CX Reviews

[CX]

The Descent
(2005 movie)

This is a film that's received a lot of praise in some circles because it's seen as being different from the standard horror flick. I can't say I really agree all with that, and I'll explain why soon enough. First, though, I have to put the disclaimer out there that I'm not really a horror movie fan, though I do watch some of them if they sound interesting. The Descent sounded like it might be one of those movies, but in the end I didn't care for it because it still had pretty much all the same clichés that I don't like about horror movies, chief among them stupid characters. The thing is, when a movie is filled with stupid people, I find that I can't really sympathize with them all that much, so I don't care what happens to them. If they're really bad, I actually start to cheer for whatever or whoever is hunting them down. The Descent avoided the latter, but not the former. Instead, it was safely in "meh" territory, much like Pandorum. One thing that does separate it from Pandorum, though, is that it takes its sweet time instead of diving right in, in an attempt to make us feel sorry for the characters, I guess.

It's been said that this movie represents female empowerment somehow, and that it avoids the typical romantic subplots that most horror movies have. The same people who say that kind of thing also criticize most horror movies for basically boiling down to "monster chases attractive female character," and naturally the implication there is that this movie somehow avoids that. But really, it doesn't. In fact, the only movie I've seen that avoids both the romantic subplot and "monster chases attractive female character" storyline is The Thing. Actually, I bring this up because this movie is often compared to it specifically for that reason, the specious claim being that the only difference here is that the cast is all female rather than male. Unfortunately for these reviewers, they've forgotten a rather important element from the start of the movie that comes into play at the end of the movie – an affair between the protagonist's husband and one of her friends. Because while this friend, Juno, is later made out to be the antagonist for the group for several reasons, really what it comes down to for me is that the main character, Sarah, ends up taking revenge on her not for any of those reasons, but really for the affair with her husband right before her family was destroyed.

You see, right in the beginning of the movie, we're introduced to Sarah, Juno, and Beth, another of their friends, along with Sarah's husband and young daughter. Sarah and her friends like doing extreme sports, and in this case they're white water rafting while the husband and kid watch from shore. When the women are done and meet up with Sarah's husband and kid on shore, it becomes really painfully obvious that Sarah's husband has developed a case of yellow fever (Juno is played by an Asian actress in case you didn't get that ). But, that isn't a problem for too long, because as Sarah starts to question her husband about it on the drive back to home he gets distracted enough to cross the center line, and naturally that's just when another vehicle comes along to kill both the husband and the kid by impaling them through the heads with pipes while leaving Sarah alive. I'm sure for some people this was a horrific turn of events and shocking or whatever, but I saw it coming from a mile away, and it all played out as a really obvious attempt to make me sympathetic toward Sarah. I didn't really understand fully why the movie was trying this hard until later on, though.

So, fast-forward to a year later, and Sarah is meeting up with all of her friends in the good ol' US of A to do some spelunking. We're introduced to three more characters, but they aren't really all that important, so I'll only mention Holly. Why? Well, just look:



*sigh* So kawaii... I mean, short spiky hair, cute with a spunky, enthusiastic attitude – my kind of woman. Unfortunately women like that seem to tend to be lesbians, both in the movies and in real life, but I can't say one way or the other in this movie because it pretty much avoids any romantic implications other than what you might read into it on your own depending on how dirty your mind is.

Now the movie takes a decent amount of time establishing the friendship between these women and their hobby for extreme sports, of which caving is only one of them, apparently. This is both good and bad because it gives the audience information, but in the end it failed to really make me feel anything for these characters one way or another when it came to their little cave adventure. Then not long after this, some of the characters, namely Juno and Holly, start to develop personalities that start to wear on me very quickly. Holly in particular becomes rude, mouthy, and overconfident, so it should be unsurprising that she's the first to die. What might be surprising is that it takes about and hour into the movie for this to happen.

Anyway, the basic plot of the movie is actually pretty similar to The Cave, which came out the same year. Basically, a group of people wanders down into an unknown cave and gets picked off by the mutant human cave dwellers after getting cut off from the only known exit. The main differences aside from tone are that there's a larger team of mixed races and sexes and that the creatures are more like bats, which can both fly and swim. In The Descent, the creatures look like Morlocks from The Time Machine.



Juno planned this adventure that would get most of them killed as a way of making up to Sarah, as she explains later. The problem was that Juno took them to an unexplored cave and lied about it, telling them that instead they were going to a well-explored one. The thing is, this makes no sense, because most of the women are pretty new to the whole caving thing, and Sarah in particular has a thing with closed in spaces. Oh, and Juno never told anyone where they were going. Convenient. This is pretty painfully obvious to me as a way of making Juno out to be the antagonist of the group, even while the movie at the same time makes her out to be someone who fights to save her friends. The thing that's supposed to seal it later on is when, after fighting really hard and losing against the Morlocks to keep them from dragging off Holly's body, Beth, for some unknown reason, quietly sneaks up behind Juno right after she's finished killing one of the monsters and gets a pick-axe to the neck. Now Juno really obviously didn't intend to kill Beth, but really the only bad thing she did was to freak out and run off instead of looking after her. But the movie insists that this is an unforgivable sin, like Juno meant to kill Beth, so in spite of all the fighting Juno does to try to save her friends, including the body of one who was already dead, this is all basically so Sarah has an excuse to kill her. And while the movie reasons that this is for revenge over Beth and leading them all down there, it was fairly transparent for me that it was more about the affair from the beginning of the movie, and this is actually brought up toward the end of the movie. So really it doesn't avoid the romance subplot at all, it just shoves it more into the background than usual. It also doesn't avoid the "monsters chasing attractive female characters" plot in the least, so the only thing really of note here is that during the main storyline in the cave there are no male characters for any of the women to fawn over.

