Black Rock (2012)

Who's In It: Katie Aselton (The League, Our Idiot Brother), Lake Bell (Surface, In a World...), and Kate Bosworth (Superman Returns, Homefront).

What It's About: Three friends try to overcome personal baggage while camping on an island and running from sociopathic former soldiers.

How It Is: After Shark Night I was questioning some of the movies on my watchlist, but once I started watching Black Rock I quickly figured out why I wanted to see it. I love lonely islands, both in real life and as settings for movies. Come to think of it, that and the sea creatures were probably my initial attraction to Shark Night. Then there's the female-led cast in a survival movie directed by a woman and written by her husband.

The director is Katie Aselton, who also heads the cast. She shot the movie in and around her hometown in Maine and there's some really nice stuff in it. The scenery is amazing, the soundtrack by The Kills is great, and it's got a couple of actors I really like. I've been a fan of Lake Bell since the too-short-lived series Surface and I'm one of the three people who really liked Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. I wasn't very familiar with Aselton, but she does a great job playing a very flawed, but relatable character. Once things go wrong on the island, the action often feels brutally real, though going after that kind of authenticity doesn't always work in the movie's favor.

I don't know how much of the dialogue was scripted and how much was improvised, but it certainly feels improvised in a lot of places. Sometimes that works, but there are some important, dramatic moments that could have used another take or two. Scenes that should feel powerfully emotional sometimes come off awkward. Not always, but more often than should be and in some important parts of the plot. Because of that, some crucial motivations feel unnatural, which calls the whole story into question.

But look, it could've been so much worse. Maybe I'm just glad it wasn't another Shark Night, but for what's essentially a homemade movie, Black Rock has a lot more going for it than I expected. That's barely praise, I know, but it hit enough of my favorite buttons that I enjoyed it.

Rating: Three out of five isolated islands.

Shark Night (2011)

Who's In It: Sara Paxton (Superhero Movie), Dustin Milligan (The Butterfly Effect 2), Katherine McPhee (American Idol), and Donal Logue (Blade, Gotham).

What It's About: A group of college students go to a rural area on a saltwater lake and are attacked by catfish. Just kidding. It's sharks.

How It Is: Every cabin-in-the-woods cliché ever is packed into this thing, including creepy rednecks. There's a slight attempt at characterization by giving Sara Paxton's character a backstory that ties into what's going on with the sharks, but it's stupid, barely sketched out, and isn't the kind of thing that happens to real people. The movie does one clever thing by gender switching the virginal character into a boy (Milligan), but that and Paxton's bikini are really the only things Shark Night has going for it.



No wait, that's a lie. I don't know if this was in the theatrical release, but the DVD has a post-credits rap song performed by the cast and shot while they made the movie. And it is awesome. Truly and unironically. I mean, it's awful, but it's hilariously, entertainingly awful and I wish the movie was as good. It's funnier if you've seen the movie, but because it made sitting through that garbage worthwhile, here it is:



Rating: Two out of five mother-sharking hammerheads.

Gothic Gotham [Guest Post]

As promised, occasional guest-Adventureblogger GW Thomas is back. He's actually sent in a couple of posts that I wanted to have up before now, but needed to figure out how to fit in with Countdown to Halloween. Not tone-wise, but just schedule-wise. Having to post a couple of times a day for the last couple of days helped me figure that out though, so this morning we have GW on the importance and influence of gothic literature (very timely for the season!). Then this evening I'll talk about another horror movie. Enjoy! And thanks to GW for the great piece! -- Michael

In 1764, a bored English peer, no longer active in politics, builder of a fairy tale castle in the middle of Twickenham, came up with a strange idea for a book. He wanted to tell a modern story but with elements of days gone-by. You know the kind of thing: ghosts, violent sword-fights, secret doors, family curses, desperate adventures. The only problem was he lived in the Age of Reason. Nobody wrote that kind of silliness anymore. Man had Intellect. He had Science. Books were for instruction, logic and improvement. Why would anyone want to read such an anomaly, such an anachronism?

