TIME AFTER TIME (1979) ***

H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) invents a time machine when wouldn’t you know it, Jack the fucking Ripper (David Warner) steals it to elude capture by the police.  Wells takes off to modern day San Francisco in hot pursuit of the Ripper and stop him from committing more murders.  Along the way, he winds up falling in love with a sweet-natured bank teller (Mary Steenburgen) who naturally becomes the Ripper’s next target.

Director Nicholas Meyer takes a fantastic premise and goes off and running with it right from the get-go.  The first-person opening scene of the Ripper preying upon an unsuspecting prostitute is a crackling bit of suspense that would make Hitchcock proud.  The ensuing scenes of Wells getting his first taste of the future are fun (like when he goes to McDonald’s) and McDowell’s light and cheery performance is truly winning.

After a breezy setup, the movie reaches a plateau once McDowell begins his courtship of Steenburgen.  Although there is considerable chemistry between the two (they fell in love on set and were later married), these scenes are just too drawn out and not nearly as engaging as McDowell’s hunt for Warner.  Things perk up during the finale, but it ultimately lacks the punch of the early scenes. 

Steenburgen later starred in another romantic time travel movie, Back to the Future 3, and Meyer went on to write another time traveling flick set in San Francisco, Star Trek 4:  The Voyage Home. 

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN (2018) ***

Christopher Robin is like a Snuggle commercial directed by Terrence Malick.  It’s beautiful to look at, but it’s ultimately a hollow cash grab from Disney who’s trying to update their back library of characters for the 21^st century.  It’s easy to be cynical about these things, especially if you’re like me and a fan of the old traditionally animated Winnie the Pooh cartoons.  Still, there’s been enough goodwill generated over the years from these characters to carry it over the various hiccups.

The plot is one of the weaker elements.  Christopher Robin puts away his toys when he goes away to boarding school.  He grows up to become workaholic Ewan McGregor who puts his job ahead of his family.  I’m sure you can guess what happens next.  Pooh and the rest of the Hundred Acre Wood gang come looking for Christopher Robin and force him to stop being such a grown-up and reclaim the childhood he left behind.

This stuff is standard issue for the most part.  The engaging performances certainly help.  McGregor really sells his character’s transformation, despite his predictable arc and the hackneyed script.  Marc (Quantum of Solace) Forster’s whimsical direction is another plus.  He really sells the fantastic elements of the story and contrasts them with the grounded aspects of Christopher’s everyday gloomy existence.  This masks the lightweight plot somewhat, as does Forster’s lightning pacing.  

My biggest beef is with the ugly character designs.  I know Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, and the rest of the gang are supposed to be ratty, thirty-year-old stuffed animals, but still.  There’s also something unsettling about a fuzzy bear with creepy, lifeless, coal black eyes spouting Zen-like fortune cookie wisdom.  Maybe I’m just too attached to the older animated designs that it’s hard for to me accept these new incarnations of the characters.  Maybe like Christopher Robin I need to lighten up and embrace my childhood.  

The characters, though realized through CGI, still talk and act the same way we remember.  They all have their moments to shine (especially Eeyore, who practically steals the movie), and provide plenty of laughs along the way.  They’re so much fun to watch that you kind of forget that the script is nothing more than a thinly sketched outline.

AKA:  I Became an Adult with Pooh.

TRANCERS 6 (2002) ½ *

Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson, who is only briefly seen in outtakes from the other Trancers movies while on a video monitor) is once again “sent down the line” back to the past (which is still the future to us).  His consciousness winds up in the body of his daughter (Zette Sullivan), a scientist who is studying the sudden appearance of an alien meteor.  Once getting acclimated to his new body, Jack sets out to stop a plot cooked up by his daughter’s evil boss who is using the meteor to spawn a new army of Trancers.

Seeing Sullivan trying to talk tough and act like Thomerson is a soul-crushing experience.  The body swapping idea could’ve worked, but she just isn’t convincing at playing Deth.  Her monotone delivery is often slurred and mumbled, which makes the already unfunny jokes fall flat.  Since virtually the whole movie is about a man trapped in a woman’s body, it’s shocking how little is actually done with the concept.  Even when they do try to comment on the situation, it is handled so clumsily that it borders on embarrassing.

