Not to be confused with the forgettable Matthew Broderick/monkey team-up of the ’80s or the insipid teenagers’ apoca-party flick, this Project X is one of William Castle’s lesser-known pictures, likely because it’s neither gimmicky nor Rosemary’s Baby. It deserves not to be so obscure; far more eyes should feast upon this imaginative mix of The Matrix and Fantastic Voyage than just me and the Wachowski siblings (formerly known as the Wachowski brothers).

Set in 2118, the film posits the difficulty of retrieving a top-secret piece of info from the brain on a felled spy (Christopher George, Pieces) four days after he’s been frozen following a near-fatal plane crash. His last message to HQ warned that their country would be destroyed in 14 days, but failed to mention the weapon at play. To do this requires imprinting a new matrix (in other words, an entirely new identity and personality) as they probe his subconscious and pray his doesn’t notice or suffer brain damage.

They decide to make him part of a post-heist gang of bank robbers hiding out in a farmhouse in the 1960s. Their manipulation efforts include a dumb, beautiful blonde (Greta Baldwin), but the lost spy (Monte Markham, Guns of the Magnificent Seven) infiltrating the grounds isn’t part of their plan.

There’s a lot of Cold War paranoia going on here, but Castle does his best to dress it up as sci-fi entertainment, lest risk scaring audiences away. Despite a cast heavy with old fogies in jumpsuits and Brylcreem hairdos, he succeeds in crafting something resembling cutting-edge at his budgetary level. Production design is outstanding, even in its now-dated touches, and going further are the “special sequences by” producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera — yes, the animation giants, and this has to be the funkiest, hippest work of their careers. For Castle, Project X is his meatiest in subject matter; once his Tetris opening credits stop, the Big Ideas begin. —Rod Lott

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As if New Orleans didn’t have enough problems already, what with the occasional hurricane, frat-boy vomit in the streets and the constant smell of hobo urine, the city has to deal with an arachnoquake — that is, an earthquake that unleashes giant spiders, doy! — in … wait for it … Arachnoquake. It’s one of those made-for-Syfy movies, but you probably knew that.

These eight-legged freaks mostly harass a tour group on a trolley driven by Bug Hall (Alfalfa of 1994’s The Little Rascals). His passengers include a grumpy old man, an airhead woman, her Not LL Cool J hubby, two smirking teens and their asthmatic mom (Tracey Gold of TV’s Growing Pains), whose job as an eighth-grade biology teacher comes in handy to provide exposition during the requisite dissection scene. Elsewhere, her husband (Edward Furlong, Terminator 2) drives a bus of high schoolers that also is menaced.

Spiders are so creepy that the concept doesn’t require a big budget to exploit audiences’ readymade fear. (Take, for instance, 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders, the greatest depiction of the arac war yet, which sends chills up the spine.) They need only look real, if not be real; Arachnoquake‘s only could look more fake if they were cutouts on sticks. They’re completely computer-animated, with rounded edges and as white as a KKK costume. They breathe fire and dog-paddle in water. They look like cartoons.

On that note, director G.E. Furst (Lake Placid 3) colors his crap with touches befitting a ‘toon, despite Arachnoquake‘s relatively serious tone. Just one example: When one spider traverses a crosswalk, the street sign makes a cuckoo-clock sound for no good reason. It’s as senseless as Furlong’s big wisecrack after taking a baseball bat to a dead spider on the road: “Now that is how you make jambalaya! Yeaaaaahhhhh!”

Nooooo. —Rod Lott

Fifty years after an elementary school buries a time capsule, the modern-day student body unearths it. Everyone gets crappy Crayola drawings they’re all excited about, but lil’ Caleb (Chandler Canterbury, After.Life) receives a page of seemingly random numbers. His dad, John (Nicolas Cage), a “cool” science professor who says “Shit just happens” in class, gives it the ol’ look-see.