But he wrote it anyway. And published it under a pseudonym. It was a bestseller. For the second edition, he revealed his authorship and some felt it was a cheat. For he had presented it as an old manuscript, not a new story. Others didn't care and wrote more stories just like it. The book was called The Castle of Otranto (published in 1765). It was the first Gothic novel and it's importance (or perhaps more importantly the Gothic's importance) is only now being truly revealed. Horace Walpole's tale of lost heirs, gigantic armour, family curses, fleeing through tunnels, improbable plot twists and operatic dialogue seems quaint by today's standards, but its legacy drives all the most popular media of today.

The Gothic is the fountainhead from which all genre fiction springs. Its inspiration of the Horror genre is pretty easy to see. It's not that far from Otranto to Dracula. From the dreams of a young woman, Mary Shelley, it became Science Fiction. From there it sprang, through the genius of Gothic master, Edgar Allan Poe, into the Mystery and Detective genre. The mainstream toyed with the Gothic for a while, taking in and then kicking it out again, but not before such writers as the Bronte Sisters, Sir Walter Scott and Henry James borrowed from it for "serious" novels. From these it became the less serious Gothic Romance. Blending with mythology and fairy tales, it became Sword-and-Sorcery and Modern Fantasy. The daring-do of the Gothic inspired flamboyant heroes as far apart as the Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Blood and Allan Quatermain. It was the Pimpernel that would grandfather Jimmy Dale, the Gray Seal, (by Frank L. Packard) the first of the Masked Avengers, siring the Pulp heroes from the Shadow to Phantom Detective. And it was only a very short bus ride from there to the Comics.

Let's skip ahead 174 year after Otranto to 1939. A young artist named Bob Kane teams up with writer Bill Finger to produce a new, stranger kind of detective to stand out from the crowd of Superman wannabes. Masked (of course) but winged as well, he was Batman (first appearance Detective Comics #27, May 1939). Not since Superman started leaping tall buildings in a single bound had a character caught the public's fancy so strongly. But unlike the Man of Steel, Batman is dark, creepy and utterly Gothic. Where Superman is an alien from another planet, Batman is just a man tortured by loss, the Heathcliff of superheroes. Where Superman gained powers given him by his birthright, Batman has to rely on his own inventiveness to create new gadgets. Superman faces forces from outer space, while Batman deals with insane criminals of a more earthly nature.

I was struck by all this recently while watching the pilot of the new Gotham series. Even though the detectives mentioned things like DNA and used computers, the feel of Gotham is so close to Bill Finger and Bob Kane's original dark vision. The fun of the show for some is the old "Year One" effect. In other words, let's see where all these heroes and villains came from. And in this way I did enjoy it too. But it was actually the Gothic effect that really made me watch. The driving force of Gothic is the past trying to destroy the future. The death of Bruce Wayne's parents begins a course of action that will lead to everything that will happen to Batman. Like a good Noir novel (a very Gothic enterprise, indeed), the tragedy that makes Bruce Wayne the Batman pulls in two directions. It makes him a superhero, more than an ordinary man, but it also consumes him, robbing him of any kind of ordinary happiness. It is this conflict that makes Batman so enduring. It is this frisson that keeps us watching even when the plot lines get convoluted and (let's be honest) so improbable that we could not possibly buy it if presented any other way. The Castle of Otranto has this same goofy logic that has earned it the hatred of the Reasoners, those scientific Rationalist who poo-pooed the Gothic back in the 1700s (Jane Austen's Northhanger Abbey hinges on this contempt and the idea that reading Gothics ruined young women's minds.) It was the same hatred that Fredric Wertham presents in Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and for the Senate Committee on Juvenile Deliquency (and I would extend that even to the vitriol heaped upon Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. I have almost forgiven Tom Hanks for being in Mazes and Monsters (1982). Almost.)

I have often thought humanity divides pretty easily here. Let's call it the Otranto Line. For some the world of facts, ledgers, evening news, sports, DIY and all things seeable, proveable. On the other side: Walpole's camp, are the dreamers, the LARPers, the fanboys, those who stood in line for hours to see The Lord of the Rings first, who see that this season we have Arrow plus three other DC shows and cry tears of joy. These are my people. They are the Children of the Gothic. Those who dwell upon the unseeable, the unproved. Who felt a little chill the first time Michael Keaton said "I'm Batman!" Long live the Gothic!

