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SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With T

Teenage Caveman (2002)       

Genres: SF

Not what I expected from the video cover. Pretty good. Not Hollywood-style. It would be really nice if there were more encouragement for movies like this, that don't conform to the official mold of the moment, to be made. Or maybe they are being made a lot and I am too uncultured to know.

The video cover was made to look like something more generic. It said, "This movie is like all those other stupid teenage horror movies. You should rent it." How sad.

The protagonist was in several episodes of Buffy. At least I think it was him; it looked like him. This is not a shallow comment but a profound one. I will explain. (I find I have to do that with profound comments.) I evoke the popular show with its legions of fans; fans, stupid shallow rabid fans, rent this movie because it has a Buffy person in it. It's shallow and pathetic but this is the harsh reality of what works. And that's showbiz, baby. Oh, and also there is a surprising amount of sex.

This guy looks better here than he did in Buffy. His hair's longer and he's all primal and has less clothing. If it is him.

Tenchi Muyo! In Love (1996 Japan)       

Genres: Ani SF

Watched: 25 min

The Tenchi Muyo series is the ultimate in boys' fantasy anime. There's this worthless boy and zillions of girls, Earth and alien, fall in love with him and move in with him, and trip over each other to get his attention, and want to have sex with him, and he keeps putting them off because he's young and shy, or a loser.

This movie has the gang travel back in time to figure out what caused a temporal disturbance in their own time that threatens to erase the boy from existence. I was pretty bored and asked J what he thought of it, and he woke up and said NR because it was so boring he fell asleep. The point of this anime doesn't seem to be non-boring dialogue or non-boring characters or non-boring anything; it's how the loser boy's feelings are important (although you might think, who could possibly care?) to a bunch of sexy girls who are all in love with him and the whole plot centers around his pathetic little loser self. I wonder why Japanese boys thrill to stuff like this while American boys don't. Maybe American kids have better self esteem and don't need this kind of boost. It is true that wild uneducated people tend to have high self-esteem, and certainly American school kids are wilder than Japanese ones.

Clearly it has to do with lack of discipline. The Japanese force their kids to wear uniforms to school, and this is very conducive to discipline. Granted, the adults have ulterior motives as far as the uniforms go. They like to look at girls' underwear and want to ensure that they always wear miniskirts, and also they especially are attracted to very young girls, so a girl in school uniform is much more attractive to them than a girl in whatever clothing. (It's true; there's even a cult of dressing like little girls among young Japanese women.) And, certainly, punishing them, those cute nubescent girls in school uniform miniskirts, that is pure delight. So, the kids are very well-behaved.

Terminator 3 (2003)       

Genres: Act SF

SO stupid and boring. Which is unsurprising because they switched scriptwriters and director. When the car chase scenes are so tedious you look forward to them ending, you know you might as well leave. And what is with this crappy girl terminator? The previous model was far more effective. Her people skills are far inferior, and her body, with the internal skeleton covered with liquid metal, is clearly much worse because the internal skeleton can be damaged. My theory: machines took over, and were quite successful, until they developed a management class. With this new management bureaucracy, stupid (and possibly politically correct) design decisions got made.

And don't get me started on the time-travel. Why travel only back to this one point in the past? As machines get more advanced they ought to be more and more effective and so ought to be able to do better than their predecessors did in the pasts of Terminators I and II, so wouldn't it make more sense to send them there? OK, random chance might have had something to do with the arrival time, but clearly this isn't the way the universe works in these films. I mean you have to have this particular set of losers leading the resistance or all is lost. And also, given that this terminator is actually crappier, she would be a wash in the previous situations and perhaps the machines aren't so dumb they don't realize it.

And it also gave me an overload of ugly. John of II has grown up into a hideous troll, apparently. Well, maybe half a dozen motorcycle crashes too many did it. The female protagonist is too skinny and her nose is all chunky. My date said she was really pretty. I understood right away what he meant. He's a nerd and couldn't conceive of a beautiful actress having anything to do with him. But a too-skinny girl with a lumpy nose might. NO! I don't mean I look like that! I am NOT skinny.

Arnie is certainly good-looking still but he's aged a lot. And so it's much harder to forgive him now for making a silly anti-science movie. Also being older makes frozen-faced "cool" acting work far worse. When you're so beautiful people will love you whether you exhibit interesting mentation or not, it's fine, but older people ought to rely more on facial expressions.

