In Space, There's No Air To Suck: Horror Sequels Set in Space, Page 2

In Space, There's No Air to Suck:
Horror Sequels Set in Space

PART II: STRAIGHT TO VIDEO

john cribbs

The Critters may have technically won the 90's Horror Franchise Space Race, their celestial adventure having been released (direct to video) four years before those delicious cenobites invaded the heavens with their signature brand of nipple-pinching, flesh-tearing, monologuing sadomachism. But technically the Critters came from space in the first place, so is it cheating to include Critters 4 in this group of movies that sent their monsters into orbit? Wouldn't that be like if Bachman-Turner Overdrive headlined a gig in Canada under the banner "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet: B.T.O. Conquers the Great North?" Yeah but...they came from there. Maybe I'm more picky than the casual fan, but for me that knowledge would spoil the thrill of seeing 70-year-old Fred Turner, Randy Bachman and Mitchell Overdrive take care of business.

Before we get into whether sending aliens back to space falls under the umbrella of the "late horror series space gimmick," let's address a more pertinent question: which ones are the Critters again? Of all the Gremlins clones churned out in the late 80's and early 90's, were they the ones who came out of the toilet? Didn't they go native and develop a craving for pizza and beer? Do they have the ability to speak, and if so did they at one point use the word "Bitchin'"? Are they played by midgets or hand puppets? The Munchies* also came from space, didn't they? Do the Critters have anything to do with the Ghoulies or the Hobgoblins or the Trolls or any other Charles Band band of Gremlins-biting tiny demonic toys, killer dolls or Central European subspecies?

Even Charlie, the eccentric Critter exterminator and star of all 3 of the previous movies, has trouble explaining them to a new character in Part 4, attempting to compare them to piranha before conceding, "Well, they don't really look like a piranha. But they're hungry like a piranha." (The kid he's talking to cops to a vague knowledge of what a piranha is - "Some kind of fish, right?" - because it's the future and there aren't many fish found in space.) So, the creatures of this particular franchise come from space and are often hungry; also they hatch from slimy eggs, like another certain cinematic space beast...oh, and apparently they're called Crites or Krites, so is it actually pronounced "Krite-rs?" (After finishing my yummy cenobites I can always go for a bowl of crunchy Kriters.) This is all that someone largely unfamiliar with Critters 1 thru 3, such as myself, learns about the Critters - I'm not calling them Krites, it sounds like some kind of racial slur - for the first 35 minutes of the movie: even though it takes only six minutes to get to space (from Kansas), the title troublemakers sit out for the first third of the film.

In the meantime, we're audience to the antics of the bickering space crew of an unnamed salvage ship floating around "somewhere in the Saturan Quadrant" in the year 2045. Despite being just over a half century into the future, man has apparently forged his way into space and gotten comfortable; there's already talk of an "old" Intergalacic Council that was dissolved and...wait, are these crewmembers even humans? I mean, do they come from Earth? It's bad enough I don't know much about the Critters, I should at least feel confident as to the origin of these jockeys I'm supposed to be rooting for, right? One of the characters pines for a return to Earth, stating he knows people there, but when Charlie asks him, "Are you an alien?" he responses, "No - do I look like one?" Well, what do aliens look like in the Critters universe? Are they all tiny furballs or are they humanoid, like in Star Trek? It's never really established one way or another.

Wherever they hail from, like in Alien the crew is made up of space money whores who agree to transport a mystery pod, which contains the last two Critters eggs, to an old abandoned space station in exchange for a couple space bucks. The cautionary fretter is Brad Dourif as Al Bert (yeah, that's the way it appears in the credits - throughout the movie people just call him "Albert" like it's his first name...if this is some kind of weird future name separation thing, I don't get it). So we sort of got a "Chucky vs Critters" thing going, although I don't think Dourif even once crosses paths with a Critter the entire movie. He mainly just sits around as images from the computer screen reflect over his face. Kind of a letdown - Dourif should be the one playing the eccentric exterminator, a role he already nailed in Graveyard Shift (he would end up back in space in Alien: Resurrection a few years later, which is either a step up or a step down depending on your point of view). The greedy half of the group is made up of Dogme 95's own Anders Hove (on loan from the Subspecies series) as the captain and Eric DaRe (Twin Peaks alum/Vincent D'onofrio from Full Metal Jacket clone) as a shifty dude who tries to steal some space drugs. Then there's some obnoxious kid - not Leo DiCaprio, he was in Part 3, although this guy has the same River Phoenix-style bangs - who I can't believe the filmmakers didn't put in there to be horribly killed to satisfy the audience.

