FILM REVIEW OF ''THE TERMINATOR'' (1984)

"Piranha 2: The Spawning" director James Cameron scored his first major cinematic success with "The Terminator" (*** OUT OF ****), a gritty, but gripping low-budget science fiction horror actioneer about time travel with a curious twist. Austrian body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger virtually guaranteed that this 107 minute exercise in murder and mayhem would qualify as a blockbuster with his villainous, straight-faced portrayal of a relentless cyborg that allows nothing to stand between it and its programmed objective of executing a woman, Sarah Connor, in the past. The chief science fiction element in Cameron's film is the use of predestination paradox where it appears that history is being altered, when in fact, it is really being fulfilled. Cameron rehashed much of the "Terminator" action in his superior sequel, but he made the Schwarzenegger more sympathetic by having him serve as young John Connor's bodyguard in the follow-up film. Ironically, this $6-million plus movie wasn't that original because cybernetic organisms have been around in fantasy literature as early as Edgar Allan Poe. Nevertheless, "The Terminator" put cyborgs on the map more than "The Six-Million Dollar Man" and eventually inspired the "Robocop" franchise.

"The Terminator" opens in Los Angeles in 2029 A.D., at night while enemy Hunter Killer hovercraft prowl the post-apocalyptic rubble of the city for human prey. Heavy combat vehicles with massive treads crush hundreds of human skulls into powder while human survivors exchange fire with skeletal metal terminators with fiery red eyes. A preamble of sorts comes up and sets the scene: "The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here in our present . . . tonight." The actual story unfolds at 1:52 AM when a garbage truck driver watches crackling blue plasma-type waves envelope him and his vehicle.

A garbage truck operator is emptying trash bins when a plasma-like web of jagged blue lighting bolts envelopes his vehicle and shuts the vehicle down. He flees when the T-101 Terminator assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger of "Conan") appears naked out of nowhere. Skynet has dispatched the T-101 from the future back to the year 1984 to assassinate the mother of resistance leader John Connor. The naked T-101 saunters up to three punks at the Griffith Park Observatory overlooking Los Angeles. An obnoxious, blue-haired punk (Bill Paxton of "Aliens" and "Twister") and his friend (veteran heavy Brian Thompson of "Sudden Impact" and "Cobra") ridicule the T-101. The Terminator kills both of them while the third strips off his clothing. Meanwhile, elsewhere in L.A., another naked man, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn of "The Rock") materializes from the future. He steals a homeless man's pants, evades the L.A.P.D., breaks into a clothing store, steals Nike sneakers and a trench coat. Whereas the T-101 wants to kill Sarah, Kyle sets out to save this damsel-in-distress! Not surprisingly, young Sarah Connor doesn't have a clue that anybody yearns to either murder her or save her.

Sarah works at a fast-food restaurant. The T-101 finds three Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book and kills the first two and then invades Sarah's apartment and kills her roommate Ginger and Matt (Rick Rossovich of "Top Gun") her boyfriend. Eventually, Sarah discovers what is happening and holes up at the Tech Noir nightclub where the T-101 tracks her down. Kyle Reese rescues Sarah, and they flee, but the L.A.P.D. capture them.  Reese has to cough up his far-fetched story to a by pompous psychologist Dr. Peter Silberman (Earl Boen of "Alien Nation") who doesn't believe a syllable of his saga. Silberman diagnoses Reese as suffering from paranoid delusions and boasts that he make a career out of analyzing the guy's stories. During Reese's interrogation scene at police headquarters with Silberman, Cameron and co-writers Gale Ann Hurd and an uncredited William Wisher, Jr., provide audiences with crucial expository information about Skynet and the war with the cyborgs that seek to annihilate mankind.

The bulk of "The Terminator" concerns the T-101's tireless efforts to kill Sarah while Reese struggles to lead her to safety. During their flight, Reese and Sarah become romantically involved and Reese gets Sarah pregnant with future resistance leader John Connor. Talk about twisted time travel?! Cameron intersperses a flashback to the future where a T-101 (Schwarzenegger's pal Franco Columbu of "Beretta's Island") invades a resistance bunker and goes on a murderous rampage before he is eliminated. Throughout the blazing action sequences, Cameron gradually strips the T-101 down to its alloyed metal endoskeleton. Reese explains to Silberman that a Terminator is a cyborg, half-man, and half-machine that will never stop until it kills Sarah. Everybody at the police station regards Reese as a fruit cake with his unbelievable story until the T-101 shows up with an arsenal of weapons and shoots up the premises, killing at least 17 cops. Reese and Sarah escape, hid out in a motel where they build pipe bombs, but the resourceful T-101 finds Sarah's mother, kills her off-screen, and imitates her so that it can learn Sarah's whereabouts. Another ramped up chase ensues with the T-101 caught in a blazing 18-wheeler. The fire scorches its entire body in the last 15 minutes so that all that remains is the skeleton. Reese dies blowing the skeleton in two. The torso of the T-101 continues to stalk Sarah until she crushes it in a tool manufacturing factory so that only the hand and forearm, which appears in the sequel "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." James Cameron has more road trip action in this thriller than actual science fiction, but the action-packed scenes more than deliver their quota of thrills and chills. One of the earliest scenes in a pawnshop has the T-101 gathering an arsenal of hardware from an unsuspecting clerk (Dick Miller) and then killing him instead of paying for it. The "I'll be back" scene at the police station massacre is probably the best scene in this supercharged little spine-tingler.

