Trancers 5 (1994) – After as unimpressive as Trancers 4 was, this one is even duller. Instead of following up on the pseudo-cliffhanger that ended the last installment, we leap forward WEEKS, with Jack Deth still stuck in this pseudo-medieval parallel universe that looks a lot like Romania. The bad guy who was killed at the end of the last one is promptly resurrected, there’s a subplot about a psychic artist that contributes nothing, and we basically end with no one caring anymore, including the audience.
This was the last twitch of the Trancers franchise until 2002, in which Tim Thomerson only appears in stock footage, while the character of Jack Deth jumps to another ancestor’s body (yeah, remember that premise, clear from the original Trancers?), specifically the daughter that he and Helen Hunt had…
As a whole, Trancers may have the distinction of the most unlikable sequels squeezed from a single good movie ever. Eat your heart out, Highlander!
Nightbeast (1982) – Don Dohler was a backyard filmmaker before video cameras made it easy. His first feature, The Alien Factor (1978, though mostly shot in 1972), was about some bloodthirsty killer aliens crash-landing in rural America. Then came Fiend (1980), a zombie movie (not a “zombies” movie — there’s only a single walking corpse), and then he returned to his roots to make this movie, about… a bloodthirsty alien crash-landing in rural America. (In case you’re wondering, his next flick was Galaxy Invader (1985), about a bloodthirsty alien crash-landing in rural America. Range!)
In this current outing, there’s an alien, see, and it… well, it shoots people, and it eats people. It’s apparently intelligent enough to wear clothing, but none of its actions evince any motivation behind simply killing people. (At also attacks at least as much during daylight as at night, rendering the title inaccurate.) Marshalled against him is a small-town sheriff with a glorious head of permed hair, and his cute blonde deputy with whom he shares the most awkward nude scene in history.
There may be many reasons to watch Nightbeast — in order to document the rise of DIY genre filmmaking, for instance — but the expectation of entertainment should not be one of those reasons.
Intersect (2020) – Despite the preponderance of negative reviews for this movie on IMDb, it is not a bad movie as such. It is an unsuccessful movie, which is a different thing.
Told by chunks in reverse chronological order, it puts together the narrative around the first time machine, but as part of a university project (the fact that it’s Miskatonic U. may have you expecting camp, but there’s precious little of that). The narrative is little hard to follow, as it’s not always immediately clear that we’re suddenly viewing incidents prior to what we were just watching, and the story pretty much falls apart when, at the eleventh hour (or at least the three-quarters mark) we suddenly are introduced to the idea of extradimensional creatures of dubious motivation… But again, this isn’t a bad movie. The filmmakers’ reach simply exceeded their grasp, alas.