Every now and then, a movie really is every bit the feast of turkey as the critics say. Supernova is that movie.

By all accounts, it was a troubled post-production process, with director Walter Hill (The Warriors) taking his name off it, The Hidden’s Jack Sholder coming in for reshoots, Francis Ford Coppola doing some uncredited editing — and the end result is such a mess, it feels like you’re watching what would happen if the studio held an “Edit a Feature Film!” contest for the general public.

Supernovocaine (as I like to call it) follows a small crew floating through space on one huge ship. There’s the captain, Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), who watches Tom & Jerry cartoons. James Spader (Stargate) is a recovering addict, which has nothing to do with anything, but you’ll notice that with his hair dyed black, he looks a lot like Jeff Goldblum. Angela Bassett (Strange Days) is the no-nonsense, tough-as-nails doctor. Then there’s Lou Diamond Phillips (Young Guns); Robin Tunney (The Craft), who looks like a man here; and a robot so laughable that it appears to come straight out of Hardware Wars.

Everything’s peachy-keen until they rescue a mysterious young man (Can’t Hardly Wait’s Peter Facinelli, the JV Tom Cruise) from a mining facility in another dimension. He brought a glowing, vagina-shaped special effect with him, you see, and he likes to kill people. So he begins the rote one-by-one method of cinematic homicide. Who do you think will make it to the climactic showdown? To quote Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57, “Always bet on black!”

None of it makes sense, and it doesn’t help that the cast is saddled with mumbo-jumbo dialogue like “We’ve jumped into a high-grav field right in the path of that moon’s debris cloud!,” which Spader is forced to utter without so much as a smile. Not even the promise of zero-gravity sex scenes — fulfilled — is enough to save this one from stupidity. —Rod Lott

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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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