FILM REVIEW OF ''ALIEN ARMAGEDDON" (2011)

"Battlespace" writer & director Neil Johnson’s derivative, low-budget science fiction thriller “Alien Armageddon” (* out of ****) chronicles a breed of Martian invaders, ‘the Nephilim,’ who dominate planet Earth for 67 historic days. These hostile intruders establish their headquarters in Los Angeles after subjugating the Earth and then rely on our own scientists to modify our DNA so that we become fodder for them. You see, these ravenous monsters had to abandon their famine-stricken world. Actually, the villainous Nephilim have been quietly infiltrating Earth for many decades, acquiring knowledge about our character and culture. The computer generated special effects imagery of the alien armada during the first ten minutes looks like something out of a black & white graphic novel. This fleet of spacecraft, which resemble naval vessels, hover as if they were vultures over every major city. The lackluster battle sequences are comprised of ersatz mushroom cloud explosions and flashes inserted in photographs of California and other overseas locales. Johnson shakes his camera to give the fake explosions some impact. The Nephilim infantry look like distant cousins of the "Star Wars" robot C3PO. Decked out in metal football shoulder pads and breast-plates bristling with hoses, these soldiers shoulder deadly automatic weapons but they aren't too bright. When humans are struck by Nephilim ordnance, they dissolve into a splatter of blood and momentarily obstruct the camera lens. Not surprisingly, the nefarious extraterrestrials conquer and enslave humanity by the forty-fourth day or roughly the first half-hour of the action. Some of the treacherous humans, desperate to survive, turn into quislings, while the incarcerated humans are fed a diet of contaminated food which makes them edible to the aliens.

Johnson begins the action with a quotation from the Book of Enoch (10:9-10:15) out of the Apocrypha. "The Lord said to Gabriel: Proceed against the bastards, and the reprobates, and the sons of the fornicators, and destroy the sons of the Watchers from amongst men . . . bind them for seventy generations . . . Semyaza, the leader, will be destroyed with them. And destroy the Nephilim for they have wronged men." Following this quotation, Johnson employs horror icon Christopher Lee to provide some dramatic voice-over narration: "In ages past, the Nephilim Empire ruled the Earth, but they fell from grace. Once their slaves, Humanity rose up and defeated their gods. The Nephilim were purged from the earth and banished to the darkness. For centuries, they watched and waited. The Nephilim Empire would one day rise again." Afterward, Johnson introduces the hero, Cowboy (Don Scribner of "Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity"), who wears hair long and speaks through a grizzled beard. Cowboy is a convict at Folsom State Prison where he is serving time for the murder of his son and twenty-eight passengers on a bus. When a television reporter asks why he killed his son, Cowboy replies cryptically, "Boy had to die. He was cancer." Johnson cross cuts between this TV interview with Cowboy and the blitzkreig attack launched by the Nephilim against Earth. Later, dressed in an orange prison jump suit, Cowboy appears without explanation outside Folsom and takes the keys to an SUV from the corpse of its driver.

Our heroine is a feisty Jewish red-head, Jodie Elliot (British actress Katharine McEwan of "Sinners"), who operates a printing shop in contemporary Los Angeles. She is contending with a disgruntled customers who wants a discount when the alien ships appear over the city. The customer describes the ships erroneously as hot-air balloons, but Jodie fears the worst is about to happen. After the aliens have taken over Los Angeles and built a wall around the metropolis, Jodie joins an underground resistance movement. Eventually, the Nephilim ferret out her hiding place and capture her. Jodie shares a skyscraper prison cell with an African-American soldier, Markus (Benjamin J. Cain Jr. of "Dogma") and white, Catholic, B-2 Spirit bomber pilot Sheen (William David Tulin of "KingBreaker") who nuked Chicago before the Nephilim could make it their headquarters. An electronic force field substitutes for iron bars on the entrance of their cell, and she suffers a jolt when she tries to penetrate it. They dine on slop out of black plastic buckets and relieve themselves into a small foot locker. The meat that they are given is so vile that they puke it up, but this is all they are allowed to eat.

Meantime, Cowboy links up with another resistance unit. He sports a duster now with a Stetson riding low on his forehead. The Nephilim capture him after a firefight in the desert. Not long afterward, he winds up in the same cell with Jodie. Our heroine wants desperately to break out and rejoin her daughter who resides in the small town of Little Rock, California. She watches in horror as her cell mates are dragged off to become brunch. At one point, Jodie manages to escape briefly and witnesses a harrowing scene when a pregnant female inmate strapped down to a bed gives birth to several chunks of flesh. All along, two scientists Franci (Rochelle Vallese of "Scar") and Dr. Brenna (Julia Parker of "Girl Crazy") have been collaborating with the Nephilim to make humanity more palatable for their extraterrestrial taste buds. Once the Nephilim have used Franci, they stick her in the same cell with our heroes. The Nephilim take Markus and feed him to a flesh eating zombie like creature. Jodie, Franci, and Cowboy escape when Jodie stages a bout of illness. The girls head for Little Rock, but Jodie doesn’t find her daughter. Cowboy later rejoins them after commandeering an alien interceptor aircraft.

Meantime, Franci injects Jodie with some strange serum so that she becomes a bio-medical weapon against the Nephilim. Franci rhapsodizes about the pleasures of masquerading as a human and all the feelings that life has evoked for her. Predictably, she dies. Eventually, humanity triumphs over the Martian invaders. Before this occurs, we get to see revolting shots of giant, beady, orange slugs with pincers gnawing on the flesh and bones of decaying humans. Before Franci dispatches Jodie on her sacrificial mission to save mankind, they indulging in a lingering lesbian lip-lock. Jodie neither pukes nor repels Franci. Johnson concludes with another quotation from Enoch 16:1. "And the death of the Nephilim, and wherever the spirits have left their bodies, their flesh will be destroyed, before the judgement. They will be banished until the Day of the Great Consumption and this also will stand against the Watchers and all those who are impious."

"Alien Armageddon" qualifies as an abominable opus with shoddy storytelling, sketchy characters, second-rate special effects, subpar dialogue, and shallow acting. Little about this below-average sci-fi saga is either groundbreaking or sensational. The occasional clashes between Nephilim infantry and earthlings enliven the exposition heavy narrative, and the few revelations in this predictable, standard-issue invasion flick lack impact. The Nephilim chieftain looks menacing enough with his cadaverous, predatory complexion, but Johnson doesn't permit him adequate screen time to create more than a fleeting impression. Basically, this sci-fi actioneer spends more time on Earth than in the heavens. Clocking in at 95 interminable minutes, “Alien Armageddon” makes “Wing Commander” look like “Star Wars.”

