Jerry Jameson is the Michael Corleone of made-for-TV disaster movies. He’d directed about a half-dozen before graduating to the big-screen reins of Airport ’77 and Raise the Titanic (a disaster movie in reverse?). Just when he thought he was done with uh-oh flicks for the tube, they pulled him back in. Arguably the biggest is Starflight One, also known by the unimaginative, kindergartener-workshopped title Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. It may as well have been called Airport ’83: In Space.

On the eve of the maiden voyage of Starflight One, the world’s first hypersonic transport plane, designer Josh Gilliam (Hal Linden, TV’s Barney Miller) doesn’t think it’s ready to fly. But because stocks are more valuable than humans, the cantankerous CEO (Ray Milland, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) refuses to delay launch. So up, up, up it goes, with Lee Majors (TV’s The Six Million Dollar Man) starring as the pilot, with Lauren Hutton (Viva Knievel!) playing the publicist intimately familiar with his cockpit.

Wouldn’t you know it? Things go wrong, kicking the $50 million craft out of Earth’s orbit and gaining a hole in its cargo hold, placing all 60-some-odd passengers in mortal danger. To account for the loss of gravity, string is strung down the aisle for people to hold onto! But how to solve the problem of precious air hissing away by the second? The crew simply calls the Space Shuttle Columbia (R.I.P.) to drive on over, pick up Gilliam (transferred by floating coffin, no less) and take him back to man the ground-control computers. After that, the shuttle returns to fetch the passengers from Starflight One via a snake-like chute whose insides look like a Fantastic Voyage through the esophagus.

Sizewise, Hutton’s celebrated space between her two front teeth doth not compare to any gap of logic among the dozens present in Starflight One. Curiously, in look and feel and theme, the film is like a no-jokes retread of Airplane II: The Sequel, as if one of the Starflight producers — for sake of argument, let’s say Henry Winkler — saw the comedy the year before and said, “Ayyyyyyy! Let’s do that, but serious. And with chintzier cheeseball effects.”

Also aboard this interminable, star-studded teleturkey are future Oscar nominee Tess Harper as Majors’ too-mousy wife, future Weekend at Bernie’s corpse Terry Kiser as an asshole, future Elm Street teen-dream slayer Robert Englund and future insufferable evangelical Kirk Cameron. Thoughts and prayers. —Rod Lott

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Unrelated to his 1970 featurette of the same name, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future posits a time in which “surgery is the new sex” amid human evolution’s next giant leap.

Starring in his fourth Cronenberg film, Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, a man whose body grows new organs. His blood and guts make the ideal canvas for performance artist Caprice (Léa Seydoux, No Time to Die), who tattoos these organs and, in full view of spectators, removes them via remote-controlled device of crab leg-like bony things tipped with scalpel blades. It slices, it dices, responding to Caprice’s every push of a gamepad, which looks not unlike a frog and strongly recalls the director’s 1999 effort, eXistenZ. As Tenser and others undergo the procedures, they moan in orgasmic ecstasy — and with an acceptable amount of camp — at each cut.

Enter Kristen Stewart (2019’s Charlie’s Angels) as part of a shadowy organization that registers people’s organs, Scott Speedman (The Strangers) as the father of a kid who eats plastic, and the foregone conclusion that Cronenberg is not operating in accessibility mode à la A History of Violence, his first collaboration with Mortensen, the DiCaprio to his Scorsese. Did I mention the dancer (Tassos Karahalios) with several dozen ears and a sewn-shut mouth and eyes?

As par for Cronenberg’s course, Crimes of the Future finds him bringing an inherently intriguing premise full of Big, Intellectual Ideas. What ultimately keeps this film’s from success is how less-than-fully fleshed-out the speculative execution seems, in part due to an overly talky script. The auteur’s unmistakable and unmatched eye for set design, however, is present and alert, from a pulsating umbilical bed to a tooth-laden feeding chair with herky-jerky moves like the 4D motion seats at your local multiplex — you know, the theater chain likely not playing this movie.

Intentional or not, this is Cronenberg as close to alienating the mainstream as possible. I say “close” only because at no point does a character sexually penetrate an open wound — and certainly not for a lack of opportunity. That’s too bad, because Crimes of the Future could use a car Crash or four. —Rod Lott

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Six people wake in a cornfield. None have any idea of why or how they got there, but each finds an object next to them: matches, a compass, a gun, etc.

Is this a cruel prank? A Hangover scenario? A sociology experiment? A government conspiracy? The work of Malachai? A concussion-involved LARP? A holiday party for pawn shop employees? Or Cube as serialized in The Old Farmers’ Almanac?

