Scanners

A harrowing battle scene. Suck it, Braveheart.

The basic premise of Scanners involves people with super brain powers engaging in psychic dueling, which is not particularly cinematic.  The best the filmmakers could do is show two people squinting really constipatedly until someone’s head explodes.  Try this: Go to a bathroom where someone has just finished a particularly nasty bit of business.  Look at yourself in the mirror and try to divide 1,486 by 29 in your head.  See that series of expressions on your face?  That’s almost every scene in the movie.

The exact psychic powers that all these mutants, called Scanners, have are poorly defined.  Sometimes they can barely distract a ferret and the next minute they can make a phone booth explode.  That’s a pretty impressive power given how the only thing flammable in there is the yellow pages.  Then again, this was the 80’s, so everything is probably coated in hairspray.  The abilities of the Scanners waxes and wanes with the needs of the plot.  It’s basically X-men but with no unique abilities or budget.  There might have been more to the story than that, but I kind of fell asleep for some of it.  I dreamt of unicorns!

The climax is a duel between the bad and good Scanners that is mostly a lot of sweating and grunting, leading to my wife coming in sleepily and asking me to turn down the gay porn again.  Eventually, body parts start exploding and catching fire until somebody wins by doing something that is never previously established as possible.  Look, sci-fi has enough problems not being terrible.  At least establish some rules so I understand what’s at stake, or at least what’s happening, during the climatic fight.  Otherwise I’m just watching sweaty dudes making eyes at one another and that makes me uncomfortable.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: Only in my dreams.

Dark Star

Later on, the bean-bag alien uses a lava lamp to solve a puzzle hidden in a blacklight poster.

I made a couple of mistakes when watching Dark Star. My first mistake was deciding to watch a 1974 sci-fi movie about some guys with shaggy hair sitting in a spaceship for 20 years with no outside contact. The second came from the relentless optimism that darkens every day I live. There were two options in the DVD menu. One made the movie last a little over an hour, and one for 80 minutes. I thought to myself, “Surely, you sexy devil, you can handle a mere 80 minutes of film.” No. I couldn’t. I had to fast forward through an extra fifteen minutes. So I wasted an extra two minutes, or one Hot Pocket, of my life.

The story related above is significantly more interesting than the movie itself. There’s dudes in space, nothing happens until the last five minutes, then the movie ends. The Must-See Movie book insists that this is a comedy, which is funnier than anything in the movie itself. It’s a bleak, depressing movie. Not because of the loneliness of space or anything like that, but because someone in the 70’s thought this movie was a good idea. I can’t believe the 70’s happened. I just can’t. The decade is like genies, a good Jennifer Lopez movie, or landing on the moon. It’s never happened.

In this long, drawn out eighty minutes of crap, the special effects deserve special mention. This is the least convincing recreation of space since I suffocated myself with a plastic bag and passed out. An excruciatingly long sequence in the middle of the movie involves an alien that looks like a bean bag with rubber feet. I’m not saying that to give you a rough approximation of what the alien’s appearance. It literally looks like someone strapped a bean bag to a pair of rubber feet. I can see the seams on the bean bag. If the Must-see Movie book is right and this movie influenced a generation of sci-fi film-makers, I no longer have to guess why most sci-fi movies suck so hard. Mystery solved, Scooby!

Rating:  Musty

Did I fast-forward: Yes