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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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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