Answer: It’s Escape the Field, an inconsistently diverting puzzle thriller from first-feature director Emerson Moore. The survival tale quickly establishes its central mystery, intros the characters and amps up the stakes as the unwitting players search for answers, not the least of is which is a way out. And how these objects might help them. And hey, who/what else is hiding among the acres of ears?

With Jordan Claire Robbins (TV’s The Umbrella Academy), Theo Rossi (Kill Theory) and Shane West (Awakening the Zodiac) leading the cost-efficient cast, Escape the Field appears more than capable of being an agriculture-dependent take on the Escape Room franchise. After all, Moore and co-scribes Sean Wathen and Joshua Dobkin have packed a season’s worth of Lost into an untaxing hour and a half, without all the side stories to detract from the action.

However, they also bring the divisive series’ mountain of frustration — less in how it ends and more about just what the heck we’re looking at in the final shot. After three rewinds, I still don’t know. —Rod Lott

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Pity poor Lisa. She wakes in what looks to be a high-tech air duct, but with no idea where she is, how she got there or why. Only the gadget encircling her wrist — part flashlight, part timepiece — gives her an indication: It’s not good.

Sure enough, Lisa (Gaia Weiss, The Legend of Hercules) is part of a truly twisted game, forced to crawl through a maze of pipes of varying circumference — none comfortable for her or the Meander viewer. That goes double when the pipes start retracting in size as she scurries through.

You could say if a saving grace exists for her, it’s that the pipes aren’t loaded with surprise traps!

But you’d be wrong, because the pipes are loaded with surprise traps: fire, water, acid, wire and — take a breath; you’ll need it — much, much more.

Little dialogue notwithstanding, how can a film consisting almost entirely of a woman maneuvering her way through dark, tight passageways be compelling? Doesn’t matter, because Hostile writer and director Mathieu Turi succeeds with just that — perhaps too well, as Meander quickly grows so increasingly claustrophobic, I had to look away a few times just in case my daily dose of Lisinopril weren’t strong enough to keep my blood pressure at a manageable level.

I had no such reaction to watching Ryan Reynolds or Stephen Dorff trapped in their respective wooden coffin and car trunk for the whole of their also-respective Buried and Brake. But there’s something about Meander that elicits raw panic; going out on a limb, I’m guessing it’s the potential to get stuck. The inability to turn around. The absence of knowledge of what lie ahead. The praying it’s not a sharp curve. Hell, the poster alone sends me into a loop-de-loop of anxiety.

Comparisons to Cube and Saw are not only inevitable, but well-founded, as Turi merges the core ideas of both without fully imitating either, yet reaching a final scene that may disappoint most. One element of Meander, however, is incontrovertible: the sheer bravery of Weiss in her performance and as a performer. She made me feel every inch of confinement to a point of oppression; even with the element of make-believe, I don’t know how she did it. —Rod Lott

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Even though I’m typically the first one to openly ridicule many modern films focusing on fantastical fare along the lines of goblins, hobbits and elves, there are a few from the 1980s I unabashedly enjoy, with one of them being the 1985 Ridley Scott flick Legend, a favorite video rental of my mother.

I have to admit that, during my many childhood viewings, even though I was somewhat lost in the plot, as soon as Tim Curry’s demonic creature Darkness showed up in the third act, the fear of God was in me and it didn’t matter what had come before, as I was engrossed.

And that Bryan Ferry song playing over the credits? I’ve always loved that tune.

Tom Cruise is Jack, a forest dweller in love with the lovely Princess Lili (Mia Sara). In order to impress her, like most men would do, he shows her the secret unicorns roaming the woods. However, some evil demons are looking for the same beasts, mostly to steal their horns which apparently are imbued with some kind of magic.

This causes an immediate winter in the forest, as Jack and his newfound elven buddies try to make it down to the underworld to rescue Lili and regain the horn. That’s all well and good, but the place is ruled by Darkness, who, if you ask me, is the most perfect realization of a Satan-like creature in all of film. He is truly some scary stuff, although I heard women say he’s erotic. (Chances are they were looking for attention.)

When originally released, Legend was a bit of a bomb, and I can see why: The film suffers from a case of overimagination, almost creating its own rules and language — something that hurts many nonderivative films, as many moviegoers just want something they can get in and out of in around 90 minutes.

And, bless the studio, in the original theatrical cut, they sliced much of Scott’s work down to right around 90 minutes.

That being said, after viewing the director’s cut, I think he ably did his best to craft a modern-day fairy tale in the studio system, with actual thought put into it, so of course they didn’t want it. This isn’t just kids running around shouting made-up words like morons. But, you know, that’s the kind of fantasy that sells and this didn’t, so what do I know? —Louis Fowler

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