Bill Murray/Vince Vaughn role of the affable, dumpy slob who nonetheless saves the day and gets the girl (in this case, Bring It On’s Clare Kramer). With the aid of a hospital security guard named José (Candyman: Day of the Dead’s Lombardo Boyar, who makes not-that-funny lines funny in his scene-stealing delivery), Alex chases a deadly spider that gets exponentially larger over the course of one crazy day.

Even before this arachnid has grown large enough to scale the Deloitte office tower King Kong-style, the military is summoned. Immediately, it’s clear the troops have little to no experience dealing with giant spiders that spray some liquid with the power to melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant and take out a public park full of volleyball-playing bikini hussies in nothing flat. (That last part is the best.)

Working from a script by Centipede! scribe Gregory Gieras (I smell a trend), Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers) directs with such a featherweight touch, one practically can sense him smiling from behind the camera. The eight-legged freak’s utter CGI phoniness keeps Big Ass Spider! from venturing beyond a comic vibe into anything approaching fright; I doubt the giving of the willies ever was a goal. At times, the movie feels like you’re watching a video game — the Call of Duty-esque first-person shooter POV sees to that — and that sensibility ultimately seeps into an overall verdict of harmless.

After 75 fleet-footed minutes, the end credits begin. A few seconds later, a stinger suggests a sequel, presumably to be titled Big Ass Cockroach! Fine, boys, but let’s not neglect the hyphen again. —Rod Lott

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There are many thoughts that leap to mind while returning to Red Sonja decades after you’ve last seen it, but the one I kept focusing on was, “Where the heck did Brigitte Nielsen’s breasts go?”

Admittedly, I have a tendency to overfocus on this sort of thing and I should probably get some help and talk to someone about it, but I’m not wrong in noticing that the international ’80s Amazon’s dimensions here in her cinematic debut are somewhat less Amazonian than those found in her later films (Cobra included), which suggests to me a direct correlation between getting enormous implants and subsequently starring in a series of shittier and shittier movies.

I may be alone in expressing this, but I think Nielsen actually showed some (unmet) promise in this, her film debut. Sure, she’s often flatly unintelligible, but so is her co-star, and that didn’t stop him from starring in Batman & Robin or becoming the governor of California. As an action heroine, however, she’s entirely credible and was probably the only actress/model of the period with a build both substantial and sexy enough to take on the role of Robert E. Howard’s most famous female character. She was just missing the breasts, which she must have noticed and decided to correct for her future work (which sadly never included that proposed big-screen adaptation of She-Hulk, for which she was born).

The rest of the movie manages to serve as a solid example of the decade’s sword-and-sorcery silliness. Not as memorable as Luigi Cozzi’s two Hercules films, but still better than Conan the Destroyer and its many low-budget clones (none of which were foolish enough to copy John Milius’ superior original), Red Sonja is a serviceable time-waster lessened only by its distinct lack of a D-cup. —Allan Mott

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From Tron director Steven Lisberger slips Slipstream, which boasts an “all-star cast” of Mark Hamill, F. Murray Abraham, Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton. It tries fairly hard, but can’t make the “science fiction spectacular” a movie that sits comfortably in one’s head.

Its story takes place in a post-something future in which cyborgs, bounty hunters and lowlifes symbiotically abide. There’s a “slipstream” or something, that somehow is supposed to indicate that the world and nature are out of sorts. A lot of scenes are thrown in that appear to be there to enhance characters, provoke emotion and induce laughs, yet none of them succeed.

Plus, there’s dialogue intended to make Paxton (Twister) the folksy, down-to-earth, Han Solo-type with whom we can all identify. After one of many awkward exchanges between his character and one of the female bounty hunters, he sarcastically quips, “The hospitality of women never ceases to amaze me.” What does that mean? That women are never hospitable? Has the gesture of hospitality always eluded Paxton in his dealings with women, thereby warranting such a response? No one knows!

Additional scenes and snippets make no sense, including a dancing (that’s right, dancing!) scene in which the male cyborg learns to love life, as well as some anonymous female character. It’s supposed to make our hearts swell and eyes tear. I think I held up my middle finger until the scene was over.

With nothing to work with but a beard, Star Wars vet Hamill actually acts fairly unshittily, but Slipstream is quite a mess. I surprised myself by sitting through it until the end. —Richard York

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I often play a mental game, connecting unconnected films through themes, style, etc. and pretending they exist in the same cinematic universe. Example: Outland, sharing a composer, costume designer, concept artist and probably more than a few grips with Alien always has seemed to exist in the same world as Ridley Scott’s film. Perhaps the Weyland-Yutani Corporation owns Outland’s Con-Am 27 mining operation. (I’m also sure Wey-Yu has a hand in Blade Runner‘s corporate world, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find its logo stenciled on equipment scattered about the base of Moon, either.)

Outland has no xenomorphs running about, but it does have Sean Connery kicking ass on the surface of Jupiter’s third moon, Io, so it ain’t a total loss. Actually, it is a great deal of fun, and while it’s often dismissed as being High Noon in space, why is that a bad thing? After all, Alien is Halloween in space, really.

Connery delivers one of his best performances, 007 or otherwise, as a planet-weary marshal policing a mining community on the ass-end of space. Trying to stop the shipments of a drug that increases worker performance and causes insanity (writer/director Peter Hyams’ script is weirdly prescient of America’s ongoing meth crisis), he finds little help from anyone, loses his family, and soon finds himself counting down the hours until hit men arrive to take him out.

It’s not terribly original, and there are quibbles to be found in its inaccuracies concerning science, gravity, technology, et al. But it also has terrific visual design, clean action, Young Frankenstein‘s Peter Boyle, marvelous miniatures and practical effects from the golden age of such, and a wonderful supporting turn by Francis Sternhagen (The Mist) as the local Bones McCoy, reminding us of her many talents outside of being Cliff Clavin’s mother on TV’s Cheers.

Speaking of Cliff Clavin: If you, like me, are not a fan of the character and/or John Ratzenberger, you’ll find immense gratification in Outland’s first five minutes, when the actor’s head explodes in the vacuum of space. Again, not scientifically accurate, but satisfying and splatterific. —Corey Redekop

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Known to Americans under its dubbed title of Majin, the Monster of Terror, the Japanese fantasy Daimajin doesn’t really kick in until after the first 30 minutes, when the requisite precocious youth with bad hair is attacked in the forest by skeleton hands and superimposed bedsheets standing in for ghosts.

But that’s nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the giant mountain god Daimajin. For the first half of the movie, Daimajin is simply a statue to be worshipped. But when angry villagers start hammering away at his head and cause it to bleed, well, who can blame Daimajin for opening up the ground so he can spit fire and swallow fat guys whole?

What heretofore was a blank face as threatening as Holly Hobbie is replaced with a blue-green demonic kabuki glare with one wave of Daimajin’s stone arm. The big guy frees himself from his mountain home and goes to town to — in the finest tradition of Far Eastern genre cinema — smash some shit up.

The balsa wood flies as Daimajin destroys houses and randomly stops to impale citizens. At the end, he turns to dust, thus ending the carnage, but quite clearly driving home the moral of the story: Don’t stick steel spikes into the foreheads of a statue in the mountains unless you want it to come alive and fuck up your village. Got it? No one did, because two sequels immediately followed. —Rod Lott

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