DamnAlienDVDReviews

October 2003
© 2003 Ernest Lilley / SFRevu
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Damnaliens DVD Review by the Damnaliens
Want a second opinion? We suggest www.imdb.com - Ernest

Gay Birdday Earthers! We must admit that we have yet to come across another species that manages to find more ways to avoid work than yours. This creation of holy days (although what a bird stuffed with fungus has to do with religion still escapes us) is truly one of your more widely held belief systems. We find it everywhere.

Recent Releases / Classics / SFTV / Anime

Recent Releases

We’ve been trying to understand your politics. In many countries you change leadership by sacrificing your current leaders whether they want to be or not. In the US you seem more intent on belittling them by replacing them with obvious lesser-qualified replacements, much like going to court and having the judge replace your parents with monkeys. To better understand this we were eager to get our pseudopods on Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines. Did none of your people go and see Terminator 2? Was not that entire movie about a cyborg sent from the future to kill John Connor but who is thwarted by the remains of the first terminator? Did we not see this film or are we having Crennalatory Effects again? More machines, less character development, more explosions and 172 million dollars worth of special effects (You know you could get to Mars on less) prove once more that you do love to see things explode. Oh yes, and the future, surprise ending here, is dark and dismal.

We got very excited when, early on in this movie, one of the characters runs through a field yelling “The juggers are coming, the juggers are coming!” We had visions of....well, they were visions. Unfortunately, in The Blood of Heroes, juggers are what you call players of a game, the purpose of which is to place a dog’s skull on an opposing team’s stick. Yes, indeed, this is once again one of the futures you envision for yourselves, albeit a future with fewer dogs than normal. The juggers jugger their way across the apocalyptic wasteland to the professional jugger ranks where they get to play against the best team of juggers in existence, which is not really saying much considering how violent this sport is. In the end all the survivors are happy and you can’t ask much more than that.

What do you get when you cross a bunch of scientists, some military types and a buxom psychic? Bio Hazard. Actually what you get is a demon wrenched from another dimension. Now, technically, demons are not interdimensional but planar so we’re not sure whether this demon was just sightseeing or whether someone got their facts wrong. We’re not sure how good the psychic is either since wouldn’t it have been her job to let everyone know that things were going to go badly? We surmise she may have been along for a different kind of ride. So, this demon gets wrenched, your military, poorly prepared as usual, lets the thing get free and off it goes to create havoc on the countryside. Luckily the psychic gets her psychic friend network together to track the thing (and again would this be necessary if they were really that good) and everyone lives happily ever after. Except, of course, for those rendered limb from limb by the demon.

We’re pretty sure that Angelina Jolie put on lots of weight before this movie. How else to explain that all of her costumes were so tight fitting? Lara Croft Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life, has Jolie, reprising the title role, traipsing all across everywhere doing things that only someone in a video game would be capable of. Why even some of her body parts defy the laws of gravity. We thought we’d find this fun but it was just more running around blowing things up for no apparent reason.

We have been reluctant to tell you this but the time seems right. You are all mutants. Now that that is out of the way we can talk about X2 - X-Men United, which is about mutants, although it is really about you if you understand what we mean, which most of the time you don’t. This film continues the silliness of the first with these mutant beings creating massive amounts of collateral damage. Who pays for the repair of all the buildings and vehicles that get destroyed while they are off saving everyone? I’m sure if we landed the mothership on one of your municipal buildings there would be heck to pay along with a pretty large bill.

Classics

We put this dvd in the classics section because it is truly a classic representation of the way things really are. Naked Lunch, is based on the Burroughs novel, no, no the Tarzan Burroughs but the other one. David Cronenberg directed this flick and it reflects not only Burroughs visions but his own. What can we say about a flick that contains some of our very favorite characters, especially the typewriters. Truly you must see this to believe it and, after seeing it you either won’t believe what you’ve seen or won’t believe you’ve seen it. And yet it is a must see.

Finally, a film that we can relate to, although it once again portrays one of you very apocalyptic futures. A Boy & His Dog, is about Vic and Blood; a boy and his dog who roam the wasteland looking for food and sex. The story that this dvd was based on was written by Harlan Ellison who, we understand, roamed Hollywood for a number of years doing the exact same thing. Vic gets enticed into the lair of the middle class while blood is left to fend for himself. However, eschewing a life of sex and food for freedom and no sex or food, Vic manages to escape to roam once more. Go figure that only you people would see this as a victory.

SFTV

It seems you can’t turn around without laying a tenstacle on a Star Trek dvd these days. They seem to be spreading faster than Shattner’s second season belly. Star Trek Deep Space Nine - The Complete Sixth Season, is the latest offering. We’d like to tell you where these episodes fit in the grand scheme of things but frankly we’ve become confused. We’re pretty sure they fall somewhere between the fat Kirk and the dumb Janeway but we would not take bets on it. Many of these episodes focused on the Dominion War, although we should note that many of the episodes were also making attempts at being, we believe, funny. This humor while blowing up things is second most only to your morbid love of dystopian futures.

Anime

We had anime dvd’s, honest we did but Hummer, he’s the big one with the shiny tenstacles, left them too near the spooze dispenser and they got converted, we think to raspberry. The covers do make nice coasters though so we don’t think we’re going to bring them back. We used an alias we got from an illegal alien friend of ours to rent them anyway so we figure no one will ever find out. Until next month we wish you saucy cranberries and let us be the first to say happy your welcome gettings.