The Sender is idiotic on an interstellar level and is so awful it doesn’t know when to end insisting instead to aimlessly ramble on for ten minutes after Area 51 has been blown to smithereens! You would think that director Richard Pepin would be itching to bail out since the movie’s story only putrefied more and more as it went along, but there he is giving us scenes of poorly realized aliens waving and endless reunion and goodbye moments like he was getting paid a bonus for surpassing the 90 minute mark!

Pepin really ought to know better since he also directed one of PM Entertainment’s great sci-fi/action hybrid flicks, Dark Breed as well as one its worst, The Silencers. Sadly, instead of the brawny-tough-as-nails-alien-invasion-thwarted-by-Jack-Scalia action of Dark Breed what we end up with in The Sender is closer to the nonsensical evil government/good guy alien mish-mash that sunk The Silencers.

The Sender was pretty much everything I hate in my earthbound science fiction movies, what with its super advanced aliens who never show much advancement, except when the plot dictates it.

For instance, The Sender features an alien that can produce fire balls, sense when people are after her, can cure cancer and bullet wounds, fly around in an advanced spaceship with cloaking features and other gizmos that our government desperately wants.

She can also shape shift into different people, generate whatever clothes she wants, and somehow was able to watch our main character (Michael Madsen in a role that requires him to do nothing more than to take off his sunglasses periodically) grow up and see every important event of his life without him ever knowing she existed! She can even apparently appear and disappear at will.

So why in the world is she spending most of the movie getting chased by R. Lee Ermey’s goons? Why is her spaceship able to be hit by a surface to air missile, but only to the extent that it disables the cloaking device and weapons systems? Why does it take Madsen half the movie to figure out that he and her are being tracked through his pager? And why doesn’t she do a better job of protecting Madsen’s child who is the object of all the car chases? (This is the sort of alien who is content to let a car chase go on for several miles before suddenly deciding to send a fire ball here or there to allow her and Madsen to temporarily escape.)

She and Madsen eventually allow themselves to be captured, presumably so that they would be taken to the facility where his daughter is being held at. This is another bit I never get in these movies. Why do the bad guys always take the people they capture to the same location as the person the good guys are searching for?

And in this particular case, why would you assume the bad guys would take you prisoner when they’ve spent the whole movie trying to kill you? Shoot, the blew up Madsen’s house and R. Lee personally pumped several bullets into Madsen at point blank range in an effort to kill him!

The story borders on being too dumb to even repeat but it involves some mumbo jumbo about an alien gene that Madsen’s daughter possesses that makes her capable of being a Sender which means she can generate a green ball that allows her to travel places, including outer space. The government naturally wants her for their own purposes while the aliens don’t think the earth governments are ready to have that power.

How did she get this alien gene? Don’t know. How did the aliens know one little girl on one little planet in the entire universe had it? Never explained. How does the government know she has it and what it means she is capable of? Who knows! This is a PM Entertainment movie so we’ve got an RV to crash into a truck loaded with hay bales!

And how come these smart ass aliens always send only one of them on these ultra important missions? There was a big mothership screwing around with Madsen’s fighter pilot father in the Bermuda Triangle back in the 1960s during that pointless prologue and the big mothership suddenly appears again at the end of the movie, but where were they when all the chasing and shooting were going on?

And why did they save Madsen’s father from when his jet crashed into the ocean, but not return him to his family for thirty years? And when he finally was returned, he was the same age and wearing the exact same clothes as on the day when he crashed three decades before! What was all that about?

And then there’s whole self-destruct sequence at Area 51! Somehow, the head bad guy (The X-Files‘ Steven Williams wearing ridiculously spray-painted on white eyebrows, hair and mustache) causes the “core” to be breached or melt down or whatever. What kind of core does Area 51 have? And why can you punch a few buttons to make it blow up?

And then Steve tries to play the old “let me have your daughter or half of Nevada will be destroyed” card! Me and Madsen were pretty much, “so what – we don’t know anybody in Nevada and we’ve got a super powered alien on our side” and then Area 51 blows up anyway!

Completely abominable on an intergalactic scale, if I was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn, I’d be more embarrassed by this then by either Zombie 5: The Killing Birds or those commercials he does for law firms that always seem to air during daytime talk shows.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

One brother got himself doublecrossed on a mission in the Caribbean. Left for dead by the DEA after a mission goes horribly wrong, he falls into the hands of the local evil drug lord/cyborg developer and is fashioned into the most cybernetic cop of all time! Robocop? Whatever! That guy was all robo and stuff! Cyborg Cop is what the cool kids like to have their ass kicked by!

Cyborg Cop is so much better than Robocop because he doesn’t look like a robot, but instead looks like Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation! That means instead of a snazzy silver helmet and shiny metallic skin with smart black accents, Cyborg Cop pretty much looks like you or me except that his hair is slicked back and his face is that light yellowish color that Data made so popular for cyborgs on a budget back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And just because Cyborg Cop doesn’t look like much, doesn’t mean that he can’t hold his own against the other cyborg milling around the drug lord’s estate. The battle these two have is so epic, they don’t brawl so much as lumber deliberately, every blow struck by a large metal pole accentuated with animated sparks!

And Cyborg Cop has a secret weapon, too! He still retains the emotions of his previous life! This means that when the drug lord (Kessel) orders him to kill his brother, he instead helps his brother out!

