A sequel to one of only three — maybe four, on the right day — good movies starring Christopher Lambert (and no, Highlander isn’t one of them), Fortress 2: Re-Entry really should be called Fortress 2: Re-Exit, right? After all, it’s the escape that’s the thing.

In the near future, giving birth is still a felony punishable by life sentences. John Henry Brennick (Lambert), having survived the first film, is now reunited with his family and living in the wilderness … until the bad guys find and arrest him.

The futuristic prison fortress he’s taken to, however, looks totally unlike the sleek, state-of-the-art facility of the 1992 movie, presumably due to a low budget. Similarly, this sequel retains only a fraction of the original’s cleverness and wit — a trade-off I’d expect when you go from a director like Re-Animator’s Stuart Gordon to Geoff Murphy, the guy who helmed Young Guns II. Her Jackie Brown comeback apparently already over, Pam Grier has a senseless supporting role as the corporate owner of the prison.

The third act may be silly and convoluted, but there’s some decent airlock action, camera-equipped cockroaches and numerous shower scenes to compensate. Lambert hams it up as usual, although his voice hardly raises above a whisper. “Why’s he talk like that?” my wife asked.

“Because he’s French and he’s not a good actor,” I answered. I mean, the guy may have a grasp on the English language, but his palms are still greased with Vaseline. —Rod Lott

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The first Toho-born Godzilla feature to play our shores since Godzilla 1985, the equally unimaginatively titled Godzilla 2000 is seriously silly fun, wringing unintentional laughs out of every stab at earnestness. And of course, the nearly wall-to-wall scenes of demolition and destruction don’t hurt, either.

As the film opens, the Japanese equivalent of Fisher Stevens and his young daughter are carousing about Tokyo with a female reporter in their Godzilla Protection Network Mobile Unit. As soon as the novelty of atrocious dubbing wears down, Godzilla makes his first appearance, and it’s good to see him downright mean and pissed again, bent on reckless abandon.

He then spends a great deal of time trashing the coastline and downtown, either via unconvincing miniatures or poor composite shots. He meets his match in the form of a flying, prehistoric rock that emerges from the sea and eventually breaks open to reveal a shiny, silver UFO that sucks the power of the city via tentacles that only can be seen via infrared vision. (The Japanese are obsessed with tentacles, you know. They’re also obsessed with vaginal imagery, and just when you think the movie will be over before they get to that, it’s “Hello, labia monster!”)

The flick’s Americanization is wildly apparent, perhaps most evident in lines like, “Nice try, you asshole!,” “Oh, bite me!” and “It will go through Godzilla like crap through a goose!” Despite its shortcomings in the special effects and story departments, this Godzilla is at least a true Godzilla — something than Roland Emmerich cannot say. —Rod Lott

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It’s appropriate that Spiders’ third act hinges on a trip to a toy store, because what is its sector of science fiction but a big game of pretend? Directed by The Gate’s Tibor Takács, Spiders proves as harmless and hard-hitting as a Nerf football.

A Soviet space station containing experimental arachnids crashes into the New York City subway system, much to the dismay of Pelham-esque transit line supervisor Jason (Starship Troopers vet Patrick Muldoon, really intense and looking like Baby Pacino). He’s recently divorced from health department worker Rachel (2001 Maniacs’ Christa Campbell, increasingly pneumatic), who gets drawn into the resulting cover-up, in which the government spreads word of a highly contagious virus, because “giant spiders” would really freak the fuck out of the Big Apple.

Aggressive and bloodthirsty, the spiders grow 6 inches per hour. They also growl, hiss and cry, and can head-butt Army trucks. Their queen possesses a yell like Godzilla. Initially, these creepy crawlers are icky enough to give arachnophobic viewers a mild case of shivers, but once they balloon into unnaturally grotesque sizes, their computer-generated design is so overly spiky as to be incredibly unrealistic. Muldoon and Campbell look like they’re just running from cartoons.

Then again, no one goes into Spiders expecting smarts. After all, not once in the movie does any unsuspecting citizen exclaim something to the effect of, “Holy shit! Look at that huge fuckin’ spider! What the hell’s happening?,” but you can bet that proverbial bottom dollar that Campbell stupidly walks right into an enormous, super-thick web covering an entire hallway.

