Like a French version of 1984’s Night of the Comet, Dead Shadows depicts one night in the City of Lights — specifically, the one with the passing of a comet. This rare event makes tech-support slacker Chris (newcomer Fabian Wolfrom) very nervous. After all, when a comet last passed a decade ago, dear old’ Dad went mad and killed Mom; Chris has been afraid of the dark ever since.

With Chris on edge more than usual, a relaxant of sorts arrives in the form of Claire (Blandine Marmigère), his hot, newly single neighbor. An artist by trade, she invites Chris to an “apocalypse party” that night. We know she’s good to go when she shares the name of her in-progress series of paintings: Orgasmic Explosions.

Chris agrees — wouldn’t you? — but has trouble finding Claire at the soirée. He does, however, see a man’s anaconda-like alien phallus slither up a slutty attendee’s behind … and out her mouth. Basically, the comet’s presence causes the citizenry to mutate — or is it all just in Chris’ head? — into a parade of Lovecraftian monsters that would give Guillermo del Toro a Pacific Rim-sized erection.

With a running time under the 75-minute mark, Dead Shadows should spark to life on the double; first-time director David Cholewa bides his time, however, so viewers likely will expect a payoff worthy of his slow build. It does not happen, although a face-melting partygoer and a topless spider-woman are effects well-realized. Cholewa’s direction is not at fault for the film’s eventual place one step above mediocrity — it’s newbie Vincent Julé’s script, stupide. In the end, with all accounted for, the movie is far more c’est la vie than c’est magnifique. —Rod Lott

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Mercilessly yet accurately parodied by the titular segments of 1987’s Amazon Women on the Moon, the sci-fi spectacle of 1958’s Queen of Outer Space stands today — shoulders back, girls! — as a camp curio. After all, it stars everyone’s second favorite Hungarian beauty, Zsa Zsa Gabor, now known more for playing herself (i.e. The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear) and/or a real-life bride (nine trips at press time) than actually acting.

In the year 1985, a group of square-jawed astronauts is sent on a mission to Venus, to determine whether Earth is in mortal danger from the cloud planet. Turns out, hardly! Thought to be uninhabitable, Venus houses a bevy of beautiful women — the shapely kind for which the term “wowza” was coined. Most of them are friendly; their wicked queen is decidedly not. Contrary to audiences’ expectations and beliefs, her highness Queen Yllana is not played by Gabor, but Laurie Mitchell (Attack of the Puppet People) — because I’m guessing Gabor wouldn’t dare appear with a face that looks that looks dipped in boiled goulash.

Queen of Outer Space comes form-fitted with many a sci-fi trope and prop — do look out for the giant rubber spider — but plays like a Miss America pageant in glorious CinemaScope … and not-so-glorious misogyny. In accentuating beauty above all else, it portrays women as trophies to periodically hold one’s sperm. As the horniest of the men, Patrick Waltz (The Silencers) fires off lines like:
• “How’d you like to drag that to the senior prom?”
• “You know how women drivers are!”
• “How could a bunch of women invent a gizmo like that?”
• “How can a doll as cute as that be such a pain the neck?”
• “She’s jealous! Twenty-six million miles from Earth, and the little dolls are just the same.”

How much of that was just the character is up for debate, but so many clues suggest director Edward Bernds (Return of the Fly) and screenwriter Charles Beaumont (TV’s The Twilight Zone) were charter members of the ol’ “barefoot and pregnant” brigade. If anything else within the colorful fun of Queen hits a sour note, it’s that an uncredited Joi Lansing (Marriage on the Rocks) appears only in the prologue. —Rod Lott

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With only five helming credits to his name, Guilio Paradisi — aka the Americanized Michael J. Paradise — had an undistinguished career as a director, mostly of comedies long forgotten, if ever recipients of attention. Luckily for us, in the center of that short list stands The Visitor, a way-out blend of science fiction and horror. While Paradisi displays as artistic a touch in the Italian-made mind-melter as the budget allowed, the true guiding hand appears to belong to producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, whose story credit fits well within the weirdo vibe of his screenplays for Beyond the Door and Piranha Part Two: The Spawning.

In Atlanta (as in Georgia, the titles make clear), a precocious, pigtailed and potty-mouthed girl named Katy Collins (Paige Conner, Fast Food) lives in a spacious, mid-century-modern house complete with a front-projection, big-screen television on which she plays Pong. Katy looks a lot like The Exorcist‘s Regan MacNeil, but behaves more like The Omen‘s Damien Thorn. For starters, she telekinetically causes the basketball to explode in the final second of a pivotal pro game; later, at her own 8th birthday party, she “accidentally” shoots her mother, Barbara (Joanne Nail, Switchblade Sisters), with a gun, paralyzing the utterly lovely woman from the waist down.

Barbara’s delicate condition is good news for boyfriend Ray (Lance Henriksen, Alien vs. Predator), the hoops team owner tasked by some super-secret, super-wealthy organization to marry the woman so that he can put a baby in her. See, although Barbara doesn’t know it, her womb is special in that it can “give birth to children with immense powers.” Even kreepy Katy encourages Mom to do some cushion-pushin’ so Ray can dump his seed and give her a little brother.