Okay, it wasn’t really that secret a weapon since Kessel’s scientist told him they hadn’t had a chance to erase his emotions, but can you really fault Kessel for hoping that deep down the guy hated his brother and would pretend that he was going all cyborg on his bro just as an excuse to lay a beatdown on him?

But don’t worry, this isn’t some wispy new age cyborg who wonders what it’s like to be real boy or whatever. He has no problem snapping his traitorous best friend’s neck when he is asked.

For all the glamor that is Cyborg Cop though and despite being the title character, Cyborg Cop pretty much takes a back seat to his brother, Greaser Cop. Greaser Cop (David Bradley) is even sweeter than Cyborg Cop because he is all too human! And greasy!

Greaser Cop makes his mark running around this swelteringly hot island nation in a leather jacket, belt with gold studs, black fanny pack, and some seriously jacked up hair that made me think I was watching a midget version of Andrew Dice Clay.

For his part, director Sam Firstenberg has one of the coolest resumes in cinema. He directed all you favorite ninja movies such as Revenge Of The Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, American Ninja and American Ninja II. A lot of your favorite movies with the word “force” in the title came from Sam as well, including Avenging Force, Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, and Operation Delta Force. He also teamed with Greaser Cop again to make Cyborg Cop II, American Samurai and Blood Warriors. Not a bad lifetime’s work. For about ten directors!

Sam obviously knows what it takes to make a movie about a guy running drugs who decides to get into the cyborg assassin game. It takes lots of explosions!

It also takes Greaser Cop on a motorbike battling a cyborg to the death! I hate to just skip right to the end of the movie, but it was everything that a motorbike vs. killing machine ought to be! While all the cops stand around and watch, Greaser Cop drives his motorbike back and forth, taunting the cyborg until he gets up a good head of steam, jumps the bike in the air and decapitates the cyborg with the bike’s wheel in mid-flight! Hollywood should have just given Sam Firstenberg and David Bradley a lifetime pension for service to their industry right then and there!

You don’t make pretty much every great Cannon Pictures action movie of the 1980s by saving up all the good stuff for the end though! Greaser Cop is actually an ex-DEA agent! He had to quit the force due to a controversial shooting of a suspect! If you really care about the details, you can read the newspaper headlines as they fly by in the montage!

When Greaser Cop finds out that Cyborg Cop was left behind on this island, he mounts a one man rescue mission that he immediately compromises by teaming up with a nosy reporter! They bicker, they screw, they hunt for clues at the local morgue. It’s a solid action movie relationship.

The film also allows Greaser Cop to demonstrate a nice variety of violent and aggressive behavior. He beats up half the DEA in a bar fight when he’s trying to get information on his brother. He beats up half of Kessel’s guys when they try to kidnap him from a bar on the island. He kills the other half of Kessel’s guys when he invades Kessel’s compound. He gets involved in a Dukes Of Hazzard-style car chase with the local authorities and he even electrocutes a cyborg! (You have to wonder why Kessel bothered with all this cyborg stuff when there’s perfectly good humans like Greaser Cop running around that can wreak the kind of havoc a legion of cyborgs, Robocops, Terminators, and Predators could only fantasize about.)

The movie is so perfectly tuned that the storyline about a little brat that Cyborg Cop was going to adopt was wrapped up as the credits rolled! Time spent talking about the adoption during the actual movie would have just been time away from cyborgs punching their fists through guys’ heads! Without question, the very best combination of Robocop and The Lords Of Flatbush out there!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Far from being the stinky space junk you would normally expect from producer Roger Corman (see Dead Space, Star Quest, and Starquest II), Star Hunter teaches kids important life lessons that are usually missing from these 1990s straight to video efforts.

By not focusing on the star players, but on the benchwarmers, us athletically challenged losers see that if we keep battling and never give up that we too could someday hope to be shot and killed by a murderous alien!

And it also teaches us not to underestimate that nasty old broad that drives our school bus every day! She might just know how to handle a rifle and be ready to give that alien creep everything it can handle! Before getting her head chopped off!

A couple of these lame backup players and two cheerleaders have to take the short bus back from the game since the real bus is full of real players. Mrs. Marsh is the tough as nails bus driver who has to try to keep the pot smoking Cooper in line while refereeing disputes between the other parties on the bus who keep insulting one another for no reason other to demonstrate why coach is sitting their negative asses on the bench!

But in every life there comes a time when you have to man up! A time when you need to stand tall and grow a set! A time when your bus mysteriously breaks down in the Hood!

At least one of the characters announces that he thinks they broke down in the Hood. And with the graffiti strategically spray painted on the wall behind them, you can’t help but think he’s probably right!

Following the breakdown of their bus, everyone makes their way to the warehouse where Roddy McDowall (Unknown Origin) is living for some reason. He’s a weird guy who claims to be blind and he offers to call a cab for them.

While snooping around Roddy’s place, they notice his large collection of weapons as well as the room with the weird electrical gadgets and severed heads. Roddy turns out to be one of the Star Hunters!

As was explained in the opening of the film the Star Hunters operate in duos. One is the lure and one is the hunter. This is completely idiotic of course, especially when your lure is a creepy, effeminate British guy, but it’s positively genius compared to the Tracker!

The Tracker is the alien that is dispatched to try and recover or terminate the Star Hunters! The Tracker is a guy with long stringy hair, but luckily he has the ability to enter into another person’s body so we don’t have to see him hardly at all during the movie.