FILM REVIEW OF "INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS" (1956)

No single movie more effectively captured the paranoia and depicted the conformity that afflicted America in the 1950s than director Don Siegel's low-budget, black & white, science fiction chiller "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (**** out of ****) with Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. Siegel remembered it as his favorite film and its potency lies in Siegel's subtle handling of the outlandish subject matter. Every Siegel film has examined the theme of the individual versus society. Never has any Siegel protagonist ever blended in with the swarm. Iconoclastic to the hilt, Siegel's protagonists clash with the status quo. Siegel's respect for these outcasts prompted him to make "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." "I think that the world is populated by pods," he observed, "and I wanted to show them." Despite its melodramatic title and ghoulish adversaries, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" shares little similarity with sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s. Surprisingly, this minor Allied Artists release quickly acquired a reputation. Film critics and scholars alike have read considerably more into its standard narrative about aliens taking over the earth than Siegel intended. Kevin McCarthy said years later he saw "no political significance" in the plot. One of Don Siegel's contemporaries and a renowned film producer in his own right, Walter Mirish, wrote about the film's significance in his autobiography. "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple." Nevertheless, the best works of art are always prone to interpretations beyond those of its creators, and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" became a lightning rod for commentary.
Three schools of thought emerged about "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The first construed it as a polemic against the hysteria-inducing tactics of discredited Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy who alleged Communists had infiltrated American government. McCarthy never substantiated his charges, but he forged an atmosphere of hatred and mistrust that ostracized iconoclasts. The second saw it as a metaphor for the perennial threat Communism posed to Americans. During the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee launched a witch hunt and blacklisted many Hollywood filmmakers because of their involvement with the Communist Party between the 1930s and 1950s. As a casualty of the blacklist, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenarist Daniel Mainwaring spent his remaining years writing under a pseudonym. A third school saw it as an indictment of the Levittown suburban mentality where everybody acted and dressed in identical fashion.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" opens with a prologue as the police transport Dr. Hill (Whit Bissell of "He Walks By Night") from the State Mental Hospital to observe a delusional inmate who claims that he isn't insane. Dr. Hill sits down with our disheveled hero and listens to his story. Until the epilogue, when Siegel returns to the asylum, everything from here until then occurs in flashback as the story is told. Things begin innocently enough as a local physician, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy of "Annapolis Story"), has encountered patients in the small town of Santa Mira, California, who complain about their loved ones behaving like impostors. Town psychiatrist Dr. Dan Kaufman (Larry Gates of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) dismisses everything as "hysteria." Soon, Bennell and his old friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan of “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”) and his wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones of "The Addams Family") along with Bennell's former sweetheart Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), discover a replica of Jack in his house lying on his pool table. "It's like the first impression stamped on a coin," Jack observes to Bennell. Bennell takes the body's fingerprints, but it has no fingerprints at this point. The thing awakens no long afterward, and Jack and Teddy flee in terror to Bennell's house with news that the body looks exactly like Jack. Indeed, Teddy points out that it resembles Jack right down to his slashed hand palm where he cut himself dropping a bottle of bourbon. Later, they learn seed pods are appearing everywhere. When people fall asleep, the pods hatch facsimiles. After Jack and Teddy show up at Bennell’s house, the doctor’s imagination runs wild and he leaps into his car in his pajamas and house robe and careens over the Becky’s house. Bennell breaks into Becky's house. He enters the house by smashing a window in the basement. Bennell finds a pod in her cellar, but rescues Becky before she can turn into a pod person. Our hero theorizes that so many things have been discovered in the world since the advent of the atomic bomb that radiation may have affected plant or animal life or some weird alien organism. Dr. Kaufman comes over to Bennell’s house and they explain to him the outlandish events that have happened. Predictably, Dr. Kaufman refuses to believe anything that they say. Bennell and Jack accompany Dr. Kaufman over to Jack’s house to show him the facsimile on the billiards table. When they reach the billiards table, they find the body has vanished. Dr. Kaufman points out a blood stain on the table, but the body is nowhere to be found. They drive over to Becky’s house and check the basement for Becky’s facsimile, but they find nothing. Dr. Kaufman launches into a lecture to the incredulous Miles Bennell. “Why did you come here tonight? You’d seen a dead man at Jack’s, an average sized man. The face in death was smooth and unlined, bland in expression, which often happens, You had become aware of a curious, unexplainable epidemic mass hysteria. Men, women, and children suddenly convinced themselves that their relatives weren’t their relatives at all so your mind starting playing tricks.”

No sooner has Dr. Kaufman finished than Becky’s father, Stanley Driscoll (Kenneth Patterson of “Baby Face Nelson”), appears with a shotgun in his fists. He wants to know what they are doing in his basement. Not long afterward, Santa Mira Police Chief Nick Grivett (Ralph Dumke of “Violent Saturday”) pokes his head in the broken window that Bennell and company have entered the basement. When they try to explain about the body over at Jack’s house, the chief interrupts and gives them a complete description of the man. The chief saw the body on the slab. He informs Bennell, Jack, and Dr. Kaufman that the body was found in a burning haystack on Mike Gessner’s south pasture. Afterward, several people who had complained about their relatives no longer show anxiety. The little boy that Bennell nearly ran over earlier, Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark of “Kentucky Jubilee”), is neither afraid of his mother nor of attending school. Similarly, Wilma Lentz (Virginia Christine of “Billy the Kid versus Dracula ) is no longer worried about her Uncle Ira being an impostor.

Approximately, forty minutes into the action, Siegel shows the first pod as it is replicating a human; the kind of shot that Siegel uses is designated a ‘Dutch’ tilt shot. The camera is set-up as if it were on its side so that image looks definitely out of place. Siegel is deliberately calling attention to the seed pods. Bennell notices the seed pods when one gurgles, and Jack, Teddy, and Becky join him. Becky confesses that her father hasn’t been the same since Bennell and she came home yesterday and found him leaving the basement. “They have to be destroyed,” cries Teddy, “all of them.” Bennell assures her that they will. The doctor and the others haven’t caught on yet about the brutal truth. “We’re going to have to search every building, every house in town. Men, women, and children have to be examined. We’ve got some phoning to do.” Bennell tries to call the FBI in Los Angeles. The switchboard operator informs him that all Los Angeles circuits are dead. When he asks for the governor in Sacramento, Bennell learns that all Sacramento circuits are busy. Bennell sends Jack and Teddy out of town to alert the authorities. He tried to make Becky go with them, but she refuses and stays behind with him. Bennell takes the pitchfork and checks the seed poles. One of them has disgorged a replica of Becky, but Bennell cannot spear it. Instead, he finds his own replica and plunges the spear into it repeatedly. Eventually, the impostors take over and corner Bennell and Becky. They explain that the seed pods entered the Earth, landed at a farm and took root. Life has driven too many people over the edge and the pods will free mankind of its worries. Nobody will ever be troubled by anything again. "There is no need for love or emotion. Love, desire, ambition, faith—without them—life is so simple." Originally, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" concluded with the frantic Bennell screaming his warning about these space aliens who robbed humans of their emotions and turned them into thoughtless automatons. Allied Artists sought to soften the hysteria. Siegel agreed against his wishes to add a prologue and an epilogue on the advice of Wanger for fear that the studio would re-edit the film.

