SPACE RAIDERS (1983) **

Roger Corman produced many films that reused the sets, special effects, and score from Battle Beyond the Stars.  This one was the first.  Not only is it a Star Wars knockoff, it’s one of those early ‘80s movies that had the word “Raiders” in title to cash in on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A little boy (David Mendenhall, the kid from Over the Top) stows away aboard the spaceship of a band of space pirates.  He proves himself to be useful to the crew and they eventually take a shine to him.  Trouble brews when “The Company” sends a robot ship after them to blast them out of the stars.

The band of space pirates is comprised of an OK band of riff raff.  Vince Edwards is the leader of the gang whose only memorable trait is that he drinks beer (thank God there’s still beer in the future) while piloting his ship in the midst of a space dogfight.  Thom (Hawk from Buck Rogers) Christopher fares better as the alien with psychic powers.  Luca Bercovici is the generic space cowboy of the group.

Space Raiders was directed by Howard Cohen, the man who gave us Saturday the 14th.  It’s all rather harmless, forgettable, intermittently entertaining Saturday afternoon drivel.  Even if it seems overly familiar and more than a tad cheesy (the lizard guy is well done, even though the characters pronounce his name about six different ways), it moves at a steady clip, which is appreciated.  It also manages to have more heart than most of these things, thanks to Mendenhall’s performance.    

Sure, we’ve seen Star Wars rip-offs with alien cantina scenes, space battles, and long establishing shots of slow-moving spacecraft, but this is the only one I can think of that features Dick Miller as a sleazy used spaceship dealer, so that at the very least is worth something.

AKA:  Star Child.

WHEELMAN (2017) ***

Frank Grillo stars as a getaway driver who gets a call from an unknown number telling him to ditch his crew during a job and take off with the money.  As it turns out, it’s only the beginning of a double (or perhaps triple) cross.  Soon, people are on the lookout for his car, and he’s wanted by both the cops and the crooks.  In order to stay ahead of the bad guys and stay alive, he’ll have to think fast and (of course) do a lot of fancy driving.

Produced by Joe Carnahan, Wheelman is a blast from start to finish.  What makes it a change of pace from the typical crime thriller is the fact that it takes place almost exclusively inside of Grillo’s car.  Aside from a few establishing shots from the rearview mirror or of the tires’ POV, the camera rarely leaves the vehicle.  Writer/director Jeremy Rush does a good job ratcheting up the suspense and raising the stakes for Grillo’s character.  What’s maybe even more impressive is the fact that the film maintains a sense of claustrophobia while still feeling cinematic.  We’ve seen so many car chases in movies nowadays that when we see one entirely from behind the wheel of one of the cars, it feels like a breath of fresh air.

This is a perfect… ahem… vehicle for Grillo.  He gives a no-nonsense and commanding performance, a real feat considering you only see him from the shoulders up for most of the running time.  Very few actors could make a movie work using so little, but Grillo pulls it off effectively and assuredly.

At its heart, Wheelman is a gimmick movie, but it’s a pretty good gimmick.  It keeps up the gimmick for a long time too, breaking form only briefly near the end.  It was here where I feared it was going to become a more traditional picture, but luckily (SPOILER) the Wheelman was just changing cars!  From there, it resumes the automobile-bound framework and continues to kick ass. 

If it does have a fault, it’s that Wheelman (pardon the pun) never quite goes into fourth gear.  Despite that, it remains a solidly entertaining flick throughout.  If you still haven’t seen it, put the pedal to the metal and check it out.

MALIGNANT (2021) ** ½

Malignant is James Wan’s return to the horror genre after making Aquaman.  Previously, Wan made movies like Saw and Dead Silence with his co-writer and star Leigh Whannell, who has since moved on to direct the likes of Upgrade and The Invisible Man.  Malignant just might be proof that Whannell was the brains of the outfit because this one is a fucking mess.  

That said, I’m not sure Whannell could’ve concocted such a humdinger of an ending.  Whatever its faults are early on, the last twenty minutes or so of Malignant offer up some nutty goodness.  It kind of comes as a day late and a dollar short, but if and when they make Malignant 2, I’ll be first in line.