The Tracker is a completely useless fool who doesn’t do anything except periodically explain something or provide a tip on how to combat the Star Hunter. (His suggestion to use tinfoil was like something right out of an outer space Hints From Heloise)!

Once the kids run away from Roddy’s place, they discover a shield encompassing the area which prevents them from getting out. This leads to a series of scenes where they try to evade the Star Hunter.

It all takes place in the same generic warehouse and alley locations and it’s only the occasional gem of dialogue from one of the kids like how one decides that once they beat the Star Hunter, he’s going to become a soldier of fortune that prevents things from being a total galactic-sized disaster!

The movie also deserves attention for featuring one of the lamest alien killing machines of all time. Aside from the bit where a bunch of tin foil strung along a clothes line confused it, there were other embarrassing moments for Star Hunter.

There was the time it didn’t know what to do when a person next to him didn’t move while someone further down the alley banged on a dumpster. And the bit where it was totally confounded by a couple of shirts soaked with perfume will have to go down as one of the all-time great Achilles heels of a near invincible villain.

At 80 minutes the movie is obviously an hour or so too long and I can’t tell you that it wasn’t fairly painful watching everyone involved do their absolute worst including Roddy and 1960s hottie Stella Stevens as the bus driver. Then again, this is junior varsity high school football players vs. aliens, so do you even care?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

If that sounds like the set up for producer Roger Corman’s Lords Of The Deep to you, then you are not only correct, but also have my sympathies for apparently having been subjected to that waterlogged abomination.

But Roger is all about second chances! Because a second chance costs half as much as an all new first chance! Thus, this not very intriguing or original premise is also the jumping off point for another of his company’s movies, Unknown Origin.

There’s only so many great ideas floating around, so it’s understandable that every so often you’re going to have recycle a story here or there. This is especially true in one of our most cherished genres, the “underwater version of Alien” genre.

Movies like Deepstar Six, Leviathan, and Endless Descent are favorites because not only do you get plenty of gory deaths from icky creatures, but also because it all takes place right here on planet Earth! This ups the suspense because it’s a lot easier to believe that terribly deformed bloodthirsty creatures are rampaging around a super secret advanced lab that’s been constructed at the deepest part of the ocean for some usually vague mining reason than it is to buy that it’s all happening on a spaceship!

A spaceship? That’s science fiction! Undersea labs are basically submarines that are parked! That’s science fact!

In keeping with the movie’s theory that we can’t continue to plunder our nation’s non-renewable resources, Corman leads by example by re-positioning some of his favorite footage from Lords Of The Deep into Unknown Origin! Pretty much all the exterior shots of the undersea lab as well as the scenes of the lab’s subs moving here and there were first seen in Lords Of The Deep.

There’s also probably some footage from other Corman movies inserted as well. There is at least a shot of an explosion in a shaft that was also seen in Star Hunter and The Terror Within.

None of that is particularly shocking or off-putting since we’ve seen that sort of thing done before in movies like Ultra Warrior. Despite Unknown Origin not having the sheer quantity of re-used scenes as a movie like Ultra Warrior, Corman still turns it up a notch and does something I’ve never seen before in a movie – he uses the same opening text that describes the plight of earth in 2020 as he did in Lords Of The Deep!

I urge you though to ride it out because Corman takes everything that was wrong about Lords Of The Deep (everything) and changes it! I was going to say that he fixed it, but replacing a surly Bradford Dillman as the lab commander with a surly Alex Hyde-White was not exactly an upgrade.

To Alex’s credit, he does spend most of the movie threatening his crew and pulling a gun on them while forcing them to suffocate to prove they aren’t possessed by an alien parasite. Besides, it wasn’t like he didn’t take his suffocation first. It’s called leading by example.

The story of Unknown Origin is just the sort of story we were wishing for while enduring Lords Of The Deep. Gone are the pansy aliens who want to tell us how to save our planet and spend all their brain power communicating with a perpetually stupefied looking Priscilla Barnes. In their place are nasty little lizard-rat-like parasites that crawl into your mouth and slap pinkish tentacles all around your head! And the only to way to destroy them? Burning!

You know what that means! Time to hit the mining supply depot and load up on the flame throwers!

The stuntmen who specialize in burn scenes get a nice workout in this movie as there are at least three guys who get burned alive! That was a smart choice for this movie because in these undersea movies you aren’t able to blow up cars and watching models of subs and labs explode doesn’t give you the same kind of rush. Guys engulfed by flames and writing around on the floor though? Always appreciated!

The parasites are brought over accidentally when the crew investigates a distress call from an underwater Russian mining facility. The Russians uncovered the aliens while digging under the sea and once the parasites were on the loose, everyone went crazy and killed each other.

Despite not knowing the cause of death, the dead bodies are brought aboard for examination as is a survivor. Naturally, he’s infected and the corpses are harboring parasite eggs.

It’s true that the super powers the parasites exhibit are never fully explained. Like how they can avoid almost all detection despite being a big lizardy thing that’s moving around inside a body. And yes, they somehow can possess a person, commanding them to do whatever nefarious bidding they can think of. And really, isn’t it obvious that they’d also have a dose of that super strength all parasitic reptiles are renowned for?

But who really cares about some monster’s dubious résumé so long as there’s 75 minutes of shooting, burning, accusations, and a lab with a self destruct sequence! It even has an android in it along with a shady doctor who has his own agenda!

