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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The good news is that by 1979, man will have a functional space station. The bad news is that it’ll be destroyed by space amazons from Venus.
 
I know, men: You’re worried. Space amazons from Venus sound bad. Well, hot … but also bad. You’re thinking that they’re probably led by some horribly disfigured queen with a white-hot grudge against the men who made her that way, and you’re right. But at least she covers up her radiation-scarred face with a mask and wears short skirts. Her legs are still awesome.
 
And it gets better. Sure, the Queen of Outer Space has a small posse of fellow man-haters on her side, but most of the space amazons — like Zsa Zsa Gabor — are cool.

They miss us, guys, and they’re ready for some lovin. So what we’re gonna do is this: We’re going to send three, handsome, Captain Kirk-esque woman-tamers into space so the Venusians can capture and fall in love with them. We’ll also throw in a middle-aged scientist because it’ll be hilariously awkward when he’s sitting by himself while the good-looking astronauts are making out with Zsa Zsa and her two, hot friends around the campfire. Don’t worry about him, though. He’ll totally get mobbed by sex-starved babes once the revolution’s over and all the women realize that the three attractive guys are spoken for.
 
So, fellas, contact NASA today and tell them you want to be an astronaut. The future’s going to be amazing. —Michael May

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Contamination’s opening credits have the balls to claim it’s “based on an original story by Lewis Coates.” It should read, “based on an original story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett,” because what writer/director Lewis Coates (aka Italy’s Luigi Cozzi, the man who gave us Starcrash, the Star Wars rip-off that’s more fun than Star Wars) came up with clearly wouldn’t exist without Ridley Scott’s Alien. In fact, Cozzi wanted to call it Alien Arrives on Earth.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. Cozzi took Alien’s elements of the outer-space eggs and stomach bursting, and ran with them. When you have an effect as cool as an exploding gut, why use it only once? Why not a dozen times? You certainly get your money’s worth. Just ignore the stupid ending.

The intestinal problems start in New York City, when a ghost ship from the tropics wanders into port without a crew — alive, anyway. The conditions the investigating authorities find the seamen in will put you off deli meats for the day. And in boxes bearing a coffee company’s logo are slimy, green eggs that pulsate. Posits one investigator, “It could be somethin’ like a giant squash or an avocado or some kind of mango!”

Despite the decrepit-flesh buffet they’ve just witnessed, another investigator thinks it best to pick the egg up. Let the tummy troubles begin! Who cares if the actors suddenly look pregnant before their midsection blows? Cozzi had the good sense to shoot them all in slo-mo. The eggs even emit a pre-kablooey sound, like sea lions orgasming. Speaking of sound, the great Goblin provides the synth-tastic soundtrack, which is good considering how slowly the film’s final third moves. —Rod Lott

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Here is why I love Dune: It doesn’t work. Not as a drama. Not as a space opera. Not as a war movie. By the basic tenets of comprehensible storytelling, it’s ridiculous. Its overall failure is legendary. But taken as a whole, it’s a twisted dream, rife with spectacularly unique imagery and a baroque, Flash Gordon-like design that never fails to draw me in, even while I’m picking it apart.

But this is what happens when you hire David Lynch, that most idiosyncratic and nonlinear of directors, to adapt Frank Herbert’s dense, sci-fi classic. Lynch pares the plot of a space messiah on a desert planet past the bare essentials to a series of stunning images, tying them together with the most convoluted of narratives, goofy dialogue and aggressively uneven special effects — the first appearance of a sand worm is a classic, but the poor use of green screen would make modern Asylum mockbusters blush with shame.

Yet within Dune lie the seeds of something much greater. Watch as the Guild Space Navigator (an effects wonder) speaks through a grotesque vaginal slit. Gaze upon Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), his face swollen with boils, hovering beneath a shower of oil. Listen to the absurd rock score by Toto, which under no circumstance should work, yet does so gloriously. View the premature birth of a mutated reverend mother from the inside of the womb.

Dune, again, is ridiculous, with a game cast vastly more talented than necessary. However, by watching it, you glimpse the nightmarish vision of a director who just needed a chance to express himself outside the narrative demands of others. If nothing else, it makes you wonder what Lynch (who was approached) would have made of Return of the Jedi. I bet the Ewoks would have been far more feral, festooned with gaping wounds. —Corey Redekop

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