Spiders is in no danger of ending up on the list of cinema’s best eight-legged thrillers — heck, it’s not even as good as 2000’s straight-to-video Spiders — and yet, a few scenes play out with an itsy-bitsy amount of fun. I’m looking at you, Muldoon Commandeers a Forklift. —Rod Lott

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For years, I’ve read what a crackling good ghost story The Stone Tape is, what a corker of an ending it holds. (Mind you, most of this came from British entertainment magazines; hence the words “crackling” and “corker.”) Having finally seen it, my reaction is a mix of mild admiration and major disappointment.

Directed by Peter Sasdy (Taste the Blood of Dracula), the BBC telefilm takes place on a palatial estate, derelict since the war, in which researchers from an electronics company are interested in one room in particular: Once marked for storage, it contains a fungus-lined stone wall, a crude staircase and one loud ghost.

The spirit of a screaming Victorian maid is first seen and heard by the lone female team member (The Masque of the Red Death’s Jane Asher, saddled with playing fraidy-cat for the entirety). The idea is that the wall has acted as some kind of recording device, and what a fortune awaits if that could be turned into a revolutionary new medium. It is, as the men say, “the big one”; move over, 8-tracks!

Famously scripted by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, The Stone Tape holds a gem of an idea within its core, but suffers from overlength. While 90 minutes is considered ideal for features, I’m afraid this plot was better-suited to a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode — 60 if truly generous. Had that happened, we all (rather than the other side of the pond) might be talking about it in shorthand like “the one where Burgess Meredith steps on his glasses.”

As for that supposedly frightening conclusion, it arrives exactly just as one would expect. In other words, wholly predictable, and time has been rather unkind to its primitive effects. Love it or hate it, however, The Stone Tape’s influence on the John Carpenter projects Prince of Darkness and Halloween III: Season of the Witch is evident. —Rod Lott

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This is all you need to know to make an effective decision about whether to watch the giant cockroach film Mimic: the kids die.

The Relic was released around the same time, and it, too, had a scene where street-smart kids did some ill-advised adventuring. Of the two, Relic’s kids are more annoying; sadly, they survive that movie’s man-beast, whereas director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) has no compunction about showing the feral impulses of his mutants. So if you want a “safe” monsterama that entertains yet doesn’t strive for anything else, Relic is your choice. Want something with more meat? Go Team Mimic.

The sci-fi flick is imperfect, made much better by the director’s cut which adds character development, backstory and subtlety to what is still very much an “us vs. them” movie à la Aliens. Even neutered, Mimic is the best pure killer-bug film in ages, possibly since the giant ants of 1954’s Them! Whereas Them! warned us of the dangers of nuclear testing, Mimic introduces the more modern peril of biological tampering. Its heritage hews closer to Frankenstein than The Deadly Mantis, as Mira Sorvino’s scientist has the best of intentions, releasing bioengineered sterile cockroaches to stop a plague. As in all “nature runs amok” films, however, nature finds a way; in this instance, “the way” is to grow to 6 feet tall and learn to imitate humans.

What del Toro initially planned doesn’t come to fruition, but what survived studio interference is damned entertaining. Sorvino (The Replacement Killers) is strong and resourceful as the resident Sigourney; Jeremy Northam (The Net) makes a charmingly geeky counterpart; Charles S. Dutton (Alien 3) pulls out his usual Charles S. Dutton charm. The CGI is fine, if a little raw; the practical effects gloriously disgusting (you’ll never think about excrement the same way again!), and if the final result somewhat lacks for the usual del Toro verve, blame studio execs.

It’s instructive to place Mimic up against movies like The Relic (and not just for the dead kids). The Relic gives us a journeyman director (Peter Hyams) with nothing really vested in the material, working for a paycheck and delivering the product as just that: a product, something to be merchandised. Mimic shows us a genuine artist struggling within artificially defined constraints to deliver a personal vision. It’s flawed and the seams show at points, but del Toro’s compromise is still worth 10 times Hyams’ manufactured goods. —Corey Redekop

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