Unknown Origin is what Lords Of the Deep should have been, which admittedly wasn’t a hell of a lot, but still, I’ll gladly trade slimy parasites with unexplained powers for preachy manta rays too stupid to communicate with anyone other than one of the gals from Three’s Company!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And into this nightmarish way life rides one man astride his chopper, ready to brawl with evildoers and romance native gals with access to a potassium mine! Yeah, it’s an apocalypse pretty much like you were hoping for!

Raiders Of The Sun was made by Cirio H. Santiago for Roger Corman. Cirio was pretty much the one man Philippine equivalent of the entire Italian trash movie industry. The titles of his films are a mouthwatering collection of junk that will instantly convert the uninitiated into Cirio fanatics!

Equalizer 2000, Dune Warriors, Future Hunters, and Wheels Of Fire are just a few of the more prestigious of his post-apocalyptic oeuvre alone! That he also shot a film called Bloodfist 2050 but somehow without Don “The Dragon” Wilson only cements his status as “Favorite Director Who Was Not Italian But Should’ve Been.”

At the beginning of Raiders Of The Sun there is some narration explaining how the world ended, but that’s just strictly boiler plate stuff, legally required to get us to the point where nameless groups of poorly dressed extras run around shooting and blowing each other up!

The Alpha League are the good guys and they’re fighting another group of losers for control of this really awesome quarry. You can tell everyone apart because the Alpha League wear yellow vests and one of the leaders of the bad guys commands his troops while wearing a hoghead, as if he was on his way to an Arkansas Razorback football game when Armageddon broke out.

The film follows the wasteland adventures of Talbot and Brodie. Talbot is a pretty generic guy who thinks the war is finally over and he can go home to his wife. Before he can get there though, his wife is kidnapped by the bad guys thus sending him on a search for her deep into the heart of enemy territory.

Brodie (Deathfight and Not Another Mistake’s Richard Norton) is mega cool with his blonde hair, dark beard, black leather pants, and open black leather jacket with no shirt. He rocks some mean kung fu when he has to and always seems to be hauling a giant gun, squeezing off rounds into whatever freak wanders by. He also gets hooked up with a bunch of midgets!

Cirio is obviously going for an epic feel with his almost 80 minute thriller by splitting the story between Talbot’s attempts to rescue his wife, Brodie’s quest for the hidden potassium mine, and the bad guys’ scheming to destroy the Alpha League once and for all.

There is a concern that perhaps Cirio is trying to cram too much into such a limited amount of time and that the movie might suffer from a lack of focus. Do not panic! The movie is excellent at maintaining its focus on stuff exploding!

Besides, you’ll be wrapped up in Brodie’s and Talbot’s situations in no time. With Talbot undercover in the evil gang, you’ll get to go on raids with him where he gets to see his buddies die, you’ll see him in a deadly rite of initiation that involves swinging on ropes while trying to club another to death, and you’ll see the big jail break where he and his old lady make their dash for freedom!

And don’t think that his old lady is just some piece of white trash arm candy (though she is that, too!) because she gives as good as she gets and manages to run over the guy in the hog helmet with his own car! Let me tell you something, brother – the end times is COLD!

But whither Brodie? After rescuing a native girl and getting shot for his troubles (thankfully not in the leather pants!), she takes him back to her secret village which just happens to be the very same village he was looking for that worships a potassium mine.

Their leader doesn’t want any outsiders because outsiders bring trouble, but Brodie is wise and says that trouble will find them anyway and trains the men in the village in stick fighting. He also has time to bang his new girlfriend and again demonstrates the wisdom of a guy who is getting banged regularly by saying that for the first time he knows what it is to be at peace.

Nothing is forever though! Especially in this new world where guys in leather pants are our wisest people! The bad guys roll in, steal gunpowder, kill Brodie’s girlfriend, and trap them all in a cave in!

The friendly midgets that Brodie saved earlier from being burned alive appear and dig Brodie and the villagers out of the cave in. Brodie heads back to the Alpha League to assist the final battle with the bad guys and when he gets out of a station wagon followed by about five or six midgets carrying buckets of gunpowder, the power of that scene is self-explanatory.

The best moments of the movie though occur when Brodie goes one on one with the leader of the bad guys. Karate fighting is the order of the day as kicks, punches, kneeings, head bashing, and assorting grapplings are delivered without mercy. That it was done to the chunky beats of the bad ass background music only made Brodie and his leather pants that much more awe-inspiring!

Raiders Of The Sun keeps getting better even as it ends when there’s a little victory parade where Brodie hugs Talbot and is taken through the assembled crowd of about ten people by his midget pals. It was kind of like the end of Star Wars when Han Solo and Luke and the rest were recognized by the Rebellion for their bravery. But with tight leather pants. To state the obvious, I, like Brodie, now know what it is to be at peace.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Olivier Gruner plays an emotionless mining cop who somehow gets almost emotionally involved in investigating his brother’s death. More importantly, he sports a pretty bad haircut (but not nearly as bad as the one in Savage) and throws his badge down on the ground after he finishes getting all sorts of vegeneace on pretty much the entire population of Mars.

The mining company is up on Mars to mine Silex which is some kind of something that’s a really great source of fuel for all us greedy Earthlings. Like all miracle discoveries in science fiction though, Silex turns out to be decidedly un-miraclous.

