The world is finally run by hospital bureaucrats, more specifically Liev Schreiber.  The UNION grants new and better organs to anyone, for an impossible price. That’s where Law and Whitaker come into play. When you run up your 90 day grace period they repossess your overdue organs.  But what happens when the man repossessing needs an organ of his own? After a failed collection, Law is forced to use his own artificial organ. From then on our hero runs for his life and the life of his spicy Latina (Braga).  Now, this isn’t a spoiler site so I won’t give away anything, but this movie even though it seems like your run of the mill bloody action movie, creates a twist that would make M.Night Shamalamading-dong blush.

The DVD contains Deleted Scenes, Special UNION commercials (worth a few chuckles of their own) Featurette on the highly advanced visual effects. Commentary with the Director and Writers.

If you love seeing hearts and organs being ripped out of people’s chests, bouncing breasts, and huge explosions (if you’re on this site its assumed that’s your bread and butter), then do yourself a favor and buy the Blu Ray single disk unrated edition.

Don’t make this movie something it’s not. If you’re in the mood for tons of blood and some memorable explosions give Repo Men a peek. You won’t be dissapointed.

Contributing Critic: C.C. Edwards

If an action-adventure TV series (particularly science fiction) goes on long enough, they usually do “The Most Dangerous Game” episode. This was a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, where an eccentric millionaire kidnaps people to hunt them on his private island.

Here’s a Predator movie that goes along these lines.

Predators

Pandora has an atmosphere, but humans can’t breath it without a mask. There are 9-foot tall blue humanoids in the jungle, the Na’Vi, hunter-gatherers. To interact with them, humans have genetically engineered, in effect, biological puppets of the Na’Vi, called avatars, grown in a vat with a mix of human and Na’Vi DNA. Humans go into a tank and are cybernetically connected to their avatar, which they can then use to explore Pandora. Yes, it’s kind of like an avatar in World of Warcraft or other computer games.

Avatar

Also Michelle Rodrieguez (Lost) is a tough-as-nails hovercraft-warship pilot.

Sully, once he is controlling his avatar, finds himself in a strange alien world. The jungle is a beautiful and dangerous place with life forms of all descriptions; flying creatures, others of dinosaur proportions. Even the grass glows with phosphorescence when you run through it at night.

Now comes the conflict: the corporation, and their mercenary-marines, want to relocate one tribe of Na’Vi from their big tree, because the biggest unobtanium deposit is right under it.

Sully, over time, has gone native. Through his avatar, he’s even fallen in love with one of the Na’Vi, Neytiri (played, through motion capture, by Zoe Saldana, who played Uhura in this summer’s J.J. Abrams Star Trek).

Yes, this is basically Dances With Wolves with blue aliens. Dances With Blue Aliens?

But James Cameron brings those little touches that set his movies apart. Here he’s constructed all sorts of future-tech, and a fully realized alien world. Its jungle planet reminds of the worlds created by science fiction authors I read as a kid, like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Alan Dean Foster. And there are a lot of elements of Aliens here (especially in the corporate and military trappings of the humans), as well as The Abyss, and, during one battle scene, even a nod to the conclusion of True Lies.

And I realized how dumbed-down big budget science fiction movies have gotten, with this summer’s Terminator Salvation and Star Trek. Both dumb fun, but not chock full of good science fiction ideas, like Avatar is.

So there’s a lot of exploring of the alien planet, and then an eventual showdown between the human marines and the natives, in the planet’s holy of holies, which oddly looks a bit like the Roger Dean cover artwork on old Yes record albums.

The computer animation is spectacular. Does it look “real?” Well, it looks really neat. It looks like the best computer animation you’ve ever seen, or the best next-generation computer game you’ve never played. There’s still a level of suspension of disbelief required, that’s equal if not more to when they did big-budget science fiction movie special effects with puppets and stop-animation.

But you couldn’t have done this movie any other way, and it creates an alien world unlike anything ever created on film. I wondered briefly, would it have been more seamless if the humans had been animated as well (as in Beowulf, for example). But no, having actors like Sigourney Weaver really there sells it.

It’s playing in some theaters in 3-D, in others in 2-D. Also 3-D IMAX. Is the 3-D worth it? Yes it is, but it’s not mandatory, I expect this will look look good on movie screens without 3-D, and also eventually on DVD and Blue-Ray.

The movie is 2 hours and 42 minutes long, so get comfortable in the theater.

Moon stars Sam Rockwell, and is directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie. It’s set in a not-too-distant future where a corporation is mining the Moon for Helium-3 to provide energy back on Earth.

Moon

Sam is a lone astronaut sent to the Moon to oversee one of the automated bases. He has a three-year stint, his only companion the robot GERTY (Voiced by Kevin Spacey), who seems to be a cousin of HAL-9000.

He’s now a short-timer; a couple more weeks and he’ll be sent home. But he starts to observe strange things on the Moon, and he may not be alone up there. Or maybe he’s just going nuts.

This is a neat little movie in its own right, but it’s also a homage to late 1960s/1970s/early 1980s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Dark Star, Alien, and Outland. And, I suspect, the Moonscapes and miniatures of Space: 1999.

And the Moonscapes and miniatures in this are spectacular, and seem for the most part to be done Old School, with models instead of CGI.

This is a science fiction movie where the story drives the special effects, not the other way around. This is a thoughful film that depicts the Moon as a desolate, hostile, beautiful place. There’s no holes in the space-time continuum, no giant explosions, and the robots don’t transform into sports cars and 18-wheel trucks. It goes where no science fiction film has gone in a long time – up a flight of stairs for your brain to climb.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the second live action big budget summer block buster rendition of the old Transformers animated series.   Or should I say animated toy commercial?   We loved the original Transformers movie, and we gave it a full 5 stars.   It was quite simply a good time.   Michael Bay and the studios obviously thought more of the same would be even better!

So we get more Decipticons, more Autobots, more fights, more action, and well, you get the point.   But the question is whether more is better?   One of the few complaints we had with the first movie was that during the big final fight there was so much action on screen that you really couldn’t keep up with who was who and what is going on.   Instead of a Rocky versus Apollo type fight, there’s just random robot parts, missibles and bullets flying all over.   Well, we get a lot more of that too!

