Lima

Poster tagline: AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR! DESTROYING AND TERRIFYING! This is just bad. I don't think Roger Corman (here as executive producer) brags about this film to his grandchildren. The title promises a B-horror ride, but the alien, endowed with more than a million senses, makes its first appearance in the last seconds of the film, in a form reminiscent of the lazy peek of my hamster when she looks from the opening of her bed what kind of grain I've put in her bowl. The spaceship in which the alien lives and uses radio waves to control the minds of the surrounding animals and humans (in real life, a farming family and their weird neighbour) is located somewhere in the Texas desert and looks like a food processor. There’s a rabid dog barking at the camera and, just in case, we have plush ravens thrown at the camera playing hostile birds. The performances are appropriate to the level of this cinematic dreck: listless and uninvolved. The only one who’s alive it at least a little bit is Chester Conklin, whose exaggerated gestures let us know who was THE star of silent films in the old days.

Poster tagline: FROM TIME UNBORN... A HIDEOUS SHE-THING! The synopsis has a suitably trashy feel: using a time machine constructed by Dr. Erling somewhere on a Florida island, a visitor from the future, a woman disfigured by radiation (wearing a tight black jumpsuit with phosphorescent scales, front teeth like a rabbit, and three massive warts on her face) spends the entire film trying to kidnap Erling's assistant into the future in order to expand the population of healthy individuals with him, by copiously mating (in her case, the word "making love" is hard to utter). The whole film is in a lazy conversational plane and some of the excitement comes only in the last act, when the woman from the future runs around the jungle, kills her rival in love and, before the redemptive words "THE END" come, you forget what it was all about. It didn’t offend me, it just bored me a bit. Paradoxically, the main character was played by the acclaimed Broadway musical actress Salome Jens. Maybe she needed to pay off some debts.

It’s remarkable that the seams that connect the different stories in different time and space are so imperceptible that the film flows smoothly and the three hours are not even noticeable. Unfortunately, it results in something that has neither sufficient emotional nor cathartic effect. In other words, there is no profound experience, and by the end I felt a bit....empty. Anyway, I appreciate the courage to come up with something so non-commercial and non-subversive in this day and age, when A-film production resembles a controlled process to make money.

Bollywood at its most fun. There hasn't been anything like this for years and there won't be again for a long time. For a viewer uninitiated into the Bollywood phenomenon, the first quarter of the film can be a bit annoying, with all the over-the-top acting and annoying Indian disco tunes accompanying the protagonist's amorous tooting. But then, after the reincarnation of the main character into a fly, an incredible geyser of invention and ideas comes to the fore, cemented into a unifying theme of one fly's revenge on a wayward bad guy for killing him and trying to seduce a girl. There is also a Rocky-like muscle building scene, mini goggles, a mask and iron gloves, as well as various inventive ways in which a tiny creature can make someone's life as unpleasant as possible, all in the name of bloody revenge. And most importantly, as the runtime increases, the premise of a fly taking revenge on a bad guy for his death and his girlfriend no longer sounds so contrived, on the contrary, you start to like the character, despite the digital pixels. And another point for the brilliantly built-up finale. PS: Watched with English subtitles.

Sam, Mark Webb can’t hold a candle to you. Under Raimi, Spider-Man was better in every sense: funnier, more imaginative, livelier. Parker's becoming acquainted with his new abilities was rendered much more inventively, while Webb dispatches him with one awkward scene on the subway and a skateboard romp. In the second half, the all-too-new Spider-Man gets tangled with a digital lizard and has nothing more to offer. I won't even elaborate on the fact that the action scenes have no charge and are sometimes strangely edited. And the stars? Tobey Maguire was such a nice guy next door, a good friend with whom you'd go for a beer (well, in his case more like a glass of Kofola), while Garfield is just a grinning and weakly wisecracking brat. Summary: a pointless reboot.

Poster tagline: TERRIFYING MONSTERS FROM A LOST AGE!!! This sci-fi flick holds the dubious distinction of being Universal's weakest horror film with critics overseas. Naturally, taken in today's terms, the film is not very scary (only a brief glimpse of two burnt female bodies might have struck a nerve at the time), the titular monsters – the "creatures of darkness" with their hump, clawed tentacles and plump eyeballs – nowadays only evoke a condescending smile, but otherwise it’s a quite pleasant adventure B-movie. The story itself isn't completely silly and makes quite a bit of sense, the backdrop of a lost Siberian civilization in the depths of the earth isn't entirely objectionable, and a certain "seriousness" (sort of) is added to by a short scientific lecture at the beginning about the depths of planet Earth, given by then popular scientist Frank Baxter. Perhaps the only disappointment is the rushed ending with the logically not very defensible death of one of the characters. But in the context of the B-movies that film studios were churning out at the time, this is an above-average film that fit my current mood.

Poster tagline: SPECTACULAR ADVENTURE BEYOND TIME AND SPACE TAKES YOU TO THE ANGRY RED PLANET!!! A pretty popular sci-fi B-movie in its day. Firstly, it was filmed in colour and with Cinemagic technology (the predecessor of today's 3D), which gave the an impression of spatiality and depth. When the action takes place aboard the spaceship (about two-thirds of the runtime), the film is static and doesn't deliver much in terms of entertainment, but at least the dialogue, performed by experienced and popular actors of the time, is easily survivable. The real fun only starts on Mars, when the overabundance of red (overly contrasting camera filters) will make your pupils spin. The props of the Martian flora and fauna consist of a pair of bushes and a garishly painted backdrop; a giant carnivorous plant comes into play, with the actress wrapping one of its tentacles around herself to make it look real; there's also an attack by a Martian cross between a bat and a rat with crab tentacles; and a mysterious jelly-like amoeba that emerges from the Martian sea. The film concludes with an audible appeal from a three-eyed Martian, who warns Earthlings that another visit could be much worse. Thanks for the warning, but as you can see these days, NASA scientists don’t care too much :o)

There hasn’t been such an overwrought, obtuse and primal assault on your sensory system since Transformers 2. Anderson completely ignores everything such as story, logic or expressive sobriety and from beginning to end serves, without sense or respite, one sterile action sequence after another, all supported by the tiresome techno-film of an individual called tomandandy and with the motto "the more slow-motion shots we cram in, the better, they're so cool!". If the previous episodes were too much for you, this one will make you puke. My grandmother from Ostrava, God rest her soul, would sum it up saying “well, wasn’t that some bollocks!”

The visually arresting first half will tickle the heart of any sci-fi fan. And it doesn't matter that the Asian architecture, the perpetual rain and parakeets are a rip-off of Blade Runner, and the chases with hoverboards are a rip-off of Minority Report. But then, as the minutes tick by, the film makes it clear that the script was written by the infamous Kurt Wimmer, a man with no talent and no creative intelligence, so the mounting annoying clichés and situations like those from the most subpar B-movies quickly cool down the initial enthusiasm. Where the old Total Recall clearly wiped its ass with clichéd Hollywood and was engaging in its ambiguous answer to what is truth and what is a dream, Wiseman's film is dull and woefully predictable. It's like Kate Beckinsale's "terminator" character: visually appealing and energetic, but bluntly direct.

Very decent. Bourne's Legacy blends tastefully with the third part of the Bourne trilogy without parasitizing it. It suffers from a very lukewarm start, but from about the 30th minute onwards, action follows action and everything culminates in a half-hour continuous set-piece in the Philippines. Jeremy Renner stood with honour up to a possible comparison with Matt Damon. That said, I won't be looking forward to the next piece of this spy puzzle, the Bourne universe has been gnawed to the bone by this film.