They (2002)       NR

Genres: Hor F

Watched: second half

Pointless and boring but I was stuck in a motel in Houston on a Sunday afternoon and it was better than watching the Super Bowl.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)       NR

Genres: Rom SF

It is a typical situation. A couple have a date at the movies, but what to see? She wants to see Summertime Romance in Paris; he wants to see Lesbian Zombies in Space. Just for this case, they make movies to appeal to both -- Summertime Lesbian Zombie Romance in Space-Paris! Or, The Thirteenth Floor. It's a chick flick, yet also an SF detective!

Alas, when you pair genres like "detective" or "SF" with "chick flick," you rarely get anything palatable, except possibly to chicks.

Time After Time (1979)       

Genres: SF

Watched: 55 min

Jack the Ripper steals H. G. Wells's time machine to escape the police; Wells pursues Jack with the goal of retrieving him from 1979 San Francisco. It sounds silly and lively but instead it's just boring. And silly, although it doesn't intend to be. Wells goes after a violent psychopath with no kind of weapon or plan of any kind except asking him nicely to return and face the consequences of his actions. Whatever. Not having a good plan before you go -- that's silly. And boring. Plus stories placing a character in contact with an environment familiar to the audience and then treating the audience to the hilarity of watching him wondering at all this stuff that is familiar to us piss me off.

The Time Machine (1960)       

Genres: SF

J said he wanted to smack the protagonist because he was so smug. Indeed he is annoying, although he has a nice tight butt. The butt shots are less annoying. He is especially annoying when you can see his face and he's talking. I can understand his decision about the land of cute easy women, but he seems to always go everywhere woefully underprepared. And he doesn't think logically about how to use time travel advantageously, unlike Bill and Ted. What a jerk. He acts like a poet or something. Could he be a reflection of the pacifist screenwriter? They're typically logically-challenged pacifists.

Titan A. E. (2000)       

Genres: Ani SF Adv

I don't remember this, probably because the plot is so broken I have nothing to latch on to. There is some nice art.

Transformers (2007) and Our Inner Ape, by Frans de Waal       

Genres: SF, Act, Kid, apes, porn

Guest review: A and I saw Transformers; also we're listening to a books-on-CD version of Our Inner Ape, so I figured I'd save some reviewing time and do one of those "mash ups" that the kids like so much nowadays.

The idea is that violent, power-hungry aliens (called Chimpticons) and peaceable, matriarchal sex-crazed aliens (called Bonobots) come to earth seeking The Cube, a primordial artifact that causes mechanisms to express their inner bonobo-natures (if they have one) and become Bonobots, or if they lack bonobo-nature to become Chimpticons. The Chimpticons want to use the Cube to take over; the Bonobots just want to get it on! One of the key plot points is: can the government decode the strange metallic gnashing noise heard when the aliens are hacking their systems? That's the sweet sound of Bonobot tribadism - social bonding at work! Where do you think the word "tribe" came from, anyway?

The operative question and main point of the movie, then, is "Which items possess the bonobo-nature?" or to state it more colloquially, "Is my refrigerator sexy?" Director and respected theologian Michael Bay illustrates the chimp/bonobo mechanical partition in two ways, by transformation and by assumption. The extraterrestrial Chimpticons and Bonobots seek their totem forms in the extant technological metaphor; the forms so chosen illustrate the bonobo-nature of the mimicants through transformation.

In a clever twist, Bay picked for the protagonist Dustin Diamond (Screech from Saved By the Bell) of recent sex tape fame - a perfect ally for the hypersexual Bonobots. During his, I mean the, climax, Screech accidentally turns on The Cube (and I do mean "turns on"), causing it to sow its seed of life in assorted mechanical receptacles. These receptacles are shown to have, or not have, the bonobo-nature by assumption.

Theological breakdown:

I found some surprises here: the Hummer is more about sex than violence - OK, maybe that's not a surprise - and the Ford Mustang is not about sex at all! Dang, if the Mustang doesn't even have the bonobo-nature, what black hole of anti-bonoboism must be my beat up '97 Explorer with the front bumper held on by telephone cable? (A has suggested that you could fix a Mustang by putting a unicorn horn on the logo on the grille.)

While researching this review, I was impressed with the movie's official website: if you click that you like robots, you have your choice of either the Bonobot matriarch's or Chimpticon alpha male's crotch in your face! Enjoy!

Oh, and P.S. you may be wondering, Dear Reader, if Dustin Diamond manages to top his famous Dirty Sanchez scene from Screeched . . . he does, and I leave you with just two words: Dirty Groucho!