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

John Dies at the End (2012)

Who's In It: Chase Williamson (Sparks), Rob Mayes (The Client List), Paul Giamatti (Planet of the Apes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), Clancy Brown (Highlander, Carnivàle), Glynn Turman (Super 8), and Doug Jones (Hellboy).

What It's About: A young man named Dave (Williamson) tells a reporter (Giamatti) how he and his pal John (Mayes) developed supernatural powers and saved the world from extra-dimensional invaders.

How It Is: Freaky. Really weird. Not that that's a bad thing.

It's a kitchen sink movie with just tons of stuff thrown in. It reminds me a little of Buckaroo Banzai like that. There's time travel, alien invasion, a sentient dog, a meat demon, a sentient drug, teen romance, a one-handed girl, a flying moustache, a Cthulhu-like being with a cult of naked followers, a vengeful detective, a mysterious dude who keeps showing up in back seats of cars, the Tony Stark of mentalists, and lots of other crazy stuff more spoilery than I want to mention. Surprisingly, it all holds together in a convincing story. It has cult movie written all over it, and if you're a fan of Buckaroo Banzai or Big Trouble in Little China, you should check it out.

It's not perfect though and one of its biggest flaws is that all of the insanity revolves around a couple of pretty bland characters. Dave and John (not telling whether the title is actually a spoiler or not) are supposed to be just everyday slackers, but they succeed at that too well. They're not especially charismatic or interesting on their own and neither are their friends for that matter. There's a lot to like about John Dies at the End, but it needs some interesting heroes to make it great.

Rating: Three out of five awesome dogs.

Bigfoot (2012)

Who's In It: Danny Bonaduce (The Partridge Family), Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch), Bruce Davison (X-Men, the Harry and the Hendersons TV show), Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks), Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati, Head of the Class), and ever-so-briefly Alice Cooper (Wayne's World, Scream, Dark Shadows).

What It's About: The rivalry between former members of a New Wave band comes to a head when one of them (Bonaduce) wants to tear down forest land to throw an '80s music festival and the other (Williams) tries to stop him. Then Bigfoot shows up.

How It Is: As I told a friend on Facebook, Bigfoot really unmixes my mixed feelings about The Asylum, and not in a good way. There's everything to love about the idea of Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams hunting Bigfoot, but The Asylum managed to screw it up.

It's not just about crap effects, though there's also plenty of that. Bigfoot is a horrid, cheap looking CGI creature with maybe five or six different moves that get repeated over and over again throughout the movie. I've come to expect that of Asylum movies and usually cut them a lot of slack, but maybe that's a mistake. More on that in a minute.

What makes Bigfoot  an especially miserable experience is the story and the characters. Bonaduce plays Harley Anderson, a stereotypically crass right-winger who doesn't care about the environment, while Williams' Simon Quint is a just-as-cliché tree-hugging liberal. There's no depth or subtlety to either character and though the movie seems to have an environmental theme, it has absolutely nothing to say about it. Bigfoot is supposed to represent the dangers of messing with nature, but he slaughters people so indiscriminately that it's impossible to root for him. And when Simon tries to, it just makes him look as clueless and pathetic as Harley has been saying he is. Since Harley is just as despicable, there's really no one to pull for in the film.



Sherilyn Fenn is supposed to be the audience's connection to the movie as the town's new sheriff who's just taken over the job from her dad. But she and her deputy (Davison) spend the entire movie running around helplessly and making a lot of plans that don't go anywhere. The movie could lose both of them and not be affected except for its running time.

Bigfoot isn't all bad though. The actors seem to be enjoying themselves, especially Bonaduce and Howard Hesseman (who plays the town's delightfully crooked mayor). Alice Cooper shows up for a few minutes at the music festival and is a lot of fun to watch. And my favorite character in the whole movie was a nameless guy who dressed as Bigfoot to attend the concert. Well, him and the blonde woman with novelty glasses who kept making devil signs to Alice Cooper during the show. I also dig the guts it took to go ahead and make Bigfoot a giant, rampaging monster instead of a shadowy, skulking figure.