It turns out that Silex has a little bit of a side effect on those exposed to it. It gives them a good dose of the Martian Plague! Not the Martian Plague that gives everyone unsightly sores! Yes, that very Martian Plague!

But as cool as Martian Plague is, the Silex proves its mettle as miracle gunk whose breathrough uses are surpassed only by its breatkthrough medical problems by also causing heinous birth defects!

You can see where this one is going, right? Olivier Gruner battling to the death on the red-tinted sandy landscape of Mars against an army of mutant babies! It’s like director Jon Hess (The Lawless Land and Excessive Force) tapped into my brain and downloaded the wet dream I’ve been having since I could squirt standing up!

Despite this promising set up, Mars proves that in space, everyone with a hankering for lesser Olivier Gruner movies can see and hear you fail! How can you have a movie predicated on the awfulness of a mining corporation killing mutant babies in an effort to keep everyone in the dark about Silex’s horrible side effects, but never show me a freaking mutant baby? Just having something wrapped in a bundle and people looking at it like someone just crapped on their wedding cake isn’t going to cut it!

To be fair, the movie trotted out a full grown mutant that was the son of Pete the Hermit, but a Martian Elephant Man who shuffles around and hides upstairs in his bedroom is certainly no substitute for a squalling little brat with giant eyes, fangs and claws!

Lack of nasty deformed kids aside, Mars still has plenty to keep your own deformed kids borderlined entranced for a good 15 minutes or so. Olivier knows the conventions of this type of movie and thus his investigation takes him to the local strip club! The movie demonstrates a nice balance of action between shots of strippers swinging around poles and Olivier stabbing and punching miners!

Olivier also manages to get mugged as soon as he arrives in Alpha City, but it all worked out because he beat up a gang of roughnecks dispatched by the company to keep Olivier from digging too deep into his brother’s death. He also picks up the annoying chatterbox sidekick that helps him out the rest of the film. As obnoxious as he was, it was certainly preferrable to having Olivier hang around Shari Belafonte’s doctor character who was sporting a Susan Powter haircut.

Somehow, Olivier decides that a trip outside the domed city to visit old Pete the Hermit is just what the case needs and it turns out he’s right because once they get old Pete the Hermit talking, he tells us everything! I always like a movie where a single character is sitting out there waiting to be interviewed so that he can spill every bit of story we need to solve the mystery and finish up the movie.

It’s so much faster than having our hero visit the library, the local hall of records, and breaking into the bad guy’s office to take a peek at the incriminating file that was just left laying around on his desk. I also like a movie where news of this important meeting just happens to be overheard by someone who can report it to the bad guys. It makes the final confrontation so much easier to schedule.

Olivier gets embroiled in series of fights at the end of the film as he battles his way back to the head of the mining company who knew all along all the bad stuff that was happening and who wants Olivier dead.

Mars is the expected menu of low budget action violence where guys get punched, kicked, stabbed, shot, blown up, and set on fire. None of it was executed with any particular panache and nothing of much consequence was destroyed. (I’m probably spoiled by PM Entertainment’s movies where buses and cars are routinely flying through the air and blowing up.)

Olivier’s part doesn’t call for him to demonstrate much of anything beyond a vague irritated squint and the occasionally kickboxing eruption and thus he executes his role to perfection.

There is one thing that absolutely sinks the movie and it isn’t the bad computer graphics of spaceships landing on Mars which I thought was stolen from a early generation video game. It also isn’t the fact that most of the action on Mars seems to take place in steam tunnels and other grungy industrial locales that could’ve been any number of factories in my own town!

No, the single detail that you will remember from this movie when your friends are asking you to rate the Gruner movies you’ve seen is that they had someone else dub Gruner’s voice!

I’ll be the first to admit that in most of his other movies, I can’t understand half of what he is saying due to his soft-spoken French accent, but when you’ve grown up with him yammering like that, it kind of becomes part of the charm of any given Gruner film! Dubbing Gruner is like colorizing Frank Sinatra’s eyes or painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa! I kept trying to convince myself that Olivier just had a cold or that it was the Martian atmosphere affecting his sinuses, but in space everyone can hear your hideously dubbed voice!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Corbin gets to dress up in a silly looking outfit, chomp his cigars and spin around in office chairs while taking over or “spacejacking” the Star Princess.

His real-life wife Amanda Pays is along for the ride as a good guy trying to help save the rest of the passengers.

I found it odd that Corbin and Amanda didn’t have very many scenes together, but she probably got a look at him crawling around on the floor of the bridge imitating a sheep and began to have second thoughts about this whole “let’s make a movie together” scheme.

The Star Princess is full up (with about 10 or so people) with billionaires who are on board for a trip to the moon. The ship has all the amenities any self-respecting sci-fi movie from Roger Corman’s production company would be expected to have.

There’s ugly set desgin where everything high tech has a decidedly low tech look. (The communications system is basically just some closed circuit TVs).

There’s the utterly pointless use of virtual reality which was a requirement for all early to mid-1990s futuristic and cheap movies. (This allows some sex scenes to be added as well as some scenes to be filmed inexpensively outdoors without having to dress it up any.)

And you of course have the androids that look exactly like you and I, save one critical difference. (Horrible haircuts.)

Corbin plays the Second Mate on board the ship and has a scheme so diabolical that an entirely new word has to be invented to describe his crime: Spacejack! It’s like hijack, but in space!

