Remember, folks, these sci-fi movie reviews have SPOILERS!.
Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai
I guess this is as good a place to put this review as any. It's not like IMDB knows what the hell they are doing with reviews. They put something called 'Halloween On Ice' under the Sci-Fi genre listing. Not to mention all those other movies that are completely ruined by placing it not under the genre it's supposed to go under but under the genre the last five minutes of the movie classify it as. Oh yeah, this movie, about aliens invading and cowboy-type scientists fighting them, is pretty damn good.
Alien
I first saw this while staring out of the back window of my parent's car while we listened to some Disney flick. Explains a lot.
This movie made no real impression on me, except for the classic table scene and the robot. Damn robots!
Aliens
I like how they indicated it was a sequel due to the placement of the extra letter.
Hicks kicks ass.
Alien 3
Someone fucked up here. Newt, the whole point of the second movie, and Hicks, die when the escape shuttle crashes into a prison planet. Newt, of course, had an alien inside her. The prisoners have to fight this singular beast.
Yanno, when the second movie had HUNDREDS of the alien monsters, go back to battling ONE is just a bit of a letdown.
At least Dark Horse ignored this movie in their ALIENS comic book series and novels. This movie deserves to be ignored. It would be a stinker even if Hicks and Newt had survived. Of course, if Hicks was alive the alien would be toast ten minutes into the movie and a lot of congugal visits would be happenin'.
Alien: Resurrection
'Posiden Adventure' was a heavy influence on this movie. The plot, action, camrea work, every bit of it was top-notch. (Ever notice how no 'fan' movies win any award whatsoever? Buncha facists).
It did have a few plot-holes.
Why did Sigourney have that weird affection for the baby alien at the end? Kill the fucker!
Why did that one character, who had been kicking ass and taking names, freeze like a ninny when encountering a differing shaped alien?
My brother was of the opinion that at the end, they were killing people just to kill people.
Voyager fans, keep an eye out for Ensign Suder.
Blade Runner
I fell asleep halfway through. This seems to be a common occurence with others.
Bicentennial Man
Oh my god. This has got to be the worst movie in the history of the entire damn universe.
Tell a five year old the premise of this plot. I garuntee you, after ten minutes of searching for the right words and being distracted by something shiny, he'll manage to get every last relevant plot point across to you. Then he'll talk about Pokemon. And it'll still be much more entertaining then this movie.
Escape From L.A.
See 'Escape From New York' but stupider. For example, the entire L.A. sewer system, according to this movie, leads to one specific point on beach. In reverse, the open flood control system leads back to the one point, the one road where the bad guy's lackey is driving.
Escape From New York
New York is a prison for thugs and degenerates. (But in the movie, there's a wall). Anywho, Kurt Russel is sent in after the President accidentally crash lands in the middle of all this mess.
This is one of the rare 'So bad it's good movies'. The plot is utterly predictable. The random new ally just happens to know just the right person to talk to to accomplish the task. The other good guys just happen to appear on the scene at the right time to provide just the right kind of help.
Oh, and did you know that mines placed right underneath cement without disturbing the cement in anyway are powerful enough to cut a cab in half and only harm the driver? They're called 'Split In Half, Cement Permeable, Non-Passenger Harming Mines' and they make a wonderful appearance in this fim.
Event Horizon
Boy oh boy, where do we start?
The jive talking black man? The gruff and arrogant engineer? The snooty, high falootin' doctor?
All the characters are drawn straight from 'Cliche 101'. Sam Neil and Laurence Fishbourne make their characters work. Almost.
The plot revolves around a ship attempting to rescue yet another ship who get itself in trouble.
I forgot if they used prison-planet volunteers for this mission but these people were certainly not millitary-trained. They bitched, complained, disobeyed orders, got killed because of it and went off the deep end a lot.
Frankly if I found the ship I was supposed to rescue empty, a giant floating void in the hold and half a log that showed a bloody massacre I would say "Oops, they're dead", turn around and go home.
In the end, yet another ship is sent to rescue the second one. Riiight. "Let's throw a third ship in where the last two went kaput!"
Fifth Element
Starring Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman and nipples.
Fortress 2
Despite the unrelenting efforts of the cast and crew, this story about a prison in space run by evil wardens actually managed not to suck.
Gattaca
It's '1984' but if they made it suck. The whole movie's focus is the main character's desire to go into space. And yet...and yet...the only thing we see OF space is out a porthole window.
Also, has a staple of low-budget crap movies; The scene in the empty floor-control pathways of L.A. (Think 'Terminator 2' chase scene, not that 'T2' was crap).
He-Man
Monica Geller and Tom Paris vs. Skeletor. How can you go wrong?
Independence Day
I darn near cried at the patriotic speech Bill Pullman gave near the end of the movie.
I did cry during the rest of the movie but not because of a love for my country. Because the movie sucked.
Innerspace
Martin Short gets a manned minature craft injected into his ass. It's mostly a comedy but worth it for the cool shots of inside a human body.
Johnny Mnemonic
The cover box has a white space on Keanu's head, so the tape reel would show up as if it was inside his skull. Sadly, this is the most clever thing of the entire movie.
