Charles Band’s attempt to cash in on the Dungeons & Dungeons craze is, well, crazed. Big computer dork Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn) somehow gets warped into the underworld, where he must save his girlfriend (Leslie Wing, The Frighteners) by doing battle with Satan, logically played by Bull from TV’s Night Court (Richard Moll).

To win, Paul must emerge victorious in Satan’s seven challenges; each of the septet of segments is helmed by a different director, including Band, Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision), John Carl Buechler (Troll), Peter Manoogian (Seedpeople) and stop-motion wizard David Allen (Puppet Master II).

Thus, Paul does battle with the following:
1. desert warriors;
2. a cave gnome;
3. mute midgets;
4. a stone creature;
5. frozen people;
6. a slasher; and
7. a horned demon puppet named Ratspit.

Unfortunately, there’s no suspense generated by these skirmishes, because all Paul has to do is punch a button or two on his computer wristband capable of emitting a laser, thereby taking care of anything and everything. Through it all, he spouts nerdy dialogue like, “I reject your reality and I substitute my own!” Them’s fightin’ words.

A hair over one hour long, The Dungeonmaster is a prime example of Band’s Empire Pictures catalog. Everything in the movie — the haircuts, the fashions, the effects, the art direction (but primarily the appearance of hair-metal band W.A.S.P.) — screams, “I am from the ’80s!” This is not a bad thing. In fact, I’m dying for a DVD. —Rod Lott

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The setup: The government blackmails a criminal into launching a rescue mission within a heavily fortified prison. The movie? The John Carpenter classic pulp thriller Escape from New York, obviously, implanting Kurt Russell’s borderline-insane Snake Plissken with a bomb so that he’ll willingly rescue the POTUS. But also Lockout, a PG-13 exercise in taking a great concept and smoothing down all rough edges during execution, leaving it a neutered shadow of the original.

The prison in Lockout is almost a masterpiece of ridiculousness: an orbit-bound space jail full of the most dangerous convicts in existence, so there must be no need for visitors to go through even the most rudimentary of weapons searches. Oh, and let’s not forget the remarkably easy access to the solitary button that releases every prisoner at once. So handy.

So when the convicts escape (as is their wont) — the president’s daughter conveniently onboard (Taken‘s Maggie Grace, given nothing to work with) — it’s up to bad dude Snow (Guy Pearce, Memento), wrongly accused of murder, to rescue her. Cue uninteresting fights, paper-thin antagonists, a few neat moments and a motorcycle chase with such inept special effects, it looks like leftovers from a PS2-era cutscene.

Pearce is a great, charismatic actor, and it is one of the movie’s few pleasures that we finally get to watch him cut loose. He takes to the role with abandon, milking every corny one-liner and proving himself fully capable of acting the hero. If there’s a reason to watch, it’s to see him eclipse everyone and everything else onscreen. You keep wondering what it would be like to watch him in a good film, or at least a competent one.

But Escape’s true genius, and the reason Lockout barely registers as entertainment, is its anti-hero. At no time do we really think Snow to be a “bad guy.” In the end, he’s a misunderstood, huggable hero; Han Solo instead of Snake Plissken. Plissken is a true sociopath, and what drives Carpenter’s film is his and Russell’s refusal to compromise on Snake’s inherent instability. Snake never would have coddled the president’s willful daughter into begrudgingly liking him; Snake wouldn’t have given two shits either way.

Snake made Escape gritty and disturbing, pushing it from a merely neat idea into something memorable. Snow is too much like the movie he’s trapped in: all flash. Now, seriously, someone put Pearce together with a franchise worthy of his talent. Let’s get this guy a Die Hard of his own. —Corey Redekop

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The few people who saw Equilibrium in theaters openly compared it to The Matrix, as if that were the first action film to feature martial arts, guys dressed in black or thumping techno music. Although Christian Bale’s blank-faced performance does suggest an ace Keanu Reeves impression, Ultraviolet director Kurt Wimmer’s film really owes more debt to dusty books with numbers in their titles — namely, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The Dark Knight himself, Bale stars as John Preston, a “cleric,” which is a fancy-sounding term for a futuristic government/sentry/cop type charged with finding and burning anything that allows people to experience emotions. All feelings have been outlawed, see; the powers that be keep the public pacified and zombie-faced through daily injections of a sedative.

But when Preston accidentally breaks his dose and can’t get another, he begins to question his ways, allegiance and life. Heck, he even begins to feel and sniff Emily Watson’s red ribbon when no one’s looking.

If it sounds all thinky-schminky, well, yeah, it is. But it’s not bogged down in Matrix-type explanations that are so wordy, they cease to be explanations at all. The high points are the action scenes, in which Bale engages in a kind of turbo-charged gunplay we hadn’t seen before (at least at the time). He’s also skilled with the sword, neatly slicing off Taye Diggs’ face toward the end.

While not great, it’s certainly better than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, which alone should make it worth a rental. —Rod Lott

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Reptilian is South Korea’s needless attempt at creating a Godzilla-esque franchise like Japan, with a little all-American Independence Day thrown in for foul measure.

The derivative monster in question begins the movie as a mere dinosaur fossil, before he’s awakened by an electromagnetic force from an alien spaceship. Then he’s a living, fire-breathing killing machine, and dubbed something that sounds like “Young Gary” by the pesky humans. (It’s really Yonggarry, the original, overseas title.)

The aliens are some of the cheapest-looking the decade produced (they speak English, yet their mouths never move), and Young Gary isn’t any better. Since he’s entirely a CGI creation, he’s entirely phony-looking the duration of the movie. Because director Hyung-rae Shim (Dragon Wars: D-War) and his fellow crew members were bankrupt in the idea department, a second Young Gary emerges from the ground at the end, only so the two can battle each other.

The terribly bad acting — with terribly bad dialogue to match — keeps Reptilian from being a total snoozer. At one point, someone exclaims, “Compared to this guy, Godzilla is a pussy!” That’s untrue. —Rod Lott

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Those toothy, rolling fuzzballs are back … and in space! Although they did the galaxy-quest thing well before Jason Voorhees, Pinhead or even the Leprechaun went into orbit, they certainly didn’t do it better.

Headed home from Saturn, members of a spaceship crew — played by Brad Dourif (Child’s Play), Eric DaRe (TV’s Twin Peaks) and a certainly now-ashamed Angela Bassett (Strange Days), among others — must fight for their lives when their craft becomes overrun by the exceedingly puppet-like varmints of the title. Said critters accidentally are freed from their eggs when a guy gets mad after Bassett punches him for walking in on her in the shower, so he shoots the eggs with an energy blast. It happens.

Directed by Rupert Harvey — who produced the 1986 original and 1991’s Critters 3, the inauspicious film debut of Leonardo DiCaprio — Critters 4 desperately would like to emulate Ridley Scott’s Alien. The problem with this goal is that Harvey’s monsters are silly, not scary, and yet Critters 4 isn’t spoofy.

But it is very cheap and very stupid, and at no time does anyone help Bassett get her groove back. The apex of humor comes at the end when the credits assure us that no critters were harmed in the making of the movie. Ooh, stop it! My sides are splittin’! —Rod Lott

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