The Tomorrow War (2021) – Chris Pratt vs. Xenomorphs! Thirty years in the future, there’s an alien invasion, and Earth has almost fallen to the ferocious invasive species, basically the Alien franchise’s Xenomorphs with added all-natural projectile weapons. Running out of cannon fodder in the future, the last line of defense there starts drafting people from the present to pull triggers.
It’s a fun movie, but terminally stupid. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to prepare for the aliens before they show up between now and the future, just throw more bodies into the losing battle thirty years from now. There’s a brief discussion of paradoxes (they only draft people from the present who would be dead in thirty years anyway, and they don’t send anyone over 30 back to the present for recruiting), but absolutely no one mentions how killing millions of people from now would change the world by the time the aliens arrive; Pratt meets (and serves under) his own daughter in the future, but nobody brings up, “Hey, this is going to change our relationship if Dad makes it back to his own time.” And the last twenty minutes is a different movie entirely.
Ah, well. Who woulda thunk, a decade ago, that Chris Pratt would be best known as an action hero by now?
The Dark Power (1985) – Lash La Rue was a minor western star through the late ’40s and early ’50s; his claim to fame was his expert use of the bullwhip. This indie movie was made in 1985, showcasing La Lue and his whip as their “star power” when he was 68. For really stupid reasons, four Toltec sorcerers were buried on a property in North Carolina, and when the last Native American guardian of the site dies in the opening scene, everything’s ripe for the Toltecs to come back. By the time they do, the guardian’s former house in exurbia (gotta love those shots of a comfortable slip-level in full daylight accompanied by spooooky music) is full of coeds and the frat boys pursuing them.
It’s so dumb that it’s charming. Especially wonderful is the way in which the reanimated “Toltecs” look not like Toltecs, but like vaguely Indian-themed heavy metal rockers. And by that point in the running time, the powers that be decided to play things for laughs. (Gotta keep it from being too scary, you know.)
Vampire Journals (1997) – This sort of a sideways-adjunct to the Subspecies franchise from the same writer-director, with a namecheck to Radu of Transylvania and some commonalities of vampire lore to tie them together (plus the way in which the vampires travel “by shadow”). Young hunky Zachary is a reluctant vampire determined to exterminate his whole bloodline; Ash is the next on his list, a vampire of the frilly-shirt “ennui of immortality” school; Sofia is a young and brilliant pianist with whom Ash is obsessed, wanting to pull her into the immortal night life so she can play for him forever.
By 1997, the financial decline of Full Moon Entertainment was such that shooting was confined mostly to a few interior locations in Bucharest. Fortunately, Bucharest is apparently chock-full of buildings with the kind of elegant decay that you want for a frilly-shirt vampire movie. And as the movie revolves so much around music, it’s gratifying to be able to relate that Richard Kosinski’s score doesn’t let the rest of the movie down. That said, the plot is pretty watered down, and the feature ends inconclusively, as if a “Part 2” were intended but never made. (And it really could have done without Zachary’s voiceover, explaining things we could clearly see how ourselves.)
Abandoned movies:
Prisoners of the Sun (2013) – So much expository prologue…