We went into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with low expectations.   That’s likely a good thing as we ended up being more entertained that we thought we would be.   What did we like?   Megan Fox running and bouncing in those Michael Bay slow-mo shots for one thing!   The added humor was a nice touch.   There were a lot of cool new bots.

What was not to like?  The action was almost “frantic”.   The plot was predictable at best.   And there was little if any character development.   We do not really get to know any of the new bots, nor do we really find out much about what the others have been up to since the last movie. One exception is a pair of twin Autobots that talk in hip hop slang.  These two suffer from “Jar Jar syndrome” big time as they are so obviously there only to make the little ones giggle and wanna buy toys.   They will annoy most rational adults.

This movie is what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood for sequels.   The summer blockbuster formula is get as much of the original cast as you can, double the action and effects budget, whip up a comfortable safe low risk script, shoot some really cool trailers and let it rip.   But hey, check your head at the door, get in the nice cool theater out of the heat and watch the bots go boom!   Dont expect deep sci-fi, just expect to have fun, and you will.   We give it 4 stars.

It follows two families, the Greystones, and the Adamas. Both are struck by tragedy when a terrorist plot on Caprica kills loved ones. So if Battlestar is an Iraq War metaphor, this has overtones of 9/11.

But, it revolves around virtual reality technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Eric Stolz plays Daniel Greystone. After losing his daughter Zoe (Alessandra Torresani, who looks a bit like a younger Zooey Deschanel), he discovers that The Kids Today on the planet Caprica have been playing around in in a virtual reality world to sample the vices that they haven’t done in real life. But he discovers his daughter has left a simulacrum of herself in the virtual world. He becomes obsessed in a Doctor Frankenstein way with bringing her back to life, at least in some form. He’s also developing robotic soldiers for the government. Proto-Cylons, basically.

Meanwhile, he befriends Joseph Adama (Esai Morales), who lost his wife and daughter in the same terrorist attack. His son survives, and, if you watched Battlestar, you can probably guess who he’s going to turn out to be.

The Adama family are immigrants from the planet Tauron. There is prejudice against them on Caprica, and, let’s face it, as depicted here, Taurons are basically movie Sicilians. He’s a lawyer for a Tauron crime syndicate. At times, the Godfather overtones are laid on pretty thick.

Then there’s Laci Rand (Magda Apanowicz), a schoolmate of Zoe’s, who discovers her school may shield a religious cult of dangerous fanatics.

The look of the production is interesting. Like the revamped Battlestar Galactica, it tries to keep fashion and props and architecture somewhat like our world (everybody isn’t dressed in tinfoil outfits) while still trying to make it look like another world in a far-away time.

For the record, I was a mild fan of the revamped Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen the last half of Season 3 and most of Season 4. I still haven’t seen the first two seasons. It was an interestingly gritty retake on the original series, a big Iraq War metaphor. I think it bogged down sometimes in all the Cylon mysticism.

So I watched this with some misgivings. Did it really need a prequel series?

But it’s actually very good. As science fiction, better than Battlestar Galactica.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out as a series in 2010. For now, you can watch the DVD of the pilot.

Beyond the dinosaurs, this does incorporate a lot of atmosphere from the original series. In this version, Marshall, Will, and Holly are not related, and are all adults, so we get a lot of jokes about groping Holly’s boobs. But there are still cliff landscapes, jungles, lost cities, and the lizard-men Sleestaks, along with semi-evolved primate Cha-Ka.

But what it mostly is, is Will Ferrell doing some crude, sometimes gross, and generally pretty funny schtick in dinosaur lands – sometimes Laugh Out Loud funny.

It’s not really much of a parody of the old show – oddly enough, the Sleestaks are played pretty straight. And I’m not sure how much of this really needed to be in The Land of the Lost… pretty much the same jokes would have worked with any time-machine-throws-us-back-in-time story.

But, probably a lot of people seeing it have never heard of the original show.

Quite a lot of the movie takes place in a sort of desert Sargasso Sea of time; where artifacts from our world seem to have dropped in willy-nilly. I don’t remember that in the old show, but maybe that was in the 2nd or 3rd season.

The movie seems a little confused at times as to what kind of farce it wants to be. Still, Will Ferrell dumping dinosaur pee on himself, that’s entertainment!

This time, McG directs. And most of the movie takes place in the future post-apocalypse.

Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is on death row in 2003. He donates his body to science. In 2018 he wakes up to discover the world is a post-apocalypse, and killer robots stalk the ruins.  How did he get here?

Meanwhile, John Connor (Christian Bale, who, as we’ve seen on the Internet of late, takes his movie-making ****ing seriously!) leads the Resistance against the robots, getting the few survivors to fight.

Skynet, the killer computer network, has new Terminators at its command; motorcycle-Terminators and underwater-Terminators.

And young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, who’s having a good summer, since he also played Chekhov in Star Trek), destined to go back in time to be John Connor’s father in the first Terminator movie, is in danger here, and John Connor has to take steps to save him.

Bryce Dallas Howard is apparently playing the character that Claire Danes played in the third movie.

This is a pretty good action movie. As Terminator movies go, it’s not in the same class as the first two James Cameron ones, but it’s better than the third one (which is still a fun movie).

And, really, the first three movies are all variants on the same basic structure. This one does manage to do something new.

This is the second summer-movie blockbuster in two weeks to revolve around time travel (Star Trek being the other). Without giving spoilers, I think it is arguable that the time travel here doesn’t seem to quite work the way it does in the other movies; but that’s part of the fun of time travel movies; drawing diagrams on a beer-soaked napkin and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work with a completely impossible thing.

Apparently this is going to be a trilogy of movies with Christian Bale. So he’ll be back. And he’ll be back…again.

This version of Star Trek comes from director J.J. Abrams of “Lost” fame.  Don’t worry, no smoke monster here.   What he does do is bring a much needed reboot to the Star Trek franchise that I would liken to what happened to the Batman franchise starting with Batman Begins.   Basically he threw out all preconceived notions of the franchiase and make a movie for today’s audience.   He does stay true to the characters for the most part, they are all quite recognizable with their trademark quotes, etc.   And the NCC 1701, the original Enterprise looks as you would expect, so nothing too radical there, but he does not limit himself to the known history of the existing franchise.