The legacy of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is considerable. Hollywood has remade this original three times along with the unacknowledged remakes, such as the 2007 "Invasion of the Pod People" Philip Kaufman helmed an urban version of the Siegel film in 1978 with Donald Sutherland, but situated it in the urban sprawl of San Francisco. McCarthy reprised his role, and Siegel had a cameo. Later, independent director Abel Ferrara took it back to its rural roots in 1994 with "Body Snatchers" and located the action on a military base in Alabama. In 2007, another remake simply called "Invasion" appeared with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Originally, Jack Finney wrote the novel that "Collier's Magazine" serialized in 1954.

FILM REVIEW OF ''REPO MEN" (2010)

No, “Dreamer” director Miguel Sapochnik’s violent, outlandish science fiction thriller “Repo Men,” co-starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, bears no relation to director Alex Cox’s cult hit “Repo Man” (1986), with Emilio Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, about repossessing automobiles. Instead, “Repo Men” (** ½ out of ****) concerns the sales and manufacture of artificial body parts in the unspecified future and the ruthless ruffians dispatched to repossess these state-of-the-art organs from individuals who fail to maintain their payments. Although it features many suspenseful scenes, some appealing characters and charismatic performances, “Repo Men” looks more often than not like an uneven blend of “Brazil” and “Blade Runner” with an ending that leaves an unsavory taste in your mouth.

Derived from Eric Garcia's 2009 novel "The Repossession Mambo,” this slickly-produced dystopian chiller -vaguely similar to "Repo: The Genetic Opera"--boasts its share of twists and turns that will keep your hands clenched into white-knuckled fists until its one-too-many endings alienates you. Jude Law toplines an incomparable cast and you’ll find yourself cheering for him, even though he qualifies initially as a quasi-villain. Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber play unrepentant villains and they milk their roles for every ounce of villainy that they can muster. An opening metaphor about a cat trapped in a metal box filled with a deadly nerve gas will most certainly offend feline animal lovers, but the crowd that this Universal Pictures release is targeting will take pleasure in the adrenaline fueled action sequences and the high-tech equipment with which the principals deal. Hopelessly far-fetched in every detail, “Repo Men” has some elements that should undoubtedly absorb sci-fi fans. The aerosol foam that seals up gashes in the human body like fast-acting super-glue and the miraculous resiliency of the victims as they endure hands probing around inside them is pretty far-out stuff.

In the future, a billion-dollar corporation, the Union, fabricates high-tech artificial organs, nicknamed "artiforgs," so that nobody’s loved ones need endure the heartache and torment of biding their time awaiting genetically compatible body parts. The catch, however, is the sky-high cost of these miracle organs. In fact, few people can afford loan-shark interest rates imposed by the Union once they have signed a contract with the company. As a result of not being able to manage their credit cards anymore than their debts, these unfortunate souls wind up not only paying through the nose, but also often losing those pricey parts. When a recipient falls behind more than three months on their payments, the eponymous men materialize when they least expect them to gut and retrieve the Union’s property.

Remy (Jude Law of “Sherlock Holmes”) and Jake (Forest Whitaker of “Vantage Point”) are childhood pals, and the best repo men at the Union. They waste no time when they are on the job and show no more compassion that a repo man in the car business. Standard operating procedure dictates that our heroes provide the victim with the option to call an ambulance before they eviscerate them. Meantime, Remy’s wife Carol (Carice van Houten of “Valkyrie”) wants her husband to stop repossessing organs and move over into sales so he can allocate more time with their adolescent son, Peter (Chandler Canterbury of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), who doesn’t see his dad as often as he’d like. Eventually, Carol puts her foot down and refuses to let Remy sleep with her, much get gain access to their comfortable house. As much as Remy wants to accommodate Carol, he loathes the idea of a buttoned down suit and tie existence on a 9-to-5 schedule.

Matters come to a head during one job when Remy visits a musician. As he is about to give the guy a jolt from a defibrillator to take his heart, the device malfunctions and knocks him unconscious. When Remy recovers, he finds himself in a hospital bed with Jake and local Union branch manager Frank (Liev Schreiber of “The Manchurian Candidate”) hovering over him with their smiling faces. The horror of what has occurred sinks in and Remy wants nothing to do with his new high-priced ticker. Nevertheless, Jake and Frank bring him around and Remy is back on his feet in no time and prepared to pick up where he left off repossessing organs. The problem is that Remy is no longer the same guy and he no longer has his heart in his job. In fact, he ends up in the same predicament that virtually every Union creditor finds themselves in and has to worry about Frank sending out Jake to repossess his heart.

“Repo Men” is a darkly-themed satire that never takes itself seriously, and Sapochnik stages several visceral action scenes involving blood, gore, and stabbing galore that may challenge your ability to keep from chucking up, when body parts are repossessed. Like the hero in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” Remy winds up on the other side and helps out other organ recipients who have gone to the black market to save themselves. Like the heroes in a Sam Peckinpah western, our life-long friends—Remy and Jake--find themselves on opposite sides. Clearly, the producers couldn’t have picked a better time to release this sardonic nail-biter about high-tech medicine as Congress has passed a new health insurance bill. This compelling, sometimes convoluted, amoral thriller shows the two sides of humanity. Ironically, once it has eliminated the problem of obtaining human body parts, our capitalistic society has created a larger problem, footing the bill for manufactured variety. Organ donor epics will never be the same with the advent of “Repo Men.”

