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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Originally one-third of Miramax’s aborted sci-fi anthology Alien Love Triangle, director Gary Fleder’s Impostor clearly should have stayed that way instead of being expanded into a full-length movie. As a half-hour short (which the DVD allows you to see), it’s nice and compact in a perfectly acceptable Twilight Zone-ish way. But multiply that by three, and it only succeeds in not succeeding.

The elfin-faced Gary Sinise (TV’s CSI: NY) stars as Spencer, a weapons designer some 75 years into the future. One day at work, he’s arrested by military man Hathaway (Vincent D’Onofrio, Full Metal Jacket) and assumed to be an android with a bomb in his heart, intended to assassinate a government official.

So is he or isn’t he? Even Spence doesn’t know for sure, but he spends the rest of the movie running and trying to clear his name, making Impostor an uneasy mix of The Fugitive and Minority Report, which, like this, was based on a Philip K. Dick short story.

Somehow, the film seems to progress at half the speed of its on-the-lam main character. This is because it’s padded with repetitious scenes, needless subplots and just plain ol’ drawn-out sequences. Sinise’s miscasting doesn’t help matters; he’s about the most unappealing action hero modern cinema could think up. —Rod Lott

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Even as a kid, I knew Krull to be a weird and not altogether successful amalgam of Star Wars, Excalibur, The Lord of the Rings, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer and many, many others. Peter Yates’ film follows the standard adventure template set out by its betters: Take some reasonably attractive and devastatingly dull people, throw in an incomprehensible evil only they can stop, mix with secondary actors far more charismatic than the leads, and stir. It doesn’t really matter that it feels like the people behind the camera are making it all up as they go along, as long as something is always happening.

And what happens offers its share of pleasures, if you can fight your way past a few substandard effects and the pale-white blandness of leads Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony. Past that, Krull offers:
• bizarre Stormtrooper/alien hybrids conquering a pseudo-feudal kingdom with laser muskets;
• invaluable character actor Freddie Jones (Dune) as the movie’s Obi-Wan;
• fierce-yet-lovable highwaymen (including Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane!);
• a wimpy-yet-lovable shape-shifting magician;
• a towering-yet-lovable cyclops;
• the glave, a legendary weapon that actually has very little purpose, but is kinda cool;
• and the crystal spider, terrifying and not-at-all-lovable. It’s one of the last true examples of Ray Harryhausen-esque stop-motion monsters and cinema’s last great giant spider until Shelob replaced it in my nightmares.

If nothing else, I would love Krull just for its part in one of my favorite geek jokes of all time, a quick visual gag on TV’s American Dad: a close-up of Wizards and Shut-Ins magazine, the cover proudly proclaiming, “500 Reasons Why Krull is Better than Sex!”

Better than sex Krull ain’t. But it’s far preferable to more modern, but far less fun adventure epics like Dungeons & Dragons and Eragon. Those movies were craven attempts at pandering to a fan base, whereas Krull, for all its numerous faults, at least tries to have some fun. —Corey Redekop

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The “jumper” of Jumper is a young man named David (Hayden Christensen, Star Wars episodes I through III) who suddenly and inexplicably acquires the gift of teleportation. (Plot points pop up and vanish almost as quickly.) The newfound power allows him to escape an abusive father and get the bright idea to “borrow” considerable cash sums from bank vaults.

While romancing Millie (Rachel Bilson, TV’s The O.C.), a childhood crush grown up to be a clueless barmaid, David is chased not by the cops, but by the Paladins, a shadowy organization for whom Roland (Samuel L. Jackson, sporting white hair that makes him look like a Fisher-Price toy) works. Yes, that’s right: David is not the only “jumper,” as he learns when he meets the cocky Brit named Griffin (Jamie Bell, Billy Elliot).

The mild joy of Steven C. Gould’s 1992 source novel stems from its childlike view of an amazing power. With the on-the-page David greeting his newfound skills with equal guilt and glee, it’s not unreasonable to view it as a thinly veiled tale of hitting puberty and discovering the magic of erections.

For the screen, however, the normally gifted director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) reduces that story to a mere special effect. Although mildly diverting, there’s nothing all that innocent — or human — about it. Wooden, however, is a quality Christensen has in spades. –Rod Lott

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Birds committing suicide by smashing into a Japanese airliner doesn’t bode well for its passengers. Shortly thereafter, a glowing UFO appears and forces the plane to crash-land in a remote area not only without water, but an almost equal hope of rescue.

Among the survivors is a white-gloved, would-be terrorist (Hideo Ko, Horrors of Malformed Men) who wanders into a cave where a blue blob of space Jell-O throbs and telepathically splits his forehead vertically, from hairline to nose tip – or, as a fellow passenger puts it, “like a pomegranate.” Now under the control of an unseen alien force, he becomes the host for its bidding.

The aliens’ objective: Exterminate the human race. They do it via body snatching. You know how to snatch a body, don’t you? You just press your lips together and suck a neck.

In Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, there exists a surfeit of survivors arguing over who will leave the confines of the downed jet and when. Pacing and padding issues, however, are made up for in the vibrant visuals. Impressive miniatures in the plane crash and rockslides (both of them) are one thing; the use of saturated color is another — even the plane’s pilots make note of it in the opening scene.

While the title links itself to the classic pod-people Invasion of 1956, Goke appears to hold influence itself, most notably on 1987’s The Hidden. More than just sci-fi shocks, the film is a pointed commentary on the nuclear age from Hajime Sato, the director of Terror Beneath the Sea, with the most memorable moments arriving in the final minutes. —Rod Lott

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