Invaders

They (2002): written by Brendan Hood; directed by Robert Harmon; starring Laura Regan, Marc Blucas (Buffy's Riley Finn!), and Ethan Embry: 

Underwhelming horror movie with a far-too-passive heroine as played by Laura Regan. Can Regan act? The script doesn't give her much to do other than run around screaming or stand around woodenly denying the supernatural, so who knows? Marc Blucas, Buffy ex Riley Finn, has almost nothing to do. 

Really, no one has much to do -- the shadowy monsters drive the action completely and prove to be unstoppable so early in the movie that one wonders what the point is. They do have an odd array of powers -- not just shutting down electricity but also operating elevators and running subway trains. It sure seems that way, anyway. An interesting film involving Night Terrors hides under the inept writing. Not recommended.

Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956): written by Francis Martin; directed by Winston Jones: Odd, seminal combination of documentary and docudrama covering the evidence of Flying Saucers Over America! as of 1956. Great for those who love this sort of thing, somewhat tedious for those who don't. The film interpolates actual colour footage of UFO's as captured by reputable civilian photographers -- fleeting, fascinating stuff given extra zing by the fact that the real stuff is in colour and the rest of the film is in black and white. Dry, great stuff. Recommended.

X2

The X-Files: [Fight the Future]: (1998): written by Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter; directed by Rob Bowman; starring David Duchovny (Agent Mulder), Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully), John Neville (The Well-Manicured Man), William B. Davis (Cigarette-Smoking Man), Martin Landau (Kurtzwell), and Mitch Pileggi (Assistant FBI Director Skinner): 

Released to theatres between Seasons 5 and 6 of The X-Files TV show, The X-Files: [Fight the Future] is actually less satisfying than the shows that led directly into and out of it. So it goes. It does codify certain things about the show's alien conspiracy, in part because John Neville's character delivers two minutes of exposition that explains about five years of show. In riffing on dire conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, the movie accidentally seems to forecast some of the more dire theories about 9/11. So it goes in the Ourobouros of paranoia. 

The movie does take advantage of having a much larger budget by delivering a couple of cinematic set-pieces and a lot of black helicopters. It also takes advantage of being a movie to give the viewer several widescreen panaromas dominated by the sky, something that didn't happen a lot on the show. It's still a bit incoherent and riddled with coincidence as a plot device. The final Antarctic set-piece gives us the series' most exaggerated and unbelievable example of Scully looking the wrong way when something extraordinary happens. Recommended for X-Files fans.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe: (2008): written by Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter; directed by Chris Carter; starring David Duchovny (Agent Mulder), Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully), Billy Connolly (Father Joe), Amanda Peet (Agent Whitney), Xzibit (Agent Drummy), Callum Keith Rennie (Abductor), and Mitch Pileggi (Assistant FBI Director Skinner): 

Low-budget, enervated attempt to bring back The X-Files as a movie series six years after its TV cancellation was a critical and box-office disaster back in 2008. The main plot would barely have warranted a shrug on the series. The $20 million or so spent on the movie somehow looks cheaper than most of the show's much lower-budget British-Columbia-lensed episodes of its first four seasons, possibly because series creator Chris Carter isn't a very good movie director.

More unfortunately, Carter simply ignores the final episodes of his own show in this movie. That may not be a bad thing entirely, but the result reminds me of the exasperated cry of Sam Rockwell's character to the main cast members of the TV show in Galaxy Quest -- "Did you guys ever WATCH the show?" 

Billy Connolly does good work as a pedophile Roman Catholic priest searching for redemption. David Duchovny's fake beard looks really fake for the 30 minutes of film he's stuck sporting it prior to "shaving" it off. A sub-plot involving Gillian Anderson's Scully and her medical career would be great on a TV show. In a movie, it feels like 20 minutes of filler. Not really recommended except for X-Files completists. 