So what you end up with here is the original crew in their youth as they assume their roles on the Enterprise, but you also get a solid reboot of the whole franchise.   All of the new actors give great nods to their predecessors, playing off of some of their stereotypes and catch phrases.   They have a little fun with it and go tongue in cheek but stop well short of being campy.    I was worried about some of the casting.   I mean, I have to admit there were times that I was expecting to see John Cho (from Harold and Kumar) as Sulu plot a course for White Castle.   But it worked surprisingly well, I didn’t even hear ticking whenever I would see Sylar as Spock after a while.

This would be an easy movie to spoil.   I think you’ll enjoy it most by going in not really knowing much about what to expect and just sit back and enjoy it, so I’m not going to go into the storyline much.   What I will tell you is to expect a lot of absolutely killer effects, stunts, fighting and good old fashioned space battles.

We’ll bottom line it for you.   5 stars.   Go see it, then buy it on Blu-ray as soon as it’s out.   I don’t care whether you are a previous fan or a hardcore trekkie fanboy, if you love SciFi movies, I cant see how you could possibly not have a blast watching this movie.

This 3-D animated movie asks, what if all of those movies were dropped into a blender?   What if all those monsters existed in the same world, like a kid’s version of Alan Moore’s LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN?   A League of Extraordinary Monsters, if you will.

Enter Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon), an ordinary young woman who has the misfortune to be hit by a radioactive meteorite right before her wedding.     She quickly grows to a great height (49 feet 11 inches, so she’s NOT a fifty-foot woman!).  She stomps through her wedding like Bridezilla, and soon government black helicopters are surrounding her, and they’ve got a big tranquilizing dart just for the occasion.

She wakes up in a secret Area 51-ish government base, which is effectively a prison for an oddball crew of Earth-spawned monsters:   B.O.B., a good-natured, dimwitted gelatinous mass (Seth Rogen).  Dr. Cockroach, a mad scientist who combined cockroach DNA into his own (Hugh Laurie).  The Missing Link, a fish-ape hybrid (Will Arnett).  And Insectosaurus,   a 350-foot monster caught stomping Tokyo.

They’re all pretty cuddly, and surprisingly not very upset about being incarcerated in a secret government prison for decades.

The general in charge of the operation (Kiefer Sutherland) informs Susan that she will now be known as Ginormica.    But, since she’ll be kept locked away, she won’t get much chance to use her new moniker.

Things change however when an alien invasion starts, led by Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson), and his alien clone army.    An Attack of the Clones, if you will.    

The government calls on the Earth monsters to win one for the home planet.

What follows is an epic battle in San Francisco culminating on the Golden Gate Bridge (Shades of the Ray Harryhausen movie It Came From Beneath The Sea with the giant octopus attacking the Golden Gate Bridge).

Then Susan gets abducted aboard a UFO because the head alien wants the radioactive stuff that made her big, and her new-found Earth monster pals have to try to rescue her.

Dreamworks made this, and it has the directors of Shrek 2 and Fish Tale.    This is a better movie than either of those, however.

Rounding out the voice talents are Stephen Colbert, Paul Rudd, and Amy Poehler.

It claims to be the first animated movie completely in 3-D (I thought Fly Me To The Moon was also claiming that title).   The 3-D is good, no doubt about it.

This is a fun time; nothing here that isn’t suitable for kids, but plenty that adults can laugh at, particularly if you’re a fan of those old 1950s monster movies.  And the alien invasion is more like what the movie Mars Attacks! should have been.

Along the way, he meets warrior-babe Freya (Sophia Myles), and other Vikings (Jack Huston, John Hurt, Ron Perlman).

Seemingly the idea here is that humans are from elsewhere than Earth, and Earth was colonized so long ago that we Earthlings forgot we were from another planet. Skip forward a few thousand years, and it’s Viking Times! A spacecraft crashs, an alien monster gets loose, and a warrior (who’s lost his ray-gun) has to hunt down the monster. Got all that?

This is basically The 13th Warrior meets Predator. Presumably the idea here is this is the event that inspires the epic poem Beowulf, but the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with it. It’s a B-movie with A-movie production values, and it’s fun.

And the Viking village and costumes are meticulously recreated. We also see some flashbacks from Kainan’s homeworld. It may be that the monster is just misunderstood; however, he’s still trying to eat Vikings, and Vikings Just Don’t Go For That Kind Of A Thing.

An alien spaceship arrives on Earth and lands in Central Park in New York City. Out comes alien Klaatu, who is promptly shot by an overzealous army guy. Meanwhile, his giant robot guardian Gort (or G.O.R.T in this version) is pissed.

Klaatu is rushed to a hospital, and, from an alien cocoon, emerges butterfly Keanu Reeves.

Jennifer Connelly plays a scientist, Jaden Smith (Will Smith’s son) is her stepson who befriends, sort of, Alien Klaatu, Kathy Bates is the Secretary of Defense, Kyle Chandler from the Friday Night Lights TV series plays another government official, and Robert Knepper (Prison Break) is an army colonel who keeps finding that Earth weapons aren’t very effective against Gort. And John Cleese does a small role as The Wise Old Earth Scientist.

The original movie was about nuclear proliferation, this is more environmental. A conglomerate of alien civilizations isn’t happy about the way humans cause other Earth species to go extinct, and they’re prepared for a final solution.

This is about 3/4ths of a good movie; it’s a very atmospheric First Contact story. And as the aliens (or rather Gort) revs up to begin Operation Destroy All Humans, there’s some spectacular special effects. It progresses to a weak ending though.

Keannu is fine as the otherworldy Klaatu. Like the original, there’s a Jesus motif going (he walks on water at one point).

Mysteriously, the famous alien catchphrase from the original movie isn’t used. Or if it was, it was hidden so well I couldn’t spot it. Seems like they could have fit it in somewhere.

I think the makers of the movie felt it’d be too corny to have a 1950s-style dénouement at the end, but as it is, we’re kind of left hanging.

