For all the bad press Michael Bay gets for Transformers — incomprehensibly edited, poorly acted, overly long, transparently cynical — there is one remarkable thing: Somehow, despite all odds, Bay made giant robot battles a thing of pure boredom. Pacific Rim saves the concept by making giant robots, well, fun again. Maybe it comes down to a subtle difference: Transformers is made by people who think people will pay money to see giant robots fight; Pacific Rim is made by people who genuinely find giant robots to be the coolest thing ever.

There’s no point pretending that Pacific Rim isn’t a $200 million mega-monolith of special effects. Nor should we pretend it reinvents the wheel. Director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) crafts his spectacle of monsters battling humanity from classic archetypes of character and situation. There is really nothing here you haven’t seen in Star Wars or Independence Day, or Homer’s The Iliad, for that matter.

But gawddammit, it’s tons of fun. Whereas Bay soaks his movies in scorn for the theme, del Toro brings childlike enthusiasm and monster-centric glee. For good reason is his tale of hideous leviathan kaiju versus iron giants dedicated to stop-motion creature master Ray Harryhausen and Godzilla maestro Ishiro Honda: Del Toro simply loves what he does.

Nicely breaking tradition from the usual “all-American” route, del Toro goes international in casting, tossing Brit Charlie Hunnam (TV’s Sons of Anarchy) in as the token heroic American who pilots a robot, teaming him with spunky Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) and allowing the towering Idris Elba (Prometheus) the rare privilege of keeping his British accent. Throw in a comedic pair of bickering scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, both very funny in the C-3P0 and R2-D2 roles) and a slimy opportunist played with aplomb by genre veteran Ron Perlman (again, Hellboy), and you’ve got broad, yet effective characters played at perfect pitch by all.

And as for the real reason most people will watch Pacific Rim? The monsters are enormous, the robots huge, the effects freaking incredible, and the battles directed with clarity and verve. These things have weight to them. The punch-ups are epic, and show Bay how it’s done. Not once was I ever confused as to what was punching what.

So yeah, I loved it, if for no other reason than this: At the reveal of the first kaiju, 30 seconds in, I was grinning from ear to ear, and I never stopped. Except when, no kidding, I honestly choked up when the Aussie father/son pilot combo said their goodbyes to each other. Huge lump in my throat. —Corey Redekop

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Told via three “transmissions,” The Signal stands as a unique interpretation of the end-of-the-world scenario that informs so many works of speculative fiction. The quasi-anthology of interlocking stories depicts the effects of a synapse-disrupting broadcast that travels through all modes of electronic communication — from television sets to telephones — resulting in mass psychosis.

Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell explored eerily similar territory, but whereas his book ultimately left me thinking, “Why did I bother reading this?,” The Signal had me asking, “Why didn’t I see this sooner?”

Not so much separate stories as shifts in perspective, the tales of co-writer/directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry largely follow an unfaithful young woman (Anessa Ramsey, Rites of Spring) whose blue-collar hubby (AJ Bowen, The House of the Devil) succumbs; the cuckolding boyfriend (Justin Welborn, The Crazies) who tries to save her; her paranoid neighbor (Sahr Ngaujah, Stomp the Yard) who cobbles together some improvised weaponry; and attendees of the bleakest of New Year’s Eve parties. People haven’t taken this many shots to the head since … well, insert the gang-bang joke of your choice here.

For a good half, the proceedings exhibit a freewheeling style where anything can happen; somewhere around that mark, however, it gets caught in a vortex of repetition. The film crawls out of it for the third and final bit, but it pales in comparison to the strongest segment: the first. So while the scrappy triptych amounts to one of diminishing returns, the exercise is arresting just enough to emerge on the side of positive. —Rod Lott

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Three scenes utterly traumatized me as a youngster:
1. the reveal of the “star child” in 2001: A Space Odyssey (nightmarish!);
2. the rabbit attack in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (that was a lot of blood); and
3. the finale of Disney’s The Black Hole, wherein an ostensibly family-friendly flick suddenly goes medieval and takes a trek through literal Hell. After 80 minutes of cinematic sci-fi — ending with the entire cast being sucked into the eponymous hole — Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell, Deep Impact), imprisoned within the armor of his killer robot, stands guard over a blasted hellscape as tortured souls trudge down pathways carved into a flaming mountain range.

Today, the scene is a cinematic curiosity, a weird and unforeseen side trek into Christian mythology that barely makes contextual sense. But back then? Schell’s eyes suddenly peering out from the furnace-red eye slit of his mechanical beast damaged the 8-year-old me worse than anything. Forget the Bible; the Hell of The Black Hole is what almost scared me into belief.

Past that, The Black Hole is an unbalanced amalgamation of Star Wars, Star Trek, Disney cutesiness and horror. On the plus side, you’ve got an admittedly awesome-looking hole in space, some pretty terrific effects, a terrifying mute demon robot that performs what surely counts as the only disembowelment to appear in a Disney film (bloodless though it is) and a John Barry score better than the film 90 percent of the time and more suitable for Monday Night Football for the other 10.

