Oblivion (1994)

Welcome to the township of Oblivion on a planet we’ll just call Wild West. After all, it’s just like the Wild West from the movies, but in space and with random goofy SF bits bolted on.

Town Marshal – and yeah, the film clearly means sheriff but in a recurring problem is too dumb to know the difference - Stone (Mike Genovese) is shot by evil reptile dude Redeye (Andrew Divoff) in a perfectly fair fight. In fact, Redeye took care of it actually being fair by disabling the Marshall’s force field which would usually have protected him from all harm – something the outlaw doesn’t have; and it’s hardly Redeye’s fault that Stone is the slowest draw on the planet. Anyway, after that Redeye does some actually evil stuff, and he and his gang of idiot wackos (played by people like Musetta Vander and Irwin Keyes) lord it over the town rather badly.

The Marshal’s alienated son Zack (Richard Joseph Paul) is out prospecting - and saving Space Indian Buteo (Jimmie F. Skaggs) from death by giant scorpion – but even once he hears of what has occurred, he is really going to take his time to get up to some revenge, what with him being an empath and – gasp! – a pacifist. He will later turn out to be a crack shot too, for reasons the film of course doesn’t bother to get into.

And that’s because Sam Irvin’s Oblivion is one of those comedies that believes it can escape any question about world building or internal logic by vaguely waving its and and cracking a crappy joke. Which comedies often can indeed get away with. Alas, that trick only works when a film’s jokes are actually funny, so no chance for Oblivion there.

The script was apparently written by great comics scribe Peter David (with the IMDB also giving “story” credits to Charles Band, John Rheaume, Greg Suddeth and Mark Goldstein), though it doesn’t actually feel like it at all. Or really, it doesn’t feel as if any professional writer had had much of a hand in it, but rather like a series of bad ideas and underdeveloped jokes somebody has scrawled on a napkin and called a script. To be fair, one or two of the film’s sixty-nine running jokes are actually somewhat funny. I found town undertaker Gaunt (Carel Struycken) with his habit to always appear shortly before somebody is killed and the resulting social awkwardness whenever he simply goes somewhere for a beer (and so on) fun and indeed funny, but this sort of thing is buried under jokes I felt actively embarrassed by despite not at all being responsible for them.

You’d think that this could still have been saved by the pretty wonderful cast of character actors and troopers – apart from those whom I have already mentioned there are also Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes, Julie Newmar and George Takei to wonder at – but most of them are pressed into bouts of deeply unfunny mugging. The usually intensely charming Takei and Newmar are particularly terrible, also thanks to the film’s insistence on making bad meta-jokes about certain other roles of these two, again and again and again. But really, the only actors on screen who seem to have any idea what they are doing and why are Divoff, Foster, Struycken, and boring love interest to a terrible hero Jackie Swanson (because really, being boring is never difficult). Everybody else seems rather too conscious of how deep the cow shit is they have stumbled into and acts accordingly.

Things become even worse whenever the film tries to turn sort of serious for a scene or two and attempts to treat Zack’s “inner struggle” as if anybody watching cared. Something that is completely impossible to take seriously given the surrounding nonsense, badly written anyway, and done by an actor who couldn’t act his way through an open door.


But hey, the space scorpions and Divoff’s make-up are pretty good, and it’s a mid-90s Charles Band movie without puppets and dolls, so there’s that to say for the whole mess.

Under the Bed (2012)

After having spent two years with his Aunt, undergoing psychological treatment and being home-schooled, teenager Neal Hausman (Jonny Weston) is dragged back home by his father Terry (Peter Holden). Neal had to leave home in some event involving a fire he may or may not have started that caused the death of his mother, an event the film will explain in detail much later. In any case, Terry clearly blames Neal for his wife's death.

Consequently, it's not so much Terry's idea to take his son back in, but rather that of his soon-to-be new wife Angela (Musetta Vander) who'd like to help Terry, Neal and Neal's little brother Paulie (Gattlin Griffith), who has been living with his father and her, grow back together again.

Despite Angela's - not always well thought through - efforts, there are quite a few things standing in the way of her dream of a pleasant and loving family life: namely a future husband whose reaction to psychologically troubled kids is screaming at them like an actual crazy person and rambling bullshit about normality and being a man at them. Terry's the type who loves to talk about other people having to take responsibility for their lives, something he seems particularly bad at himself. I think we're supposed to assume Terry wasn't always the jerk he is now, and the death of his wife changed him, but the film doesn't establish any visible signs of an inner conflict for him; in fact, he makes not a single loving gesture towards his children in the whole movie until the very end.

Terry himself would already be more than enough trouble for any child or teenager not coming from a family TV show but then there's the fact that Neal is as damaged as he is for an even worse reason than an emotionally abusive father. What really drove him away from home is the monster living under his bed. Even worse, once Neal was gone, it started terrorizing Paulie who didn't have anyone to help him, and is now pretty much at the end of his mental strength. From this perspective, Neal's return is the best that could have happened, for now, the brothers can face their fear (and a very real monster) together.

Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed is a bit of a frustrating film. The problem is not so much that it is a bad film, but rather that it is a pretty good film that regularly misses its opportunities for becoming great, despite cribbing whenever possible from every movie about children and teenagers having to face their supernatural monsters alone (particularly the Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark remake seems to be a favourite here).