As much as I love those elements though, they frustrate me. They're meant to prove that the film isn't taking itself seriously, with the implication being that the audience shouldn't either. That's pretty much The Asylum's trademark, right? They're known for bad movies, so it's pretty dumb to be critical of them when their movies meet that expectation.

But I don't know if lowering the bar all the way to the ground should be an excuse. As much as I like certain moments in Bigfoot, watching it wasn't a joyful experience. I genuinely like some pretty bad movies, but this isn't one of them. The bad movies I enjoy are usually earnest attempts that just fail for whatever reason: not enough money, not enough talent, whatever. Most of Bigfoot just feels lazy and uncaring and no amount of winking at the camera can make that better.

Rating: Two out of five super-sized sasquatch

Mummy Monday | The Mummy's Hand (1940)

Who's In It: Dick Foran (Black Legion), Peggy Moran (King of the Cowboys), Wallace Ford (Freaks), Cecil Kellaway (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), George Zucco (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, House of Frankenstein), and Tom Tyler (Stagecoach, The Adventures of Captain Marvel).

What It's About: A down-on-his-luck archeologist (Foran) and his partner (Ford) discover a map to an important tomb and convince a fellow American (Kellaway) and his daughter (Moran) to finance an expedition. Unfortunately, the tomb is guarded by an evil priest (Zucco) and a living mummy (Tyler).

How It Is: Not so much a remake of the 1932 Mummy as it is a reboot of the concept. It uses the same backstory for the mummy's creation. In fact, it reuses the same footage from the flashback scenes of The Mummy, replacing Boris Karloff with Tom Tyler in the parts where we get a good look at his face. But as you can tell from the plot description above, that's where the similarities end.

The Mummy's Hand was 15 years before Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, but there's a strange, Abbott and Costello schtick going on between Foran and Ford's characters. Foran's the straight man, while his partner Ford is a short, chubby, cowardly goof named Babe, which even sounds like the name of a Lou Costello character. Hand isn't a comedy, but it has a lighter heart than the Karloff film. Kellaway's character, for instance, isn't just a guy with money; he's a successful stage magician who loves showing off tricks and baffling his audience. Especially Babe.

The plot is lighter too. Moran's character isn't the reincarnated soul of the mummy's lost love and the mummy doesn't actually have a lot to do. He doesn't even speak, thanks to an addition to the backstory where his tongue was cut out prior to his mummification. The real villain of the piece is Zucco's priest, who's willing to use the mummy as a murder weapon to protect the tomb's secrets. Late in the movie, Zucco falls in love with Moran and tries to immortalize her and himself as the mummy keeps the good guys at bay. Instead of the gothic romance of Karloff's Mummy, The Mummy's Hand is mostly an adventure story.

That makes it more fun in a lot of ways, but also frustrating. I like Tyler's silent, shambling mummy. He's exactly what people think of when they imagine mummy movies. And maybe this is sacrilegious, but I like him better than Karloff's version. What's frustrating is that since he's just a weapon used by Zucco, he's really not important to the story and only even appears after a half-hour, which is significant in an hour-long film.

Another frustrating element is Moran's character. Especially after the way that Zita Johann's character so successfully looked after herself in the Karloff movie, it's hard to see Hand's only female stand around useless except when it's time to be kidnapped and rescued.

Rating: Three out of five mute, meandering monsters.

FallCon report

FallCon was a huge success on Saturday. It was an especially cold day (the weather folk were evening threatening snow), but that didn't keep people away. Crowds were great all day and especially huge around lunch time. And they were spending money, too. Every creator I talked to had great sales days.

Kill All Monsters did really well and my son David sold out of a couple of issues of his Hulkasaurus mini-comic. He also made huge dents in his stock of the other two. I'm really proud of that boy. He set his own prices and hawked his own stuff all day. His work is great, too. I know I'm totally biased, but his drawings are super imaginative and often laugh out loud funny. He's becoming a real pro at this.

My wife Diane had kids lined up all day long for face-painting and for the second year in a row FallCon was her most successful show of the year. After doing FallCon solo for so many years, it's been great sharing a table with David for the last two or three and with Diane a little more recently than that. As she says, "The family that cons together, bonds together." Gonna need that on a T-shirt.

