The Night Stalker (1972)

REVIEW

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. 

Weird Detective Stories

Solomon Kane: based on the character created by Robert E. Howard and scripted by Michael J. Bassett; directed by Michael J. Bassett; starring James Purefoy (Solomon Kane), Max von Sydow (Josiah Kane), Rachel Hurd-Wood (Meredith), Pete Postlewaite (William), Alice Krige (Katherine), and Jason Flemyng (Malachi) (2009): A second time through, and I again concluded it's a damn shame Solomon Kane didn't get at least a couple of sequels. Writer-director Michael J. Bassett plays a bit fast and loose with Robert E. Howard's quasi-Puritan demon-hunter to give him an origin story with a redemptive arc, but as a whole the movie is fairly true to the character. 

For a fairly low-budget fantasy film, Solomon Kane looks great, is jam-packed with good actors who seem to be invested in their roles, and has a suitably haunted James Purefoy as Kane. In terms of both sword-and-sorcery movies and Robert E. Howard adaptations, I might actually rank this over the original Conan the Barbarian, if only because its lack of pomposity hews much closer to Howard's writing than John Milius's bellicose sturm-und-drang. Highly recommended.

Marlowe: adapted by Stirling Silliphant from the novel The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler; directed by Paul Bogart; starring James Garner (Philip Marlowe), Gayle Hunnicutt (Mavis Wald), Carroll O'Connor (Lt. French), Rita Moreno (Dolores Gonzales), Jackie Coogan (Grant Hicks), Bruce Lee (Winslow Wong), and Sharon Farrell (Orfamay Quest) (1969): Enjoyable, typically twisty Raymond Chandler mystery gets updated by 20 years to late 1960's Los Angeles. James Garner is his typically low-key self as Philip Marlowe -- you could see this as an audition tape for the later Rockford Files. Bruce Lee shows up as a mob enforcer; what happens to him is actually pretty hilarious. Recommended.

The X-Files: Goblins by Charles L. Grant (1994): The first original X-Files novel has its pleasures. Released midway through the second season of the series, Goblins was written by veteran horror scribe Charles L. Grant. As with Grant's own work, Goblins is quiet horror for the most part, implying a lot and showing very little. Unfortunately, the 'monster' in Goblins would barely support an hour-long episode of the series, much less a nearly 300-page novel. Grant does a nice job of capturing the Mulder/Scully dynamic and the paranoid tone of the series. Suffice to say, though, that as in the dreadful movie Hollow Man, 'invisible' apparently means the same as 'invincible.' Lightly recommended.

Department 18: Night Souls by L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims (2010): Night Souls tools along for its first three-quarters as a fairly soapy occult procedural that's light on horror and originality and really long on really short chapters, I assume because it was meant to be read in installments during every trip to the bathroom.

Alas, with about 75 pages to go, it completely craps the bed. Despite the fact that its climax is rushed and sketchy and amazingly satisfaction-light, Night Souls nonetheless finds the space for back-to-back chapters in which major female characters are raped, murdered, and dismembered in graphic detail. Then it throws in the dismemberment of an old homeless guy in a subsequent chapter because the writers seem to have lost all interest in the procedural aspects of their own narrative. As we've already been shown how bad the antagonists can be, these chapters don't tell or show us anything we don't know -- and the later fate of the rapist-murderers comes and goes with so little effect that there's no sense of catharsis or justice or really much of anything.

Oh, and one of the women is raped by a lizard-like monster which we're told on more than one occasion has a foot-long penis with giant barbs on it. Hooray! As the only other horror-novel rape scenes involving monsters with barbed penises that I recall happen in terrible Richard Laymon novels (yes, more than once, barbed-penis-rape-scene fans!), I can only assume this is a grotesque tip of a grotesque hat. There are horror novels that effectively portray rape scenes; Night Souls is not one of them unless you're a rape fetishist or a connoisseur of unusually large barbed penises. Not 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.