“So, uh, all 6.7 billion of us will eat bean sprouts and live in teepees and stop killing animals then?”

The first straight-to-DVD movie, STARGATE: THE ARK OF TRUTH, wrapped up the unfinished storyline from seasons 9-10 of the series.

This second movie is a little more accessible to the casual viewer.

It’s a story they’ve done before, but never so well. A time travel paradox causes the SG-1 team to be stranded in an alternate timeline.

This time around, those in charge put the brakes on them correcting the timeline. After all, to everybody else on Earth, this is how history is supposed to be. So we get to see the characters spending some time adjusting to their new universe.

At 98 minutes, this is about 2-1/2 times a regular episode, and the movie has time to show us some nice moments with the characters, and explore the ramifications of the storyline.

The movie has all the major characters, including Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson). Don S. Davis appears as General Jack Hammond, one of his last appearances before his death in June 2008. Various villains from seasons past make appearances.

CONTINUUM has a bigger budget feel than the TV episodes, and it has another spectacular addition as well: The U.S. Navy let the movie film at their 2007 Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Station, nearly 200 miles out on the frozen ocean, above the Arctic Circle. These are some vistas that you can’t get on a soundstage.

Starship Troopers 2 was a pretty low-budget outing; surrounded by bug aliens, the soldiers retreated into a fortress and the rest of the movie became somewhat ALIENesque.

This time around, either they had a bigger budget, or they really stretched it filming in South Africa. The sets for the human base are pretty impressive, and the CGI is comparable to the theatrical movie.

Casper Van Dien is back as Johnny Rico. Jolene Blalock (The Vulcan on STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE) also stars.

More importantly, some of the dark humor about the fascist overtones of the Earth government are back from the first movie. Along with the retro-future newsreel footage. Do you want to know more?

A military base on a farm planet is attacked. Johnny Rico repels the attack, but, when he punches a superior officer, is sentenced to hang.

Meanwhile, Jolene Blaloch’s ship is forced to set down on a major Bug world.

Rico is sprung to go on a rescue mission.

There’s lots of weird new Bugs.

This movie manages to be a fun science fiction monster movie, with some of the throwback feel of the original movie. And there’s a big dose of political and religious satire.

Also, there’s a nice homage to the original Robert Heinlein novel, with the introduction of the power armor suits (Marauders).

Keeping in mind that a straight-to-DVD movie isn’t going to be equal to a theatrical movie, this is a pretty good third movie, much better than the second one.

Of course, one thing that’s never been explained in any of these three movies is how the alien Bugs travel between different planets. Seems difficult to hold an interstellar war with creatures who have no means of space travel. Yet they seem to have infested the whole galaxy!

So the scriptwriters were given the assignment, update this for the 21st century, where now we have an Internet, laptop computers, cellphones, GPS systems, etc.

The setup is pretty convoluted, so take notes. The hacker, basically a good kid but in need of some quick money, is playing on a website that’s a combination gaming site and gambling site. So you could wager your money on poker, but you could also bet you’ll win some first-person-shooter game or whatever. The site’s avatar is R.I.P.L.E.Y, a 2-D Lara Croft-ish babe. Why “Ripley” is chosen as a hot babe’s name is mysterious, except that doubtlessly the writers have seen a lot of ALIEN movies.

Now, it turns out, the site is a front for a Department of Defense supercomputer that is trying to catch terrorists. The thought is, terrorists or would-be terrorists will play the games that have a terrorist theme (So watch out when you’re playing CounterStrike, always play the Good Guys!), and bet money on it.

This idea is pretty wonky (Can we assume that the Department of Defense is handling the millions of dollars that would inevitable result from the people just there to play poker?). But wait, there’s more. As it happens, our hero has “borrowed” the money to play the game from his former-Syrian neighbor whom he was helping with his computer problems, and the money transfer triggers an alert that it’s Middle Eastern Money. Also, the kid’s mom works in biological research, and has been bringing samples from the lab home with her.

All this ends up basically pointing the finger at the kid as a terrorist. He flies to Montreal on a high school chess club trip (which he’s joined to impress his would-be girlfriend).

Somewhere in there RIPLEY goes HAL-9000, and decides she’s going to really release a biological agent or nerve gas or some damn thing from a drone plane on Philadelphia.

None of this really makes a lot of sense, but it’s directed at a fairly breakneck pace. It’s a competently done thriller. It plays out more like a movie like ENEMY OF THE STATE; lots of running around, trying to avoid government agents and surveillance cameras.

Eventually the movie shows that it is a sequel and not just a remake; we get appearances by two characters from the original movie (though not the actors).

A theatrical movie is a theatrical movie, and a straight-to-DVD movie is its own animal. It’s not really fair to berate this for not being of theatrical quality: If it was, they would have released it theatrically. This is mildly enjoyable, as a homage to the original, but it’s also very silly.

There’s a number of occasions where it would seem that when the Department of Defense realizes things have gone haywire, their problems with RIPLEY could be solved in minutes with the use of a large axe.

Look for the cameo appearance of the coming MMORPG, STARGATE WORLDS.

Now comes DEATH RACE, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (RESIDENT EVIL, and the first ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movie), and produced by Roger Corman.

It’s a remake, of sorts, of the 1975 DEATH RACE 2000 with David Carradine. In that one, racers competed in a cross-country road race where the goal was to run over pedestrians. This time, more of an action movie and less of a comedy (though still a satire of televised sports), the race is held within a private prison. Inmates are forced to race, and the games are shown on Pay Per View. The cars are equipped with various weapons.

Jason Statham is a former racer framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and coerced into the race, taking over the role of the legendary masked racer Frankenstein. Tyrese Gibson plays his main rival, Machine Gun Joe (Played by Sylvester Stallone in the original). Ian McShane (DEADWOOD) is part of Frankenstein’s pit crew. And each driver, to help with the pay-per-view ratings, is given a sexy (and largely unnecessary) female convict navigator. Frankenstein’s navigator is played by model Natalie Martinez. She’s sexy, and in case you didn’t notice she’s sexy, every time she gets out of a car, they show it in slow motion, playing a song with lyrics that go, “Yeah, sexy sexy hot girl, gettin’ out of a car, shakin’ her thing, yeah!” Something like that.

