In the near future, Jennifer Jason Leigh is Allegra Gellar, the world’s best game designer. The controls for her game look like pulsating handheld vaginas, and they attach directly to your spine with an umbilical cord. As the film opens, Leigh and a dozen others are test-driving her new virtual-reality game for the first time when she’s nearly assassinated by a man with a gun made of flesh that shoots teeth.

In case you couldn’t guess by now, eXistenZ was written and directed by David Cronenberg.

With various people wanting her dead, Allegra goes on the run with her company’s PR trainee, played by Jude Law. He’s never played her games before, so they get the necessary “bioport” installed in his back at a local gas station by attendant Willem Dafoe. Now Jude and Jen can play the game together to make sure it works.

The game plants Jude on the assembly line, cutting open mutated frogs for parts to make mini gamepods. This, incidentally, is where the movie starts to go south. Jen worries about her own gamepod, because it’s sick and diseased, and you wonder how the actors were able to keep a straight face.

Both Law and Leigh are fine, even if I suspect the latter is convinced she’s playing Elisabeth Shue. What’s Cronenberg trying to say in the Möbius-strip eXistenZ? Hell if I know! But for a while, I liked how he said it — gory amphibian parts, clitoral joysticks and all. —Rod Lott

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Hammer Film Productions was and is known for horror, but give the group credit for its one and only attempt at a sci-fi Western in Moon Zero Two. In the year 2021, the moon is inhabited; its residents play a circular-shaped board game called Moonopoly; and social life amounts to hanging out at the Lazy B Saloon, where the drink of choice — distilled rocket fuel, of choice — runs $35 a shot.

Our hero is Capt. William H. Kemp (James Olson, The Andromeda Strain), who specializes in retrieval of satellite scrap, and doesn’t want to shuttle interplanetary tourists: “I’m a space pilot, not a mechanically minded wet nurse.” However, when safety violations threaten to ground him, a guy’s gotta look long-term.

For Kemp, that means listening to Hubbard (Warren Mitchell, Jabberwocky), the purple-cloaked, eyepatch-sporting baldie about illegally mining the sapphire from a 6,000-ton asteroid. Total fox Clementine Taplin (Catherina von Schell, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), searching for her missing brother, shows up to provide much sexual innuendo.

The film’s highlights are a gravity-free bar brawl, however brief, and cartoon opening credits in a loony spirit not exhibited by the mostly serious story that follows. Directed by Roy Ward Baker (Quatermass and the Pit), Moon Zero Two certainly looks cool — and sounds it, with a swingin’ ’60s score — but feels forever set at quarter-speed. Good thing that in space, no one can hear you snore. —Rod Lott

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Imagine if The Terminator were a made-for-TV movie. And instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer robot with an authority problem, what if they cast a guy who looks not unlike Gopher from The Love Boat? Voilà! You have Assassin, written and directed by cathode vet Sandor Stern (Pin).

As the telefilm opens, government-created android Robert Golem (get it?) goes nutzoid and kills two fellow agents before going on the run, in search of more government agents to kill. In order to stop him, the team has to recruit two ex-agents now in the public sector. One is star Robert Conrad, bringing to Assassin all the verve and intensity of his Duracell commercials. The other is Karen Austin (Markie Post’s Night Court predecessor), because with Conrad in the lead, they needed someone to balance that out and lend the action film some testosterone.

Austin explains to Conrad that she helped create the cyborg (Robert Young, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who has two built-in weaknesses: His brain is in his stomach and he has to recharge his power supply every 72 hours by plugging into an air-conditioning unit for 30 minutes, which he does by removing a cord implanted in his ankle. He also has a detachable tummy for working on his insides and is prone to jumping out of high-rise windows to escape capture.

Assassin has no forward drive, nor anything resembling pure action. It’s mediocre in every way, right down to the costumer’s decision to clothe Conrad in butt-hugging khakis. It’s not intended for laughs, but generated a fair share for me. —Rod Lott

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Trailer provided by Video Detective

With roughly 14 minutes, no sound and the barest of film technology, Georges Méliès sure did pack a ton of stuff into A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage Dans La Lune if you’re French), the world’s first science-fiction film.

After a wizard demonstrates via chalkboard the path their rocket will leave Earth and land on its near-instant journey to the lunar body, laborers build the metallic capsule. Once complete, with much pomp and circumstance, it’s loaded into a giant phallus of a cannon by chunky ladies in short pants and Buster Brown hats. With half a dozen rich, old white men as passengers, it lands with a bloody thud into the right eyesocket of that creepy, creepy moon face.

The would-be astronauts climb out — clutching canes, but no oxygen tanks — and wave to their friends back on Earth. Then, being white-haired and all, they bunk down and sleep, wake up to a storm of stardust, and climb into the moon’s underground garden of oversized mushrooms, where hopping demons scoot their butts across a log like a dog with troubled anal glands does to your carpet. Our Earth warriors beat the crap out of them (they go up in puffs of smoke) and high-tail it home, only to land in the ocean. They get a parade in their honor, and probably got crazy laid.

Kidding aside, Méliès’ imagination is as off-the-charts as his ingenuity. Repopularized by Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Hugo, the cinema classic is best viewed in its 2011 restored form, containing its original, hand-colored images and with missing frames mimicked. It also now boasts a score by Air that’s — dare I say it — out of this freakin’ world. This Trip truly is one. —Rod Lott

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After a two-minute “previously on Gantz” type of intro, something one may construe as action goes down in Gantz II: Perfect Answer. It’s too little, too late, however, and followed by even more slog, until an ungodly walking running time of two hours and 21 minutes is reached. The whole of Japan should know better.

It’s a damned shame, given how frenetic the first film was a mere one year before. I suspect both Gantz chapters — birthed from a presumably never-ending manga, it bears mentioning — were shot back-to-back, as the original film ended in a cliffhanger. In hindsight, I’d rather have my questions of what would happen go unanswered, if the imperfect Perfect Answer is the lame response.

Although I give returning director Shinsuke Sato immense credit for not doing the same thing twice, I found myself pining for at least the mission-after-mission, go-get-this-goon structure to stick its head into the proceedings. In its place is a plot twist that the big, black ball called Gantz has up and changed the rules of his own game, thus pitting the black leather-costumed “contestants” against one another. Never underestimate the love of a human heart to fracture a team.

A couple of zippy sequences exist, primarily a mowdown-cum-showdown amid a crowded, speeding subway train. But the finale is sappy; the rogue’s gallery of aliens, missing; the electric charge sent down your cinematic spine, startlingly weak. So underwhelming and disappointing is this immediate follow-up, the experience is like licking the top of an old 9-volt battery to see if it has any sign of life left. —Rod Lott

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