Dir - J.S. Cardone
Overall: MEH
B-movie writer/director J.S. Cardone paired up with Charles Band's Full Moon production company for the sci-fi/horror hybrid Shadowzone; a mediocre yet adequate creature feature done in the bog-standard straight-to-video style of countless others at the turn of the 1990s. The monster is largely kept off-screen and is given a nifty hook of being able to physically appear as its victim's most primal fears, which is something that has to do with it spawning from some sort of subconscious nightmare realm that is discovered from covert medical experiments conducted by Louise Fletcher, James Hong, and the "damn enchiladas" man himself Miguel A. Núñez Jr.. The most immediate aspect of course is the very presence of Fletcher, so seeing a former Academy Award winner having to play dead while a smiley animatronic puppet gently caresses her is the stuff of unintended hysterics. Fletcher gives the material an air of sophistication that it hardly deserves, but all of the performances are surprisingly void of scenery-chewing and Cardone maintains a serious tone, playing its Alien-adjacent framework straight.
Dir - David Schmoeller
Overall: MEH
For his follow-up to Puppet Master, director David Schmoeller made the comparatively less goofy yet still D-rent genre offering The Arrival. It is a sci-fi/vampire mash-up where an elderly grandpa gets possessed or something by a crashed extraterrestrial and then de-ages into a different actor while simultaneously craving women's estrogen-laced blood. Yum. Taking a schlockless approach to the material, Schmoeller stages it as a tragedy where and old man gets another chance at life, (and a chance to romance his adorable nurse that is fifty years his junior), only for it to be perverted into an alien survival story where said being from another planet finds love and just begins to enjoy Earth's splendor, only to be taken down by the cops. Even with some lazy dream sequences and mild nudity, it is mostly a dull, monotonous series of not-graphic murders followed by law enforcement officials showing up at the crime scene one step behind the perpetrator. Some cameos from Stuart Gordon, his wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, and Michael J. Pollard are fun, plus John Saxton goes way outside of his comfort zone playing a...wait for it....police detective. These are the jokes folks.
(1998)
Dir- Abel Ferrara
Overall: MEH
Mislabeled as a cyberpunk thriller yet boasting his patented seedy style with trusty sidekick Christopher Walken on board, (as well as Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento), Abel Ferrara's adaptation of William Gibson's short story New Rose Hotel is a well-performed yet incoherent mess. Though it is set internationally, it is a New York movie like many others in Ferrara's filmography, depicting high-stakes/big city players that get in over their heads with a long-con that robs them of their manhood, finances, and ultimately their lives. Walken has the more showy role as the ambitious industrial spy or at least he plays it that way, gliding his way through juicy monologues with a cane and his natural, ballerina-like grace. Dafoe is equally as excellent as Walken's more introspective cohort who breaks protocol by falling in love with Argento, the latter who makes her American debut as a modern day fem fatale that is straight out of film noir cliches. Unfortunately, Gibson's source material is rendered incomprehensible with Ferrara's "style over substance" approach, having the movie shot with blurry, hand-held cameras in dingy-lit locations and relying on endless callbacks that showcase more of the character's inner paranoia than providing the audience with any substantial clues to go on. This may have been the point to some extent though, so if anyone comes in with their expectations adjusted accordingly in order to see the main players deliver some gravitas to their performances, it is a worthy watch.
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