Joan Allen plays the bony-sexy-cold evil prison warden. Sadly, she doesn’t get a theme song (”Yeah, sexy-bony-cold evil prison warden, makin’ you race cars in a death race, yeah!”).

All this is window dressing for the race. It’s in three parts, conveniently giving the movie three acts. Their prison is on a man-made island, and the race course looks like a conglomeration of every warehouse and abandoned factory from every ROBOCOP movie. It’s BEN HUR with beweaponed cars instead of chariots.

I was expecting a dumb fun violent action movie, but this movie is slightly better than that. In the beginning I feared it was going to be too much shaky-cam and quick cuts so that you can’t really tell what’s going on in the race, but it settles down. It really peaks in the second part of the race, which has some truly spectacular racing stunts.

The movie falters a bit in trying to arrange an improbable happy ending. In the nihilistic world that it depicts, probably the best that could be hoped for is a draw or a Pyrrhic victory.

Of course, all this is like various violent driving video games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, and others where vehicles are loaded up with weapons. Actually, it provides a reasonable explanation for something I’ve always found weird in those driving games. Often in those games, you’re seemingly driving around in a real world with real physics, but you have the incongruity of floating spheres that give you Power or Shields or Health when you drive over them. This movie provides a credible implementation of that; when the racers driver over certain checkpoints, it sends a signal that activates the weapons in that car.

The original movie was as much a satire and a comedy as an action movie. This can’t really make that claim; it condemns the mentality that would make a television death sport of car gladiators, but it’s also, let’s face it, creating this fantasy world so that we can partake of it and revel in the mechanical mayhem. So, don’t take it seriously and think of it as an escapist fantasy that you’ve had when stuck in traffic. If you had some heat-seeking missiles mounted on your car, you’d be through this traffic jam in no time!

This theatrical movie takes place between STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES and STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH.

Anakin and Obi-Wan continue to lead clone soldiers in battle against the droid armies on various planets. Anakin Skywalker has just been promoted to Jedi, and he’s been assigned an apprentice, Ahsoka Tano, an orange-skinned alien with 3 head tails. Apparently not the same species as the blue-skinned aliens with 2 head tails. The dress code for Padawans seems to have been relaxed, because she runs around in a halter top and shorts.

Darth Sidius and Count Dooku want control of the Outer Rim systems, and to do this they need the cooperation of gangster Jabba the Hutt. So, they’ve kidnapped his son, Rotta the Huttlet, but made it look like somebody else did it. Their plan is to “rescue” him, return him to Jabba, and get in Jabba’s good graces. Their minion, Asajj Ventress, a bald pale-white goth Sith (She appeared in the 2003-2005 CLONE WARS series), is holed up in an ancient monastery atop a mountain with the little bugger.

Anakin and Ahsoka head to the planet where Lil’ Hutt is being held, while Obi-Wan goes to Tatooine
to deal with Jabba.

Meanwhile, in the film’s most bizarre scenes, Padme, Anakin’s secret wife, goes to a nightclub on Coruscant to try to negotiate with Jabba the Hutt’s gay uncle, Truman Capote the Hutt.

It took me about a half hour to warm to the animation style in this, but then it was fun. The Good Guy assault on the mountaintop monastery where the bad guys are hanging out is truly spectacular, with big crawling tanks going vertically up the cliffs while droids plummet all around.

Either you’ve had enough of STAR WARS or you haven’t, and if you want some more, this is enjoyable. And it’ll be interesting to see what they do in the TV series (Apparently the focus of the series won’t be on Anakin and Obi-Wan, but will follow various characters in the STAR WARS universe).

Now FOX is producing four straight-to-DVD movies, and this first one, FUTURAMA: BENDER’S BIG SCORE, came out in November 2007.

A race of nudist aliens (and, like most nudists, they should keep their clothes on) has attacked Earth with an email scamming plot, and are taking over the planet with identify theft and stolen credit card numbers.

They discover that, mysteriously, the secret to time travel has been tattooed on Fry’s ass in the form of a Bender tattoo. Using this, they take over Bender and send him into the past to steal Earth’s greatest art treasures.

Time travel was a plotline not explored on the FUTURAMA series, with the exception of one expedition to 1947 Roswell.

This works as an epic story more than just a string of FUTURAMA episodes lumped together (although it’s being sliced up into 4 episodes for syndication). The 4+ year hiatus allowed the writers to bring their A-game back to this. And they get a bit fancier with the animation. About the only thing that doesn’t work is some ill-conceived musical numbers.

If you’re not a fan of the show, this probably won’t change your mind, but if you did like the show, this is a fun reunion.

DVD extras:

* Feature-length commentary with Groening, the writers and director, and the voice actors.
* “Futurama Returns!”, a live reading by the cast of a FUTURAMA comic book at a science fiction convention.
* “A Terrifying Message from Al Gore.”
* “Bite My Shiny Metal X”, A math lecture about FUTURAMA.
* “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad”, a TV show from the FUTURAMA-verse.
* Deleted scenes.
* Character sketches.
* Comic-Con promo.

When we last tuned in to the ongoing struggle against the Ori, ascended beings from another galaxy trying to get everybody in our galaxy to believe in their religion or die, our heroes had unleashed a weapon that (they think) wiped out all the Ori. Unfortunately, the human minions of the Ori, the Priors (basically fanatical priests who make the Spanish Inquisition look like a pack of playground bullies), are still around.

This time, Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Teal’c, Cameron Mitchell, and Vala try to locate an ancient secret weapon: One that will brainwash the Ori Priors into learning the truth. That is, it’ll make them get on the side of The Good Guys.

This seems a little morally ambiguous, and they touch on that briefly, but onward. For the first time, the Stargate team flies a ship through the Supergate into the Ori galaxy.

Once there, everybody but Mitchell beams down to another planet that looks like forest around Vancouver to look for this weapon. Meanwhile, Mitchell’s ship in orbit is threatened by an overzealous Earth bureaucrat, and, eventually, an old enemy.