Now as we all know from Jason X (a.k.a. Jason Part 10) hockey's been outlawed for twenty years, so these guys have nothing to do for entertainment except get on each other's nerves and gather together to watch Angela Bassett take a shower (Butt Double alert!) It's hard to say if the 5-time Image Award winner was still paying her dues at this point: the movie came out a month before Malcolm X (a.k.a. Malcolm Part 10) and only a year prior to her Oscar nomination for What's Love Got to Do With It, and she certainly didn't stray from pure crap in the ensuing years - not even pure crap set in space. But you can tell she's prepping for greater things: for example, at one point she gets punched in the face by Terrence Mann, clearly rehearsing for her upcoming performance as Tina Turner.

Terrence Mann, now there's another dude you'd think would be under the impression that he's too classy for Critters: after all, he originated the role of Rum Tum Tugger in the Broadway debut of Cats (anybody see it?) Yet apparently he was the hero of the first 3 movies, one of two interstellar bounty hunters who makes it his mission to annihilate all the Critters. Weirdly enough, in Part 4 he becomes the greedy corporate villain - that's like Loomis teaming up with Michael Myers! (Or joining the Cult of Thorn? Something along those lines.) Charlie, the other character from the previous films, is the Ripley stand-in: having climbed into the Critter egg pod at the behest of Mann's hologram, he wakes up after 53 years of hyper-stasis (it was 57 years in Aliens, so this is totally different). This also draws an interesting comparison to Jason X, in which the present day hero(ine) also wakes up in the future alongside the monster, albeit after a much longer nap, and gets to feed exposition to the future folk. (Charlie ends up in a Freddy Kruger shirt, New Line giving itself a little nod I suppose. Critters 4 director Rupert Harvey produced a bevvy of New Line movies including Nightmare on Elm St 5: The Dream Child.)

Seeing as how I'm unfamiliar with the first 3 movies, I can't rightly attest to whether this one meets the Critterion of the Crittercally-acclaimed series but I can say this: I do not like this Charle character one bit. It's as if a supporting character from a Stephen King book was promoted to leading man status - just imagine Donnie Wahlberg's cancer-retard/alien mind librarian from Dreamcatcher as the main character. The opening of the movie, set in a basement in Kansas, posits the ol' ethical question of whether wiping the Critters out of existence is ok or not, which would make for some compelling sci fi except that Don Keith Opper, the guy who plays Charlie, is no Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks. The score ends up fairly even, with two lead Critters killing two lead characters (both assholes) before getting taken out, so I guess the moral question is answered by a resounding shrug. Wipe 'em out, let them roll around and eat bad people - whatever works. Whereas Voorhees took out an entire space station without even trying: that's a threat that clearly should have been terminated in the womb.

More dirt on these Critters: they're kind of like a Magwai/Gremlin hybrid, fuzzy and big-eyed like Furbies but with sharp teeth they use to eat people. Yeah they eat people, which does not endear them to me: I prefer my man-eating monsters to be gigantic and preferably animated by Ray Harryhausen (or played by Janine Lindemulder). You'd think it was impossible for these tiny things to take down a healthy human being unless they had the advantage of sheer numbers with which to overwhelm the victim, but in the case of this movie there are only two of them. Usually sequels up the number of monsters - more gremlins, more aliens. Apparently they couldn't even afford four critters for Critters 4. They're apparently intelligent, reprogramming the ship's computer to set a course for Earth, and communicative among each other, even occasionally subtitled (whether this is the only pretentious Critters entry with subtitles or not I couldn't say). Charlie claims that they "love ducts," but there's little evidence of them strategically hiding or traveling via ducts or vents (maybe he meant they love ducks?) They just roll around like hedgehogs (lotta Critters POV shots in this movie), making it even more ridiculous that victims can't simply kick them away or merely close a few doors, maybe open a few hatches, to keep them out.