Last Starfighter, The
Wouldn't a training simulator have much better graphics.
Lost In Space
Oh my! Oh me oh my. What an awesome movie! Gary Oldman was a fantastic Dr. Smith.
This whole thing was sheer brilliance from start to finish.
And Lacey Chabert has the coolest voice ever.
Speaking of such, did you see how they made her look horrible and evil in FHM? God, they must have slathered on the makeup with a cement mixer. I'll never understand makeup.
Mars Attacks
Big-headed mutant freaks from another planet shoot up ours.
I liked it. It made much more sense then 'Independence Day' and was ten times scarier.
Fans will notice Queen Amidala as the First Kid.
Matrix
There is no review.
Men In Black
Adapted from an Ultraverse/Marvel limited series, two heros stop a rampaging alien.
Everyone loves Jay and Kay but before this movie came out, Men In Black weren't so ... um... heroic. In UFO circles the M.I.B. reports indicate the men are scary, threatening, abusive and sometimes, not exactly human.
Mom And Dad Save The World
Kudos for not bothering to answer the question of 'How are they breathing' as the car in drawn through space.
Jeers for the insane editing job. The reunion between the rebel soilder and the pudgy Royal assistant is supposed to mean something, according to how long they spent on it. Unfortunately no more then a few seconds were spent even acknowledging this relationship in the first place.
Still, the movie works as it was supposed to, being a sci-fi comedy. Just don't watch it after 'Ferris Bueller'. Cheering for the evil principal makes my head spin.
Predator
Arnold leads a team of cannon fodder into the jungle. A nasty buggy alien hunts them down and fights them. The governer of Minnesota and that guy from the 'War Of The Worlds' series have roles.
Predator 2
Oh no! He's come to some run down California city with a few days to kill! A bathroom is not an impressive sight to see the Predator in when we've already seen him in the jungle.
A pointless, boring story all around punctuated by the hopeful, yet futile occasional explosion. Even the game was has impossible controls.
Quiet Earth, The
A man wakes up to find that everyone else has just...vanished. Taking his opprotunity while he has it, he runs to the local theatre and kick-starts the newest blockbuster into running so he can a view a movie without anyone who JUST WON'T SHUT THE HELL UP MY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU SHUT UP!
Screamers
A colony is overrun by a secuirty system gone whacko.
Pure eye-candy (scenery, not porn!) with an utterly predictable plot and a laughable ending.
Soilder
There's not much to rag on with this film. Kurt Russell plays a 'Universal Soilder' that was dumped on a junkyard planet when the brass brought some upgrades.
Naturally the brass decides to send the upgrade to execute the junkyard scroungers. Sometimes a simple and basic plot can be incredibly well done and that's what happened here.
I forgot why the Version 2's were sent to hassle Kurt's new friends. I blame my raging senility, not the movie.
Starship Troopers
Basic review for a basic movie.
1) Sleveeless chest armor wearing soilders vs. giant-ass bugs.
2) The ass-bugs shot a rock across thousands of light years and hit earth. Never mind hitting a specific SPOT on earth. They actuall launched a rock out of their ass and hit our planet.
3) Why did all the support ships bunch together?
4) Why did the squad commander shoot his man instead of the bug that had attacked his man?
Wait a second...you know, most of this movie makes sense if the millitary powers that be had it in for the cannon fodder.
That's where the above beefs (and dozens more) come from. I thought the millitary was a bunch of total boobs. Maybe the brass sent legions of ill-prepared men and women against the bugs to see what they could learn. Maybe there was an overpopulation program and the bugs were a convienent excuse to wipe some excess. Maybe the brass didn't want so many people to become more powerful citizens once their tour of duty was up so they sent out orders that would get a lot of the grunts killed off. Maybe the brass just got off on casualty reports.
P.S. I still don't understand why a news team was allowed so deep into enemy territory. Free recruitment propaganda?
Star Wars
A young farmboy is swept up into an interesting fight against an evil galactic empire. I like how they started during the attack on the princess' ship, creating the feeling of 'joining the story in progress'.
Luke, the farmboy, grows up fast as the Imperials turn their attention to him. He joins up with a scruffy space smuggler who has an inabillity to tell distance measurements from time measurments. The smuggler helps out in promises for riches and thngs go on from there.
Classic space opera with a few suspenseful-scary sscenes. Espically the run down the trench of the Death Star , the moon sized battle station.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
And boy do they ever! Things blow up, people run all over the place, Luke is tempted by the Dark Side, Han gets frozen into a popsicle, more things blow up and Luke and Leia kiss! Aww, I knew these two would get together.
Star Wars The Return Of The Jedi
Kind of a mis-leading title as the only Jedi is Luke and he really didn't go anywhere except for the hospital. (He lost a hand).
The Empire is building yet another Death Star. (You think they'd learn but no...)
More battles, intrigue and what not. Our Hero's mission is to destroy the Death Star shield generator on the forest moon of Endor. They recieve help from some horrible marketing decisions called Ewoks. They look like teddy bears and are cute as a button. Of course, no one remembers that they planned to slaughter and eat Our Heros. Maybe Luke brainwashed his friends afterwards, knowing the Ewoks would make good cannon fodder against the Imperial ground troops.