Annabelle Wallis stars as a grieving woman who just lost her baby.  As she tries to move forward, we learn that the doctors who cared for her as a kid are being brutally murdered.  Could it be her childhood imaginary friend seeking revenge?  Or could it be something even grosser?

Malignant has a bunch of cool ideas, but no singular vision to tie everything together.  It cribs bits from The Dark Half, Poltergeist 2, Basket Case and a few others.  Overall, it just feels like an overlong, overcomplicated mishmash.  None of it is particularly scary either.  Wan does his best to replicate the look and feel of a Dario Argento movie during the scenes where Wallis and the killer are psychically linked (Wallis is practically in Daria Nicolodi cosplay the whole movie), although he is only successful about half the time.  Ultimately, the excessive CGI that morphs the two settings into one during these sequences are cheesy, and hamper what little atmosphere Wan had managed to build up.

Also, what’s the deal with horror flicks being stretched out to absurd lengths nowadays?  The Empty Man was 137 minutes.  In the Earth was 106.  This is a whopping 111.  Can’t filmmakers just give us a 90-minute movie anymore?  Or would that mean it wouldn’t be “elevated” because it doesn’t have a bloated running time?  

Seriously, the first ninety minutes or so of Malignant are a slog.  It really could’ve been trimmed down, and no one would’ve noticed or cared.  However, that last act is a work of demented genius.  I just wish there was more of that kooky glee present elsewhere in the film.

THE RAVAGER (1970) **

Joe (Pierre Agostino from The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher) is a soldier who gets separated from his unit in Vietnam and witnesses a woman being brutalized and raped.  He then returns home a disturbed individual and sets out to blow up couples necking in secluded areas.  Eventually, Joe takes to only blowing up the dude after sex so he can have his woman all to himself.  When he accidentally blows up a woman and her young son, the cops double their efforts to apprehend him.  

The Ravager is kind of like Taxi Driver if the guy was bald, didn’t drive a taxi, and didn’t write longwinded journal entries.  Agostino, with his Michael Berryman haircut and creepy demeanor, makes Nosferatu look like a Chippendales dancer in comparison.  Because of that, he makes for a pretty good psycho.

Unfortunately, some of the sex scenes are chopped all to hell, which probably means this was a hardcore (or at the very least X-rated) flick at some point before being butchered.  The sex scenes do get longer (and somewhat) better as the movie goes along, though.  One highlight is the scene where the lesbian couple frolics in the desert.  They get a pretty good tryst on a boat, which is followed by an effective scene where Joe ties one of them up and burns her alive.  This sequence is the exception rather than the rule.  Another scene where Joe is “reduced to being an ordinary peeping tom” was probably footage from another movie used to pad out the running time.  (Another tip-off:  It’s also the best scene in the movie.)

Ultimately, Joe spends more time in his room fiddling with his bombs than spying on couples and blowing them sky high.  Also a problem:  Most of the time, we see more of Joe’s reaction shots to the sex than the sex itself.  Also, I’m not sure why it’s called The Ravager.  “The Blower-Upper” would’ve been more accurate.

Director Charles Nizet later made the excellent Help Me… I’m Possessed.   

IN THE EARTH (2021) **

In the Earth is the new slow-burn horror flick from Ben (High-Rise) Wheatley.  How much of a slow burn is it?  Well, I fell asleep twice before the second act.  Luckily, things do pick up as the film progresses, but it’s kind of rough going there for a while.  

A scientist (Joel Fry) is looking for a cure to a virus that has caused a global pandemic.  A helpful forest ranger (Ellora Torchia) guides him through the woods to make sure he gets to base camp okay.  On their journey, they are waylaid by a crazy man (Reece Shearsmith) who likes to drug, mutilate, and torture them.  Worst of all, he makes them pose for weird photoshoots in the middle of the woods.

Since we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, it kind of irks me that many filmmakers have taken to making horror movies about a global pandemic.  I’m not one of those “Too Soon!” guys or anything, but could we at least wait a bit to take stock of the situation before we exploit it to make a buck?  Luckily, Wheatley doesn’t dwell on that aspect of the story for too long.  

He also gives us a pretty good sequence involving an axe and a certain appendage that manages to be simultaneously unnerving, suspenseful, and quite funny.  It’s a shame the damn-near insufferable first act didn’t have that same energy.  Unfortunately, moments like this are the exception rather than the rule as the final act proves to be yet another sluggish affair, culminating in an artsy-fartsy Kubrick-inspired ending that doesn’t really add much to the overall story.