This is a good wrapup to the Ori storyline. At about 2-1/2 times the length of a regular episode, it doesn’t feel like just another episode either. And the production values are higher (as we see with a lot of shots of Teal’c striding majestically over a mountain range).

Either you’re a fan of STARGATE SG-1 or you’re not; if you’ve never seen the TV series, this probably isn’t going to wow you, but if you did watch it, this is a nice wrapup of loose ends.

DVD Extras: They did a good job with these (unlike the bare-bones DVD for FARSCAPE: THE PEACEKEEPER WARS). There’s a commentary track with the director, the director of photography, and Christopher Judge. A 9-minute PRELUDE which gives a synopsis of seasons 9 and 10 of STARGATE SG-1, in case you missed some of it or have forgotten details. A 20-minute Q&A filmed at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con with the cast. And a 30-minute Making Of documentary (Uncovering The Ark of Truth).

As we saw in the first movie, Hellboy is a demon-spawn brought through a dimensional gateway during a World War II Nazi experiment as an infant. But the U.S. Army got a hold of him, and he was adopted by a loving human father and raised to be one of the good guys. Now, 60+ years later (he ages slower than humans), he works for a Men In Black-style organization, the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense). As his foster father says in the first movie, “There are things that go bump in the night. We are the ones who bump back.”

Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has his motley crew: his human girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), who has pyrokinetic powers, and Atlantis-survivor fishman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, The Silver Surfer in FANTASTIC FOUR 2). This time out they get a new leader, Johann Kraus (Voiced by FAMILY GUY’s Seth McFarlane), who has a case of the vapors and doesn’t get along well with Hellboy.

It turns out at the dawn of time humans warred with elves. These aren’t your Tolkien elves, though (And they look a little like the Wraith in STARGATE ATLANTIS) . They have a magical robot army that’s been in storage, consisting of 4900 ostensibly indestructable robots. The son of the elf king wants to crank them up and give humanity an ass-whuppin’. Hellboy begs to differ.

This is based on the comics written and drawn by Mike Mignola (who also did THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD). It’s directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also did an interesting 1993 vampire movie CRONOS, MIMIC, BLADE II, the first HELLBOY, PAN’S LABYRINTH, and has both a DOCTOR STRANGE movie and THE HOBBIT in the works.

PAN’S LABYRINTH was a big influence on this sequel; the look of the creatures and the underworld is along the lines of that movie. It’s a visual feast. The Troll’s Market feels a bit like Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s too much of a good thing; the director has thrown in everything but the troll kitchen sink, and the pace of the movie is sometimes sluggish due to all the visuals.

The pals of Hellboy, Liz and Abe, get a lot of nice character moments. Liz is finding the trials and tribulations of dating Hellboy; Abe strikes up a romance with an elf babe and twin sister of the bad guy. I haven’t read the comics, but I suspect if you’re a big fan of the comics, you’ll really like all the character moments. But again sometimes this comes as the expense of the pacing of the film; this at times seems more like a DVD “Director’s Cut.” Maybe after the critical raves for PAN’S LABYRINTH nobody felt they could tell del Toro to trim some scenes.

Still, Hellboy gets to kick a lot of monster butt, and it’s a fun ride.

Then one day, a spaceship lands and disgorges a new robot, EVE, who seems to be a few centuries more technologically advanced than WALL-E. Out of his league, in other words. But he’s smitten.

This causes him to stow away on her ship when it departs, and eventually he encounters what’s left of the human race in deep space. They’ve been living on a space cruise ship, and pampered by their robotic guardians until they’re overweight couch potatoes.

Pixar/Disney continues to make CGI animated movies far ahead of the competition, because the story is as important as the animation. What’s particularly impressive this time out is that much of the movie is told virtually in pantomime; WALL-E can speak more English than R2D2, but not much. Almost everything is conveyed through body language. That the body is a little robot makes it even more astonishing that what he’s thinking is so clearly conveyed.

And much of the time he’s the only character around, which makes it a bit like Tom Hanks in CASTAWAY, or, more to the point, Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, exploring the ruins of an empty planet.

Also like I AM LEGEND, the movie is perhaps slightly more interesting before he discovers that there are still other people.

The ruined Earth has an amazing tactile gritty feel to it. The space cruise ship is done in a different style; Post-Decadent Jetsons.

A little jarring, among the robots and the couch potato humans (which look like regular Pixar People gone to seed), is actor Fred Willard, shown in ancient video recordings, pretty much as is, seemingly with a minimum of CGI transformation.

Pixar continues to make great films that are almost more for adults than kids (but completely appropriate for kids). This one has a pretty esoteric plotline though. I wonder if the youngest kids parents take to this won’t get a little restless in the theater. Then again, I wondered the same thing about RATATOUILLE, so if your very small kids loved that, they’ll probably love this.

Now it’s 1957, the Nazis are 12 years defeated, and Indy has become a bit of a relic himself. He spent World War II in the OSS (Perhaps one day we’ll see these adventures told in comic books). Now, America is in the grip of (as it turns out, entirely justified) Cold War paranoia.

Dr. Jones finds himself in the clutches of a Soviet Nogoodnik, Irina Spalko played by Cate Blanchett. She wants him to help them recover an Important Artifact from a U.S. military base in New Mexico. He has a sidekick, Mac (Ray Winstone, BEOWULF), whom he’s had many previous adventures with, we’ve just never seen any of them before now.

Then it’s off to New Jersey where his college campus has become dangerous to him.

And then, with a new sidekick, Mutt (Shia LeBeouf, as a 1950s greaser), it’s off to South America for a search for another artifact, with the Soviets in hot pursuit.

People are going to debate endlessly on the Internet whether this is as good as the movies of the original trilogy. Well, it’s not. But it’s still a fun ride, and a nice encore. There’s a lot of nice touches, references to now deceased characters from previous movies (Indy’s father, and Marcus Brody), mention of an adventure that Indy had as a teenager with Pancho Villa (as shown in the TV series THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES).

I could nitpick a lot of little things that don’t quite work, but Spielberg and Harrison Ford generate a lot of good will in this; they’re enthused about bringing Indy back one more time and it shows.