The movie isn't all bad, though, as cliché-filled as it is. It actually does have one point toward female empowerment in that the women don't freak out so much as to be completely useless even though there are things trying to kill them, and they even fight back. That was actually kind of refreshing because the usual response to "monster chases attractive female character" is for said character to shriek and run away whilst acting stupidly and not even attempting to fight back. It also didn't overcompensate by having the women be completely bad ass either, so they characters themselves were fairly well-rounded and believable. I'll also give this movie a point for managing to successfully gross me out without resorting to gore porn. Instead, it reminded me of seeing animals get eaten, only with Holly being the one getting eaten by these cave dwellers. And while normally I might crack a joke here about a woman getting eaten out, I have to say that the way the body and head moved combined with the hyena calls made it so I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

But that's pretty much it on the positive side. Everything else is either neutral or bad as far as I'm concerned. They even do the thing with making the characters crawl through gross stuff and let the monsters crawl over them without them getting noticed that so many movies have done on more than one occasion, not to mention the fake happy ending where the main character seems to make it only for it to turn out to be a dream or delusion. The only thing that makes it worse is the sequel, which implies that despite overwhelming odds, both Juno and Sarah survived long enough to be in the sequel. But since it wasn't obvious that this movie was going to have a sequel I guess I can't really dock it for that, but that won't stop me when it comes time to rate the sequel. Instead, this ending was somewhat ambiguous, though it was definitely leaning toward "everyone dies," which isn't the usual, but isn't all that unique either.

Overall I found this movie to be fairly average; definitely not deserving of the majority of the praise that's been heaped upon it by some. Like Pandorum, it wasn't really especially bad, though it did have plenty of eye-roll worthy moments and the same kind of leaps in logic. I still think that The Thing, The Mist and Alien are the best horror movies I've ever seen because they're just good movies by themselves, so it is still damning with faint praise to say that The Descent was probably okay as far as horror movies go. Keep in mind that most horror movies involve stupid people doing stupid things until they're killed as far as I'm concerned. So with that, I'd rate this movie a 5/10.

[CX]

The Descent: Part 2
(2009 movie)

If you ever had any illusion that The Descent was a good movie, you really might want to avoid its sequel. Not only is it filled to the brim with the standard horror movie clichés, it's also basically the plot of the first movie all over again, with very few differences, only now it makes even less sense.

The movie starts with the standard misdirection scare when some old hillbilly type manages to barely avoid running down a deer, only to have Sarah slam up against the window in exactly the same fashion as the jump scare in the first movie's fake ending. And really, this is where the movie starts to not make sense, but only later on as the stupid adds up.

The movie doesn't take as much time to set things up this time, very quickly expositing things like Juno being a senator's daughter and that there are cave specialists searching for the missing women from the first movie, but in the wrong cave since Juno didn't report which cave they were going to, and a well-meaning Holly, having been mislead, filed a plan with the authorities for the wrong cave. But since Sarah turned up, they now have a lead, though the movie also goes out of its way to try to say no one will end up knowing what happens later on due to the Sherriff's insistence that a lid be kept on this new lead. Conveniently, Sarah has amnesia for the past few days, and even relives the death of her husband and daughter just to tug at out heart strings. Since she's covered in blood and has obviously been in a fight, the sheriff immediately suspects she's killed her friends. When the lab matches one of the blood types she's covered in with Juno, the sheriff really suspects her, then for no logical reason decides to drag the obviously traumatized woman back down into the cave she escaped from to help them look for the other women.

Why the sheriff's office is running this investigation is but one of many things that don't quite add up. For instance, one of the first things that happens after Sarah is found, presumably having been taken in by the old hillbilly and having been reported by him, is that the same old hillbilly leads a deputy with a bloodhound to the entrance to an old mine so they can do the standard scene where the dog gets scared and comes out whimpering before taking off in the opposite direction. Then, when the assembled team of the sheriff, a female deputy, Sarah and the three-person cave rescue team goes down into the mine using an ancient elevator that magically still works so they can get down a shaft that would have been impossible for Sarah to scale, and end up at a boarded up cave entrance that was where some miners were said to have disappeared down. Of course, the entrance was still boarded up, which makes one wonder just how the hell Sarah managed to get out of there. It was at this point that I'd already started to give up on the movie due to the utter lack of basic logic, but I was still going to give it a chance.

After the team made it further into the cave they found the half-eaten body of one of the women, and even though it was pretty obviously done by an animal, the sheriff suspects Sarah (a running theme if you haven't noticed), which isn't helped when she conveniently remembers the Morlocks and freaks out, injuring one of the cave rescuers in the process. What happens next is pretty much the same as what happened in the first movie, complete with an isolating cave-in. Then the characters are picked off one by one, only this time they act a lot more stupidly than the characters in the first movie. And magically, Sarah and as it turns out Juno, have become completely hardened bad-asses who can kill the cave dwellers more or less at will. Of course to survive the ending of the first movie, Juno, who'd had a pick-axe put through her calf by Sarah, would have had to fight off at least a dozen of the things, whereas Sarah was pretty much just staring into the flame of her make-shift torch while more crawlers called off in the distance. Apparently having a big sharp piece of metal put through her leg wasn't so bad for Juno after all, because she moves like it never happened.

Anyway, the sheriff, being the dumbest of all of the characters, ends up handcuffing Sarah as soon as he gets the chance, despite the protests from the deputy she saved, and really just common sense given where they were at. Naturally, they get to a part of the cave where the combined weight of Sarah and the sheriff causes a collapse and both of them are left hanging for their lives. This is another point where nothing makes sense, because without much hesitation and Juno egging her on, the deputy brutally cuts off the hand of the sheriff, sending him to his death. You know, a man she was made out to have the utmost respect for and had probably worked for quite a while, because she is supposed to be one of his most trusted deputies, and she kills him, just like that, because Juno and Sarah have both become hardened survival experts who believe in sacrificing others to save their own skin, yet inexplicably not only let bygones be bygones between them but have taken a liking to the deputy and so decide to save her. *takes breath* And the stupid isn't even over yet even if the movie basically is.