"Well ok," Mr. New Line producer chimes in. "What if these ravenous porcupines were BIGGER?" The idea is suggested prior to the Critters' first appearance when the crew happens upon an old educational video in which space scientist Anne Ramsay - sadly not the Throw Mama from the Train star or the sister of Bruce Ramsay, star of Hellraiser: Bloodline - lays out the station's plans to experiment with some kind of stupendous future ray that genetically enhances biological lifeforms. The subjects are poodle-sized alien insects Ramsay identifies as "Cythloids." This seems to be setting up one of two eventualities: either the Critters will run afoul of these giant Cythloids resulting in a creature-on-creature battle royale, or the Critters will use the ray to turn themselves into giants. Yet neither of these expectations pay off, exactly. The Cythloids are never mentioned again, and the one Critter who discovers the ray uses it to make himself a little bit bigger - but not much. Not to any real advantage, that is. He roughly goes from the size of a volleyball to the size of a basketball.

If the budget wasn't there to make the underachieving Critter the size of a corridor, they probably should have just cut the idea of resizing it out of the script. But the film's real budgetary problem are the sets: the benefit of having your actors run around on grungy, dark space stations is lots of shadows and big equipment that doesn't have to do anything but sit there as set decoration. The problem is that nothing distinguishes Critters 4's space station from the crew's ship, except the female voice of a comically backwards computer on the station.** But since I tend to associate computer voices with ships (and specifically female computer voices with the ships from Supernova and the Futurama episode "Locket and Rocket"), I kept forgetting they were supposed to be running around on a space station as opposed to the ship, or vice versa. At one point, Charlie is shooting at a Critter while everyone is shouting at him to stop. I had no idea what their problem was until things calmed down and it turned out they're now in the ship's cockpit, not the station's computer room, which has been sufficiently damaged by the gunfire. The only room that looks any different from any other is a waste compartment where Charlie and the kid wind up after sliding down a chute and getting trapped inside a'la Star Wars.

Come to think of it, the cargo bay set is unique in its own way. It's set apart by...hanging chains! That's right, Critters pointlessly ripped off the Alien hanging chains before Hellraiser could. (The back-stabbing captain uses it to hoist the unconscious kid after he tries to foil his plot. Then Charlie almost instantly gets the kid down, there was absolutely no point in him to be hoisted anywhere for any reason.)

Despite the hanging chains, Critters 4 is at least not as apparent an Aliens clone as Jason X - kudos to the writers (parts 3 & 4 were co-written by horror author David J. Schow, who distinguished himself with such works as the enjoyable short story collection Seeing Red yet has also been involved in some dubious Texas Chainsaw sequels/remakes) for not having any goddamn space soldiers as lead characters. Space soldiers do appear at the end but are evil, look more like stormtroopers and all die without a line of dialogue.

Weirdly enough, the Alien connection in Critters 4 stems from its notable similarities to Alien 3,*** which had only come out in theaters five months earlier. Both films feature fewer monsters than the previous movie, open with the series' main character and title monster being salvaged from space together, are structured around the good guys awaiting rescue while trying not to get picked off one at a time, and end with a showdown between them and mute government troops led by a sinister smooth talker who was a good guy the last time we saw him in the series, resulting in one of the main characters being shot to death. Stranger still, Critters 4 shares Alien 3's somber tone - I was under the impression that the Critters movies were regarded as horror-comedies. But even scenes that seem conceived to be comedic such as Charlie shooting up the cockpit of the ship come off like Arthur Miller in Space: poor prehistoric dullard Charlie can't understand why no one is happy he killed himself a Critter, not understanding that he's doomed the entire crew - he's lost the respect of his new space friends. Was there a concern that the Critters' typical face-eating hijinxs wouldn't play off-Earth? Keep in mind, this was a still a few years before the space-comedy concept was proven by Space Jam.

