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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With Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg — spawn of David — makes his feature-film debut as both writer and director. The result? Well, like father, like son! That’s only a bad thing if Papa Cronenberg’s works of body horror give you the Shivers.

In a near-future world where celebrity obsession has grown to become unhealthy in the literal sense, The Lucas Clinic makes a mint by bringing its patients closer to their paparazzi-chased idols. For big bucks, its reps inject clients with viruses taken directly from the celebs. That way, you, too, not only can contract herpes simplex like the gorgeous Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon, Cosmopolis), but get it as if she gave it to you herself! Swoon!

It is the job of clinic rep Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones, The Last Exorcism) to administer these injections (the needles penetrating flesh shown in unflinching close-ups, of course). So lucrative is his gig that he dabbles in freelance, swiping inventory to sell on the black market, including to a butcher shop that grows meat from the stars’ muscle cells. March is good as what he does; unfortunately, he becomes the victim of his own sales pitch.

To that end, Jones’ appearance as a pale, emaciated Macaulay Culkin benefits the movie as his body deteriorates, in some of the gnarliest-looking ways imaginable. No doubt Dad is proud of Brandon keeping the family business going. In terms of a debut, Antiviral is more accomplished and assured than his father’s, yet it wouldn’t exist had the elder Cronenberg not spent the majority of his career exploring the ways in which our organs revolt (in both meanings of the word) against us, played out and splayed out against a sterile backdrop.

Antiviral becomes less aggressive in its second half — call it the Malcolm McDowell Effect — but at least it’s about something. —Rod Lott

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