They do. The troops are defeated and the shield goes down. Lando and some Ass-Face guy pilot Han's ship deep into the half-built Death Star and blow the fucking shit out of it.
The resulting shockwave and irradiated mass of the Death Star causes untold tonnes of debris to rain down onto Endor, rendering it a lifeless ball of rock. Go, Rebels, go!
Strange Days
Beware of setting your movie too close to real time. Mankind will soon overtake it. Do we need a new genre 'Alternate History Sci-Fi'?
Anywho, this is a great action-drama about well...I'm not exactly sure. I only saw the last half. I know there were corrupt cops and a brainscan of a murder...
Supernova
A horrible evil infects a hospital ship.
There is this one scene where an armed character is moving through the transport tube section. (More on this later). He is suprised by the evil. The character, instead of freezing up, blasts a hole straight in the evil's face. It doesn't work, but you gotta give him credit for having the balls to do such where any other character would've frozen up and gotten killed off.
The transport tubes are devices people have to be in in order to survive hyperspace jumps. Their are six people in the medical ship's crew. There are six tubes. I guess returning with injured people just wasn't part of the plans.
Tank Girl
Adapted comic book series that oddly enough, stays true to it's origins.
Malcom McDowell (Kirk-killer) plays an evil water-baron in a parched post-apocalypse world.
This movie has some fantastic bits. The make up on the kangaroo men is astonishing. The bit with water from the human body is frightening and disgusting. I still get shivers from thinking about the torture tube with rails on it. (You get sent down a descending tube that decreases in size until your body mass stops you. Horrifying for claustraphobiacs. Then they send the water down).
Also, it's probably one of the first movies with a 'pretend to be a lesbian' scene.
Terminator 2
Come with me if you want to live. Man! I love this movie. The twist at the end is kind of obvious but it's still cool.
The elvator scene with the bad guy on top stabbing blades through the roof still makes me tingle. Even now I sometimes look up when riding down.
Ever notice how no one ever looks up or down anymore? For any reason? It's always straight ahead. You miss the coolest stuff.
Thirteenth Floor
I turned this off halfway through. After what seemed like hours and hours of buildup we finally got our main character to actually USE the virtual reality machine and where does he end up? 1930's New York.
For the love of crap! I mean what a let down! I hate when popular media does this. Star Trek does this all the time. The Holodeck is always set for some, 'Pre twentieth century earth' locale. Never 'Vulcan a hundred years ago' or 'Adromeda five hundred years ago'.
They probably could have kept my interest in 1930's New York if there was good acting and a story I might have cared for, let alone understood.
Tommyknockers, The
A crappy Stephen King book gets turned into a crappier TV series.
Here's a clue. When the townspeople start acting weird and strange, get in a car and leave. If you don't have a car, walk. Just get the fuck out of there. The National Gaurd can do more for your best friend then you can do on your own, you rummy.
Total Recall
Arnold must stop a deadly conspiracy on a Mars based city.
I don't know what happened here. Did they switch production companies between the scenes on Earth and the scenes on Mars? The Earth scenes were exciting, dynamic and sexy. The Mars scenes were cliched, boring and made me want to stick my head in a grease pit.
Well...the Mars scenes -looked- nice but come on.
Plot point by plot point it marches on towards the most predictable ending ever. Let's see. This person will betray them. This person will die after giving them info. Time for a fight scene. Yawn yawn yawn.
And eyes do NOT bulge out like that in a vacum.
P.S. There were rumors of a sequel that would have had this movie be just a 'Total Recall' segment. Thankfully Hollywood isn't THAT stupid, even though they made 'Halloween 3'.
Virtuosity
Russel Crowe is an artifical intelligence that gains life. Too bad he's cuckoo as a clock.
It's more suspense then sci-fi. Crowe can't be stopped by normal bullets. Crowe and Denzel Washington run around town exchanging one liners, bullets and getting on each other's nerves. It's fantastic. Crowe makes a good of a psychotic as Anthony Hopkins.
Washington basically re-did this entire plot as 'Fallen' a few years later. Unfortunately the second movie forgot to include important plot elements such as 'comedy', 'suspense' and 'making any fucking sense at all'.
Weird Science
It's hard to review this movie. It's good, don't get me wrong. It manages to be a teenaged sci-fi/comedy without being too trashy.
I guess you can say it was everything the '80s were all rolled into one. Sex, wild hair, malls, teens, emotional conflicts and nuclear missiles in the bedroom.
What Planet Are You From?
Man, this movie had no budget whatsoever! They couldn't even afford to shoot the climatic desert scene IN the desert.
Stay far, far away from this. It's just too damn dumb.
Wing Commander
Pilots cannot be rescued from the craft if said craft does not make it through the forcefield that is halfway down the landing ramp.
Okay. I can accept that.
So a bulldozer trundles out and pushes the craft over the side.
Why couldn't they attach a grappling hook and drag the craft through the forcefield?
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