We were worn out after the show, so I didn't get a post ready for yesterday, but I'll make that up tomorrow with two horror movies. And I'll have one up tonight, too. It is Mummy Monday after all.

[Thanks to Grant Gould for taking the photo above.]

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

Who's In It: Liev Schreiber (Scream, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Elias Koteas (Some Kind of Wonderful, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Romola Garai (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights), and Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense).

What It's About: As an international team of scientists wrap up their stay on Mars, they discover an indigenous bacteria that turns humans into space zombies.

How It Is: Almost entirely rubbish, but I do have to say that it's a good-looking movie. It was shot in the deserts of Jordan, so the landscape is stunning, and the designs of the shelters and vehicles are cool. That's all the good I have to say about it though.

The Hollywood pitch is Alien with zombies set on Mars and that is exactly what the movie has to offer. I mean, it's nowhere near as good as Alien, but it's obviously trying to evoke that feel. Replace one of the greatest monster designs of all time with the most generic, overused monster of all time and voila, you've got The Last Days on Mars. All that's left to do is make a list of every sad horror trope ever and tick them off one by one. The movie writes itself. Or at least it feels like it did.

Rating: 2 out of 5 space rovers.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

Who's In It: Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Moonrise Kingdom), Tom Hiddleston (Thor, The Avengers), Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Stoker), Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation), and John Hurt (Alien, Hellboy).

What It's About: A vampire couple struggles to find meaning in their immortal lives.

How It Is: Like Under the Skin, Only Lovers Left Alive starts with a horror trope, but isn’t interested in the horrific elements of it. Under the Skin was the story of a killer alien stalking human prey, but told from the alien’s point of view as a dark, fish-out-of-water experience. Only Lovers Left Alive is about vampires, but doesn’t care about the usual themes of seduction and death. Instead it focuses on immortality and how that would affect a person.

It also deals with hunger, but not in the usual way. The vampires obviously need blood to survive, but their real hunger is for meaning in lives that never end. When you have that much time, how do you fill it with purpose? It’s a cool way to tackle a fundamental question. It’s also the second time I’ve seen a writer/director use fantasy to discuss the meaning of life in the last few months, but Lovers’ Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) is way more successful at it than Luc Besson was in Lucy. Besson suggests that the meaning of life is to learn and to pass on knowledge, but that’s boring and unfulfilling. Exactly like his movie.

Jarmusch’s vampires each have different answers to the problem, but they’re all more compelling than Besson’s. Adam (Hiddleston) has succumbed to ennui and lost whatever’s driven him in the past. He’s a musician and he appreciates great art, but he’s also depressed about the state of humanity and finds no joy in anything. His one tether to life is his wife Eve (Swinton), who lives on the other side of the world, but travels to Detroit to visit Adam when she learns he needs help.

Their separation isn’t due to a rift in their relationship. It’s obvious that they love each other very much and always have. Instead, not living together seems to be the natural product of their healthy, but immortal relationship. It’s good for married people to have individual interests that they don’t necessarily share with their partners. And when they literally have all the time in the world, it’s easy to see that extend to where they live. Detroit very much reflects Adam’s state of mind, while Eve embraces the life and culture she finds in Tangiers. Adam has withdrawn from vampire society and relies on an unwitting human (Yelchin) to get him stuff he needs, while Eve has the support of fellow vampire Christopher Marlowe (yes, that Christopher Marlowe; played by John Hurt). Another coping method is represented by Eve’s sister Ava (Wasikowska) who lives hedonistically and carelessly among humans.

Jarmusch presents one of these points of view as the healthiest, but he never comes right out and says it. He simply introduces these characters and lets us spend a couple of hours with them until we figure it out on our own. And that’s both the biggest strength and biggest problem with the movie. Adam and Eve’s worlds are aesthetically gorgeous, filled with things that give them pleasure, and it’s pleasant to spend time with them in those environments. But that’s really all that the movie is about. Things happen to the characters, but there’s very little actual story. Enjoyment of it depends entirely on how much you like just sort of hanging out with these characters. For me, I enjoyed visiting with them for a couple of hours and listening and thinking about what they had to say, but when our time came to an end, I wasn’t exactly wrangling for an invitation to come back.