Corbin is going to hold the rich dilettantes hostage until they give him access codes for their money. Once he gets the money, a guy in another spaceship will rendezvous with Corbin and aid his escape. Corbin is then going to use the money to set up a colony for him and the androids he builds! Because real people are super sucky!

He executes the plan to perfection when the android he has reprogrammed to help him blows up way too much of the ship killing most of the people on board! We see several extras falling down and lots of junk falling in the cooridors of the ship before things settle down. There’s still enough wealthy passengers left though to get him the money he needs, but more importantly there’s still the First Mate and Amanda to contend with!

The First Mate (Taylor) has the advanatage of looking like Tom Wopat which reassures the audience that he is a sort of can-do fellow who’s not going to give up until every hairbrained last ditch plan is used and every air duct is crawled through!

Do you need a guy who can get himself caught in an area of the ship that Corbin depressurizes so that he almost gets sucked out into space? Check! Is a dude that kicks Corbin in the nuts during a stilted fight scene where he stands around waiting for Corbin to hit him back something you’ve been craving? Spacejacked is just that jacked!

Amanda is on board not because she is rich, but because she won a contest. She is an afficiando of luxury space liners though and knows all about them from flying simulated versions of them on her home computer!

Somehow this prepares her to go out on a spacewalk where she and Taylor find some extra C-4 plastic explosive that didn’t detonate for some reason when Corbin’s android blew up the ship. And heck, that stuff is still good if you just stick a flare in it, light it up, and throw it in that android’s face!

The movie is at its hideous best though when it is simultaneously trying to tell us what a genius Corbin is while showing us what nitwit he really is.

While we are supposed to believe that he somehow had access to and reprogrammed one of the ship’s androids, was able to get the ship loaded up with explosives, and arranged for a partner with a spaceship to be the getaway vehicle, he hadn’t planned at all on how to secure the ship from a guy climbing onto the bridge through the big air duct while his back was turned? Surely, after all the Die Hard clones where one man thwarts terrorists by climbing inside ventilation systems, any aspiring terrorist would address that issue first.

As befits most of Roger Corman’s science fiction movies of the era, Spacejacked continues to recycle the worst of the clichés these movies usually traffic in. I speak of course of the dreaded “self-destruct countdown.” Why would a civilian passenger spaceship come equipped with a self-destruct ability? The self-destruct gimmick needs to be retired unless and until someone can convincingly explain why it’s necessary.

Everything finishes up in expectedly anemic fashion when Taylor and Amanda are rescued after a passing spaceship spots a good android that Corbin had blown into space and the good android leads his rescuers back to the Star Princess. The only Spacejacking you will remember when this one finishes is the hour and fifteen minutes the Bernsen family spacejacks out of your life.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

To be caught outside of the futuristic structure where the whores are kept known as a House of Pleasure means certain death!  Police suspecting a Subgrade of cavorting illegally with a woman will demand to see their junk to make sure its not suspiciously engorged!

It goes without saying that this new world we all have to look forward to is a paradise!  These restrictions on the class of people most prone to breaking them (young, unemployed, horny, single guys) inevitably leads to zero crime!  It’s true!  David Carradine even says so!

Carradine is in fine form during this particular cheap sci-fi phase of his career (see also Warlords, Dune Warriors, Karate Cop) as the enigmatic Jason, a cigar chomping, suit wearing guy who recruits Bone and Helen to pull off a heist for him.

Bone is a guy who was just fired from his job which means he’s busted back down to Subgrade. He hangs out with a couple of his loser Subgrade friends including Creon (Michael Shaner, the serial killer from The Expert) and J.D.

Helen (Sherilyn Fenn in a pre-Twin Peaks role) is a whore who catches Bone’s eye.  After beating Creon at some futurisitc pool game (the balls looked different) and fending off his advances, Helen hooks up with Bone and begins an illegal love affair with him.

Jason appears and offers to help them escape their city (Soleil) if they’ll just steal a computer disc with some information on it for him.  They do this and immediately become Soleil’s most wanted criminals.

When they meet with Jason to find out about their escape, he explains that they need to pull off one more job for him and then they can go to the rival city that Soleil is currently at war with.

So they rob a bank and screw that up, but they were already public enemey number one, so it’s not like the tension is exactly ratcheted up any.

In the first twist of the movie that comes as a surprise only to a Subgrade named Bone, Jason turns out to be one of the head cops!  He explains that since the cops are so freaking great, there’s no crime in Soleil anymore so he has to create crime! And Bone and Helen are his greatest creations to date!

I can’t say that I really understood why he willingly put himself in harm’s way so that he could explain his devious dealings, but perhaps it was just a way to really get his criminal superstars over to the public.  Still, seems a bit risky.

In the meantime, Creon’s grudge against Bone and Helen has really blossomed and it isn’t long before Jason approaches him with an offer for vengeance!

Bone and Helen, having escaped Jason and his police, have hooked up with their old military pilot buddy Alexi and cooked up a plot to steal a helicopter and fly to Soleil’s mortal enemy and seek sanctuary there.

But first, Bone and Helen are going to pull one last job!  How many “one last jobs” are they going to pull?  Thankfully, this one is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.  Except in a really cheap, cruddy, sci-fi movie.

It takes place at the cryogenic facility where the rich people are housed.  There’s about three or four of them and they’re just standing up inside plastic tubes with a little lighted collar on.  It’s less than great.