Even the tagline/subtitle appears to be under the impression that this should be a comedy: "They're invading your space!" But the film itself is pun-free until the very end, when the obnoxious kid freezes the Final Critter (the one whose proportions have multiplied from pomelo to watermelon) with nitroglycerin and wryly quips, "Chill out, asshole!" Sorry Schwarzenegger - turns out you didn't originate that one.

Critters 4 differs from the other three movies discussed in this article in one significant way: it's the last one of the series.**** No more Critters! The series ends in space. I suppose it's appropriate, since it started there, but it's interesting that the producers considered this to be the farthest the franchise could possibly stretch. And so many unanswered questions remain: what about the Critters' homeworld? Are they the dominant species on their planet? No interest in crossing over with another Gremlins cash-in series, like Critters vs Munchies? Sending their proud series to space was a conscious move on the filmmakers' part: this wasn't a random gimmick like Leprechaun or an essential reboot a'la Jason X, it picked up right where Part 3 left off, with Charlie and the Critter eggs being shot into space. With all that preparation, it's too bad they couldn't think of anything different for the Critters to do besides roll around a space station, chat in subtitles and grow slightly bigger.

christopher funderburg

The pressing, if implicit, question with all of these films is why is this serial killer/Cenobite/Critter/Irish pun impresario in space? The sharpest measure of Leprechaun 4: In Space's overall "who gives a fuck"-ery is that it answers that essential question with "Who gives a fuck?" When the movie begins, Warwick Davis's stunningly enduring gold-obsessed murderous midget fairytale creature is already there in space, just hanging around. Well, not outer space precisely, but in a cave on some generic red-haze/lightning clouds planet. He's got an alien space princess (a.k.a. some normal actress slathered in glitter bodypaint) chained up in that cave.

Despite her initial shrieking terror, he proposes marriage to her because he wants to be a king and she accepts because her father (the king) apparently wasted a fortune on noble causes. Their nuptual negotiations are then interrupted by a gaggle of space marines sent to the barren planet to investigate something, something involving mines, profit, semper fi, crawling through air ducts - have we mentioned Aliens yet? This is a set-up where no one involved gives a shit. This movie is the kind of moronic nothing that can only be conceived of and executed by a gaggle of hacks who nevertheless think they're too good to be making a straight-to-video Leprechaun movie.

It is, of course, directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, whose name should be Brian I'm-too-good-for-this-shit-Smith. That is not to say that Trenchard-Smith is too good to be directing the second worst Leprechaun film,***** only that Trenchard-Smith's modus operandi and claim to (non)fame is that he always thinks he's too good for shit, whether it be space leprechauns, Australian werewolves, Most Dangerous Game rip-off's or any number of dubious b-movie concepts to which a talented director would have felt a professional obligation to bring whatever panache and inventiveness they could muster. The only thing Trenchard-Smith wants you, dear audience, to know or feel when watching one of his movies is that he's too good for this shit, that he understands what a stupid fucking idea for a movie putting a leprechaun in space is. His main method for conveying this to an audience is by being "campy." Even with the most talented of filmmakers (and Trenchard-Smith surely must be in the running for least talented of all time), that's a tricky proposition.