It was fairly obvious from almost the beginning of the movie that the deputy was supposed to be the protagonist, though it does shift around quite a bit. But as the movie moves on it focuses more and more on her. So when the three of them finally find a way out of the cave and they have to sneak past a bunch of feasting cave dwellers, both Juno and Sarah end up dead, having lost their main character immunity. Actually that scene in particular is so horribly over the top that it's laughable. Only to add to that, the deputy wriggles her way out of the cave through a hole that minutes ago had been big enough for a giant cave dweller to drag a moose through, in what looks like a direct rip-off of the fake ending from the first movie. And just so as not to disappoint us that it wasn't a complete rip-off, there's no happy ending after all. Actually I was expecting one of the cave dwellers to have come out after her, but it turned out to be the old hillbilly, who suddenly appeared out of no where to take the deputy out with a shovel to the face. He then drags her back to the hole so the creatures can get her, the implication being that he's keeping the secret of these things' existence for some unknown reason.

And really, that right there is where the stupid hits full force, because if the old hillbilly had actually been serving this role all along, why then hadn't he done the same thing at the beginning of the movie when Sarah first showed up? And since there actually are a few more people who knew where the team went in and what they were up to, how would killing the deputy keep the secret anything more than temporarily? After all, as soon as the other people who knew about the other cave figured out something bad happened to the other team, there'd be yet another search, and it'd just keep going like that until someone finally managed to get back with information about these creatures. But really what it comes down to is that this movie shouldn't have happened, because the old hillbilly should have killed Sarah at the beginning of it. The ending just doesn't jive with how he brought Sarah in to the hospital and cooperated with authorities in the beginning.

Now while the first movie was pretty much just okay, this one was definitely bad. Not only was it filled with the same clichés and gross-out stuff (some of them had to hide out in the Morlock's toilet), but it actually ripped off the first movie quite a bit on top of it all. None of the characters were the least bit interesting, and even if the deputy managed to be a little sympathetic, she still did enough stupid things and failed to be interesting enough on her own for me to care what happened to her. So as you might guess, I was underwhelmed and unimpressed with this movie. 1/10.

[CX]

Moon
(2009 movie)

This is an outstanding movie, and a return to the old style hard sci-fi from earlier decades that has been almost completely absent from more modern sci-fi. It's a pity that it hasn't gotten much notice, and that it was completely shut out of any kind of major awards outside of the sci-fi community. I'm actually kind of afraid that I can't do this movie justice, because while it's easy to make fun of a bad movie, it can be a bit harder explaining why a movie is actually good. Actually the only reason why I'm trying is just to help to get the word out there more about this movie. I only learned of its existence myself thanks to random article reading over at TV Tropes.

This movie is able to do a lot with so little – the cast is small, there isn't a lot of VFX, and there's no real action to speak of. Yet, it remains very interesting to watch, leading the viewer along as it reveals information until the truth is finally revealed. It introduces the main character, Sam Bell, and shows you not only his daily grind, but his hopes, his hobbies, and his dreams without going over the top on anything. It's easy to sympathize with this character, and to root for him against the opposition he faces later on.

The story isn't expansive like 2001, but thanks to the characters, which includes a computer named GERTY, it is soul searching. At first it doesn't seem like much – just the story of some guy alone on the moon, harvesting helium-3 as a power source for Earth. Actually it almost wouldn't seem out of place for a movie from the '60s, but once the introductory part of the movie is over, this quickly changes.

As part of his job, Sam has to go out and check up on the automated harvesters, which are somehow extracting helium-3 from the lunar soil, as well to get the helium-3 they've extracted. helium-3 is now the new magically clean power source that's all the rage on Earth right now, and Sam is introduced as a sole employee on a 3-year contract. Naturally, only a couple of weeks shy of going home, strange things start happening. Sam starts to see things, and on the way out to check up on a harvester, it causes him to crash into one of them and the rover he's in gets a hull breech from the collision. He manages to get his helmet on before passing out, and this is where the movie does a little slight of hand with us and shows him waking up in the station's medical bay. GERTY asks him if he can remember "the accident" and Sam apparently can't. He also can't move very well, as if his muscles haven't been used for a while.

As Sam recovers, more and more things aren't adding up. For instance, a problem with the communications system that prevents real-time communication with Earth that was an annoyance and just part of life on the station, apparently isn't a problem after all. He catches GERTY having a live conversation with company executives on Earth, and when questioned about it, GERTY acts like a kid who's just been caught watching porn and denies it. This is another way the movie is able to misdirect, because with everything GERTY is saying and doing in order to keep Sam in the dark and to keep him from going outside, it seems like it might be something along the lines of HAL 9000. But thankfully, this movie is actually refreshingly original, so it does do that. Instead it gets stranger, because when Sam finally does make his way outside and out to the disabled harvester, he comes face to face ... with himself.


"I think I'm a clone now, there's always two of me just a hangin' around..."

Okay, I spoiled it a bit there for you, but this is one of my reviews, so you should kind of expect that.

As you can see from the picture, Sam does go through some growing pains and find himself to be a lousy roommate. Of course, both of them are convinced that they are the original Sam Bell, at least until they get into a fight following one of them looking around for some secret part of the station. And this is where Moon separates itself from 2001, because GERTY is actually a friend. He actually comes right out to the Sam we were first introduced to and tells him that he's a clone, explaining everything about how he got to the mining station.

