Better than most of Bela Lugosi’s Poverty Row efforts — but still just average — is The Corpse Vanishes, in which he plays a mad doctor who sends poisoned orchids to brides so that they’ll expire on the altar.
He then steals their bodies — hence the title — so that he can extract their youth and inject it into his aging wife, who sleeps in a coffin. A nosy female reporter figures it all out. A cop shoots a midget. —Rod Lott
Paycheck most certainly was just that for star Ben Affleck, because he invests very little in the film, other than portraying an unlikable chucklehead, which his protagonist is not supposed to be. Like Minority Report (but with lower star wattage and much less behind-the-camera skill), Paycheck is based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Affleck plays some kind of freelance techno-whiz who consults on jobs so top-secret that after his gig is over, his memory of the experience is erased. As the story begins, he accepts a two-year assignment — one far longer than ever before — that will result in an eight-figure payday, meaning he won’t have to work ever again.
But when he’s done and his brain is wiped clean of the previous 24 months, he is shocked to find that he has forfeited his money in exchange for an envelope full of 20 items worthy of a junk drawer: a paper clip, a pass key, Affleck’s career. He’s also pursued by the police, for a murder he’s not sure he did or didn’t commit, and as he flees, he learns that each item in the envelope helps him evade capture. Perhaps he was working on a machine that could foresee … the future?!?
It’s not a terrible idea for a film, but director John Woo and company have steered it down that road. Woo’s Asian sensibilities simply do not translate well to American film; his direction is needlessly showy, making for choppy editing, awkward pacing and poor performances. Plus, when he manages — even in a sci-fi thriller — to throw a shot of his beloved white doves, I had to groan.
Affleck has shown signs of being able to act before, but here he’s simply coasting; the man can’t even laugh credibly. As a biologist and requisite love interest, Uma Thurman is completely vacant, giggling and trying to act like she’s Kate Hudson or something. She’s not and it doesn’t matter, anyway, because she and Affleck have zero chemistry. Oh, and I’m not certain, but I think Paul Giamatti is supposed to be playing a monkey. —Rod Lott
What do you get when you combine the plot of a bad ’50s sci-fi alien invasion movie with the visual aesthetics of a backyard slasher film and add just a dash of early-’80s porno sensibility? A terrible mess, naturally, but a strangely compelling mess for those not overly offended by others’ incompetence.
Evils of the Night features John Carradine, Julie Newmar and Tina Louise as alien doctors sent to our world to harvest “platelets” from healthy teenagers in order to help keep their population young beyond their years (which leads us to believe that Carradine must be a million years old by this point).
Despite their noble attempts to harvest these platelets without killing their unwilling donors, many of the kids die as a result of the harsh methods employed by their chief kidnappers, two mentally deficient mechanics (Neville Brand and Aldo Ray). The fact that we don’t actually care if any of these kids survive does have a somewhat negative impact on the movie’s overall tension.
Its brief running time is padded with a couple of spliced-in softcore interludes featuring well-known era porn stars Crystal Breeze, Amber Lynn and Jerry Butler, which — along with the minimal clothing worn by most of the female cast — makes the movie feel far sleazier than its plot requires. By the end, the (unintentional) joke does wear thin and it becomes hard to resist the temptation of your fast-forward button, but until then, Evils of the Night is just too awful for any bad movie fan to resist. —Allan Mott
Have we become such a navel-gazing, irritatingly self-introspective, youth-fellating culture that we can’t even make a decent giant monster movie anymore? It started with Cloverfield, where, instead of a gargantuan beast destroying New York, we got a group of slick hipster jerks dodging debris, searching for a superficial “love” interest while talking about how much they loved Fraggle Rock while a gargantuan beast destroyed New York. Maybe. It’s kinda hard to tell because the thing was filmed on the modern-day equivalent of a handheld Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. It’s like a Nick Zedd movie with self-esteem.
Monsters director Gareth Edwards, luckily, invested in a tripod so we can at least see what is going on. Too bad what is going on are two insipid spring breakers stuck in Central America, trying to get home to Regular America, while gargantuan monsters are destroying the lush Mexican countryside. Maybe.
This is a great idea — the chance for an Americanized District 9 — but every time leads Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able open their mouths, it’s like listening to every single drunken conversation you’ve ever overheard around closing time at Señor Frog’s. Mumblecore for the frat crowd, finally! And the monsters? They’re barely seen extraterrestrials who crash-landed in Mexico a few years back — oversized, Old Gods-esque creatures that crush and destroy whole villages and, best of all, inspire heavy-handed allegories about illegal immigration.
It’s commendable that Edwards made Monsters for $800,000 and, because of it, he’s got the upcoming Godzilla remake gig, which is awesome. If there’s one way to top the 1998 Roland Emmerich atrocity, it’s making an ultra-talky redux of a legendary kaiju film. Were the Duplass brothers all booked up? Either way, I look forward to the inevitable Taco Bell tie-ins. I won at least 10 free bean burritos last time! —Louis Fowler
I hope you like images of stars in space — because that’s the first three minutes of The Day Time Ended, an early Charles Band production in which a family living on a desert ranch in California finds strange things afoot after three supernovas explode and the light is absorbed by their abode’s solar paneling.
First off, the requisite annoying little girl finds a glowing green pyramid thing behind the barn and thinks nothing of it because she’s a selfish bitch whose one-track mind is dead-set on her new pony. This leads to bathroom lights and faucets turning themselves on and off, and soon the nighttime appearance of a 3-inch-high stop-motion alien who dances and flitters about the cabinets and bedding.
Then there’s a poorly matted spaceship that chases them through the house, and ultimately, as the title promises, time ends. Or rather, the family just gets warped into the future, on the outskirts of the city of tomorrow, and for some reason, this suits them just fine.
For us, however, it’s a whole other story — namely, one that can’t believe how director John “Bud” Cardos could follow up the greatness of Kingdom of the Spiders with dumb ol’ crap like this. —Rod Lott