A thumbnail glance at how "camp" and "cult" cinema function is this: both types have undeniably bad/embarrasing elements - "camp" fans love the artwork for its obvious glaring flaws (The Room, Birdemic) while "cult" fans love the artwork in spite of its obvious glaring flaws (The Evil Dead, Ong Bak). Those hip to the cult of Jeeja Yanin's Chocolate love its mind-blowing martial arts sequences but wouldn't be sad to see its plot reworked to literally anything other than the cringe-inducing tale of a developmentally-disabled teenager acting as an enforcer collecting debts on behalf of her cancer-striken, former-prostitute mother. By contrast, the only way to care about Sharknado is to revel in its apparent stupidity - if you take away the stupidity, its appeal vanishes. When any filmmaker attempts to manufacture "camp," what they are trying to do is intentionally make their movie terrible. The track record of intentionally terrible films being embraced by audiences is weak because the condencesion and self-importance endemic to manufactured camp has a tendency to waft over the film like a fart, noisy and stink.

Trenchard-Smith's movies always seem to be rolling their eyes at you and saying "well of course I'm not trying to be any good." But what manufactured camp ends up really being most of the time (and especially in the case of Trenchard-Smith) is painfully unfunny comedy. For example, in Leprechaun 4 the space princess gets her hand sliced off in the initial shoot-out with space marines. A marine rushes to her body and says, "Give me a hand over here!" One of the other marines tosses him the severed hand. Har, har. Or how about the "hilarious" character of Dr. Mittenhand, a Dr. Strangelove parody who speaks with an exaggerated Colonel Klink accent? At one point, he barks orders at the marines and ends his jeremiad with a garbled "...because I so say!" Then he pauses, makes an exaggeratedly embarrassed face and then mumbles, "Say so." Oh man, too funny! Just kidding - I, Brian Trenchard-Smith, know that this horseshit is unfunny garbage. It's called camp and it's totally outrageous! Don't tell me you thought this leprechaun-in-space movie would actually be any good - that's on you, my friend, not me.

The nadir of this "this is funny - no ha, ha I'm kidding this isn't supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be terrible and therefore it's good" posturing comes in a scene where the hardass marine sargeant is hypnotized by the leprechaun into dressing up in drag and doing a musical number before pulling out nunchuckas and fighting our heroes all the while still clad in a blonde wig and a shimmering mini-dress. He gets into an argument with himself, switching wildly between his cooing drag persona and his hardass military shtick - it's all played for maximum goofiness just in case you didn't get the message. So bad it's good, amirite, fellas?

Then he's killed and revealed to be a robot. And the leprechaun gets sucked out of the cargo bay and exploded in the void of space. Did I mention this, like Jason X and Hellraiser: Bloodline, is yet another Aliens rip-off? The marines even use those hand-held beeping motion-detector gadgets at one point. And don't worry, there are chains hanging from the ceiling. Wouldn't be a spaceship without chains hanging from the ceiling, we all know that. Maybe even more puzzling than why these franchises went to space is why so many of them decided to ape Aliens to such a shameless degree. I understand that Aliens is considered the ne plus ultra of genre sequels, the follow-up that expanded and even arguably improved upon the legendary original, but I don't think the argument that "Aliens is a great film therefore we will imitate Aliens" flies, because these films are not aspiring to greatness. In fact, adding space marines and air duct chases all but ensures that the fourth Leprechaun, Hellraiser and Critters films will be terrible. Brian Trenchard-Smith knows this. I'm not sure if Kevin Yagher does.

Aside from the spaciness of the fourth one, the Leprechaun series has always been a problematic series, if only because the leprechaun doesn't fit the Freddy/Jason/Chucky mold. Sequels to those films are easy: just have those guys go kill more people. Not only do the Leprechaun movies share the Hellraiser series' problem of figuring out why people keep stumbling upon the gold/opening the puzzlebox,****** they share of the problem of their antagonist's invincibility and the hazy rules of their universes. The leprechaun is magic: in the opening cave shoot-out, he jumps on a grenade to save the princess and gets blown to pieces. But he instantly is revealed to still be alive. So you can't kill him? And then one of the marines pisses on his corpse, which causes him to magically fly up the dude's urine stream and, I guess, live his in dick for a couple hours before that guy starts making out with the hot, tough lady space marine. The leprechaun then emerges from the marine's swelling crotch (so hilarious!) and says, "Always use a prophylactic!"