Case in point is the way the film portrays Terry as a raging asshole who isn't so much overwhelmed by his own guilt and his inability to cope with the troubles of his children as a natural jerk bordering on a talking plot device (need to lock up your protagonists in the dark? let Terry do it!), where a father who is trying but failing instead of making no visible effort at all would fit much better into the childhood fears Neal and Paulie have to go through. This weakness also weakens Angela as a believable character. It is, after all, not too difficult to believe she's well-meaning yet inept (but can come through at the end) doing the whole parenting thing, but it's quite impossible to understand what she'd see in Terry. The not quite believable state of these central relations between the adult characters weakens the film's cause considerably.

I'm also less than enamoured by the way Miller decides to realize its monster when it comes out. I'm perfectly fine with gore but the head-ripping creature we get in the end is so much less frightening than it could or should be it's close to embarrassing. If your monster is a metaphor for childhood fears, then it damn well better be the embodiment of childhood fears, and not just another horror movie monster. Sometimes, a bit of subtlety goes a long way. It doesn't help the creature's case that it is about four times louder than anything else in the film. The connected scares aren't so much jump scares as "fear of deafness" scares, again using a bludgeon on the audience where a scalpel would be more appropriate.

On the positive side, the film's first forty minutes or so (before these problems really hit home) are a pretty believable portrait of a traumatized teen returning home full of fear and coming to realize that his greatest fears aren't just true but now threatening the only part of his family left alive he still feels a connection to. Jonny Weston and Gattlin Griffith are highly believable and effective in their roles, too, not just bringing the pain they go through to life, but also the camaraderie and the love. It's their performances that bring the best parts of Under the Bed to life, saving large parts of it from simple mediocrity.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Mansquito (2005)

aka Mosquito Man

A viral epidemic carried by mosquitoes is plaguing the USA, but scientist Dr Jennifer Allen (Musetta Vander) has a beautiful plan built on releasing mosquitoes immunized through drugs and radiation against the virus into the wilds to save lives. Unfortunately, Allen's approach to science is just a bit too careful for her boss Dr Michaels (Jay Benedict), and he decides to haul in multiple murderer Ray Erikson (Matt Jordon) as human guinea pig.

Of course, Erikson uses this as an opportunity to escape. That attempt ends in a catastrophe: the killer becomes exposed to quite a bit of mosquito-immunizing goo and radiation, and quite quickly begins to turn into…a Mansquito.

His ensuing bloodsucking spree is investigated by Lt. Randall (Corin Nemec), who also just happens to be Allen's boyfriend. Apart from the increasingly aggressive Mansquito, other problems come up soon enough. Allen herself was exposed to some of the science goo too, but in her case, it was little enough to induce a very slow transformation rather reminiscent of Cronenberg's The Fly, if The Fly had been more like a classic creature feature, and quite a bit more silly.

Allen's slow transformation does of course incur Mansquito's romantic interest, so he begins hanging around Allen, popping away to suck somebody's blood now and again, until she will turn into a girlsquito. Once the transformation is finished, romance should ensue unobstructed. Hopefully, someone will blow the nasty bug up before that can happen.

I hate being the guy throwing around words like "perfect" when describing another SyFy monster movie, but it's impossible for me to watch a film as well put together and often downright exhilarating in its willingness to push all the right buttons of a creature feature crossed with The Fly as Tibor Takács' Mansquito and not get excited.

In fact, a lot of my experience of watching Mansquito (winner of the prize of best-titled movie of 2005) is coloured by me giggling like a loon. That's not because Mansquito is silly (which it sure is, if you still need to ask), or cheesy (which it just as sure is), or not exactly coming done on the side of believable science (which it absolutely does not), but because Takács knows all this about his movie and still directs it with total conviction. Even though everyone involved clearly knows about the silliness of the whole affair, there's no visible attempt to distance themselves from the film; even when irony and humour occur, they do so in an organic, not a distancing manner. It's a lovely thing to behold if you're tired of films unwilling to take themselves seriously (I'd argue films about silly nonsense like mansquitoes particularly need to take themselves seriously), or in love with undermining themselves for a cheap gag.

Of course, earnestness alone does not make a creature feature remarkable or even worth watching; a film needs other virtues to win my heart at least. Takács fortunately delivers the good stuff here: Mansquito is excellently paced with a real sense of escalation to it, and - like it should be - with nary a boring minute. I think the Allen-transformation angle helps a lot with the last one, because it makes what can become scenes of character-based boredom in films of this sub-genre interesting. The film goes through all the standard scenes of creature features about lovelorn monsters (unless you need a bathing scene - white bathing suits are just not a mosquito thing) without them ever feeling generic or bland.

Atypically for a Sci-Fi Original (we are after all very early in that particular cycle, and this may or may not be the first of these films where the channel actually involved itself in the production instead of just buying a finished film), Mansquito's monster is made via the magic of suitmation, with a few CGI enhancements, particularly once Manny has grown his wings, and while nobody will confuse it with a real living creature (don't pretend you don't know the Government has an army of mansquitoes waiting in the wings), there's a mass and a reality to it cheap CGI effects generally just can't achieve. Plus, the suit can more regularly be in the same shot as the actors, which enables more interesting camera work.

There's a sense of personality in every shot that is difficult to describe on a more analytical level than saying you'll either feel it and love the movie (and Takács) for it, or you won't and will bemoan it as generic. It's a part of the film's feel I find difficult to pin down, the kind of thing that turns a movie into something special for me yet that might not be there for anyone else, though I doubt people who enjoy creature features at all will be immune to Mansquito's charms.

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