Rating: Three out of five nonchalant nosferatu.

The Mummy (1932)

Who's In It: Boris Karloff (Frankenstein, The Black Cat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Zita Johann (Tiger Shark, The Sin of Nora Moran), David Manners (Dracula, The Black Cat), Edward Van Sloan (Frankenstein, Dracula), and Arthur Byron (The Prisoner of Shark Island).

What It's About: An ancient, undead being (Karloff) preys on a young woman (Johann) as the men in her life (Manners, Van Sloan, and Byron) try to protect her.

How It Is: The Mummy is essentially a remake of Dracula, from the plot description above to Edward Van Sloan and David Manner's basically playing Van Helsing and Harker all over again. Also, The Mummy's director Karl Freund was officially the cinematographer of Dracula, but making that film was such a chaotic mess that Tod Browning unofficially let (made?) Freund direct most of it. Add in an Egyptian protective charm that substitutes nicely for Dracula's crucifixes and the similarities are too many to ignore.

But if it's a remake, it's better than the movie it's imitating. The plots of both hinge on their leading ladies and Zita Johann's Helen is way more compelling than Helen Chandler's Mina. That's partly because Johann is a better actress (Chandler's melodramatic performance nearly ruins Dracula for me), but her character also has stronger ties to the villain and takes a more active role in fighting him. In fact, she ultimately saves herself from Karloff's Imhotep and the men just rush in afterwards to help clean up.

The pacing of The Mummy is brisker than Dracula, so it's a more exciting film. It also has more genuine chills. Imhotep is much creepier than Dracula, though he sacrifices Dracula's charisma to get there. That's one place where Dracula beats The Mummy. Imhotep is scarier, but I like Dracula more. I also prefer the gothic aesthetic of Dracula to The Mummy's Egyptian one, but that's a minor advantage. From a storytelling standpoint, I'll take The Mummy every time.

Rating: 4 out of 5 resurrected princesses.

Under the Skin (2014)

Who's In It: Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers, The Prestige)

What It's About: An alien disguises itself as a woman in order to travel Scotland and lure men to their dooms. Until...

How It Is: Not as much a horror film as the premise suggests, but that's okay. I may stretch the definition of the genre this month. Johansson plays a murderous alien, but the film isn't about exploring the horror of that from her victims' point of view. It's interested in her story and that's cool, even though I wasn't as wrapped up in it as I wanted to be.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) believes that if a shot is worth taking, it's worth spending at least thirty seconds looking at. And sometimes that's true. Under the Skin is largely a gorgeous film and makes great use of its Scot landscapes and cities. But the languid editing reaaaally makes the movie drag. To its credit, my mind never wandered away from the movie and some of my time was well spent pondering Johansson's character and her motivations. But some of my time was also spent waiting impatiently for the next shot. That means that I was always interested in what was coming next, so the film is riveting in that way, but it can also be frustrating.

Something Glazer did that was cool though was shoot some of the film Borat-style with hidden cameras recording Johansson as she seduces and has conversations with non-actors who don't know they're being filmed. I knew that going in, but I didn't know how much was shot that way or which scenes. That meant that for a while every shot had the illusion of authenticity, so that when some really horrible things started to happen they were that much more impactful as I tried to figure out what was staged and what was just Glazer letting the camera record life. As the film went on though, I got better at figuring out what was what and that impact wasn't as powerful.

I don't want to reveal too much about the development of Johansson's character, but she does have an arc and it's at least an interesting one, if not especially powerful for me. She's a blank slate, a cipher that you can either read a lot into or not much at all. Britt Hayes wrote an awesome piece for Screen Crush that's an example of the depth to be mined from what's going on with Johansson's character. I watched it from a different perspective and didn't get as much out of it. It's a good film and possibly a great one, but where it falls on that scale depends on how much you're willing to give back to it. Maybe I was just feeling lazy, but while I was intellectually curious about how the alien was changing and behaving, I was never emotionally invested in it.

Rating: Two out of five man-eating extraterrestrials.