There’s still great action sequences, but this is an older, wiser Indy who’s discovering that there are things more important than tomb raiding.

There’s a new outbreak of the plague in London, and the Powers That Be have reason to believe there’s a cure in Scotland. So they send in Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who’s part Mad Maxine, part Snake Plissken’s hot sister, and all woman.

And she’s got the best prosthetic since Rose McGowan’s machinegun-leg in PLANET TERROR.

It turns out there are survivors, and they’ve gone part Thunderdome punk-cannibals, part Renaissance Festival.

It’s no great movie, but it’s got some pretty good action sequences, culminating in a big road chase/battle ala ROAD WARRIOR.

And the movie works a bit in GRINDHOUSE country, but less self-conscious.

It’s a spoof of the 1960s animated series JONNY QUEST, but it spoofs a lot of superhero comics, boys action-adventure series, etc.

The Venture Brothers are Hank and Dean Venture. Their dad, Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, is a super-scientist. They live in his laboratory/headquarters/compound with their bodyguard, Brock Samson.

Each episode they get into adventures, often due to the nemesis of Dr. Venture, arch-villain The Monarch, and his many henchman.

Several writers of this worked on THE TICK, and it has that feel, but with more sexual innuendo and more fart jokes.

Several episodes spoof The Fantastic Four (The Visible Woman can only make her skin become invisible, leaving muscles and veins like one of those old plastic anatomical models).

Various sometimes-villains-sometimes-allies show up, like Russian femme fatale Molotov Cocktease.

In one episode, Dr. Venture has a yard sale to clear out some of the junk his father (also a super-scientist) accumulated. All the super-villains show up, hoping to buy super-weapons at low low low prices.

This is funny stuff, highly recommended.

DVD features: Each season has 13 episodes (A third season is in the works). Bonus features on the DVDs include the pilot, a Christmas short, and various deleted scenes and mockumentary segments. The first season has 5 commentaries, the second season has commentaries for all 13 episodes. Unfortunately, the commentaries aren’t very good. That’s my one complaint about this DVD set; the creators make fun of the fact that they’re doing commentaries, taking time to answer their cell phones and whatnot. This would be funny a couple of times, but doing it every commentary is a waste; I’d be interested in actually seeing some detail on the creation process behind the show.

All but the hardest core Star Trek fans were very disappointed with the first Star Trek movie, a movie with a decent story but the pacing of a glacier. Condense it down to 30 minutes, and it might have been good. As a result, there wasn’t much hope for the franchise to continue… but then the title for the second movie came out, and fans had reason to hope. Wrath? That’s gotta be action, right?! Khan? Ooohh.. from Space Seed, Khan was good!

The fans were not disappointed this time as Star Trek II turned out to be a kick ass movie, full of action, drama and more than a few surprises. To this day it’s considered the best of the Trek movies by most fans. It achieved this status by understanding what the fans wanted, and giving them exactly that.

Action. Khan is full of action sequences, and has the classic space battle between the Enterprise and the Reliant where Khan forgets that space is more than just left and right turns. There are explosions, crew members die on both ships, hulls are ripped apart by phaser fire, and nacelles are blown apart by photon torpedoes. It just rocks.

I’ve done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her: marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet, buried alive. Buried alive. – Khan

Drama. Trek fans like some drama too and we get that in spades. Ricardo Montalban’s Khan is a fantastic bad guy, smart, egotistical, and rather determined to get revenge. He’s a bit angry over being stranded and there’s no length he won’t go to to make Kirk pay. We also learn that Kirk has a son who doesn’t like him very much, we get Scottie upset over losing a cadet, and in the end, Spock dies. Come on, how much more drama do you need?!

Comedy. I’m a doctor not a bricklayer! Star Trek has always had humor as a core element, and while Khan was full of Wrath there were some great lines as well.

McCoy: Where are we going?
Kirk: Where they went.
McCoy: Suppose they went nowhere?
Kirk: Then this will be your big chance to get away from it all.

This isn’t the comedy fest that was Star Trek IV, but it’s got some great lines.

Over acting. Yeah, go ahead and admit it.. you love how over acted all those old episodes of Star Trek were, the slowly.. paced.. words… that.. came.. out of.. Kirk’s.. mouth when he wanted to make a point. The Wrath of Khan turns this up a notch with some fantastic over-acting by both Shatner and Montalban. Just look at Kirk in that picture. Awesome!

As a package Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is almost perfect. It’s easy to spot flaws of both a story and technical nature, but that’s true of all Sci-Fi movies, and misses the point. Khan was made for the fans, and the fans appreciated it.. and still appreciate it.

KHAAAAAAANNNNN! – Kirk

Initially when this movie was made it was very hush, hush and had multiple cover names while it went from editing to post to marketing so it would remain a secret. The first anyone outside of a very small circle of people inside Paramount, saw anything, was the trailer attached to Transformers in July of ‘07. The trailer gave no indication as to the theme or plot and ended in nothing but a cryptic date of 011808. The fanboys went wild trying to get to the bottom of what this meant, and I was no different. Later it was discovered the film’s title was Cloverfield or Project Cloverfield and it was a secret project from JJ Abrams that involved a monster attacking New York city ala Godzilla and King Kong. Now you’re probably wondering why I’m wasting time telling you the stuff you already know about it, and I’m avoiding telling you anything you don’t. Well that’s because any information I offer will spoil the movie for you and we don’t do that around here.

The movie follows the story of a group of people trying to get out of the city in the minutes/hours after the initial attack. The creature sinks tanker in the Hudson river and rips the head off of Lady Liberty before their very eyes. This is enough of a wake up call for these folks to say it’s time to get out of Dodge. The group consisting of Caplan, Miller, Yustman, Stahl-David an Lucas try to escape a city over run by the Military, explosions and a giant monster… That you do get to see, and oddly enough you see it pretty often.

The production value is high, the sound is excellent and the effects were outstanding… and had it not been for a weak plot device that made half the audience start saying WTF are they doing… this movie would’ve been 5 stars.

In the traditional style of the monster movies of the 60’s, Cloverfield delivers exactly what you’re looking for if that’s your cup of tea.