FILM REVIEW OF "MIMIC" (1997)

Mutated cockroaches that stand as tall as Zulu warriors menace Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam, and Charles S. Dutton in director Guillermo Del Toro’s claustrophobic horror opus “Mimic” (* OUT OF ****), a verminously boring piece of skullbuggery, that takes itself too seriously to have any camp value much less scare merit. While the bugs look convincing enough when you can see them, they don’t make the skin at the back of your neck crawl. Only somebody whose never screamed at a horror movie would have to sleep with their lights on with a can of Reid insecticide under their pillow after suffering through “Mimic.”

A pestilent epidemic spread by cockroaches is killing children by the hundreds in New York city when a group of scientists led by entomologist Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) create a genetic mutant called the Judas Breed. They have manufactured a super cockroach in their labs that can kill other cockroaches, but these little buggers cannot reproduce themselves and have a life expectancy of six months. At least, that’s what Susan Tyler and Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam of “The Net”) thought. The Judas Breed eradicates the cockroach plague and spares a generation of children. Everybody breathes a sight of relief, while deep within those abandoned New York subway tunnels, a specimen has somehow managed to survive and breed. Three years later, out it comes to feed and its favorite lunch morsel is human.

Mann tracks these vicious critters into the subway catacombs with the help of Leonard, a grumpy subway cop (the ever reliable Charles S. Dutton), who doesn’t have a clue (like most characters in horror movies) what he’s gotten himself into as the scientist’s tour guide. Meanwhile, Susan finds herself alone in a subway when a bug snatches her up and flies off with her. Miraculously, the critter doesn’t chomp her like it does its previous victims. In fact, other than flying off with her, the bug leaves her intact, dumping her in its slime. Eventually, Susan scrambles through the maze of tunnels and finds Peter. So do a swarm of the bugs. Our heroes hole up in a subway car. Just as the bugs are about to tear their way inside and eat these human sardines, Susan figures out that the bugs can smell their blood. She gets everybody to smear themselves with dead bug guts, and they leave them momentarily alone. Talk about repellent!

The premise that “Mimic” neglects to explain is how these mutants found a way to replicate themselves and take the general shape and appearance of a man huddled up in a trench coat. Gifted scenarists such as John (“Lone Star”) Sayles, Matthew (“Dragonslayer”) Robbins, and Steven (“Kafka”) Soderbergh contributed to writer-director Guillermo (“Cronos”) Del Toro’s heavily derivative script, but none of them seems to have worked the bugs out of their roachy script. “Mimic” appears to mimic “The Lost World” in two respects. The “Mimic” scientists overlook the possibility that their genetic deviants could survive in the wild like “The Lost World” dinosaurs, and one of the film’s better set-pieces shamelessly rips-off the RV scene in “Lost World,” but with considerably less suspense or tension. The only sweat that you will break in “Mimic” is waiting for director Del Toro and his writers to scare you.

Despite this surfeit of talent, “Mimic” stinks because the filmmakers wait too long to flush out the bugs. They waste over forty-five minutes setting up the story before our heroes descend into the subway tunnels. Of course, you can guess when who is going to die, so predictability paralyzes the story. Worse than that is that director Guillermo Del Toro rarely conjures up anything that remotely terrifies. There are too few instances when you want to jump because something on screen shocked you. The scene where the huge roach scoops up Mira Sorvino and swoops off with her is hilarious. It’s like those silent movies where the eagle carries the hero off to its nest. Del Toro is good at showing us lots of yucky bug slime and the bugs themselves. Most of the movie is shot in darkness so that you cannot see the bugs until the movie is half-way over. As for the bugs, the cockroaches in “Joe’s Apartment” were more fun. “Mimic’s” villainous bugs simply don’t look as murderous as either an alien or as creepy as an anaconda, even when one crawls over one of our heroes. When these buggers run, they resemble the raptors from “The Lost World,” but they are far less tenacious or terrifying.

Nothing in this handsomely produced insect epic will peg your blood pressure. A good cast is wasted, especially F. Murray Abraham, and we care so little about these one dimensional characters that when they begin to drop like flies, who cares. The filmmakers ignore whatever potential that they might have stirred up by having bodacious Mira Sorvino strip-tease a la Sigourney Weaver and lure the roaches to their demise. Charles Dutton’s subway cop comes closest to enlisting our sympathies because he gets to curse loudly and bug out his own eyes when he sees the giant insects. There’s an expendable subplot, too, about a small boy who gets lost in the tunnels and befriends the bugs. Skip this bugger. Mexican writer-director Guillermo Del Toro may have breathed new life into the vampire genre with his 1992 masterpiece “Cronos,” but “Mimic” is nothing but a load of bull!

FILM REVIEW OF ''DISTRICT 9" (2009)

Director Neill Blomkamp's freshman, feature-length, dystopian sci-fi thriller "District 9" (* out of ****)qualifies as both grotesque and grungy. Worse, heavily-laden with anti-apartheid messages, it emerges nevertheless as an uneven blend of Monty Python skits with a serious polemic about alien rights. Does anybody remember director Christopher Columbus’ “Bicentennial Man” (1999) with Robin Williams and lack of concern for alien rights? Despite some visceral action sequences that attest to Blomkamp’s expertise at staging action, this nimble but numb-skulled nail-biter puts the protagonist in a thoroughly impossible position. Essentially, “District 9” exemplifies those supernatural films that occur primarily on Earth with the 'aliens among us’ theme. Mankind knows that the aliens have arrived. In fact, not only have we accepted them, we have grossly taken advantage of them! These aliens are neither as lovable as “Wall-E” lovable nor as cunning as the “Terminator.” You could call “District 9”: 'The Day the Aliens Stood Still.'

Indeed, Blomkamp and co-scenarist Terri Tatchell encapsulate the action in a fictional expose television documentary. Intermittently, Blomkamp indulges himself with adrenalin-laced dramatic footage that no documentary film could have captured without staging it. At other times, Blomkamp cross-cuts black & white footage from surveillance cameras to show our woebegone hero at work. Essentially, he is following the same scenario as “Cloverfield,” except for those few sequences that do not fit into the documentary. Indeed, “District 9” borrows from a number of science fiction films. A gigantic alien spaceship visits Earth like in "Independence Day,” but this spacecraft cannot leave. The spaceship hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa, for three months before the authorities board it. The skeletal aliens that humans find inside are malnourished, and the good folks in Johannesburg, wind up confining these aliens in what constitutes a huge slum. The humans treat the aliens like second-class citizens and allow them to sink into squalor. The aliens resort to crime to make ends meet and are often at odds with the authorities. No, "District 9" shares little in common with the conventional "Alien Nation." These aliens look like they walked off the set of a "Predator" movie and--unlike most alien invaders--they are not as intimidating as their counterparts. These aliens remain largely at our mercy, and Blomkamp renders humanity as brutal and unscrupulous in their treatment of the aliens.