It also doesn’t help that the effects, acting, and cinematography are about on par with a Witchcraft sequel.  Strike that.  That’s an insult to the Witchcraft sequels, which can be at least sporadically entertaining under the right circumstances.  The only good part comes when Sullivan sticks test tubes into a Trancer’s eyes, but that nifty moment is woefully short lived. 

I’m not sure how I survived the agonizing seventy-nine-minute running time, which seemed at least triple that.  I thought some of the Trancers sequels were bad, but this one is such a mind-numbing bore that I might have to retroactively add an extra Half Star to their reviews just to give them some distance from this turd.  This one killed so many of my brain cells that I’m starting to think I’ve become a Trancer myself.

AKA:  Future Cop 6.  AKA:  Trancers 6:  Life After Deth.

ENCOUNTERS IN THE DEEP (1979) * ½

Encounters in the Deep gets off to a sluggish start with a longwinded narrator talking endlessly about the Bermuda Triangle while lots of stock footage is shown.  Finally, some glowing lights appear in the water emitting a strange sound that makes people disappear.  A distraught billionaire funds an expedition to go to the Bermuda Triangle to find his missing daughter and gets more than he bargained for along the way.

If you can’t already guess by the title, they were going for a Close Encounters riff on your typical Bermuda Triangle movie with a little bit of Peter Benchley’s The Deep thrown in there for good measure.  It has a lot in common with the other Bermuda Triangle movie I saw this week, The Bermuda Triangle.  Both films feature a creepy doll as a harbinger of doom, needlessly drawn out scuba diving sequences, and long scenes of people sitting around on boats.  Although it can’t boast the presence of Hugo Stiglitz, there is a guy who LOOKS a lot like Hugo Stiglitz, so there’s that.  I can honestly say it’s only slightly better than The Bermuda Triangle.  Like that film, it’s boring as shit, but at least with Encounters in the Deep there’s annoying high-pitched ringing every time the aliens appear, which prevents you from falling asleep.  

Speaking of aliens, they are good for a laugh although you’ve got to wait a long time to finally get a look at them.  I must give director Tony (Night of the Sharks) Richmond props for recreating the ending of Close Encounters on a shoestring budget.  I admire not only the brazenness in which Richmond unabashedly steals from Spielberg, but also for the way he cannily manages to replicate his style. I’m not saying it saves the movie or anything.  It’s just that he mimicked Spielberg’s style in this scene about as well as J.J. Abrams did for the entirety of Super 8.  For that and that alone, I can’t completely hate it.

HERCULES, SAMSON AND ULYSSES (1965) ** ½

Hercules (Kirk Morris) and Ulysses (Enzo Cerusico) go help some fisherman slay a sea monster.  During the battle, their ship capsizes, and they wind up ashore in Judea.  Not long after, Hercules fights and kills a lion, which gets him mistaken for the legendary strongman, Samson (Richard Lloyd).  This naturally draws the ire of the king, Laertes (Andrea Fantasia) and he orders the death of several townspeople, which sends Samson into a fury.  Thinking Herc was the one responsible, Samson goes on a warpath looking for the son of Zeus to get some payback.  Eventually the duo decides they’re stronger if they work together and they set out to bring an end to Laertes’ reign.

Hercules, Samson and Ulysses was directed by Pietro Francisci, the man who started the sword and sandal craze with the original Hercules.  It’s a strange mix of Italian peplum and biblical epic that’s just different enough to be memorable and almost silly enough to be a minor cult item.  It’s also a bit more violent than your typical peplum adventure as lots of extras get crucified, hung, and speared along the way.  

The best part is the battle with the sea monster.  I’ve seen some laughable sea monsters in my time, but this one takes the cake.  It’s nothing more than your average sea lion!  Francisci and his special effects team don’t do much to make it look all that monstrous either.  You’d think they’d film it at odd angles or something to make it appear bigger, but that’s not exactly the case.  That just makes the scene even more hysterical.

Herc also finds time to fight a bull.  This bit is reminiscent of Karate Bull Fighter, but it’s too short to leave a lasting impression.  Herc’s fight with the lion is much longer though and is more entertaining too.