Finally, the two Sams work together and uncover more and more about what's going on, like why they can't communicate directly with Earth. GERTY also reveals the past logs of the previous clones, as well as the final fate of all of them – to be knocked out and incinerated under the pretense of being put in cryosleep for the trip home. Apparently all of the clones also suffer from health problems toward the end of their "contract," as the first Sam is now also getting random nose bleeds, vomiting blood, losing teeth and the like. This Sam also finds out that the daughter he thought had just been born is now a teenager, that the beautiful young wife he thought he was having marital problems with has been dead for some time now, and the original Sam Bell is still very much alive. That scene in particular is touching, as this clone realizes his mortality, and laments how he only wants to go home.

There's some question here as to whether the treatment of the clones is something that would be criminal or not. Either way, Sam wants to go home and the two clones work on a way to make that happen. They realize that a number of things need to be in place in order to make that happen, including one of them staying behind to die, so that the "rescue" team that the company has dispatched will be fooled – otherwise, both of the clones will likely be killed by this team.

One of the clones makes it, and the very end of the movie reveals that this was definitely more than just unethical on the part of the company. This does raise an interesting point though as to the rights clones, who are nonetheless still human beings, would and should have. So while this movie might not be as big as 2001 in scope, it's still an interesting and worthwhile movie, and it's a shame that it hasn't gotten more recognition, or even just more exposure for that matter.

Another thing, Sam Rockwell is an excellent actor, and it's a pity that more of his roles don't allow him to show this off as much as this one does. Usually he gets cast as a rather one-dimensional character – either comedy relief or a bad guy. Here, he really gets a chance to shine in a dramatic role as an everyman.

If I was to knock this movie for anything, it would really just be because it kind of dates itself through the whole environmental thing at the beginning of the movie and in the attitude toward corporations revealed more toward the end of the movie. There are also a few logical missteps here and there, and it does feel a bit unresolved in the end, though to be fair we don't really need to see what happens to Sam per say, I just would have liked it better that way.

Other than that, this was a very enjoyable movie to watch, with a very focused and interesting story and characters. I would definitely recommend that you watch this movie. 9/10.

[CX]

On the Beach
(1959 movie)

This movie follows very much in the steps of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still in it's anti-nuclear angle, but, unlike those other movies, it does so without being quite as patronizing. Instead, it's a rather depressing movie about the end of the world, which has a compelling story and interesting characters that kept me watching it straight through.

At first it seemed like something along the lines of The Stand, where while most of humanity has been killed, there are some survivors which might lead to a future for the species. Here we follow the U.S.S. Sawfish, the last surviving American submarine following World War III, which took place in the far off future of 1964. The movie never says who started this nuclear war, which was kind of lame, but in retrospect that's because it might distract the audience from what the movie was actually trying to say. This movie isn't about who started the war, or who was right and who was wrong, just that all life in the northern hemisphere has ended, and that nuclear fallout is spreading over the globe. Australia is pretty much the last safe haven for our American submarine crew, who have been doing reconnaissance work for the Royal Australian Navy. The interesting thing is that despite the fact that from the beginning of the movie, everyone knows that the fallout will eventually reach Australia, they're carrying more or less normally – the only sign anything is off is the occasional mention of the end coming, and shortages of fuel and the like.

Actually one of the first things that happens in the movie, aside from a young Australian officer, Lieutenant Peter Holmes, being assigned to the Sawfish as a liaison for an upcoming unknown mission, is that said young officer and his wife conspire to set up the American captain, Dwight Towers, with a woman they know as an alcoholic and something of a slut. Pretty much everyone is trying to have a good time, though this being the '50s and all, they aren't real open about anything beyond going to parties and drinking a lot. A few people still hold on to hope, though.

In any case the idea is that Towers is supposed to hook up with Moira Davidson, the alcoholic slut who was hooked up with him, in the hopes that both of them would find some comfort. Towers, though, has a bit of an issue in that he refuses to accept that his wife and kids are dead, and refuses to go very far with Moira.

While the start is a bit slow, it does a fairly good job in setting up both the setting and the characters, introducing everything a little bit at a time in an engaging and personal manner. It's actually pretty charming. But it does take it about a half-hour to get to the point.

The main plot of the movie involves sending the Sawfish as far north as possible to check on the radiation levels in the arctic. A scientist has theorized that the radiation levels might be low enough at the extreme northern and southern latitudes that it might permit humanity to survive, either in Australia or in Antarctica. The Sawfish is to test this theory by going as far north as she can and checking the radiation levels. In addition to this, a signal is picked up from the general vicinity of San Diego being transmitted in Morse code, and it's hoped that there might be some survivors there, which would then indicate that there was some hope for the survival of humanity.

In the meantime, there's more discussion about the end coming, and what to do when it comes, or for that matter in the five months or so until it comes. Our young Australian officer has actually trying his best to get a hold of some euthanasia pills for his family, as he's worried he won't get back in time to be with his family when the radiation gets there. He manages to get a hold of them, and tries to explain to his young wife how to use them before he leaves, but she refuses to discuss it, especially when he tells her that she'd have to give it to their infant daughter. She's also majorly in denial about everything. To contrast the difficulty Holmes and his wife are having, Towers and Moira are getting growing closer together, in spite of Towers remaining steadfast that he's married and won't betray his wife. There's actually a rather touching scene as Towers breaks down, explaining to Moira that it had simply never occurred to him that with the life he was leading that something would happen to his family and not him.

Actually, come to think of it, there is one main fault the movie has, which is the tendency to mood swing back and forth between sad, touching scenes like that and more comedic scenes that tend to follow right afterwards.

Anyway, the Sawfish carries out its mission, heading up to the arctic first. She puts her periscope near Point Barrow, Alaska, but finds that the radiation is actually higher than in the mid-Pacific. Disappointed, they head back south along the west coast of the US and stop by San Francisco, with some shots of the deserted streets that I'm sure must've been eerie at the time the movie came out. This was apparently done for the benefit of the crew, so they could see home one last time before they headed back to Australia. Unfortunately this city actually was home for one of the crew, and he kind of loses it and leaves the sub. Later he's found just fishing in the bay, waiting for the radiation to kill him.