“District 9” opens with several talking heads as part of a documentary about the scandal involving the protagonist. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely) is an ordinary field representative for Multi-National United, (MNU), a private company that has dominion over the aliens. Escalating alien crime and violence has prompted the government to move some 1.8 million of them to new District 10 camp located outside of Johannesburg. They are being served eviction notices by MNU field representatives who are backed up by armed helicopters hovering above them. Our hero’ s father-in-law, Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar) assigns him to head up the mission. During one of his visits to a domicile, Wikus discovers a suspicious cylinder among an arms cache. When he fumbles with it, a black liquid squirts into his face, contaminating him with alien DNA. As the story open, Wikus is already under investigation. The tabloids carry pictures of him mating with aliens. We are given a recap of the story and then the second half opens as Wikus grows flippers on his left hand. Suddenly, Wikus becomes the most prized human alive with the alien DNA polluting his bloodstream. Alien guns that scientists could never have fired now discharge at Wikus’ half-breed DNA touch. Mind you, Wikus refuses to fire the weapons, but his captors shock him with cattle prods until he accommodates them. Wikus goes berserk and escapes from the laboratory. He joins forces with an intelligent, inventor-type alien named Christopher. Christopher wants to rekindle the energy of his command capsule so he can get back to the spacecraft overhead and haul freight.

Basically, "District 9" appropriates the ‘what if’ sci-fi theme and employs it as a metaphor for a social consciousness sermon about racial xenophobia. Neither Blomkamp nor Tatchell regard humanity in a sentimental light. Worse, we are asked to sympathize with a hero who is a complete imbecile. The theme of man's inhumanity to aliens comes through 'loud and clear.’ Imagine a science fiction movie that takes place in a third world country and you've summed up "District 9." These aliens aren't cool. They look like big bugs and they speak in guttural language. Everybody refers to them disparagingly as ‘prawns.’ Blomkamp translates the alien lingo in white subtitles. They are as pathetic as the hero who behaves as if he were in a Woody Allen comedy. He is a naive moron, a patsy, a fall guy. The important part of the plot transpires when he undergoes a quasi-alien metamorphosis a la Franz Kafka meets "The Fly."

Blomkamp lenses "District 9" like a documentary, and its bureaucratic hero makes an ass out of himself. He couldn't be any more abject if he were John Cleese in a Monty Python skit. Eventually, after he gets contaminated, he begins his transformation into an alien with one hand turning into an alien claw. Yes, the aliens do resemble huge insects which make them appear less hostile but far from appealing. Indeed, Blomkamp creates a very convincing alternative universe in that the story is credible and as down to earth as any sci-fi you can imagine. Eventually, the alien along with the Wikus Van De Merwe bureaucratic hero launch a one-man/one-alien war against the repressive organization MNU that keeps the alien cooped up in the worse circumstances. The section between Merwe escaping and then teaming up with Christopher is action packed, but there are no surprises in this flat movie. I cannot believe that so many people are going ape about this asinine little flick.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE BLOB'' (1958)

“The Blob” (*** out of ****) qualifies as a cult sci-fi film not only because it launched 27-year old Steve McQueen on a trajectory to superstardom, but also because it exploited the popular themes both of alien invasion and teenage delinquency that were inseparable in the 1950s. Interestingly, nobody in the Kay Linaker & Theodore Simonson screenplay ever refers to the amorphous, scarlet-red protoplasm that plummeted to Earth in a meteor and menaced everybody in the small town of Downingtown Pennsylvania on a Friday night as “The Blob.” Steve McQueen won the role of Josh Randall, the old West bounty hunter in “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” after producer Dick Powell saw this Paramount Pictures’ release. Meanwhile McQueen’s attractive girlfriend Aneta Corsaut went on to star opposite Andy Griffith in “The Andy Griffith Show” as Sheriff Taylor’s school teacher girlfriend Helen Crump. Of course, neither McQueen nor Corsaut were teenagers, but then rarely did actual teenagers play actual teenagers.

Director Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., made his directorial debut with “The Blob.” Linaker & Simonson’s screenplay synthesized four genres: first, the alien invasion; second, teenage delinquency; third, a murder mystery, and fourth; a horror chiller. Moreover, while the gelatinous substance assumes various shapes, it remains largely anonymous. In other words, the eponymous Jell-O neither talks nor communicates by telepathy. Instead, it kills without a qualm and discriminates against nobody. The tone of “The Blob” is fairly serious in spite of its somewhat campy nature.

As the filmmakers point out on the Criterion DVD release of “The Blob,” the movie opens uncharacteristically for a sci-fi horror thriller with our hero and heroine in a remote rural locale making out and kissing. Jane (Anita Corsaut) and Steve (Steve McQueen) see a large meteor fall to the earth and drive off to find it. Meanwhile, an old man finds the meteor and prods it with a stick. The crust of the meteor cracks open and a slimy bunch of goop clings to the stick. When the old timer (Olin Howland of “The Paleface”) gets a closer look at it, the goop attaches itself to his hand. The old guy runs screaming from the crater and Steve nearly hits him with his jalopy. Steve and Jane pick the guy up and take him to see Dr. Hallen in town.

Hallen is poised to leave town for a medical conference when Steve and Jane bring the old guy to his office. Hallen phones his nurse to return since he may need to perform an amputation. Of course, Hallen has never seen anything like the substance on the man’s forearm. Hallen sends Steve and Jane to find out what happened. Our heroes run into another group of teenagers that ridicule Steve’s fast driving. Steve fools him into a reverse drive race, but the local police chief Dave (Earl Rowe) lets him off the hook. Steve and the teenagers visit the site of the meteor crater and find the warm remains of the meteor.

