During a blizzard, a group of people is trapped inside a tiny airport. As a felon named Jack (Evil Dead icon Bruce Campbell) learns following a trip to the men’s room, some of the airport’s inhabitants are really aliens disguised as humans. Thus, the group has to simultaneously trust each other and figure out who among them isn’t the real deal. If it sounds like John Carpenter’s The Thing meets the TV sitcom Wings, you’re right!

All the stock characters are present in Terminal Invasion: the kindly old woman, precocious kids, harried businessman, insensitive husband, nagging wife, scaredy-cat security guard — right down to the token black guy who says things like, “This is whack!” and “Yeah, now that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!”

Campbell is the bad guy who is forced by circumstances to become the good guy, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine starlet Chase Masterson is a feisty alpha-female pilot. They try to find out who’s got the alien inside them by taking turns going through the X-ray machine, and not one of them brings up the sterility issue. Kids, don’t try this at home!

The first half of this straight-to-cable movie is actually pretty decent. It’s not until it becomes the standard cat-and-mouse game that things get … well, standard. Friday the 13th‘s Sean S. Cunningham directs better than usual, while Campbell is, as always, terrific fun to watch, even when mired in dung. —Rod Lott

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You know, when I watch crappy movies that went straight to video and hear ridiculous lines like “I’ll give you a lead enema!” and “I think table 3 could use some nachos,” I often wonder if the screenwriter had illusions his work was headed for the $100-million-budget treatment instead of one just above your average rental fee.

I thought that a lot during Cyber Tracker, partly because it was so boring, I had to do something to bide the time, and partly because its premise and some scenes reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. As expected, Cyber Tracker’s level of energy doesn’t compare to Minority Report, unless we’re talking about that part in the latter’s end credits where they listed the caterers.

Bloodfist franchise star Don “The Dragon” Wilson kickboxes his way through his role as a Secret Service agent in the near future, when “computerized justice” allows Terminator-like robots to execute the guilty immediately, no questions asked. But when the grieving, widowed Wilson is framed for murder, he has to clear his name in order to stay alive.

After all, he’s in danger of getting a lead enema, and table 3 sure could use some nachos. —Rod Lott

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In Paper Man, a fat, suspenders-wearing college nerd who looks like the spawn of John Denver and Munchie accidentally receives a credit card sent to his address to someone named Henry Norman. With the help of four computer lab buddies — including a foxy Stefanie Powers — they create a whole identity for this Norman character, thus enabling them to use the credit card for a spending spree.

After getting Henry a driver’s license, a Social Security number and even a birth certificate, “Henry” starts to become all too real. After the gnome boy dies from an insulin overdose and the token Asian is cut in half by an elevator — the result of computer errors both — the survivors get their computer theory pal, Avery (a sleepy Dean Stockwell), to erase Henry from the computer, which is as outdated as Ms. Powers’ hairstyle. It’s one of those big honkin’ mainframes with lotsa blinking lights, spinning tape reels and a court-stenographer interface.

But Avery’s efforts fail and Henry keeps on killin’, with fingers pointing to Avery himself. Says the computer lab technician to the sheriff, “He’s a brilliant student, but he’s abnormally shy.” Replies the sheriff, “Y’know, if there’s one thing I don’t look forward to, it’s spending time with a brilliant student who’s abnormally shy.” Huh?

The entire story is built upon incredible gaps of logic, but for a ’70s CBS made-for-TV movie, that’s expected and welcome. It doesn’t live up to the promise set forth in the first half, but the time mostly flies. I recall seeing a Married … with Children episode that was just like this mistaken-credit-card madness — just minus the murder. —Rod Lott

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If the phrase “hook echo” gives you a boner, The Day After Tomorrow is a movie tailor-made for you. For the rest of us, it’s just Independence Day with worse weather and better actors. As some sort of weather researcher, Dennis Quaid implores the world governments to do something about the current global warming situation that is melting the polar caps, certain to send the earth into a new ice age. The governments ignore his ominous threats, yet all over the world, strange phenomena of precipitation start to occur.

Although Asia initially gets some killer hail, the good ol’ USA bears the brunt of it, first with L.A. being decimated by multiple simultaneous tornadoes, and then flooding in New York City, followed by a huge temperature drop — thanks, hurricane! — that turns most of the eastern United States into an ice skating rink.

This is a great setup for a tragic disaster flick, but unfortunately, writer/director Roland Emmerich (2012), the 21st-century Irwin Allen, chooses to instead focus on Quaid’s attempts to rescue his son (Jake Gyllenhaal, Source Code) from the frozen confines of the New York Public Library. A perfectly excisable subplot has Quaid’s doctor wife Sela Ward (The Fugitive) act worried while tending to a hairless cancer-patient kid whose hands appear permanently glued to a Peter Pan hardback.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the loving father-son bond; it’s just that I don’t buy the circumstances the play out onscreen — namely, Quaid getting all his co-workers to tag along, risking their lives to walk across several state lines in sub-Arctic temperatures to retrieve someone who isn’t their own flesh and blood. I’d be like, “No thanks, boss, but you’re welcome to borrow my gloves. They’re Thinsulate!”

Some terrific effects occasionally enlighten this otherwise downbeat, underwritten and occasionally manipulative sci-fi reali-tale recommended mostly to Weather Channel geeks. —Rod Lott

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For Teenage Caveman, a remake of Roger Corman’s 1958 adventure starring Robert Vaughn, talentless pervo Kids director Larry Clark rounded up perhaps the most unappealing group of what looks like malnourished, anorexic, doped-up, but well-shampooed young adults he could unearth. These teens live in a cave in a post-apocalyptic America, but when one of them kills the sexually predatory tribal leader, they hightail it toward the ruins of Seattle, but a storm knocks them out en route.

They mysteriously wake up in their underwear, in a high-tech, 21st-century compound, having been brought there by its inhabitants, an Asian slut (Tiffany Limos, Clark’s Ken Park) and her boyfriend, Neil (Richard Hillman, Bring It On), who looks like James Van Der Beek if he were a member of the New York Dolls. From here, Clark’s waste of a film becomes the making of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, as Neil and his lady introduce the innocents to the joys of shaving your pubic region in a communal bath, snorting coke, drinking Cutty Sark by the bottle and — with detailed, hands-on instruction — having promiscuous sex.

This paradise soon sours as the kids begin dying at the hands of Neil, who is really a 120-year-old genetic freak with superheightened senses. He hulks out into a large-craniumed, hairy-chested monster who runs around in silver trousers. Thus, it’s the usual Clark film: quasi-kiddie porn with amateur acting and a shitty screenplay (“You’re a looner!” the heroine exclaims at the monster), but with the added bonus of the occasional exploding human.

Just because this is the only movie you’re likely to see where the creature flips off the “hero” and screams “You fuckin’ cunt!” before being blown to smithereens doesn’t mean you should. —Rod Lott

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