Tremors (1990)       

Genres: SF Act Com

Ravenous subterranean monsters turn up in an isolated valley and proceed to gorily devour some hicks and farm animals. Sexy handymen Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon and a swell supporting cast of assorted oddballs fight back. It's especially exciting because these plucky folks act reasonably and say funny things, so one cares whether or not they get eaten.

Three sequels and a series prove how well-received this movie was, but none of these recaptures this movie's delightful mix of hysterical mayhem and inter-character chemistry.

Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996)       

Genres: SF Act

Kevin Bacon was a good sidekick: sexy, fun, and non-annoying. The new sidekick is non-sexy and annoying. The sort of sidekick you hope will get eaten. At least Earl and Burt are back. The centerfold lady is OK too. And the monsters spring a cute nasty surprise.

Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004)       

Genres: SF Act

The back of the box says "way back in the 1800s, the miners in the small town of Perfection are disappearing under very unusual circumstances." This might lead you to believe that the problem is not underground monsters, which is what usually kills movie miners, but you would be mistaken.

The concept is nice enough. The script is good enough for a series episode. The worst problem is the bad tactics. These folks are periodically struck with bouts of crippling stupidity. Why do they keep throwing away their horses instead of parking them somewhere secure, like on rock? And why don't they use the ultimate in anti-graboid weaponry -- a pig on a rope with dynamite strapped on? And why don't they make underground spiked and/or dynamite-laced traps? And why don't they shoot more and better if they have all these guns? The monsters, on the other hand, are resourceful geniuses, despite being visually challenged. Maybe they could have even become expert shots but there isn't enough time.

One of the highlights is the ever dapperly evil Billy Drago -- he's so cute! Yessir, in the Old West you can post an ad in the paper for a gunslinger and all these hot men . . . well, anyway, at least one hot man will come and be all tough and cute and like, "So, who ya want I should kill?" And you'd think he'd set the bumbling townsfolk's troubles aright, but it turns out to not be so easy, because like I said, those graboids are geniuses.

Tron (1982)       

Genres: Adv SF

Sort of slow, but not bad. Beloved by computer professionals and related nerds, because it boldly broke new ground in computer graphics for movies and takes place inside a computer! Everyone is a program! Saying it's kind of slow it like slapping one of those big-name computing pioneers.

I usually don't care about ground-breaking so much and rate on how much I enjoyed it (if I cared I would actually know something about it and then, knowing, would enjoy the ground-breaking aspects more) but I feel too much pressure on this one from all the computer nerds.

Trucks (1997)       NR!!!

Genres: Hor SF

Watched: 15 min

All the trucks are evil! This is like Maximum Overdrive but without Emilio Estavez or the cool AC/DC soundtrack. Why was this movie remade? They figured the problem with the original movie was Emilio Estavez? Anyhow him or the script, and they couldn't get him so they'd try it again but without him. Their inspiration is somewhat elucidated when a character says,"What if this is the start? What is all inanimate objects come to life? They could make us their slaves!" I can see how such an idea might come about. Someone was really drunk. Also he was only five years old.

Tuesday (2001 UK)       

Genres: Ani F short

This gorgeously animated froggie fantasy short appears on the Paul McCartney: The Music & Animation Collection DVD.

Tune In Tomorrow (1990)       

Genres: Com MR

A bit slow to start but once it gets going it's LOL funny. I don't know exactly what Peter Falk's character is but I loved him. Keanu Reeves' character is dorky but then that's Reeves for you. Cute enough to eat with a spoon.

The Tuxedo (2002)       

Genres: Act F SF

Watched: trailer

Sigh. I love Jackie Chan. But I can't summon enough enthusiasm to view this because I know how it'll be. It's one of his recent offerings for the US market and he's finally figured out what it takes to make it big here. Sadly what it apparently takes is aggressively dumbed-down comedy. (Exclude from this the Western he made with the sexy blond guy, that's not so bad. Although, the sexy blond guy is starting to annoy me because he keeps making movies where he is the same character.)

The Big Brawl (1980), Jackie's first American film, is really cute and funny, but apparently was too sophisticated for our market so Jackie's learned his lesson about Americans. Delightful comedy is reserved for movies intended for the Asian market, idiotic comedy for the American market. Well, it's not always idiotic, but it's never as classy as the stuff never meant for us. My favorite is the hilarious Dragons Forever (1988) (with Communist fish!).

Twelve Monkeys (1995)       

Genres: Dra SF

Pretty good; surprisingly logical treatment (for a movie) of circular time travel causality.

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Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie.

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