Shameless Self Expression

Marshall Thompson is the sole survivor of the first manned mission to Mars, and tells the crew who have rescued him, that his nine fellow crew members were killed by an alien. Kim Spalding, heading the rescue team, disbelieves Thompson, thinking that he himself killed everyone and wants him court-martialled. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Thompson was telling the truth, and the killer alien has snuck on board, ready to bump everyone off one-by-one, as was before. 1958 Edward L. Cahn ( “The Creature with the Atom Brain” , “Girls in Prison” and countless other hacky projects) sci-fi movie was the inspiration for John Carpenter’s spoofy “Dark Star” , and more precisely, Ridley Scott’s popular “Alien” . I’m not much of a fan of “Alien” ( “Dark Star” is an entirely different matter altogether), but I have to say, even that film is an improvement over this boring, poorly scripted affair. The low-budget FX and sets are often criticised, but for me, they’re par for the...

Nic Cage (making Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover seem restrained) stars as an a-hole yuppie NY literary agent who gets bitten by Jennifer Beals, a girl he picked up in a bar, who turns out to be a vampire. Now a creature of the night himself, he’s eating cockroaches, sexually assaulting his secretary Maria Conchita Alonso (that is, when he’s not already busy yelling at her supposed incompetence), and...actually, not acting all that different to usual, just with more frenzy. Elizabeth Ashley is his shrink, who doesn’t for a second believe he’s really a vampire. Is he really a vampire? Or has he just lost his mind? Frankly, I didn’t care one way or the other. An unrestrained Nic Cage gives one of his worst performances (and eats a cockroach for real!) ever in this disastrously unfunny and unpleasant black comedy from 1989. Directed by Robert Bierman ( “A Merry War” , with Helena Bonham-Carter) and scripted by Joseph Minion (Scorsese’s uneven “After Hours” ), this is seriously one o...

Progressing on from “Dawn of the Dead” , zombies now outweigh humans 400,000:1. Our setting is a giant underground facility, our protagonists the various military and scientific personnel living there. Scientist Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) is attempting to find out what causes the dead to rise again as zombies. He hopes this will lead to an eventual domestication of zombies, but the doctor himself is showing signs of mental unbalance, leaving one to question his rational thinking as it relates to his work. He has a zombie guinea pig of-sorts (Howard Sherman), and while he conducts experiments on/with the zombie, and acts increasingly loopy, military hard-arse Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) and several of the overworked men at the base start to question the point of this research, let alone their orders to protect the scientists doing the research. Things seem ready to boil over from the inside, let alone having to worry about the zombie horde above ground, ready to invade. Lori Cardille...

A bunch of often barely connected characters lament the crime-ridden, frightening, and seemingly hopeless state of society in modern L.A., whilst undergoing potentially life-changing events. Kevin Kline is an immigration lawyer whose car breaks down in the last place in L.A. you want that to happen. The appearance of African-American tow-truck driver Danny Glover saves him from being another victim of gangland thugs, and Kline spends much of the rest of the film trying to come to terms with this stranger having saved him from a possible horrible fate. Meanwhile, he’s having an affair with his secretary, a very lonely and unfulfilled Mary-Louise Parker. Kline’s wife Mary McDonnell is failing to make sense of the violent times she’s living in, and also struggling to deal with the fact that her teen son (Jeremy Sisto) is going away to summer camp, and eventually will fly the coop indefinitely. A chance discovery of an abandoned, crying baby in some bushes appears to fill some of the voi...