Bone does get to confront his old boss and trade lots of unconvincing cuss words with him before Helen plugs him in the back.  Then Creon shows up and wreaks a little havoc before everyone escapes Jason and the cops.

A race to the helicopter ensues and our heroes fly to freedom!  Or do they?  I suppose that if you’re a Subgrade who hasn’t gotten laid regulary, you would be shocked at the shock ending they lay on us, but really I would have been shocked if it had ended any other way.

Landing in the territory of Soleil’s enemy, all they find is a decayed airfield with skeletons lying all over.  But who is that waiting in the hangar? Holy crud!  There’s a guy in there that looks exactly like Jason!  Oh wait, it is Jason.

For the second time in the movie Jason reveals his secret agenda.  This time he explains for no real reason that  Soleil defeated their enemey 20 or 30 years ago, but they needed to pretend the enemey was still around to keep the military budget up.

Then he started complaining about how radiation doesn’t stay where you want it, that the stolen computer disc would ensure that he wouldn’t be the next criminal of the month and that by telling everyone that Bone and Helen had gotten away and might someday come back to attack them, things would continue to be really great in Soleil.

You don’t need to be a pent up Subgrade to tell that Crime Zone is comfortably sucky. Combining no new twists with one of those dystopias that don’t make any sense (what was the entire point of the whole Subgrade system?  And how did that eliminate crime instead of make it skyrocket?  Especially since everyone lived in squalor much worse than anything most people live in today?) with the expected production values of a Roger Corman produced movie, Crime Zone will sparodically make you wince with its non-existent peformance by Bone and over-the-top mugging by Creon (the exact sort of mugging that actually worked for him in The Expert).

Mostly though, it will bore you with its trash-strewn set decorating, cops decked out in umpire chest protectors, and all sorts of boring scenes of Creon, Bone, and Helen arguing with each other.  Say what you want about the onerous life of the Subgrade, but at least they never had to watch this.  

© 2011 MonsterHunter

First of all, I wouldn’t staff my spaceship for the most important mission in the history of my civilization with only four aliens and a robot. That’s not near enough alien muscle to keep a bunch of surly and horny humans in line. The fact that three of the four aliens turn out to be rebels against the plan not only underlines the need to better vet the crew members, but to also perhaps illustrate why this race of morons needs some of our sweet goodies!

Another thing I probably would have given more thought to is the wisdom of choosing some of the humans that were ultimately chosen for this mission.

Sure, you might be able to justify the astronauts since they’ve presumably had training for space travel and would have an open mind to alien cultures. And you could also make a case for the two military personnel as they would be battle hardened tough guys that wouldn’t run scared from a little alien sexing up.

It’s the kickboxer and his stripper girlfriend that have me a little worried! Worried that with all that alien cross-breeding going on that we wouldn’t get a good dose of kickboxing and stripping that is!

Without question, Starquest II takes all that was bad about the original Star Quest and doubles it! The group of bickering jerks meandering around the same three spaceship sets bickers more and are jerkier!

The forgettable cast of TV actors that populated Star Quest are replaced with even more forgettable actors who have probably appeared in TV shows that we’ve all forgotten!

The story makes so little sense that Freddy Krueger himself, Robert England, has to explain everything to us in excruciating detail during his big death scene at the end of the movie! Just claw my brains out of my head and be done with it, Freddy!

Those of you who hated (quite rightfully I might add) Star Quest, will no doubt be concerned that Starquest II is just a weak rehash of a black hole-sized dog turd can take comfort in the fact that this latest installment crosses the final frontier of stink in an effort to deliver even less entertainment value for your time! And Starquest II is even shorter than the already short first one!

While the first movie padded out its running time with meaningless sessions in the virtual reality room, Starquest II goes and plays the softcore sex scene card!

With brain-damaging snyth porn music thumping in the background, various cast members would suddenly decide to start playing space grab ass with one another despite the fact that they had no idea what they were doing on the ship in the first place! “What? How did I get here? What are these aliens up to? I guess I’ll check into all that right after I get laid!”

Starquest II does have some things going for it though. For instance, it makes you appreciate director Fred Gallo’s alien-on-the-loose-on-a-shoestring-budget epic, Dead Space. That one had the Beastmaster Marc Singer in it though, whereas Adam Baldwin stars in Starquest II. This Adam guy isn’t even one of those cruddy famous Baldwin brothers! It just feels like you’re watching Stephen Baldwin!

I suppose that since this non-Baldwin brother appeared in Firefly and that Freddy Krueger is on board as an alien disguised as a preacher, they are the official stars. The only guy though worth watching is the potty-mouth kickboxer called Trit played by kickboxing movie legend Jerry Trimble!

Not Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble, the 1986 PKA and PKC Kickboxing Champion of the World! Yes! The very same Golden Boy who hook kicked his way into the hearts and solar plexuses of obscure action movie fans everywhere with star turns in Stranglehold, Full Contact, One Man Army, and everyone’s favorite, Live By The Fist!

Golden Boy provides the only semblance of action in the movie when he kicks the crap out of that guy from Firefly and brawls with the android. He even manages to punch a hole in the side of the ship after blasting the android with some kind of large pump action gun, causing the robot to get sucked into space!

His stripper girlfriend does her part as well, giving him a dance while he’s strapped to a chair because the rest of the humans think he killed someone. Fans of all things gratuitous will be pleased to know that she also gives a dance to an alien disguised as a sexy human woman! The alien kills her for her trouble though, proving once and for all that this is an alien race that doesn’t deserve to survive!