Fry is amusing to watch, especially when he is being threatened by the Shearsmith.  The way he tries to remain calm and civilized through the hellish medical treatment that is inflicted upon him offers a solid laugh or two.  Moments like these prevent In the Earth from being a total washout, but Wheatley’s overly deliberate pacing makes it something of an endurance test to get to them.

THE EMPTY MAN (2020) * ½

A mountain climber in Bhutan falls into a cavern where he is possessed by a spirit that erupts from an ugly skeletal altar.  His buddies rescue him and bring him to an abandoned cabin and… it doesn’t end well.  Flashforward a few years.  An ex-cop (James Badge Dale) is looking into the mysterious suicide of a family friend.  Could her death and the reaper-like specter be connected?

The pre-title sequence clocks in at a whopping twenty minutes and probably could’ve been its own effective, self-contained short film as it plays like a marriage between The Thing and Evil Dead.  From there, the movie turns into a mash-up of Candyman and The Ring with a group of teens blowing into a bottle and calling upon the titular ghost before dying an untimely death three days later.  This section of the flick is a bit of a comedown from the opening, but it isn’t bad.  

Unfortunately, once Dale becomes the sole focus, things go in the toilet PDQ.  This section of the film is slow moving, meandering, confusing, and dull.  It also takes up the bulk of the running time, which is a whopping one-hundred-and-thirty-seven minutes, which is not the optimal length for something like this.  Heck, this would’ve probably still been a mess at eighty-seven minutes, but at the very least, it would’ve been fifty fucking minutes shorter.

Dale is not a bad actor, but he is given zilch to work with here.  The rest of the cast are bland and unmemorable too.  Heck, you know you’re in trouble when your movie features Stephen Root as an aloof cult leader and he barely even registers.  

The Empty Man (which was based on a comic book I’ve never heard of) was directed by David Prior, who as far as I can tell is NOT David A. Prior, who made Sledge Hammer.  As bad as Sledge Hammer was, it was certainly better than this crap.  You know a movie is bad when you start wishing David A. Prior had directed it.  

I can’t completely write it off because the first half-hour or so works.  The problem is after that, you’re still left with almost two hours’ worth of crap to sit through.  

REMINISCENCE (2021) ***

Reminiscence is chockful of several genre cliches that have been fashioned together Frankenstein style.  First and foremost, it’s an old timey detective story complete with hardboiled narration, a tough-talking Girl Friday, and a missing dame plotline.  It’s also a pre-apocalypse movie where the world is on the verge of going to shit, but people still go about their business as if nothing’s happening.  It’s also a pseudo-Virtual Reality flick as people hop into sensory deprivation tanks and relive old memories.  

The central premise is interesting enough as the characters would all rather live in the past than face a present that includes rising tides that leave the city of Miami a virtual wading pool.  They choose to relive memories through virtual reality than face the reality in front of them.  Sure, it may be a tad on the nose, but it works.

Like many genre mash-ups, Reminiscence is a bit goofy.  I mean are we supposed to believe that in the future people are still gonna dress like they’re in the ‘40s and frequent jazz clubs where sultry singers perform musical numbers?  That kind of unabashed earnestness and commitment to the bit helps keep the film afloat even when the plot is spinning its wheels.  

A good cast helps too.  Hugh Jackman is great as the obsessed hero looking for his long-lost love, who may also be a pawn in an elaborate political scheme.  Thandiwe Newton is a lot of fun as Jackman’s feisty partner, who is more adept at handling herself in a shootout than he is.  Rebecca Ferguson is a bit bland as Jackman’s mystery lady, but that suits her character, who predictably is more than what she appears to be.  

After a fun, breezy set-up (complete with a neat first act twist to boot), things sort of dawdle in the middle section.  Just as Jackman chases his lost love, the movie chases its own tail.  Thankfully, the climax is satisfying.  Without spoiling anything, I will say it’s equal parts downbeat and bittersweet as it gives its characters closure while simultaneously allowing them to perpetually go back on their bullshit.

In short, Reminiscence is a flick worth remembering.