John determines the numbers aren’t random at all: Down to the date, casualty count and flippin’ GPS coordinates, they’ve predicted five decades’ worth of tragedies. Like what, you ask? Oh, everything from a hotel fire to something called lil’ ol’ 9/11 — perhaps you’ve heard of it? While Caleb gets a buzzing in his ears and is pursued by mysterious men who can shoot light out their mouths, his dad tries to prevent the remaining three tragedies.

Those “will they or won’t they happen?” sequences allow for some nifty effects sequences, from a passenger jet crash to a subway crash, but CGI visuals hardly can be the backbone of a sci-fi thriller. Director Alex Proyas — who’s worked on both sides of the genre spectrum with Dark City and I, Robot — should know better, but casting Cage was perhaps more damaging than anything in (or not in) the script. The once-great actor no longer can so much as yell convincingly, so of course, it’s now his go-to emotion.

With Rose Byrne (Insidious) on hand as a useless female lead, the movie all leads to a laugh-out-loud ending that combines Close Encounters with plodding stupidity. By then, any intrigue generated by the setup has eroded roughly 90 minutes prior. To paraphrase an old adage, sometimes not Knowing is better than Knowing. This is one of those times: a disaster flick that’s a disaster in itself. —Rod Lott

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Sword-and-sorcery flicks differ country to country. For example, here in America, our barbarians punch camels; in Turkey, they weep over a dead dog. Pussies. At least that’s the case with Tarkan, an adventurer created for Turkish comics and adapted to several live-action films, including Tarkan Versus the Vikings.

Tarkan (Kartal Tibet) looks like Charles Bronson (it’s the ‘stache) if he wore a long, blond wig, which we know Bronson would never do. In the comics, Tarkan’s companion is a badass wolf; here, it’s a German shepherd. Named Kurt. I don’t care how many tables Tarkans throws at his enemies, either — if you aren’t pushing the Wheel of Pain and balling Sandahl Bergman, you ain’t shit.

Good thing everyone else in the movie is more vicious than he. Its violence comes brutal and bloody — especially for its age — complete with more than one stabbed infant! What do you expect from those durn Vikings, who tie up their detractors to a dock so they may be sacrificed to a giant octopus?

Better Turkish fantasy actioners may have existed — maybe even from the Tarkan franchise — but how many contain such translated dialogue as “The game is up, you Asian rat” and, best of all, “Kurt, guard this bitch here.” —Rod Lott

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If there’s one giant monster I’ve ever truly felt sorry for, it’s The Ancient Enemy. Most cinematic behemoths don’t get much in the way of inner conflict or psychological depth. Phantoms, however, provides the audience with a study of the God complex, in the guise of an intelligent oil slick with visions of deification and serous inferiority issues who just wants to be remembered. I feel rather bad for the poor ol’ goop.

And it tries so hard to be one of the greats. It replicates humans like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It haunts the sewers like The Blob. It manifests the creepiest dog this side of The Thing. It uses giant moths to sucks out brains; it wipes out an entire town in an afternoon; and it even gives birth to a Lovecraftian cross of Liev Schreiber and a land squid.

But it just can’t seal the deal. All it takes to defeat it is a few vials of virus and Peter O’Toole (in an endearing performance of the sort only older English actors can pull off: equal parts gravitas and ham, replete with droll line readings that completely obliterate everyone else onscreen, including Sheriff Ben Affleck and Rose McGowan).

Phantoms is hardly perfect, often barely more than good, which is par for the course for anything author Dean Koontz has ever touched (the man positively reeks of adequacy). But director Joe Chappelle (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) understands how to create atmosphere, even if he doesn’t always succeed. He plays with silence and long takes, yet knows when to go for the gusto, makes the most of a low budget, keeps the cheap CGI to a bare minimum, and succeeds with a few of the creepiest moments I’ve seen in film. (That dog. That dog!)

All told, Phantoms is an effective creature feature that has quickly become a personal late-night staple, a cinematic snack to gobble down with cheap liquor and chips. Bonus points for the genius second act; the military and scientists arrive to survey the situation — a scenario which would normally result in an epic end battle of guns, mortars and tanks à la Godzilla — and The Ancient Enemy wipes them out in five minutes. Five! —Corey Redekop

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