I’m going to start with the things that are wrong with this movie, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. The story itself is kinda lame, every 500 years a serpent is chosen to become a celestial dragon. If it’s a good serpent, then things continue as expected for the next 500 years, but if it’s a bad serpent then life as we know it on Earth is over. Isn’t this a recipe for disaster? Only one failure and the world ends? To become a dragon the serpent has to join with a mystical force contained in a chosen girl when she turns 20 (the girls dies in the process of course), but we have a loophole! If the girl dies before the serpent joins with her the clock goes for another 500 years. For the humans who protect this girl the logical choice is to kill her at birth, or at least sometime before she hits 20. Let’s see… a few billion people or one baby. Tough call. Time to go all Spock on her ass!

There’s not much to say about the acting, it’s just bad. Not bad as in “these people couldn’t act their way out of a cut rate community theater production of Hamlet” but bad in the “I don’t want to be doing this, please pay me so I can go home” kind of way. The interaction between characters is just horrible in parts, enough where you just want to press fast forward and spare yourself the agony. This leads to the writing, which is also pretty bad. There are HUGE plot problems, HUGE. There’s a 1000ft snake (did I mention those serpents were kinda big?) slithering around Los Angeles, tearing down buildings and causing lots of havok… but nobody notices it. The opening scene of the movie shows a path of destruction through LA caused when the serpent first arrived, but the big snake itself wasn’t seen.. and wasn’t captured on any cameras.

That’s so stupid it was hard to keep watching.

But now for the good, the special effects. I think all but about $3.50 of the movies budget went into the CGI, and it’s really pretty good. Little details like a flag moving out of the way when a big creature walks past help set the scene for the battle in downtown LA. The obvious thing to compare the battle to is Transformers, and surprisingly it holds up pretty well. Scene after scene you see building being damaged, a big snake slithering up a sky scraper, weird dinosaur type things flying around and huddling on buildings, and it all looks good. It’s far from perfect, but much better than expected.

And that’s the only thing good I have to say about it, but it’s good enough for me to award a second star and to actually recommend that some of you give this movie a shot. If you can’t stand the 15 minutes of story setup at the beginning, just jump about 50 minutes into it and enjoy the eye candy. If you’re a big fan of sci-fi/fantasy films you might even like the story. I doubt it, but anything is possible.

Where to start?  How about the end.  When the credits roll at the end of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, we see in big and bold stylized letters that it was directed by “The Brothers Strause”.  Obviously, they must be proud of their work.  I have no idea why, however.  The only things “The Brothers Strause” ever directed before being handed this project were music videos and short features…and BOY does it show.  They’ve produced nearly 90 minutes of pure amateur-hour cinema and cleverly managed to get a lot of people to shell out $10 each to see it.

The Strause boys *do* have a lot of experience with visual effects, however, and that aspect of AVP:R is at least reasonably tolerable.  There won’t be any Oscars coming their way, but the effects could certainly have been worse.  No, the problem lies elsewhere.  Make that EVERYwhere else.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating much when I say that you can find almost every old sci-fi / action / horror cliche’ here.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Apparently the Strause boys figured that cliche’s just weren’t good enough…so they decided to mix things up by making sure that several characters got killed unexpectedly.  No part of the story was advanced by these killings, mind you, they were just random deaths.  Oh, and lets not forget all the logic holes that you could drive a truck through.  I can check my brain at the door like anyone else, but I do at least ask that you don’t insult my intelligence every five minutes.

No, this is not a rejuvenation of an old franchise.  It’s not a pleasant stroll down memory lane.  Hell, it’s not even a decent way to spend 86 minutes of your life.  It’s just simply 2 very weak star movie…and nothing more.

The 2007 version stars Will Smith as Robert Neville. The year is 2012, three years after a virus originally thought to be the cure for cancer has mutated and started turning humans into zombie like creatures with super speed and strength. These creatures eventually eat all of the uninfected humans except for one, Mr. Neville. Robert is an Army Colonel and a doctor who is working on the cure for the virus, he has continued to work at ground zero and look for other survivors while the world has died around him.

During the day he can hunt, scavenge and do his research as the one weakness of the creatures is they cant deal with ultraviolet light, so they only come out at night. Neville is accompanied by his trusty dog Sam as they do fun stuff like tear thru a now abandoned New York City in brand new sports cars while hunting deer. Kinda sounds like fun til you realize there’s not a lot of opportunity to get laid. Ever!

The effects, especially the opening, are absolutely outstanding. The visuals of Manhattan as it would look after 3 years of desolation are totally convincing. This is shown from all angles ranging from the classic top down helicopter view of the steel canyons to the detail of grass growing through the pavement on Broadway at ground level. This alone makes the movie worth seeing on a large screen.

The action is also very good. You’ll realize this isn’t your every day zombie or creature movie when you see how he captures one to do some testing. There are tons of very memorable scenes. And the movie does a very good job of suspense, it unfolds slowly, but does not drag at any point. And Will Smith is very convincing as he handles what is typically a very challenging role for an actor, that of a solitary character. We have to get to know him only by his actions and conversation with a dog and the occasional mannequin.

We’re giving I Am Legend 4 stars. It gets a little disjointed with flash backs and lacks that little magical something needed for the 5th star. It’s not the type of movie that we tend to watch over and over and over again, but it is absolutely worth catching once. And we advise seeing it on the big screen.

Low budgets and cheap looking effects can be overcome, however, with an engaging story that is well acted and directed. Unfortunately, those elements are missing from this production as well. Yes, it’s a children’s story, but you don’t have to translate it so literally to the screen. No effort at all was made to make this even remotely palatable to adults.

And, as for the kiddies, the low budget and the overly speedy treatment that some scenes receive will likely combine to bore them into wandering off to play with their Nintendo DS. And, even if it DOES manage to hold their attention, the short runtime means you would be scrambling to find something else to keep them occupied in less than an hour.

No, it’s best to just avoid this one unless it happens to be coming on free TV. At that point, you can plant the kids in front of the tube, turn the channel, and hope for the best. If it doesn’t work for them, you’re not out any cash or time.