The Sawfish next goes to San Diego to check out the mysterious signal. Luckily for them, it's from a place that's right on the shore. In keeping with the general mood of the movie at this point, the signal is found to be caused by some product placement blowing up against the telegraph key, powered by a hydroelectric damn that's kept going even with no one to watch it.

With that, the Sawfish heads back to Australia to tell everyone the bad news. The rest of the movie is spent showing how everyone deals with the end of the world coming. Towers and Moira end up hooking up, once of the others starts up a massive car race that kills a lot of participants, Holmes's wife ends up coming to terms with what's happening and the like. Some people naturally turn to religion, and the Salvation Army is there to help in any way it can. Eventually, the radiation reaches Australia and the government hands out suicide pills to the population, using census data to make sure that everyone gets one.

As for the Sawfish, the captain gives his crew the choice as to what to do, and they decide that they'd like to head for home. Towers naturally wants to stay with Moira, but in the end goes with his crew, though he doubts they'll survive the journey. So as the title indicates, Moira watches the Sawfish on the beach. The last shot of the movie is pretty much there just to remind us that the movie isn't just about the end of the world, showing us the Salvation Army banner that says, "There's still time, Brother." You can probably guess who that's directed at.

This movie is definitely a product of its time, not only in how it skirts around sex and treats the female characters, but in the prevailing attitudes of the time toward nuclear warfare, which is to say the attitudes of the people who make movies and really didn't know that much about nuclear warfare. The movie kept harping on the fact that nuclear weapons were even created, and there seems to be some misunderstanding that even by this point, these weapons were being automated to the point that one person who "thought they saw something on a radar screen" could just push a button and set everything off. There's also the misconception that everything would end very quickly, as the Sawfish was said to only be spared due to being submerged at the time everything happened. And yet the cities are essentially untouched – there's just a huge cloud of radiation floating around everywhere. In many ways, seeing the "devastated" San Francisco and San Diego made it look more like some virus had struck, leaving the cities abandoned but intact, and without any bodies around, too.

Still, this is a pretty good movie, and while it doesn't have a happy ending, it's still an interesting look at how people might deal with such a situation. Here, civilization and even military discipline are maintained basically right up to the end where it could have just as easily broken down, especially once news had broken that there was no hope left after all. As a certain Starfleet admiral said, "how we face death is at least as important as we face life."

While this movie could get a bit preachy at times, it didn't reach the same levels as The Day the Earth Stood Still. I would definitely recommend this movie. 8/10.

[Distracted]

I've seen it. Sorry. Depressing movies... well... they depress me.

[CX]

Just wait til my next review.

[Snorpenbass]

One thing: Helium-3 is already the magical fuel, we just don't have any down here. It's the best fuel for fusion, see. If we had larger quantities of it down here, we might actually see clean, safe energy within our lifetimes.

But we don't.

So we can't.

[CX]

Yeah, but how does rock get it from the sun, and how do you get it out of the rock?

[Snorpenbass]

Yeah, but how does rock get it from the sun, and how do you get it out of the rock?

Heck, I'm not a scientist, I just know Helium-3 is necessary for fusion to be viable.

And I know it only because I am a nerd who played many science fiction roleplaying games (pen and paper, not them newfangled vee-dee-yo games!) in my days.

Anyway, I know that the moon is rich in Helium-3, and that if we ever get cheaper space travel then we might get fusion and solve most of our fuel problems for the next, oh, five or six centuries or so.. Of course, since even NASA is no longer going into space, that's not gonna happen. Because apparently space is not something that helps mankind. *sigh*

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

The Helium-3 on the moon is actually very easy to get. It's in the regolith, you just have to scoop up the dust and extract it from there. Or so I've been led to understand.

[Cogito]

It's in the regolith

Oh, right. That clears the whole thing up. Thanks!

[CX]

The Quiet Earth
(1985 movie)

Ah, another "end of the world" movie, or is it? Well, at the very least, it's damn strange, and seems to be remembered most for its ending, which I have to admit I found interesting, if frustrating.

The movie starts off with something strange happening to the sun during the sunrise in New Zealand, at 6:12 in the morning. Next, we're introduced to the main character as he lies buck-ass naked in a motel room, and wakes up to slowly discover that he seems to be the only living creature on the planet. He does what I'm sure most people might do, searching as much of the country-side and nearby city as he can, looking for another person. He even goes as far as starting up a repeating message down at the local radio station in the hope that others might come to him, or call him. Then after about a week, he cuts loose, deciding to live at a now empty mansion and do everything he's apparently always wanted to do. He breaks into the mall and steals whatever suits his fancy (including suits), drives a model train, drives a real train, and dresses up in women's underwear before giving a speech on a balcony to cardboard cut-outs of famous people where he declares himself president of the world.


Come on, admit it, you'd totally do it, too.

Apparently not satisfied at being President of The Quiet Earth, he decides to run into a church looking for god and ends up shooting Jesus, shortly before declaring himself god. He then goes around and breaks things for the hell of it, and even thinks about offing himself before changing his mind. Which is about the point that he meets his first other living person. Lucky for him, it's a woman, and kind of a loose one at that. Of course being alone and thinking you're the last person on Earth for weeks might do that to a person.

Actually, it's pretty lucky for the audience that our main character, Zac Hobson, is a scientist who was working on the scientific project that apparently caused "The Effect" that made essentially every living creature disappear into thin air. He even heads back to the lab to discover that Project Flashlight was indeed completed that very morning. He then finds the body of his boss, and almost gets trapped in the lab when this somehow sets off a radiation alarm.