What I am supposed to be thinking when he gets into two seperate shootouts where he's using a little machine gun and dodging bullets? He's magic, for fuck's sake - he made handcuffs appear on a guy's wrists earlier and survived being blown up twice. Am I supposed to be hoping he gets shot? Too powerful villains aren't scary and they make it unclear what you're supposed to be rooting for to happen. When he gets hit by a shrink-ray set to reverse and becomes 20 feet tall, it just doesn't matter - couldn't he make himself 20 feet tall if he wanted to? He's blowing up flashlights and emerging out of crotches on the reg. I'm pretty sure he could supersize himself if he put his ambiguous psychic powers to it.

The original Leprechaun film came as part of an early 90's wave of fairy-tale inspired horror films like Rumplestiltskin, Pinocchio's Revenge, Jack Frost and even stuff like the evil genie flick The Wishmaster. It's not a bad idea to repurpose those stories for a modern setting, but it's just another way that Leprechaun doesn't really lend itself to further cinematic investigation. There's probably juuuust enough there for the tale of the "Hey, it's Enrico Polotzo!" guy playing a tubby man-child helping Jennifer Aniston seperate Warwick Davis from his beloved pot of gold. There is not enough of an idea there for a sequel, unless you just repeat the idea - which, hey man, no worries, Final Destination has gotten a slew of excellent films out of its repetitions. It's a venerable horror-movie tradition: clever variations on the same basic structure.

But Leprechaun jettisons both the basic structure and clever variations. Maybe worse than the lack of logic is that almost all of Leprechaun 4's weirdest (and therefore best) ideas are borrowed from other movies. Freddy Krueger was famously brought back to life by a dog pissing on his corpse in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, the late-sequel body-jumping capabilities of an established character were the only memorable part of Jason Goes to Hell,******* and the mad scientist playing around with re-spliced spider DNA to create a crazy creature more than slightly resembles that subplot of Gremlins 2.

Like Jason X, so much of it is blatantly imported from Aliens that even making leprechaun HUGE for the ending just feels like lazily rehashing the "oh shit, there's a giant alien queen!" climax of that film. What might make this all especially frustrating is that some of the effects work is genuinely great. Warwick Davis running around a set of miniatures for the giant midget sequence plays surprisingly slick, while the aforementioned scorpion/spider creature actually looks pretty darn cool. The film has a capable effects team that works wonders with the limited budget, a game cast (that includes an amusing Rebekah Carlton as the space princess and the perpetually-saddled-with-bad-parts-in-shitty-movies Miguel Nunez, Jr. as one of the marines) and a genuinely great character actor in Warwick Davis, who is legitimately too good for this shit. It's obnoxious that Trenchard-Smith displays the contempt for their work that he does with his direction.

I don't think there's any argument to be made that Leprechaun 4: In Space ever could had been good. That's not my point. My point is this: fuck Brian Trenchard-Smith. Fuck him right in his stupid ear. Even The Siege of Firebase Gloria is terrible. I've seen it. I've suffered through this guy's horseshit, so don't try to tell me otherwise.******** He can save that goofball noise for amateur hour. Leave the filmmaking to the long and awesome tradition of real directors who started out assigned fundamentally unworkable genre projects: Joe Dante (Piranha), James Cameron (Piranha 2: The Spawning), Jonathan Demme (Caged Heat), Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha) and Steven Speilberg (Duel). Not all of those movies are good (or even "not terrible") but none of those directors treated them with haughtiness, none of them trivialized the work of their associates or spit on the very idea of the job they were hired to do. I wouldn't imagine that anyone could take a lesson or two from ponderous, ridiculous Hellraiser: Bloodline, but Trenchard-Smith could learn a lot of from Kevin Yagher and his film. Namely: there are some movies worth taking your name off of and you should never set out to make one of those films.

