Based on a manga that’s literally dozens of volumes long and still going strong, the Japanese action epic Gantz has a premise both unique and head-scratching as its title. Students Kei (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama) meet an untimely death via subway car, yet are transported at the point of impact to what seems to be an alternate dimension.

At any rate, it’s a sterile-looking, unfurnished apartment, barren but for the giant black ball in the room’s middle. The sphere is to this film what the monolith is to 2001: A Space Odyssey: one big mystery. Via textual cues, it informs Kei, Kato and the few other perplexed newly dead peeps with them — naked cutie (Natsuna Watanabe) included — that they are to suit up, grab a gun and play its game.

In basic terms, that’s ridding Japan of aliens, which take on wildly varying forms, from onion-headed mutants and a clockwork robot to statues that come to life, all of which the players shoot with powerful, energy-pulse weaponry that results in exaggerated explosions of gore and grue. Die in the timed game, and you die for good; survive, and you can return to your former life, but remain at the ball’s nightly beck and call.

Combining elements of horror and sci-fi — and initially reminiscent of the great Cube — Gantz is a high-velocity thrill ride with only slight lulls between rounds of go time. Like many effects-driven Asian films, it’s a little too long, but it certainly delivers bang for your buck, not to mention some sly laughs and more than a few WTF moments. The two-hour affair doesn’t offer closure so much as a breathing point before the forthcoming Gantz: Part II, and I’m perfectly primed for another leap into its imaginative world. In the meantime, I’m intrigued to the point of seeking out the comics. —Rod Lott

It’s not hard to appreciate the impulse to turn supermodels into movie stars, despite the fact that it has never actually worked. Here you have someone who is already famous and who has already shown a tremendous ability to look fantastic in front of camera. What could possibly go wrong?

To answer that question, I give you Alien from L.A.

There is no doubt that Kathy Ireland had an arresting onscreen physical presence. The word “hot” in this case would be most à propos, especially if it was preceded by the words “goddamn” and “fucking.” But, just like many famous silent-era stars whose careers ended when talkies took over the medium, the power of Ireland’s charisma is tragically undone each and every time she opens her mouth and does us the tremendous discourtesy of allowing words to escape from it.

Cursed with the kind of voice that causes dogs to howl in misery whenever she speaks, her is further diminished by a script that requires her to essay the role of the whiniest protagonist in the history of narrative storytelling. At times, the dialogue suggests that this was a deliberate choice on the part of director/co-writer Albert Pyun. Forced to cast Ireland as his lead, he obviously decided to turn her greatest weakness into the film’s main running joke, but chose to do so in a way that only makes watching it more of a chore than it might have otherwise been.

The nominal plot concerns a California waitress (Ireland) going to Africa in order to find out more about her absentee (and presumed dead) father, only to fall down the same hole he did and become trapped in the underground city of Atlantis. To say that Alien lacks dramatic momentum is something of an understatement. The only memorable scene comes at the very end, where Ireland is finally shown in the kind of outfit that got her the role in the first place. It’s almost worth the previous 90 minutes, but in this day of Google, you can easily find similar pictures of her in similar outfits and never once fear that she might ruin it all by saying something. —Allan Mott

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From about the only part of Fantasia that isn’t a total snoozer comes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an overlong Walt Disney fantasy-adventure with special effects shooting out of every orifice. Nicolas Cage essays the role of the sorcerer half of the equation; Jay Baruchel, the apprentice.

Cage is Balthazar Blake, a thousands-year-old magician for the powers of good (yet he can’t do anything about his stringy, homeless-man hairdo), while Baruchel is Dave, a New York nerd who speaks so nasally, you’d think this was a 110-minute advertisement for Breathe Right strips. He’s also the chosen one to help Blake in the fight against bad, a magician named Whorebath. Correction: Horvath (Alfred Molina).

They’re all fighting for control of something called a “grimhole.” (Can you say that in a Disney film?) Distracting Dave are his hormones; his magic wand grows for his childhood crush, bland blonde Becky Barnes (Teresa Palmer). He impresses her by playing musical Tesla coils. When she’s coming over, he has to clean up the place lickety-split, allowing the film to re-create Mickey Mouse’s ill-fated, abracadabra approach to housekeeping, but only after a shot of a dog urinating.

Apprentice reunites Cage with his National Treasure franchise director Jon Turteltaub, and you’ll wish they had made a third one of those instead. Especially when they had the smarts to cast the fetching Monica Bellucci, yet give her maybe five minutes of screen time (all clothed, at that). The only magic in it is that it comes to an end. —Rod Lott

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Just imagine the possibilities of a B-movie concerning two men vying for the affections of the last woman on earth. None of those possibilities are to be found in Roger Corman’s version, I’m sorry to say — not even if she were the Last Woman on Earth.

We first meet our trio during a Puerto Rican cockfight — with authentic mad-rooster footage! — the semi-lovely but wrinkly Betsy Jones-Moreland; shady hubby Anthony Carbone; and his lawyer, Robert Towne (yes, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, and he wrote this one, too). While the trio is scuba diving, everyone on land dies from a sudden lack of oxygen.

This leaves them lots of time to talk and eat and talk. The men start seeing each other as a threat, and Betsy as a prize. But all they do is talk and eat and talk.

There is one sequence I liked, when the Last Woman on Earth and her two dates roam the streets of Puerto Rico and see all the carnage. For a minute, it’s like they’re wandering through a George Romero film … only directed by Corman, y’know? You can skip it. —Rod Lott

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Novelist Michael Crichton was famous for being somewhat obsessive about the subjects that caught his fancy, often studying them until he could be considered almost an expert in the field. Sadly, the 17 years he devoted to researching the art of filmmaking weren’t quite as fruitful. As a director, he never managed to be more than an undistinguished journeyman; as a screenwriter, he failed more often than he succeeded.

His sixth and penultimate film, Runaway, is a clear example of his cinematic limitations. Always more interested in the ideas presented in his work than the stories he was telling, his plots served as little more than perfunctory frameworks for specific concepts and set pieces. Because of this most of his films succeed as superficial entertainment, but don’t hold up to any kind of prolonged analysis.

Set in an unspecified future where most menial tasks are now undertaken by non-anthropomorphic robots, Tom Selleck stars as the head of the local police force’s “runaway” squad, which is in charge of catching and stopping malfunctioning machines that pose a hazard to the public. When a robot murders three people, Selleck and his cute new partner, Cynthia Rhodes, uncover a plot by ruthless killer Gene Simmons to fuck everything that moves by selling a “smart bullet” capable of targeting an individual’s heat signature.

Caught up in this plot is a very hot pre-Cheers Kirstie Alley, Selleck’s young Flight of the Navigator son and a bunch of robot spiders that inject acid into their victim’s veins. Clearly in love with the film’s future-tech (most of which looks quite dated 26 years later), Crichton obviously wasn’t so enamored with his characters, none of whom are given any more depth than his robot creations.

Runaway has a few interesting moments and a good concept, but suffers from having been made by a man who was ultimately more interested in the idea of being a filmmaker than with filmmaking itself. —Allan Mott

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