The big Herc vs. Samson scene is quite rousing.  Morris and Lloyd can throw papier Mache boulders around and topple Styrofoam ruins to the ground with the best in the business.  The fight itself is set up sort of like Batman v Superman and ends in a truce that’s just as random (although neither one of their mothers is named Martha).  The final battle where the duo team up against the king’s army isn’t nearly as good, but it’s still better than most of the stuff you see in these toga-fests.

Morris does a great job as Herc and is just as good, if not better than Steve Reeves in the role.  Lloyd isn’t quite in that league, but he certainly does a fine job during the fight scenes.  It’s Liana (Mill of the Stone Women) Orfei who very nearly steals the film as the sultry Delilah.  The highlight comes when she does a sexy dance while a guard whips off her clothes one by one.  (I guess that would make it a whiptease?)  Like most of the women in these movies, there’s a scene where she gives Herc a potion that makes him sleepy, too.  Fans of Ulysses are going to be disappointed as he spends most of the running time captured and/or whining.  You have to wonder why the heck he even got his name in the title because he does very little to earn his billing.  

At any rate, I was sort of glad I saw this.  It’s pretty kooky, although anyone who isn’t a die-hard peplum fanatic will probably be less than enthused.  Bad movie fans will get a kick out of the shitty “monsters” and fight scenes, but I imagine they’ll get restless during all the men-in-togas shit.

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1978) * ½

A ship disappears in the Bermuda Triangle.  John Huston’s boat comes across the only survivor, a cruddy looking doll, and of course, his daughter wants to keep it.  Soon after, the doll starts having a hankering for raw meat and crew members begin meeting untimely deaths.  

Directed by Mexican schlockmeister Rene (Guyana:  Cult of the Damned) Cardona Jr., The Bermuda Triangle is a long (nearly two hours) voyage to nowhere.  It has an admittedly brilliant set-up, at least one laugh-out-loud scene of incompetent silliness (the nightmare sequence), and one memorably WTF moment (the doll eats some birds).  However, about halfway through, the movie stops on a dime during an extended, slow-moving, and dull scuba diving scene.  From there on, it becomes an excruciating slog culminating in one of the more infuriating non-endings it’s been my displeasure to sit through in quite some time.

Probably sensing it would be hard to sustain the suspense of a boat’s disappearance for the entire running time, Cardona tosses in not only a killer doll, but also a creepy kid and an ill-advised quest for Atlantis into the mix.  Neither of these subplots do much to perk up the already interminable pacing.  While it’s fun seeing someone of John Huston’s stature wallowing in such schlocky surroundings, he doesn’t do much to elevate the film from the depths of embarrassment.  Only Hugo Stiglitz and Video Vacuum favorite Miguel Angel Fuentes are able to inject a little machismo into the proceedings.  

AKA:  The Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle.  AKA:  Devil’s Triangle of Bermuda.

THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES (1961) * ½

Before Sergio Leone made the immortal Dollars trilogy, he cut his teeth directing this handsomely mounted, but painfully dull sword and sandal epic.  Rory Calhoun stars as a vacationing Greek warrior in Rhodes who is torn between two opposing factions who want to overthrow the corrupt king.  He really has no time for battles and revolutions as he’d rather just spend his time batting his eyes at Lea Massari.  Eventually, Calhoun gets mistaken as a rebel and is tortured, causing him to choose a side pretty darn quickly.

If you come to the party expecting to see Leone’s over the top style on display, you’ll be sorely disappointed by The Colossus of Rhodes.  Although the film looks like a million bucks, it’s shot, assembled, and presented in a very matter of fact way.  Leone does show a knack for corralling hundreds of extras, but the fireworks are an awful long time coming.  

While The Colossus of Rhodes looks better than your average Italian peplum adventure, the tension is nominal, the running time is bloated, and the pacing is sluggish.  Cowboy star Calhoun is sorely miscast as a square-jawed hero, which also doesn’t help.  It’s mostly boring and useless until the third act, when things liven up during the big coliseum action sequence, but by then, it’s too little too late. 

Leone fared much better with six guns and cowboy boots than with swords and sandals, that’s for damned sure.