It seems Project Flashlight was something a world-wide group of scientists was working on, lead by an American team, to create a world-wide energy grid that could transmit power through the air. Actually, that's not unlike something Tesla was working on before he lost everything and died penniless. I can't help but feel though that this is just an excuse to do a little America bashing, as both the other survivors Zac finds lambast him for working on the project and for trusting the Americans, especially as the American teams was apparently withholding information from the New Zealand team. Actually, Zac had so many reservations about the project and thought that something might not be on the up-and-up anyway, and actually had tried to commit suicide by taking pills the morning of The Effect. Apparently the other two characters, Joanne and Api, were also both at the moment of death at 6:12 that morning.

Something of a love triangle develops between the three characters, and Api even tries to kill Zac at one point seemingly over Joanne, but fortunately the movie focuses more on what's going on with the world than this soap opera. Apparently some fundamental constants have been changing, which Zac has been keeping track of. He then keeps this a secret from Joanne and later Api for no real reason, simply dictating everything into his tape recorder. When he finally shares this with the others, they head back to his place to type things into the magic computer he has set up in the mansion to show them some cool '80s graphs that indicate The Effect is going to happen again the next morning. Just to drive the point home, the three of them get trapped in a music video for a few seconds, which Zac calls a "tremor" of The Effect. He also then concludes that destroying the lab he was working at will somehow take down the world-wide network Project Flashlight established and thereby prevent The Effect from happening again and disappearing whoever survived the first round.

So, having decided this, the three of them break into an army base and steal a truck-load of explosives they hope to destroy the lab and transmission tower with, though as they approach, Zac's radiation detector goes off, warning of lethal levels of radiation. They discuss how they might get the explosives close enough for their plan to work, and Zac tells them that he thinks he can grab some things from back at the mansion to rig up a remote control (which really wouldn't work too well in a radioactive environment I'm guessing). In any case this turns out to be a lie, since he apparently knew Api and Joanne would start screwing the minute he left and he used the time to rig up a detonator for the explosives instead. His plan sort of seems to work, though when he sets off the explosives we see the strange "tunnel of light" described by all of them from their earlier near-death experiences and Zac wakes up on a strange beach. This is actually one of the most eerie shots of the movie, as there are strange clouds in the distance and a large ringed planet rising on the horizon (the cover of the movie gives this away).

Oh, and then the movie just ends.

It's a little frustrating that the movie ends this way, because not only do we not know how things have ended, but really we don't know for sure what's been going on to begin with. It's actually entirely possible that all of the "survivors" are actually dead and in some form of purgatory, not that I believe in that kind of thing. The characters do bring up this possibility, but Zac in particular quickly shuffles us back on the track that it was Project Flashlight that has caused some kind of cataclysm.

As for why I find this movie interesting, I'd have to say that it has entirely to do with the story, as none of the characters are particularly interesting. Zac, our main character, is kind of weird in that he likes to run around naked when he's not dressing in women's underwear, but is otherwise kind of boring. Joanne likewise doesn't have much about her that's interesting, aside from her hair-brained "theories," like that our faces are actually moldable and that our minds determine whether we're good-looking or not. Api just seems mentally unstable, and he kind of bounces back and forth between being normal-ish and friendly to being kooky and seemingly homicidal.

The story, on the other hand, is evenly paced, and interesting, even while there isn't a whole lot to it. It's about the end of the world and how this might have come to be, essentially, while throwing a few other things in there for us to think about along the way. I like a decent mystery, so naturally my favorite parts were when Zac was wandering around, trying to figure out what happened. I also kind of like the strange (as you might have guessed from my reviews), and this movie has plenty of it, especially the ending. I didn't find it terribly deep, so for some people the ending might then ruin everything by only seeming to be there to confuse the audience. I mostly just thought it was cool, and wondered what the hell was going on, so my only disappointment there was that the movie ended just as it was starting to get more interesting.

I don't know if this movie is very well known or not, this was another TV Tropes find for me, but I thought I'd share in any case. I would definitely recommend this movie, but just know that this isn't exactly a normal movie. 7/10.

[CX]

Planeta Bur
(1962 movie)

I know a lot of people don't realize it, but the Soviet Union actually contributed its fair share of sci-fi to the movies. I actually caught one about a bald chick in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which overall felt about the same as Planeta Bur here. More people know about movies like Solaris thanks to the more recent (and apparently poor) remake that starred George Clooney, but without having seen it myself I can't really fairly say one way or the other whether it's better or worse than this film. Planeta Bur does have a few things going for it, though, mainly from a technical aspect of how the props don't all look completely like crap. For the most part, though, it's pretty much what you'd expect of sci-fi from this era, which attempts to capture the wonder of exploring another world while saving plenty of time for the characters to get all philosophical about the origin of life and how awesome they think it would be if there was a one world government.

The story follows two Soviet space ships as they just make it into orbit of Venus. There was originally a third, but it got taken out by a meteor first thing in the movie. While the surviving characters are totally bummed about this, it's made pretty clear that the real "drama" here is that if they were to follow their original mission plan and now the back-up, they'd have to wait in orbit of Venus for months until a third ship could make it there. The plan was for two ships to land on the planet while a third remained in orbit to refuel them when they came back up. Naturally, they hatch a plan to do basically the same thing, because fortunately they have a glider on one of the ships that can carry the two male crew members and a robot down to the planet. They are to spot a location for the other ship to land, and take off in that ship when they are done, while the one female crew member remains in orbit and tries not to freak out. Oh, well, really she's just supposed to stay there so they can refuel the other ship and head back to Earth, but what really happened is that Soviet cinema wasn't any more progressive than its American counterpart at the time. Actually, there's some "drama" generated on the basis of whether she'll remain calm and obey orders, or freak out and try to land on the planet in an effort to rescue the others on the surface.

Initially the movie tries to make a big deal about whether there's life on Venus or not. I say "tries" because it does so by having characters constantly referring to this as the "big question." Apparently the Soviet Union has been sending robot cosmonauts to the planet for some time when the movie takes place, but for some reason none of them can determine if there is any life on the planet. This is pretty funny, because there is all kinds of life on the planet, most of which looks just like animals from Earth. Actually, one of the first things the cosmonauts run into is a giant plant that tries to rape or eat him (I can't decide which).