Mothra Not Included

The Mothman Prophecies: adapted from the novel by John Keel by Richard Hatem; directed by Mark Pellington; starring Richard Gere (John Klein), Debra Messing (Mary Klein), Will Patton (Gordon Smallwood), and Laura Linney (Connie Mills) (2002): I suppose there's an alternate universe out there in which Mark Pellington has been an acclaimed director of horror and suspense films for the past two decades. Here, he seems to have poured much of his energy into TV production after The Mothman Prophecies came out in 2002. More's the pity.

When the publisher of the mid-1970's 'true-life' book you've based your movie on classifies that book as a novel (as Tor did John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies), you might as well run with it. I suppose if this movie were advocating the dangerous practice of exorcism while purporting to be a true story, I'd find it repugnant. 

As it instead generates a cosmic thrill-ride that ultimately comes out against pseudoscience and occultism, and as it's extremely well-made and well-acted -- well, I think The Mothman Prophecies is just swell. Pellington's games with visual and audio distortion give the film the unnerving quality of cosmic horror. The script's intentional vagueness about just what the hell is going on also helps.

Basically, back in the 1960's, a bridge collapsed in a small town in West Virginia, killing 46 people. There had been a Mothman craze in the town, fueled by a character on the Batman TV show and by our old friend, the barn owl, which has been linked to erroneous reports of aliens and monsters ever since people invented artificial lighting and started walking and driving around at night.

Nearly 10 years after the bridge collapse came the publication of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies, a surprisingly boring mix of facts, speculation, and loopy metaphysics. More than 25 years after that came this movie, which pretty much invents all its characters and moves the bridge collapse 30 years forward in time while oddly reducing the death toll by 10.

But while the 'true facts' of the case are a lot of Hoo-Ha, Pellington's movie is smart and ambiguous and clever on both the narrative and visual fronts. Richard Gere's perennial insularity as an actor serves the movie well, as his character is an obsessive emotional cipher following the death of his wife. The rest of the cast is also fine, with Laura Linney and Will Patton keeping things low-key. Even Alan Bates underplays the role of John Leek, a stand-in for writer John Keel. With Gere as John Klein, that's two author stand-ins for the price of one! Recommended.

Close Encounters of the Cthulhu Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: written by Paul Schrader and Steven Spielberg; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Richard Dreyfus (Roy Neary), Francois Truffaut (Lacombe), Melinda Dillon (Jillian Guiler), Bob Balaban (Laughlin), and Teri Garr (Ronnie Neary( (1977): It's amazing how much Close Encounters of the Third Kind plays like a horror movie for much of its length -- indeed, like an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." The film moves from location to location to show various strange events and mysteries that occur across the planet. There's a documentary feel to the location work and the narrative structure, as mysterious U.N. investigators led by Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban travel the Earth to investigate UFO-related incidents. 

In the purposefully mundane domestic sequences that focus on dissatisfied husband and father Richard Dreyfus and single mother Melinda Dillon, we see Spielberg and uncredited screenwriter Paul Schrader ground the movie in the day-to-day life of working-class Americans. And then the UFO's show up and gradually change everything. And as with many of the characters in "The Call of Cthulhu," Dillon and Dreyfus are tormented by nightmares and visions as the alien arrival on Earth approaches.

I don't know that either Schrader or Spielberg ever read "The Call of Cthulhu." It has such a sturdy narrative approach to the creation of globe-spanning cosmic horror that it's more of a surprise that more film-makers haven't stumbled upon the approach before. The main difference here being that the story is ultimately about the arrival on Earth of friendly aliens and not all-conquering alien monsters. But the aliens do enough odd things along the way that a certain measure of fear recurs throughout the movie, most notably when aliens kidnap Dillon's young son for reasons that are as murky as anything else when it comes to possible alien motivation.

The arrival of the UFO's at the conclusion of the film stands as a high point of practical, non-CGI visual effects. It's a showcase of model work, cloud tanks, mattes, and an assortment of other 'tricks' honed to near-perfection during the non-CGI years. It's also a beautiful-looking climax, with its glowing alien spacecraft set off against the night sky and the looming stump of the mountainous Devil's Tower.

