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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This is all you need to know to make an effective decision about whether to watch the giant cockroach film Mimic: the kids die.

The Relic was released around the same time, and it, too, had a scene where street-smart kids did some ill-advised adventuring. Of the two, Relic’s kids are more annoying; sadly, they survive that movie’s man-beast, whereas director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) has no compunction about showing the feral impulses of his mutants. So if you want a “safe” monsterama that entertains yet doesn’t strive for anything else, Relic is your choice. Want something with more meat? Go Team Mimic.

The sci-fi flick is imperfect, made much better by the director’s cut which adds character development, backstory and subtlety to what is still very much an “us vs. them” movie à la Aliens. Even neutered, Mimic is the best pure killer-bug film in ages, possibly since the giant ants of 1954’s Them! Whereas Them! warned us of the dangers of nuclear testing, Mimic introduces the more modern peril of biological tampering. Its heritage hews closer to Frankenstein than The Deadly Mantis, as Mira Sorvino’s scientist has the best of intentions, releasing bioengineered sterile cockroaches to stop a plague. As in all “nature runs amok” films, however, nature finds a way; in this instance, “the way” is to grow to 6 feet tall and learn to imitate humans.

What del Toro initially planned doesn’t come to fruition, but what survived studio interference is damned entertaining. Sorvino (The Replacement Killers) is strong and resourceful as the resident Sigourney; Jeremy Northam (The Net) makes a charmingly geeky counterpart; Charles S. Dutton (Alien 3) pulls out his usual Charles S. Dutton charm. The CGI is fine, if a little raw; the practical effects gloriously disgusting (you’ll never think about excrement the same way again!), and if the final result somewhat lacks for the usual del Toro verve, blame studio execs.

It’s instructive to place Mimic up against movies like The Relic (and not just for the dead kids). The Relic gives us a journeyman director (Peter Hyams) with nothing really vested in the material, working for a paycheck and delivering the product as just that: a product, something to be merchandised. Mimic shows us a genuine artist struggling within artificially defined constraints to deliver a personal vision. It’s flawed and the seams show at points, but del Toro’s compromise is still worth 10 times Hyams’ manufactured goods. —Corey Redekop

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If you’ve never seen an alligator in slacks before, you owe it to yourself to see The Alligator People. To be fair, this sci-fi schlocker technically should be titled The Alligator Person, but that’s hardly as marketable.

In the needless wraparound story set at a sanitarium, two men hypnotize a woman (B-movie queen Beverly Garland, Not of This Earth) to tell the story she otherwise doesn’t remember: the one where she was newlywed nurse Joyce Webster, seated on a train heading to her honeymoon with hubby Paul (Richard Crane, TV’s Rocky Jones, Space Ranger). But one telegram and station stop later, Paul exits the choo-choo without explanation — not to mention consummation — and leaves his nonplussed bride behind!

Sniffing for clues, Joyce hits pay dirt years later when she traces an old address of Paul’s to a stately plantation smack-dab in Louisiana swamp country. She’s invited to spend the night, provided she does not break the one red flag house rule: Do not leave the bedroom at night, no matter what. Joyce agrees, then totally leaves her bedroom at night, because she’s a nosy, horny woman and hears a piano playing. Unless this is your first film viewing ever, it spoils nothing to say that she finds Paul, his skin like cracked scabs, thanks to a science experiment entailing some 6 million volts.

Directed by Roy Del Ruth (Phantom of the Rue Morgue), this minor but merry flick bears echoes of the previous year’s mad-scientist classic The Fly, but lacks its lasting appeal. There’s still plenty to recommend, however, from Lon Chaney Jr. growling through a supporting role to Dick Smith’s alligator-man makeup effects. I want to rub my hand on them. —Rod Lott

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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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