Veterans of Dead Space and Starquest will want to know if the footage of the spaceships shooting at each other that appeared in both those movies also makes an appearance here as well. Are you stupid? Of course it does!

But there’s plenty more to keep cinematic detectives with more time than real life on their hands with all the clips that are used in this movie. Right off hand, I can say that I recognized some scenes from Crime Zone and others have already also noted scenes from Brain Dead.

Some of Roger Corman’s war and exotic dancer movies may also be represented, but I’m not well versed in either of those genres to know for sure. I’d also wager that at least some of the exterior shots of the spaceship were last seen in the first Star Quest.

I think I’m going to just start using clips of myself watching earlier movies to watch these sequels from now on.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And not your standard exciting space-related deaths like getting your stomach blasted out by some hideous alien or getting chucked out an air lock by a crabby computer! No, Star Quest is keeping it real! (And by real, I mean seriously mundane.)

One guy hangs himself and another guy has a heart attack during a particularly intense virtual reality session! There’s even some drug overdosing going on! Is this a spaceship or one of those motels with weekly rates?

The movie though isn’t all about how past problems like drugs, suicide, and underemployed actors continue to haunt us in the future. It still maintains a nice dollop of the expected horror movie in space motifs we demand in our thoughtless-provoking sci-fi.

The captain of the ship for instance is one of those guys who doesn’t make it through suspended animation! You know that guy! Everyone wakes up, but there’s always some grody looking corpse in a busted sleep chamber. It happened to hapless astronauts at least as far back as 1968′s Planet of the Apes, so you know that’s futuristic gold!

You know what else every good, great, and entirely anonymous space movie (Star Quest for example) needs? A pyscho android! I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a spaceflight yet where the android didn’t get his hard drive in a wad for some reason and started trying to manhandle all the wetware on the ship!

What’s even worse is that usually these androids are the undercover variety which means that they look like you or I (if you are I looked like an actor desperate for a paying gig) so we never see these things coming until the rest of the astronauts are smacking the android with hammers to no effect. What really helps in maintaining their cover is that we are never sure if their robotic like speech and movements are because they are really an android or just because they can’t act!

Despite all this dying and android angst happening, Starquest still manages to bend the law of physics by clocking in at less than 80 minutes, yet seeming to be infinitely longer!

This is chiefly due to a clever use of characters bickering amongst themselves for no reason, the same devastating information being doled out a couple of different times to different characters (I believe there were at least four different scenes where some character first learned that Earth had been destroyed), and the mostly pointless use of the virtual reality bit. (It did provide Roger Corman’s company an excuse to reuse the space dogfight footage that we previously thought was pointless when it appeared in Dead Space.)

There isn’t a whole lot beyond the crew members sniping at each other going on for the first half of the movie. With the captain dead, a new, unpopular guy assumes command. Though his sour disposition is the most obvious reason for this dislike, I can’t help but believe that the fact that he’s sporting a toupee that looks like the pelt of some alien creature played some small part in everyone’s distaste for him.

The crew is an international one which means we are subjected to a variety of bad accents as well as some bogus tension between people from different countries. When the Russian complains that the British chick is too reserved and the British chick retorts that the Russian is suffering from her Russian paranoia, my American apathy was kicking in big time. There’s also a French guy who sounds like he’s a moronic hayseed from Lousianna when he speaks. No wonder that android went crazy on all of them!

Predictably, once the movie ramps up the action for the big finish, it goes from being merely an annoying curiosity (why is the Russian chick smoking cigarettes on the spaceship? Why is her virtual reality session taking place during a violent demonstration at Red Square? Why is everyone so worked up over “Federation” regulations when there’s only five or six humans left in the universe?) to an increasingly dunderheaded collection of familiar space movie elements.

How many times do we have to see the scene where the android’s severed head is hooked up to a bunch of wires so that it can be interrogated by surviving crew members while it taunts them for their own lame humanness?

And what is the deal with the self-destruct sequence on spaceships? I’ll admit that it’s been a while since I’ve been on a space shuttle, but I don’t recall that it comes equipped with an auto destruct button (though you could probably tastelessly note that it really doesn’t need one).

Cars, buses, trains, planes, and boats don’t have any gizmo that lets you blow it up as a computerized voice counts down the seconds towards detonation. So why would anyone building a spaceship put that in, except to increase the tension at the end of a movie? And why is it always so hard to shut off the self-destruct? Seems like that’s the kind of thing you want to give people some leeway on if they change their mind.

When the movie finally reveals its first shock ending, it doesn’t come as a shock ending so much as just a bit of a tacked on cheat. Without giving away too much, based on what had already happened in the movie, the big reveal wasn’t really justified or realistic.

Here’s my big reveal about their big reveal – do some psychological evaluations of your crew members and don’t hire a bunch of egocentric jerks to fly in close quarters for a long time in space. These astronauts had their own rooms, a VR machine, and could smoke on board! What more do you need to keep your sanity?

The final shocker isn’t unexpected, but does give you a chance to see perhaps the worst matte painting used in a movie ever. On the other hand, the movie gives you the best scene ever of an android’s severed arm being used to fly the spaceship. Of course, that arm turns traitor and tries to blow everyone up, but that’s just another day at the office in deep space, right?

© 2011 MonsterHunter