There’s a film missing from this update. One of the screener DVDs I meant to review wouldn’t play on any of my equipment, so the promised “experimental weirdness” will not be forthcoming. I’m sure you’re all terribly broken up about that, huh? As for the movies my DVD player would accept, we have…
Alien Resurrection (1997), in which the good names of a great many talented people are dragged enthusiastically through the mud…
Hardware (1990), in which we see what a hazardous undertaking giving your girlfriend a present can be when you live in a post-apocalyptic future…
and…
My Body Burns (1972), in which dirty old men, coniving young women, and rabidly jealous lesbians team up to power some of the least erotic erotica since Anais Nin blessedly returned her pen to the desk drawer.
#1 by Blake on January 27, 2010 - 5:18 pm
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I remember kind of liking “Alien Resurrection” back when I first saw it…12.5 years ago. I liked the film’s atmosphere, but the action scenes lacked energy. My college geography teacher always told his classes that the FX people screwed up at the end and the final Earth shot was flip-flopped (i.e. Florida on the west coast, etc.) Can you confirm this?
#2 by El Santo on January 27, 2010 - 5:37 pm
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Now that you mention it, I do remember thinking that the Earth looked rather peculiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it.
#3 by Read MacGuirtose on January 27, 2010 - 7:04 pm
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Though I’m also a big fan of Joss Whedon, I’m not sure that scientific knowledge is really a forte of his. Sure, [i]Firefly[/i] was science-fiction, but it was the kind of science fiction that involves very little actual science, and as much as I enjoyed [i]Buffy the Vampire Slayer[/i] (the series, not the movie), I recall one episode involving a meteor that was chock full of really atrociously bad science, even by the low standards of a fantasy show about vampires. (Though, to be fair, Whedon apparently [url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533456/]didn’t write that episode[/url], so I’m not sure how much of the blame for it he really deserves.)
Of course, none of that has anything to do with the non-science-related story problems you bring up…
#4 by Christian Brimo on January 27, 2010 - 7:54 pm
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i saw Hardware…. set design was good, but the film as a whole was kinda muddled and crap
#5 by Blake on January 28, 2010 - 6:49 am
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Let me just state that, IIRC, the director of special effects for “Alien Resurrection” was none other than Pitof, who’d go on to direct the legendary Halle Berry film “Catwoman.”
#6 by KeithA on January 28, 2010 - 11:04 am
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I remember watching Hardware when it first came out and being unimpressed. I was happy to revisit it, though, when it hit DVD, and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around. It still has it’s flaws, but that hardly matters to me given my tastes. And I like it largely for the reason you name — it’s a tweak on the post-apocalypse formula, like a zombie movie that doesn’t involve a bunch of people holed up in a house, fighting each other as much as the zombies (that’s why I love Jean Rollin’s Grapes of Death).
Plus, we always get a kick out of the GWAR footage with Ministry music dubbed over it.
#7 by MatthewF on January 28, 2010 - 11:18 am
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Hardware is okay, but terribly in love with itself and it’s godawful psychadelic bits, I think Richard Stanley spent too much time in rave clubs at the end of the eighties.
Watching the additional material on the alien ‘quadrilogy’ boxset shows you that Alien Ressurection was the only production where the cast, crew and director didn’t end up hating eachother, and it’s by far the worst film. Make of that what you will.
#8 by The Mud Puppy on January 28, 2010 - 11:52 am
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The funny thing about you saying, “Androids (oh, come on— like it counts as a spoiler that one of the characters is really a robot yet again)”, is that anybody who remembers the film’s original release knew going in that Winona Ryder was playing an android because all of the pre-release press and interviews with Ryder explicitly stated she was playing an android. I was more shocked to discover it was meant to be a twist!
Also, you have no idea how much I wish we’d gotten that movie you suggested instead of the Species II we actually got.
#9 by Read MacGuirtose on January 28, 2010 - 12:37 pm
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Aw, dagnabbit, I don’t know why I was thinking the comments here used UBBcode; I should have remembered better. Sorry for the [i]s and [url]s cluttering my post…
#10 by DamonD on January 28, 2010 - 4:17 pm
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I just loathed Alien Resurrection tremendously. Alien3 was a disappointing flick, if a bit of a curate’s egg because there were some gems there, but at least it was still Ellen Ripley there. I felt zero connection or empathy with the clone…and she was physically so much more powerful that the drama was reduced and I ended caring less.
I enjoyed your review and so went and read your reviews for the first three films too, good stuff and pretty much dead-on…actually made me appreciate the structure of Alien & Aliens a bit more. Only thing I’d differ on is that Cameron has made it pretty clear since that he was going heavily on a Vietnam War riff with Aliens, it wasn’t just coincidental.
#11 by jason farrell on January 29, 2010 - 8:14 am
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Sigourney Weaver must have had a bad back from carrying ALIEN RES so completely on her shoulders (sort of like Ledger in DARK KNIGHT). Her performance was so leonine that I thought it basically saved the film. And I love the weird notch in the humAlien cub’s nose.
#12 by Luke Blanchard on January 30, 2010 - 3:13 am
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I’ve not seen Hardware, but I’ve read the source story. It’s a short tale from a Judge Dredd annual, set in that character’s universe. Hence the nuclear wasteland/mega-city combination: Dredd was introduced as a cop in a mega-city on America’s east coast, and later stories established that they’d been a nuclear war, and much of the US was now a radioactive wildness.
In the original story, a husband buys the remains of the robot for from a dealer in Cursed Earth artefacts for his wife. It reconstitutes its upper half and chases the woman around her apartment trying to scare her to death. *Spoiler Warning* She hides in front of an open refridgerator and apparently manages to destroy it. But when her husband arrives home a figure he thinks is his wife turns out to be the robot.
I’ve not seen Trilogy of Terror either, but from what I’ve heard about it, the story could have been inspired by the Zuni Doll segment.
#13 by Bryan on January 30, 2010 - 8:09 pm
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Oh why oh why does B-Fest have to be in the middle of the semester? I started grad school about 4 months before I heard of this extravaganza, and have been stuck since. I graduate this year, so hopefully I can attend next year. I’ll have to hit you folks up on tips if I get out there next year.
#14 by Anarquistador on January 31, 2010 - 11:15 pm
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“Tell the truth, now— wouldn’t you much rather have seen Sigourney Weaver taking down a monsterized Natasha Henstridge in a no-holds-barred, super-powered catfight than anything that happens in Alien Resurrection?”
Yes. Yes I would.
Find a way to work Milla Jovovich into that somehow, and you’ve got the makings of a frigging MASTERPIECE.