And maybe the most important lesson of all is this: don't send your horror villain to space. Just don't do it unless you have a really good idea (and ripping off Aliens is not a really good idea). Set the sequel at a summer camp, a foreboding warehouse or grandpa's old abandoned farm. Embrace the still-thriving bloodline of horror cinema. It's as eternal as a L'Merchant puzzlebox or a mysterious pot o' gold.

appendix: suggestions for current horror franchises to send to space

Tremors Part Whatever: Graboids on a Metroid

Hotel IV: Full Spacial

Saturn's Ring (The Ring in Space)

Pitch Black 2 - What the hell happened here? Critters 2 scribe David Twohy came up with some decent flying Alien knock-offs, then the series became about Vin Diesel? Let's reverse engineer a proper sequel to Pitch Black (not the redubbed "The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black") where the photosensitive hammerhead-bird things somehow make it to Earth during a full eclipse or something. Then they fight the Graboids.

* Actually, I remember Roger Corman's Munchies because it was directed by Joe Dante's editor on Twilight Zone, Explorers and Gremlins. She even enlisted actors from the Dante stable - Wendy Schaal, Paul Bartel and Gremlins 2's own Robert Picardo - to meet the Munchie threat. She never directed another movie, although she did cut Captain Ron. Also, Kevin McCarthy was in Ghoulies Go to College. Nadine Van der Velde was in both Critters and Munchies. Jim Wynorski directed the Munchies spin-off Munchie (reverse of Alien/Aliens) as well as Ghoulies IV. Very incestuous, this Gremlins-like little creature movie series family.

** I just have to mention the interesting career of the actress who voices the space station computer, Martine Beswick. I didn't recognize the name, but she's popped up in a lot of cool places. A former Miss Jamaica, she first got notice as one of the two hot-blooded feuding gypsies in From Russia with Love's very memorable gypsy cat fight scene (she also had a supporting role in Thunderball as Bond's sexy ally who takes a cyanide capsule before she can be rescued). She then took her cat fighting skills up against none other than a fur-bikini'd Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. She played the female "Hyde" in Hammer's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the Queen of Evil in Oliver Stone's hilariously bad first movie Seizure. She was the lead actress in the Spaghetti Western classic A Bullet for the General and had a small part in Melvin and Howard. Most importantly, she was the waitress in the "Shit happens when you party naked" sequence of Miami Blues who disapproves of Alec Baldwin's Frederick Frenger, Jr. after he rudely informs her the circe salad with yogurt dressing is "lousy." Jewel Shepard interviewed her for her book Invasion of the B-Girls.

*** David Twohy, co-writer of Critters 2, was one of the many screenwriters hired to work on Alien 3 whose script was ultimately scrapped.

**** I guess Jason X was technically the last of the original Friday the 13th series, although it's hard to say: did the original series end with Part 4, the original attempt to kill Jason and the franchise? Or with Part 8, the final Paramont release? Did it end with Part 9, when Jason was sent to hell? And how are we supposed to view Freddy vs Jason and the Platinum Dunes remake in regards to the continuity of the earlier films? The answer is, obviously, who cares - but since they're still making Jason movies I wouldn't personally count Jason X as the "last" one in any case.

***** Congrats, Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood - you're the worst! Just the absolute fucking worst.

****** The "Original Script for Piranha" syndrome seems inevitable here. To explain, before Joe Dante got ahold of that film, apparently the screenwriter would get all caught up in justifying why a couple would go into the piranha-infested river. Well, maybe a bear chased them in? And why is the bear chasing them? Probably there was a forest fire. But now we got to show what caused the forest fire. And so on. That's a stupid problem to have with a Piranha film - people getting in the river has many self-evident explanations. On the other hand, figuring out why people are fucking around with this bizarre puzzlebox and trying to court demon-torture or snooping around in the wilds looking for leprechaun gold actually do require some explanation. Explanation that will almost assuredly be as convoluted and bone-headed as a forest fire-induced bear chase.

******* Well, apart from the Freddy glove pulling the Jason mask down to hell.

******** The Man from Hong Kong is pretty ok, though. Just as they can't all be winners, they can't all be losers.

<<Previous Page 1 2 Next Page>>

home about contact us featured writings years in review film productions