Are they sure they haven't landed in Japan?

The crew from the glider did manage to find a landing spot for the other space ship, but they were forced to land in a swamp some distance away. Luckily, the crew of the other ship just so happened to have a neat looking hover car. Along the way, they manage to run into dinosaurs, as well as finding evidence of intelligent life on the planet. Most of that is underwater, where fortunately there isn't anything that wants to eat them, but up on the surface they keep hearing a woman sing. One of the old farts among the crew gripes that it's probably just some weird squid or something, but the others like to talk about the possibility of intelligent life being on the planet. One of them thinks that the presence of humanoid life on the planet somehow disproves Darwin's theory on the origin of species, but for the most part everyone goes on about the idea that all intelligent life in the system has a common cosmic origin, perhaps as the result of alien colonists. One of them even brings up theories on ancient aliens that I hadn't realized anyone had even thought of until more recently than this movie was made.

The ending ended up being rather rushed compared to the rest of the movie. The cosmonauts meet up and take various samples, having all kinds of fun while the lone woman they left up in orbit freaks out because they've lost radio contact quite some time ago. Then just as they pile into the landed space ship, they quickly go from "the woman probably crashed trying to land and we need some people to camp out on the planet while we go up and look for her" to "she's up in orbit, everyone hurry up and pile in again." Naturally this is forced along by a storm coming along and washing out the area the ship happens to be landed on, so they needed to take off before the soil gave out completely. Kind of a sloppy ending, really.

I'd say that overall this was a fairly okay movie, but mostly from the fact that it wasn't completely insulting more than really being good. At times it can seem to drag on, but for the most part it isn't that boring. A very "meh" film, I guess I'm saying. It's a look at Soviet sci-fi if nothing else. 4/10.

[CX]

Immortal
(2004 movie)

I'm not sure what it is about French sci-fi – it's almost like there's a rule that they aren't supposed to make sense or something. The really odd thing, though, is that oddly enough I actually find myself liking them, even though I can't really explain why. Immortal is one of those movies. It's apparently based on a comic book, which makes me wonder if one would have to be a fan of that comic book to understand this movie.

The single biggest problem with this movie is that there's simply too much going on that is never really explained for the audience. We're shown a late-21st century New York City, in which genetically engineered humans live along-side regular humans, and there seems to be some tension over the matter of genetic alteration. It's incorrectly referred to as eugenics here, but this would hardly be the first sci-fi to get that wrong. There's also a narrator, but he doesn't really explain all that much either, so he's basically pointless to have.

Anyway, this movie mainly follows a mutant named Jill, who has blue hair, blue lips, blue tears, and blue nipples. She's played by Linda Hardy, who is really hot, I might add. As you might guess from the mention of nipples, she's also the main source of fan service for this movie. Jill is something of a mystery to everyone, including herself in that not only is she strange-looking inside and out, and seem to have a built in energy weapon of some kind, but her tissues seem to only be a few months old, and no one can seem to figure out where she came from. We see her getting captured and brought in to get examined, but nothing is really explained, like how she got arrested to begin with or what's going on in the movie at this point.

We're also introduced fairly early to Horus, as in the Egyptian god Horus, who is getting judged by his fellow gods for something that is also never explained in the movie. He and his fellow gods are hanging out in a pyramid that's floating above the city, and every once in a while one of them pops out to crash the helicopter/jet/things that are buzzing around it.

Not long after this, a floating prison ship carrying a bunch of cryo-tubes on its exterior appears to have some kind of mechanical failure, sending several cryo-tubes crashing down to a bridge below. The odd thing is that the police don’t seem to know anything about it, and when they go to check it out, a bunch of thugs from some kind of eugenics company kills them and dumps their bodies in the river, and carries off all the frozen contents of the cryo-tubes that they can find. They apparently missed one of them, though, who is a political prisoner named Nikopol. This is apparently only one year early for him to come out of hibernation, though in my opinion it doesn't make much sense to freeze someone as a form of punishment anyway. In effect, they slept through all the time they spend in confinement and now get to live longer than they would have otherwise, but whatever. He's apparently hated by the bad guys because he was against eugenics. Although what the eugenics company is up to is never really explained, and Nikopol seems to have other problems to deal with anyway, because Horus has apparently chosen him to serve as his host to get his freak on with Jill.

Really what this movie boils down to is that Horus, for some unexplained reason, is being given seven days to find a human woman to procreate with before he is turned into a mortal himself as some form of punishment by the other Egyptian gods (who spend most of the movie playing Monopoly). Jill, for some reason, just happens to be one of very few women capable of procreation with Horus. Jill is actually involved with some unknown person named John, who we never see because he is wrapped head to toe in black clothing, and he's not only been teaching her everything she knows, but has been giving her some pills which are rearranging her insides to make them more like a normal humans. This has also made her something of a target for the big bad eugenics company, which is where most of the "tension" is supposed to come from. Horus, in the meantime, is using Nikopol as a host to get it on with Jill, though the first few times of this are basically raping her, as in she fights it, and then he somehow hypnotizes her into letting him have his way with her. How using Nikopol as a host means that Horus is somehow passing something on is never really explained, but then neither is why Jill sticks around Nikopol even if he explains that he isn't a willing participant either. They both seem upset about the whole rape thing, but neither really does much about it. To be fair, Horus is largely the reason for that, but pretty much all they do is argue with each other, at least until Jill decides Nikopol isn't such a bad guy after all and warms up to him.

Did I mention the blue nipples? Yeah, you get to see a lot of them about half-way through the movie. Also, apparently her tears permanently stain human skin, which she just knows for some reason.


One wonders if that's the only body fluid she has which will dye human skin...