After they visit the old man’s house and rescue a dog, the teenagers split for a spooky late night movie while Steve and Jane return to Dr. Hallen’s office. During the interim, the blob has entirely absorbed the old geezer, killed Hallen’s nurse and attacked the doctor. Neither acid thrown on the protoplasm nor Hallen’s shotgun have any effect on the blob. Steve catches a glimpse of the blob absorbing Hallen.

When Steve and Jane go to the police department to report the incident, Dave is frankly incredulous, while Sergeant Bert (John Benson) believes that it is a prank. Bert has an axe to grind with teenagers because his wife died when one struck her car.

Steve and Jane take them to Hallen’s office, but they can find neither hide nor hair of anybody, but Dave admits that the office has been vandalized. Against Sgt. Bert’s advice, Dave turns the teens over to their respective parents. No sooner have Steve and Jane fooled their folks into believing that they are snugly asleep in bed than they venture out again. They drive into town and spot the old man’s dog that got away from them in front of a supermarket. When they go to retrieve the mutt, Steve steps in front of the electric eye door of the grocery store and it opens. They find nobody inside, but they encounter the blob. Steve and Jane take refuge in a freezer and the blob doesn’t attack them.

Later, after they escape from the blob, Steve persuades his teenager buddies that challenged him in a street race to alert the authorities because he is supposed to be home in bed. Police Chief Dave and the fire department arrive at the supermarket. Steve tries to convince Dave that the blob is in the store. Sgt. Bert proves that nothing is wrong. About that time, the blob kills the theater projectionist and attacks the moviegoers. Suddenly, a horde of people exit the theater and Dave believes Steve. Steve and Jane wind up at a lunch counter that the blob attacks. The proprietor and our heroes hole up in the cellar and Steve discovers that a fire extinguisher with its freezing contents forces the blob to back off.

The authorities collect every fire extinguisher in town and manage to freeze the blob. The Pentagon sends down a team to transport the blob to the North Pole. As the remains of the blob drift down to the polar ice pack, the end credit appears with a ghostly giant question mark. Producer James B. Harris obtained stock military footage of a Globe master military transport plane depositing the parachute and its cargo.

“The Blob” proved to be a drive-in sensation and Steve McQueen’s surge to stardom gave the film added momentum. Unless you are a juvenile, this little horror movie isn’t scary at all, but Yeaworth and his scenarists create a sufficient amount of paranoia and sympathy for our heroes. They never show the blob actually assimilating its victims and leave this to your imagination, so “The Blob” isn’t without a modicum of subtlety. In his first starring role, McQueen is simply terrific and conjures up a surfeit of charisma despite the lengths that he must resort to so that the authorities will take him seriously. Corsaut is fine as his girlfriend. Although it isn’t a stellar sci-fi/horror film, “The Blob” is a lot of fun and takes itself seriously enough so that it isn’t as stupid as the Larry Hagman helmed sequel “Beware! The Blob!” (1972). The 1988 remake had a better production budget and took itself seriously, too, but neither film benefited from having a major star in the making.

FILM REVIEW OF "DOOM'' (2005)

As the latest entry in the video game inspired action movie genre, "Doom" (* out of ****) more than lives up to its nihilistic promise. Nothing about director Andrzej Bartkowski's tame science fiction thriller proves either original or exciting. Basically, the monsters amount to genetically mutated humanoids that not only appear ghoulish (what glimpses we catch of them) but also whose skeletal carcasses are covered with raspberry jam-like gore. In other words, the people that made "Doom" settled for lowest common denominator chills. Exotic alien predators don't prowl this mediocre melodrama that ranks as an all new career low for former WWE wrestling champ Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson. Okay, these monsters might frighten those under age twelve or women dragged to this drivel on a date, but blood & terror gorehounds will yawn at these murderous, run-of-the-mill fiends. For the record, these carnivores consist of either ancient Martians or zombies.

Nevertheless, "Doom" rightly deserved its R-rating for the amounts of blood, gore, and mayhem that saturate its occasionally atmospheric but wholly predictable plot. No, this dull, formulaic movie won't induce nightmares. Based on the popular first-person shooter video game where players assume the identity of an armed psychopath on a shooting spree, "Doom" recycles material from better movies, such as the "Resident Evil" epics, "Alien," (1979) and "Stargate"(1994). The best of the few surprises in "Doom" occurs as a twist near the end but it may alienate fans who revere the Rock.

Noisy, rambunctious, darkly shadowed, sporadically profane, but entirely idiotic, "Doom" follows a squad of macho U.S. Marines dispatched to the planet Mars. Their orders call for them to contain a security breach at a privately owned research institute and retrieve top secret company records. Some exposition is required to bring non-video gamers up to speed about this intergalactic gobbledygook set in the year 2046. According to freshman scenarist David Callaham and co-writer Wesley ("Cape Fear") Strick's cliché-riddled screenplay, archeologists uncovered a portal in the Nevada desert that enabled them to travel through space to the Red Planet with minimal ill effects. Sounds like "Stargate," right? Mysteriously, super humanoid creatures have begun to kill scientists in the underground labs. The institute issues a distress call that activates a Rapid Response Team led by Sarge (the Rock), a combat-seasoned Marine with Semper Fi tattooed across his back, and his crackerjack commandos.

Unlike the sexually diverse Marines in James Cameron's classic "Aliens," the "Doom" Marines are all red-blooded males with nicknames that encapsulate their one-dimensional characters. Among Sarge's troops is a God-fearing but profane grunt who craves crosses into his forearm with a razor-sharp knife when he takes the Lord's name in vain. Another Marine appears to have been modeled on the Jesse Ventura character from "Predator," because he lugs around an electric-powered Gatling gun that can turn anything into a sieve. John Grimm (Karl Urban who played Eomer in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) constitutes the most reluctant RRT team member. It seems that he once lived on Mars with his archaeologist parents and has nightmares about the experience. The trip back to Mars gives Grim a chance to re-establish contact with his estranged twin sister Samantha (Rosamund Pike of "Die Another Day") who guides Sarge and his men through the treacherous confines of the facility. Although Mars serves as the setting for "Doom," "Cradle 2 the Grave" director Bartkowski only provides us with fleeting glimpses of the planet's bleak, barren surface.

Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson gives his least charismatic performance as the hard-as-nails Sarge. He utters no clever one-liners and plays Sarge with a straight face. Meaning, the Sarge character is about as lively as a cadaver. Richard Brake of "Death Machine" takes top honors as one of Sarge's low-life jarheads who gets his comeuppance in the least likely place. Poor Rosamund Pike alternates between being a heady scientist and helpless damsel-in-distress. As it turns out, we learn that the researchers on Mars have discovered the 24th chromosome that endows humans with supernatural strength. About the worst that these monsters do is cough up large sausage-shaped worms that bore into the victims' neck, similar to the squirming critter in the "Hidden" films that entered its victims' ears and drove them psychotic. The much touted first-person shooter scene has been far over-hyped and lasts for about five minutes. This first-person shooter scene like many of the stalking scenes in the claustrophobic institute suffer from a shortage of suspense and tension. Bartkowski keeps the lights turned low on his bargain basement monstrosities and his efforts to make them intimidating rarely yield results. Altogether, "Doom" is filled with so much gloom that the plot generates few thrills and chills and emerges as just another standard-issue, testosterone-laced, mutant monster hunt.

FILM REVIEW OF ''I AM LEGEND''

Hollywood has never had much luck adapting science fiction author Richard Matheson's cult 1954 novel "I Am Legend" successfully to the screen. Iconic horror movie star Vincent Price headlined the first version; the Italian-lensed "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) ranked as an austere, but depressing widescreen, black & white epic with vampire/zombies as his antagonists. Call them zompires! Price impersonated a valiant scientist, Robert Morgan, with an acquired immunity to a deadly virus that had devastated mankind. Morgan struggled desperately not only to survive acute loneliness but also to cure the survivors. Full-frame copies of this opus are available everywhere in DVD bargain box sets. Not-surprisingly, Price perished in the end.

Charlton Heston retooled the role in the 1971 remake, "The Omega Man," released by Warner Brothers. Heston turned immunologist Robert Neville into a brawny, bare-chested, romantic, action stud hero who cavorted in a blue flight suit with a dress uniform cap complete with scrambled eggs on the visor. Watch "The Omega Man" and see if Neville doesn't resemble a Marvel Comics character. Naturally, Heston brought the messianic allure that he had gained from "The 10 Commandments" and "Ben-Hur" to the role. Along the way, Heston's Neville indulged in one of the first interracial big-screen romances with African-American actress Rosalind Cash. An army of heavily robed, non-vampiric mutants led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe) triumphed over him, and he died tragically as a misunderstood Christ figure.

Will Smith fares even worse in the third and least well-done version, "I Am Legend" (* out of ****) which finally uses the original title of Matheson's novel. Essentially, Smith imitates the Heston hero as a weapons reliant action hero/virologist. They differ in how they contend with loneliness. Heston played chess with a bust of Julius Caesar and fed images of himself via a surveillance camera onto a big-screen television. Smith's Neville dresses up mannequins at a local video rental store and converses with them when he selects a movie. Unlike both Price and Heston, Smith doesn't enjoy a post-apocalyptic romance. Instead of female companionship, Smith has to settle for a German shepherd; canine lovers are warned ahead of time to expect the worst. Even when a woman, Anna (Alice Braga of "City of God"), does show up near the end, our hero doesn't take the time to sweep her off her feet.

Generally, the problem with all three movies is that the star has to bear the movie on his shoulders for the brunt of the action. Remember that hideous Tom Hanks' movie "Castaway?" Half of "I Am Legend" looks like "Castaway" with Will Smith performing monologues devoid of humor. Sadly, despite a strong performance, Smith has to deal with adversaries that neither Price nor Heston contended with—namely, colorless, chrome-domed, computer-generated cannibals. "I Am Legend" forfeits any semblance of dramatic impact, much as "I, Robot" did, with its cartoon-like CGI villains. Smith wages an eternal war against video game antagonists who cannot speak, making them dim-witted, lowest-common-denominator dolts.

"I Am Legend" opens on an ironic note. Scientists have discovered a cure for cancer. Things go incredibly amiss, however, and Dr. Krippen (an unbilled Emma Thompson of "Sense and Sensibility") winds up unleashing a man-made virus in the year 2009 that transforms humanity into homicidal mutants that plunder and destroy everything in sight. Incidentally, these mutants don't appear until midway in the movie after scenarists Mark Protosevich of "Poseidon" and Akiva Goldman of "Batman & Robin" have established Smith's character and his predicament. The filmmakers rely on occasional flashbacks to fracture that storyline and show how Smith became the last man on Earth. We learn that his wife (Salli Richardson of TV's "Eureka") and daughter (Smith's real-life daughter Willow) died in a helicopter collision around the same time that the military quarantined Manhattan Island and sealed off access to it. The military destroy the two landmark Big Apple bridges, but Neville (Will Smith) vows to remain at ground zero and devise a cure.

Three years later, in 2012, Neville and his dog venture outside by day to search for non-infected survivors as well as to forage for food and lock themselves up at night. In an early scene, Neville hunts for fresh meat by pursuing escaped zoo animals through the cluttered, weed-choked canyons of Manhattan in a red Ford Mustang with a high powered rifle. He watches old television shows that he has recorded before the apocalypse while he eats. The mutants themselves are not very interesting. In "Last Man on Earth," the mutants were vampire/zombies that besieged the hero's house at night. In "The Omega Man," the villains were the equivalent of albino Klansmen that terrorized the streets after dark and clashed constantly with Neville.

Like the previous versions, "I Am Legend" delivers a dour, downbeat ending that will bum you out beyond belief. The special effects are shoddy and superficial; the villains emerge as a mob of one-dimensional, head-banging morons, and the hero degenerates into an ignoble, unsympathetic, atheistic lout. There is nothing exciting or suspenseful about our hero's late-night encounter with the mutants on the docks where he uses his SUV as a weapon to smash them. Even more implausible is the way that he gets out of this cliffhanger confrontation. "Constantine" director Francis Lawrence provides several startling, gotcha-by-the-gullet, scare scenes that will frighten the squeamish, but seasoned gorehounds won't find anything different or dazzling about this drivel.

Will Smith's track record with science fiction is faltering badly these days. "I Am Legend" is nowhere near as memorable or entertaining as either "Independence Day" or his "Men in Black" movies. Instead, "I Am Legend" is legendarily lame!