In In the Year 2889, fashions have devolved to the late 1960s. Oh, and nuclear war has occurred, leaving an old, curmudgeonly military man and his pretty daughter alone and holed up in their quiet, isolated valley home. He has just enough rations for three people: himself, his daughter and her fiancé, for whom they’re waiting to show up.

At the first knock at the door, however, some random, radiated, bacon-faced guy falls into their entryway. Capt. John gets out his Geiger counter and is concerned about the radiation, but his daughter insists on letting him stay. Oh, well, okay — since you asked nicely, honey.

Then, immediately following, four others show up and weasel their way into the compound. It all serves to piss off Capt. John, who promises to settle arguments with the trusty gun hanging in a holster from his tan jumpsuit. It’s not long before the group is bickering and at each other’s throats.

To complicate matters, such as a shortage of food and no more alcohol, there’s a mutant monkey monster on the loose. Or so they say it’s descended it’s from monkeys, but the budget only allows for a grampa mask with added fangs and one hollow eye socket. What else would you expect from Mars Needs Women schlockmeister Larry Buchanan? —Rod Lott

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There’s no need to watch Altered States while in an altered state, because crazed director Ken Russell appears to have done that for us. That very well could be why the science fantasy goes awry shortly after setup.

Professor Eddie Jessup (William Hurt, in his first starring role) is studying man’s ability to enter other forms of consciousness, but his time in the floating tank only takes him so far. So he goes to Mexico to partake in some ritual involving a tribal magic-mushroom concoction that looks like fecal stew. It causes him to have überkooky hallucinations of a seven-eyed goat, rape, sand lizards, a lava closet — in other words, Russell’s mid-morning daydreams and happy thoughts.

Eventually, the effects of the poop soup strengthen when Jessup soaks in a sensory-deprivation tank, causing him to regress into a primal, ape-like man. Speaking of apes, Blair Brown’s armpits are razor-neglected; she plays his love interest/wife/ex-wife (all in the span of about 15 minutes) who had a big, red flag not to continue their relationship when he admits to envisioning a crucified Christ when he orgasms.

Then 5, Drew Barrymore plays one of the Jessup children. (I didn’t check the credits, but perhaps she consulted on the hallucination scenes?) The most interesting portion of the film is when Hurt’s arms and torso start to bubble up mid-morph — nothing a little tough-actin’ Tinactin couldn’t fix — and eventually goes full-devo Darwin, turning the local zoo into his personal Golden Corral. He leaves quite a mess, which is the most apt description for Russell’s film — one full of big ideas, but little coherence and lots of, in the words of one shouting character, “Kabbalistic, quantum, friggin’ dumb, limbo mumbo-jumbo!” —Rod Lott

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Thanks to the talents of the filmmakers involved (especially screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to make both Time After Time and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) Invasion of the Bee Girls is a far better movie than any movie called Invasion of the Bee Girls has any right to be.

So much so that there’s a tendency among critics to describe it as a satire in order to justify the fact that they’re recommending a movie called Invasion of the Bee Girls, when the reality is the film mostly plays its exploitative concept completely straight, with few overt attempts at social commentary.

While I admit it is easy to interpret a film in which a group of sexually alluring women are compelled to engage in a mating ritual that causes their male partners to suffer fatal heart attacks as a sly commentary on the then-growing women’s liberation movement, it actually takes quite a bit of mental trickery to justify that interpretation based solely on the movie’s content. Tonally, Bee Girls never feels tongue-in-cheek, and if it were supposed to, then the attempted rape scene in its middle is more than simply gratuitous, but completely inappropriate as well.

The reality is that Invasion of the Bee Girls is simply a very well-executed version of a kind of film that traditionally sucks, which makes it less a commentary on its own subgenre than the standard by which that subgenre should be judged. Plus, it has tons of nudity. —Allan Mott

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Being someone who hasn’t played video games regularly since the heyday of the Atari 2600, I have zero to little knowledge of the Tekken franchise. That statement still holds true after taking in the animated feature it has spurred, Tekken: Blood Vengeance 3D. I’m guessing the word “Tekken” must mean “boredom” in at least one of the Asian languages, because that’s the best description for this sorry excuse for entertainment.

I saw neither blood nor vengeance. I did see some leather-clad babe on a motorcycle trading sore words with another improbably proportioned woman in a near-kimono. There was also a schoolgirl who rode a panda to class, only to find herself competing with a fellow co-ed — the one garishly dressed in shades of purple, up to the added colors in her albino-white hair — for the affections of a guy who has an ongoing hobby of diving off rooftops in a bid for suicide.

In other words, TBV3D — as its fan base would call it, if the film were good enough to merit one — is less a futuristic fighting action piece and more just a piece. Of poop, that is. I suppose that’s okay if you’re expecting a giggly rom-com set in the halls of a learning institution. But then it should be titled Tekken: Giggle School 3D, no?

Tekken-ites seated around me in the theater sure enjoyed it, laughing at every gag, but those came across as in-jokes to this newbie viewer, because the movie expends no effort to set up any of the characters and their relationships to one another. Just what the hell was going on in this movie? My precious time being wasted, that’s what. —Rod Lott

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I, Robot: Me, unimpressed. You, better off doing something else.

In a very loose adaptation of Issac Asimov’s classic book, I, Robot imagines a futuristic world 30 years from now, where friendly, eager-to-please robots are members of every household; where one miswired robot is suspected of murder; and where an entire robot revolution can be squashed by a wisecracking, sweet potato pie-eating cop in a skullcap and Converse sneakers.

That would be Will Smith, as Det. Spooner (a character not in the book, fork you very much), a homicide cop investigating the apparent suicide of a prominent robot inventor at the office of U.S. Robotics. All signs point to a new-model robot with the high-tech name of Sonny, although no robot has ever committed a crime before, being programmed with three laws which state, in essence, that no robot may ever harm a human; that a robot must obey human orders, as long as it doesn’t harm humans; and a robot must protect its own existence, also as long as it doesn’t harm humans. (These rules, unfortunately, do not extend to the audience.)

I, Robot doesn’t have a bad premise, just bad execution. My main problem with this movie lies with a miscast Smith. Continuously walking with a rap-video swagger, he has two modes of acting, each inappropriate: In normal situations, he’s over-the-top and shouting, while in times of life-threatening danger, he’s suddenly under the spotlight at Catch a Rising Star, lobbing leftovers from his Men in Black II quipbook. These ineffectual attempts at comedy include such one-liners as “Aw, hell, no!,” “Get off my car!” and — well, this is new — “Hold my pie!”

But he’s not the only actor to blame. As robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, model-turned-actress (in theory, at least) Bridget Moynahan is quite robotic herself, and looks to be on the verge of tears with every line reading. The best performances come from the robots, and they’re computer-generated. In fact, there are times in this movie where everything onscreen is computer-generated, turning I, Robot into, quite literally, a cartoon.

Gifted director Alex Proyas (Dark City, The Crow) doesn’t help matters, forever swirling his camera as if it were a gyroscope, killing all sense of perspective in the action scenes and nearly requiring a dose or two of Dramamine. All he’s done here is created yet another megaexpensive sci-fi film with big, dumb moments out of place for the antiseptic tone he initially sets. I can see the script meetings now: “And the explosion will hurl Will out of the house, only he won’t get hurt because he’ll use a door like a surfboard and land safely in the pond outside! And he’ll do this while saving a kitty!” In keeping with Hollywood blockbuster mentality, all feats of derring-do are filmed in slow motion, all plot points are telegraphed far in advance, and all people unloading shotguns do so with lips pursed in a scowl. —Rod Lott

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