The Lovecraftian melding of documentary-style attention to detail and the unfolding of revelations to increasingly weirded-out protagonists serve Spielberg's vision well. The acting is solid throughout and, in the case of Truffaut's visionary, quite charming. What the aliens are doing doesn't necessarily make much sense, and there are some groaners in the dialogue towards the end (an exchange about Einstein is especially dumb). But overall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is still a splendid movie, and one that probably would never be made in today's marketplace. Highly recommended.

The Call of Cthulhu: adapted by Sean Branney from the story by H.P. Lovecraft; directed by Andrew Leman; starring Matt Foyer (Narrator), Ralph Lucas (Professor Angell), Patrick O'Day (Johansen), and David Mersault (Inspector Legrasse) (2005): The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS)'s first long-form foray into film-making is now 10 years old and still dandy. An amateur film made for a pittance, it outshines most professional horror movies with far larger budgets both in its faithfulness to its source material and in its aesthetic pleasures.

Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu Mythos novella saw publication in 1926. HPLHS adapted the novella under the conceit that it had been adapted for film in its publication year. Thus, The Call of Cthulhu is a silent movie that looks and acts like a silent movie, right down to the occasional defects in the viewing experience (dig that hair on the lens in the early going!). 

We do get an excellent musical score, so one can either assume that one is in a 1926 film theatre with live music or that The Call of Cthulhu has had a score added for its 'modern' release. Whatever suspends your disbelief. But The Call of Cthulhu isn't simply an homage to the film-making tropes of the late Silent Era: it's a compelling horror movie in its own right. 

Clever visual riffs on Van Gogh and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem appropriate to the subject matter; the stop-motion Cthulhu we see towards the end of the film is a terrific use of period-appropriate visual effects that actually manages to be disquieting as it lurches across the screen. Model and prop work are also beautiful throughout the movie, with a couple of different yet equally disquieting Cthulhu idols and a terrific approximation of Cthulhu's home/prison R'lyeh, risen from the waves for a brief moment.

It's a worthwhile expenditure of an hour to watch The Call of Cthulhu. Would that big-budget horror and fantasy movies showed this level of skill and artistry. Highly recommended.

Lost in Time

Dark Skies: written and directed by Scott Stewart; starring Keri Russell (Lacy Barrett), Dakota Goyo (Jesse Barrett), J.K. Simmons (Edwin Pollard), Josh Hamilton (Daniel Barrett) and Kadan Rockett (Sam Barrett) (2013): It's as if someone beamed this movie in from 1992, before The X-Files ever hit the airwaves. The alien-abduction storyline is right out of The X-Files, as is much of the UFO mythology mined by the movie (which is to say, they mine the same resources -- The X-Files didn't invent many of the tropes it used). Even the movie's title is shared by an X-Files knock-off TV series of the mid-1990's devoted to UFO conspiracies.

It's not a bad movie. It's not really a good movie. Maybe if a viewer had somehow remained completely unaware of the UFO abduction sub-genre, it would be better. I don't know. Along the way, writer-director Scott Stewart shovels references and homages to other movies, from E.T. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Poltergeist, into the mix. And those are just the Spielberg moments.

A suburban family under financial pressure because of the architect-father's inability to get work and the real-estate-agent mother's inability to sell a house starts experiencing spooky things at home. Their youngest son reports talking to a mysterious being he calls the Sandman. In an homage to Poltergeist, someone or something does some physics-challenging furniture rearrangement at night. Nose bleeds, black-outs, and lost time start to occur. Somebody raids the refrigerator. Yes, aliens have arrived, doing those things aliens have been doing since the 1950's. Can this suburban family defend itself against invasive aliens with magical technology?

J.K. Simmons is pretty much wasted in the role of Basil Exposition, while the child actors are competent and the actors playing the parents, Felicity's Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton, are also fine. The movie is competently staged and shot. Meanwhile, the aliens acquire a bewildering array of powers by the end of the film -- they're pretty much the Swiss Army Knife of monsters. Only the ending surprises in any way. But hey, at least it's not a found-footage film! Lightly recommended.