Starring Belinda Mayne, Mord Bodin and Roberto Barrese
Written and directed by Ciro Ippolito
Midnight Legacy
Italian knock-offs of Hollywood hits were a rampant phenomenon in the 1970s. Perhaps the most successful example artistically was Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1978). Released as Zombi 2, it benefitted from the Italian release of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead under the name Zombi. Similarly Alien 2: On Earth tries to piggyback off the success of Ridley Scott’s landmark 1979 hit Alien, albeit to comparatively lacklustre results.
Humanoids from the Deep was one of those films whose giant clamshell package on the shelf of my local video store always caught my eye as a kid. The combination of a nubile woman and inhuman eyes on the cover tweaked my growing brain’s twin interests: girls and monsters. But the film’s R-rating meant I wouldn’t be seeing it anytime soon, no matter my protestations to whichever parent held the video club card.
Some thirty years later, Shout! Factory has done us geeks the honour of putting out Humanoids on DVD and Blu-ray, and the excitement I felt inserting the disc into my player was almost sexual. Finally, after all these years, I was going to get to see if the movie of my adolescent imagination would live up to the promise of its cover art.
The DLB hasn’t been to a Film School Confidential in awhile, but tomorrow night’s screening of Lifeforce (1985) at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema might just force me out of my rabbit hole.
The 1985 sci-fi/horror epic is an insane mash-up of space ships, naked vampires, sex and massive destruction that has to be seen to be believed. Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame directs The Stunt Man‘s Steve Railsback in a manic adaptation of the Colin Wilson novel The Space Vampires (pictured below) which was partly scripted by Dan O’Bannon (Return of the Living Dead, Alien). How’s that for a genre treat?
Alien inspired a lot of filmmakers. Specifically, it inspired a lot of filmmakers to rip it off.
Legendary B-movie maker Roger Corman saw the success of Ridley Scott’s now-classic 1979 effort and decided to ride the public’s appetite for predatory xenomorphs. The first (rotten) fruit of that “inspiration” was 1981’s Galaxy of Terror, an exploitation neutron bomb that included rape by intergalactic space worm. Not done with the concept, Corman gave editor Allan Holzman a day to come up with footage that might become another Alien rip-off. Unused space battle footage from Corman’s Star Wars rip-off Battle Beyond the Stars, still-standing Galaxy sets and some quick scripting provided the basis for seven minutes of footage which would become the confused opening of Forbidden World. But once it gets going, FW proves itself to be an entertaining B-movie with enough boobs, blood and balls to make it worth killing 77 minutes of your life.
Starring Adrien Brody, Alice Braga and Laurence Fishburne
Directed by Nimrod Antal
Written by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch
20th Century Fox
The first question I asked myself upon exiting my screening of Predators was this: do I want to watch it again? The original Predator thrilled me as a 17-year-old back in 1987, and I’ve watched it so many times since, both on DVD and whenever it crops up on TV, which is frequently. Did I feel the same way about Predators?
Like Event Horizon before it, Pandorum combines visionary science fiction themes with horror tropes, to only mixed success.
Dennis Quaid as Payton
Played by the intense Ben Foster (30 Days of Night), our hero Bower is a crew member aboard the malfunctioning deep space craft Elysium. Newly awakened from cryogenic suspension, Bower cannot initially remember who he is, how long he’s been asleep, or his mission. His superior officer Payton (Dennis Quaid: Dreamscape) revives and Bower goes out to investigate the seemingly dead ship, only to discover that the Elysium, which is carrying the remnants of humanity to a new world after the destruction of the Earth years before, is infested with vicious monsters hungry for flesh. Those few passengers who have revived live in fear of both the creatures and their fellow men, some of whom will do anything to survive.
Antje Trau as Nadia
Pandorum (the word refers to an insanity developed by astronauts during their years of deep space travel) is the result of a synthesis of two scripts, neither of which seem to have paid much attention to character development. Director Christian Alvart (Antibodies) keeps the film humming along action-wise, and he and his crew’s attention to detail make Pandorum one of the most realistic-looking and conceptually fully-realized sci-fi films ever made. (He freely admits his indebtedness to Alien and the world it created on the commentary track he shares with producer Jeremy Bolt.) The creatures which terrorize the crew members are also impressive, most of their physical creepiness the result of practical effects, with only slight and unnoticeable assists from CG. (Alvart cast André Hennicke, the star of his first film, the impressive serial killer thriller Antibodies, in the role of the lead hunter.)
Quaid with Cam Gigandet as Gallo
What makes Pandorum especially disappointing is its unrealized potential. The film’s mythology, well-explicated in the DVD’s behind-the-scenes featurettes and the filmmaker commentary, is involving, especially the origins of the monsters roaming the Elysum, baying for blood. It’s great to see Dennis Quaid onscreen, and Foster does his best with an underwritten role. (Brief flashbacks to his character’s wife, meant to humanize him according to Bolt, come off as perfunctory; concessions to character before getting back to the action.)
Ben Foster as Bower
A serious film, Pandorum has its fair share of scares but not a lot of thrills.