More insanity is to be plumbed from The Visitor, including vengeful ice skaters, flocks of killer birds and interdimensional warriors who work for Jesus Christ (an unbilled Franco Nero, Django). Legendary director John Huston (The African Queen) plays one of those angels and is just one of many old-age Hollywood personalities taking a lire-converted paycheck, including Glenn Ford (1978’s Superman) as a detective, Mel Ferrer (Nightmare City) and The Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah as doctors, and Shelley Winters (Lolita) as a new nanny who, despite being Caucasian and far from indentured, likes to sing “Shortnin’ Bread.”

This interesting casting is right in line with the ambitious (but not always successful) story’s hallucinogenic visuals and narrative hysterics that forever threaten to go into panic mode. So insane it should be committed, The Visitor isn’t worth watching once. It requires multiple viewings. —Rod Lott

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Even compared to Al Adamson’s other cheap films, Horror of the Blood Monsters is shameless. A patchwork stitching of new scenes by Adamson; a 1965 Filipino oddity titled Tagani; Hal Roach’s 1940 classic, One Million B.C.; and at least three other flicks, it should be called Horror of the Stock Footage. No matter how many movies incorporated, it would not make sense.

Its opening would have viewers think they’re being presented with a modern-day tale of vampires in an urban setting. Don’t be silly — that’s merely a prologue stuck atop the mission of American spaceship XB-13 to explore the heretofore “unknown solar system” discovered by Dr. Rynning (John Carradine, seen that same year in two other Adamson pictures, Five Bloody Graves and Hell’s Bloody Devils). En route, the crew members are thrown to the floor by space lightning, prompting the “funny” one to crack, “Next time I’m going to go Greyhound and leave the driving to them.”

XB-13 lands on a prehistoric planet that, depending upon where one looks, appears in a top-to-bottom tint of red, blue or green. (This is because Tagani was shot in black and white, so Adamson solved the conundrum with the “color effects” miracle known as Spectrum-X.) While Dr. Rynning stays behind due to risk of coronary, the crew traverses the area and witnesses such sights as primitive men fighting, lizards wrestling and little bat-people swooping through the air.

Unfortunately, most of such scenes appear in two bursts, leaving narrative stretches as dry and barren as the planet’s desert landscape. To pad further, Adamson occasionally cuts back to ground control, where two technicians take time out from XB-13’s emergency situation to boff. Yet even sex is boring when it’s had in Blood Monsters. Let’s put it this way: When the DVD started to pixelate and skip forward in snatches of double-digit seconds, I did not mind. —Rod Lott

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Tron — the 1982 tale of a computer programmer (Jeff Bridges, True Grit) zapped into a world of anthropomorphized data programs — is not a classic. The writing is basic; the direction, adequate; the plot, silly; the acting, coasting on charm alone, which, in the case of Bridges, is fairly substantial.

Yet little of that matters, because its unabashed special-effects joy leaps from the screen. Like Star Wars, 2001 and King Kong, Tron — with its revolutionary CGI — was an FX leap that held you to your seat with a huge grin on your face. This was benchmark, even if the rest of the film was flat as warm cola.

There was little chance that, three decades later, Tron: Legacy (plot: Bridges’ son explores the computer world to find his long-missing father) would even touch Tron’s pop-cultural importance. And despite light-years of difference between the two — more distinctive direction by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion), impressive visuals, slightly more interesting characters — Legacy fails its birthright.

Tron was a lighthearted adventure; Legacy succumbs to the Dark Knight-ization of modern reboots. Gee-whiz fun is replaced with a soul-destroying pixelscape of bleakness, the effects stunning yet in service to nothing. The original character of Tron (Bruce Boxleitner, TV’s Babylon 5) is barely even present, shoehorned in at the end to play deus ex machina and allow the scriptwriters a way out.

Weirdly enough, the real pleasures in this special-effects showcase are the actors. Nominal star Garrett Hedlund (Eragon) brings limited range to a limited role. However, Bridges’ now-iconic/laconic Zen-master shtick is a desperately welcome pleasure. Olivia Wilde (Cowboys & Aliens) uses her exotically outsized features to pleasing effect as Bridges’ companion, and Michael Sheen (Underworld) goes full “campy Joel Grey in Cabaret” with his too-brief, entertainingly broad portrayal of a conniving program with wires in every port.

It’s not enough, not when there are tens of effects for every line of dialogue. Tron, for all its weaknesses, had a soul within its electrical universe; Legacy can’t find it.

Speaking of soullessness: Bridges also portrays Legacy’s villain, Clu, a program that looks as Bridges once did, his now-aged visage replaced with a youthful one. When the face isn’t moving, it’s an impressive feat of effects work. But when it talks? Unnervingly off. It may seem odd to complain about computerized artificiality in Tron, but Bridges’ uncanny valley visit will haunt my nightmares. —Corey Redekop

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