Veering into the mediocre, there are floating-by-wire R2-D2s (voiced by Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens, and the most interesting characters); a script as thin as watered-down tapioca; robot soldiers that make the battle droids of Phantom Menace seem like crack shots; and one of those Airport/Poseidon Adventure disaster film “let’s give a bunch of B-movie actors some work” casts: the magnetic Schell, the stern Robert Forster, the perky Yvette Mimieux, the twitchy Anthony Perkins, the grumpy Ernest Borgnine and the takes-up-physical-space Joseph Bottoms. And an ending where the filmmakers must have just thrown up their hands and said, “What the hell, I guess you can breathe in outer space, sure.”

On the whole, not great. But still worth seeing for some startling imagery, fascinatingly manipulative scenes (oh, how my youngest sister bawled when old B.O.B. died), and again, that just balls-out crazy ending. I’ll be good from now on, Daddy! I promise! Don’t let the Satanbot kill me!

P.S.: Is it just me, or is Event Horizon a remake? —Corey Redekop

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The classic, Old English epic poem known as Beowulf saw a surprising resurgence in popularity in 1999 with Seamus Heaney’s new translation; that same year’s film adaptation of Beowulf is in no such danger, but its fantasy brand of cheese actually tastes quite enjoyable.

The inhabitants of a big, spooky castle are under constant threat of attack by a ghost demon named Grendle, who likes to eat people. Their saving grace comes in the form of a visiting mysterious stranger named Beowulf, played by Christopher Lambert, Highlander refugee and graduate of the Angry Whisper School of Acting.

Beowulf has a gift of sensing danger, so he knows when the monster is near. The beast is mostly a CGI creature given a wavy effect that looks like someone dragged a big magnet across your TV screen. The fight scenes — set to a techno score by Juno Reactor — alternately ape those found in Mortal Kombat, The Matrix and Evil Dead II. Beowulf also busts out some Gymkata fight moves. Assisting Beowulf is a foxy brunette (Rhona Mitra, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) who has a name, but I didn’t catch it because her bosoms threaten to break free the entire film.

Now, I don’t know how faithful this superheroic take on Beowulf is to the source material, as the piece of literature was a chore to get through in high school, but I’m pretty sure if the castle dudes were being visited in their dreams by a horny Playboy Playmate, I would’ve remembered, and maybe even aced the test. The filmmakers end up dubbing the Playmate (Layla Roberts, Miss October 1997); maybe director Graham Baker (Alien Nation) should’ve done Lambert while they were at it so we could understand him once and for all. —Rod Lott

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So nonlinear that calling it nonlinear doesn’t cut it, the Hong Kong oddity The Invincible Space Streaker has nothing to do with space, and there’s no streaker. But here’s what goes down, or as much I was able to decipher from its truncated-English subtitles (“I order you kill him!”): After a hard day at grade school, about two dozen little boys go to a local watering hole and remove their little-boy pants to go skinny-dipping. This odd group activity is halted by the appearance of a mystical guy with a stereotypical bad haircut. He’s dressed in a robe that makes him look like Dr. Strange, except that I don’t recall the Marvel Comics character having ever enjoyed an eyeful of undescended testicles during an afternoon romp.

Anyhow, this creepy doctor convinces roughly half the kids to follow him to this lab by using a poster of a superhero as bait, presumably because candy — the favored tool of kidnappers the world over — sucks ass in Asian countries. Doc promises to turn them all into “superman” (lowercase), but once the first kid is wired into a crazy contraption in the evil lair, it’s clear there will be no kid-to-superman transformations.

Instead, Doc changes the first boy into a cute capuchin monkey. The other children react via frightened subtitles: “It’s the monkey! Not superman!” Another kid becomes a pot-bellied pig. A third boy is on the road to mutation when his full-bladdered friend yanks down his shorts and pees all over Doc’s face and the machine. (And it’s no special effect, either, as the camera horrifyingly details.) These two tots manage to escape, but the one whose transformation was interrupted by the ol’ stream-of-urine-as-means-of-distraction trick finds himself turned into a masked superhero. His costume is an unsettling blend of Boba Fett, Evel Knievel, The Fly and Liberace. He kicks bad guys and then there’s an elaborate (at least by the standards set forth thus far) motorcycle chase.

Then there’s more fighting as the hero fights a walking bug, several guys on choppers and, for a split second, what appears to be a man in a wolf costume. Pee-Pee Boy helps out by discovering the joys of explosives, and then promptly dies in a slow-motion scene highly reminiscent of Willem Dafoe’s death in Platoon. This makes the hero angry enough to zap the crap out of the bad guys to emerge victorious. Why he didn’t do that in the first place and thus spare his best friend’s life is beyond me. But all the little boys celebrate this triumph by taking another nude group swim, as the title card screams, “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMING!” —Rod Lott