Anyway, Horus totally takes advantage of this and manages to get Jill preggers, and just in the nick of time for him.

Oh, and while all this is going on, there's some kind of police investigation into some strange murders which are going on around the city which point back to this eugenics company, which has entrenched itself into the city government pretty thoroughly. The cop in charge of it is actually missing half of his head because some alien shark thing bit it off. How he survived that is one of the many things that are never explained, along with where the alien shark thing came from, for that matter. This pretty much stays in the background until the climax of the movie, though.

Also going on in the background is the thing between Jill and John. He wants her to become more human and he has to go back to wherever he came from, apparently. There's also been some kind of strange portal forming in Central Park which will allow him to do this, and which will also allow the final transformation of Jill, which unfortunately for Nikopol means that she'll forget all about him and their blossoming romance. Of course this all has to take place at a specific time, or it'll just kill all of them, and to illustrate this two unknown people are shown going into it only to have their skeletal remains spit back out through the protective barrier. None of the specifics of this are really explained, though, just like everything else in this movie.

What I'm basically saying is that, objectively, this is a bad movie. There's a lot going on in it that isn't explained enough to even just give it some context. I have a feeling that this was mainly done just to try to make it something of a mystery movie on top of everything else, but since nothing is explained even in the end, it just left me confused more than anything else. So why do I (kind of) like it? Well, I hate to admit it, but mostly it has to do with Jill/Linda Hardy. What can I say? She's hot and that was enough to hold my attention for this movie, even if I didn't understand what was going on story-wise. There's also a lot of unintentional humor here which you might enjoy, along with the horrible CGI that makes most of the movie look like game cut scenes. And, who knows, you might enjoy Jill, too. Did I mention the blue nipples?

Other than that, it might be worth checking out just to see an example of sci-fi from another country. As far as French sci-fi goes, Dante 01 is another example of it I've seen and reviewed, and if you've read that review, you know that it doesn't really make all that much sense either. I'd probably give this the same score, but I've giving it an extra point for Jill's blue nipples. 4/10.

[CX]

Black Gestapo
(1975 movie)

You know, when I first saw the trailer for this thing, I thought it was one of the fake trailers that was shown between the two main features of the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse movie. I mean, no one would actually make a movie like that unless it was a joke, right? Wrong. What we have here is an actual Nazi blaxploitation film. Just take a moment to let that sink in – a Nazi black exploitation film. What it really boils down to though was just having an excuse to have a bunch of black guys march around in uniforms they thought looked cool. Well, that and a lot of gratuitous nudity – the fall back of bad movies when they want to distract you from how horrible the plot is.

At first I wasn't sure I wanted to watch this movie, but now I'm glad I did, because while it was exactly what I thought it would be, it was still pretty entertaining to watch in the same was as every other movie that so horrible it's hilarious is. It isn't quite up there with the likes of Shotgun or The Room, but it still has plenty to laugh at.



I'm sure whoever made this wanted to make some kind of point about how resorting to violence can turn would-be protectors into hated exploiters, and draw that parallel to how the Nazi party was, believe it or not, looked upon as the saviors or Germany before they started harassing the German people along with the people they claimed they were "protecting" them against, but really the comparison is pretty superficial. Actually it just makes me roll my eyes more than anything, and the numerous times images and sounds from WWII Nazi propaganda were overlaid with the movie were more laughable than anything. Kind of like how when the Black Gestapo was doing their little Nazi-esque "vengeance" chant overlaid with the actual Nazi "zeig heil" it sounded like they were chanting "ninjas!"

So, believe it or not, there is a plot here. Basically it involves a bunch of white mafia types hustling a mostly black community in Watts, California. They demand money from the many businesses, including prostitutes, and push drugs, so this is one of those "clean up the streets" type movies with a black "People's Army" trying to do just that. It's run by a "General Ahmed," and supposedly it's funded by a white politician, which Ahmed is somewhat ashamed of taking money from. Aside from spouting plenty of socialist ideology, the People's Army is shown to be generally ineffective at anything, as it is unable to provide food for the hungry, medicine for the sick, or to protect all the weakling women from getting raped by the white mobster types.

This is all just to set things up so that the second in command of the People's Army, Colonel Kojah, can form his own personal hit squad to "protect" the people of Watts. Initially this starts out as six men plus Kojah himself, and they actually do pretty much just that, roughing up the white mobsters and even castrating one for raping a black nurse. Of course, not long after this, they start demanding the same money the white mobsters were taking from people for their "protection", and really just take over the racketeering business that they were supposed to be protecting the people of Watts from. So the six-man squad quickly becomes much larger, and they start sporting the black and white uniforms in the image above, which include Nazi officer caps for its leadership, and change their names to Swahili. This so they can live a lavish lifestyle, with plenty of topless women, and a white guy dressed up like Mr. Rodgers serving them drinks at their tennis court headquarters.


Please won't you be, my master...

Anyway, while Kojah has renames himself "The Leader" and formed his own army he uses to harass the people of Watts, Ahmed has somehow been left in the dark about this, even though he only has a couple other lackeys who are brave enough to dress up in the same khaki and red uniform he wears. So after his former subordinates almost kill him, he somehow heals up after a short montage and swears to take them on all by himself, which he totally does. Watching him do it is a treat unto itself, especially since the film crew apparently forgot the night filter or something, because there were definitely points he should have been spotted, but inexplicably wasn't. And when he's all done, the movie just decides to end, apparently.

This isn't a good movie to be sure, but it was still entertaining to watch, even if it wasn't for the same reasons the people who made it probably hoped it would be. It was also something of a look back in time through a genre that has since passed into history, unless of course it's to drag its corpse out of its grave to make fun of it with movies like Black Dynamite. It's kind of hard to put a rating on this, but I think a 4/10 should do, mostly due to the unintentional humor aspect. If you can get a hold of this, it's worth a watch, if only so you can say that you've seen it.