Part 2: SFX 51-100
STREETFIGHTER II (1994)
Director: Gisaburo Sugii
Reviewed: SFX#51
“Remember the 14-year-old tossers at school who endlessly bollocksed on about video nasties they’d never seen? This is their wet dream.” Guy Haley
ORIGINAL SINS (1994)
Director: Howard S Burger, Matthew Howe
Reviewed: SFX#52
“The most entertaining thing about this nasty, inept horror film is the cast list.” Tom Mayo
MY FAVOURITE MARTIAN (1999)
Director: Donald Petrie
Reviewed: SFX#52
“Some people never learn. Especially, it would seem, people with a Hollywood Hills zip code. If creative bankruptcy could be plotted on a graph, My Favourite Martian would find the LA dream factory plummeting headlong into the red.” Nick Setchfield
BABYLON 5 "A CALL TO ARMS” (1998)
Director: Mike Vejar
Reviewed: SFX#55
“Part prelude to the doomed Crusade TV series, part stand-alone mini-movie, ‘A Call to Arms’ is undoubtedly Babylon 5’s worst hour and a half to date – a visually impoverished, sterile, tediously overwrought proto-B5 arc story, plot-processed and extruded from one small nothing into one big fat zero.” Dan Goodleff
SHRIEK (1999)
Director: Oh, who cares…?
Reviewed: SFX#56
“It’s called Shriek and it lasts 67 minutes, so I wasn’t really expecting a finely-tuned script, Mike Leigh-esque ensemble acting or mind-blowing CGI. Which was just as well, really. Because what I got was a cast so hairless and pert they’d obviously just been promoted from Stacey And Debbie Get Butt Naked and Jump Up and Down a Lot, a script that would have made George Lucas weep and a demon lovingly crafted from bits of chewing gum.” Esther Woodman
INSPECTOR GADGET (2000)
Director: David Kellogg
Reviewed: SFX#60
“The comedy is too broad and the extent to which everyone over-acts can be gauged by the fact that Rupert Everett seems positively restrained.” Nigel Floyd
SUBSPECIES: THE AWAKENING (1998)
Director: Ted Nicolaou
Reviewed: SFX#61
“This is a routine, by-the-numbers horror, trawling through all the vampire clichés with about as much wit and insight as a post-match interview with a football manager. There’s some nonsense about a ‘Bloodstone’, the exact purpose of which is rendered unintelligible thanks to the two-pronged attack of cheap foreign actors and voice-muffling false fangs.” Dave Golder
CURSE OF THE PUPPET MASTER (1998)
Director: Jock Sholder
Reviewed: SFX#61
“Working at SFX has certainly proven to be a mind-expanding experience. Every month, for example, I have to take my idea of what the worst possible film would be like, dismantle that notion and reconstruct it in the hideous form of something like – ooh, just for example – Curse of the Puppet Master. Every so often I see some shockingly bad Z-movie and think, ‘Surely this is the grossest crime against celluloid ever devised by mortal man?’ But every time, my eyes are opened to some new monstrosity. Make no mistake, this film is utter arse-candles. Even the tagline – ‘The Human Experiment’ – has less imagination than a man struggling to complete a one-piece jigsaw. So we’ve come up with our own: ‘If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close to Renting It.’”Tom Mayo
KIG COBRA (1998)
Director: David Hillenbrand
Reviewed: SFX#62
“King Cobra explores the concept of ‘direct to video’ with astonishing courage – it seems to have burst, fully formed, from a boil of creative ineptitude, bypassing the customary middle men (distributors, packagers, the YTS Tarantino wannabe behind the counter at Blockbuster) to violate the screaming maw of your VCR. This is the pitch: It’s Jaws, but with a snake. A big snake. We know it’s Jaws because horny, near-nude teens get munched on by a beastie with rather alarming teeth while a nasty scheming small-town mayor refuses to call off some festival or other (the clot). We can never be certain whether it’s a big snake, however, as the movie’s paltry budget can only accommodate a tail and a head, hiding the rest of the terrifying serpent behind handy outcrops of rock.” Nick Setchfield
THE WRAITH (1986)
Director: Mike Marvin
Reviewed: SFX#62
“The Wraith is one of those movies that would never get a release over here if the distributors couldn’t market the fact that it features an early appearance by Twin Peaks lust object Sherilyn Fenn. So, yes, she does give her mammaries an airing, in case that’s enough to make you buy it. But be warned, she only does it once and you have to put up with another 88 minutes of blandly directed guff.” Dave Golder
THE HAUNTING (1999)
Director: Jan De Bont
Reviewed: SFX#63
“Not one of the worst films ever made, but definitely one of the most pointless.” Dave Golder
THE SENTINEL (1977)
Director: Michael Winner
Reviewed: SFX#63
“Yes, it’s true. Michael Winner was once a director, just like he says he was, and not just a name-dropping socialite who verbally drubs fashionable eateries in Soho. Looking at this film explains why he dropped out of directing and went into scoffing for a living.” Guy Haley
DRACULA AD 1972 (1974)
Director: Alan Gibson
Reviewed: SFX#65
“Impossible to watch without expecting Austin Powers to appear round the corner.” MJ Simpson
SPACE PRECINCT (1995)
Director: Various
Reviewed: SFX#67
“An uncomfortable marriage between the Keystone Cops and Pigs in Space.” Steven Raynes
BEOWULF (1999)
Director: Graham Baker
Reviewed: SFX#71
“There’s a moment in Beowulf when Christopher Lambert declares with as much dull-eyed moodiness as he can muster, ‘I’m trapped between two worlds.’ ‘No,’ you bark at the screen. ‘You’re trapped on location in the wind-blown, arse-end of Romania, on the twelve-trillionth day of a damp, disheartening shoot, watching your career not so much die as trot towards the white light to embrace long-lost pets and loved ones.” Nick Setchfield
MISSION TO MARS (2000)
Director: Brian de Palma
Reviewed: SFX#71
“If Irwin Allen weren’t dead, you’d swear he must have had something to do with it.” Dave Golder
JACK FROST (1999)
Director: Troy Miller
Reviewed: SFX#72
A film that’s designed to melt your heart but does a better job melting your brain.” Dominic Powers
BICENTENNIAL MAN (1999)
Director: Chris Columbus
Reviewed: SFX#74
“At last, the perfect recipe for disaster. Take two hours of ripe corn, mix with cheese and smother in saccharine. If that doesn’t make you feel sick you may just have the stomach for Bicentennial Man.” Dave Golder
ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST (1979)
Director: Marino Girolami
Reviewed: SFX#75
“About as much fun as watching an autopsy video.” Ian Berriman
HIGHLANDER ENDGAME (2000)
Director: Douglas Aarniokoski
Reviewed: SFX#78
“When Christopher Lambert fights it’s like watching your dad dance at a party.” Jayne Nelson
LITTLE NICKY (2000)
Director: Steven Brill
Reviewed: SFX#78
“The plot isn’t really worth recounting. Devil, idiot son, Earth, pissing dog, save the world, stupidity wins the day, blah.” Tom Mayo
DRACULA 2001 (2001)
Director: Patrick Lussier
Reviewed: SFX#79
“As the rock soundtrack pumps away across a New Orleans populated by rentagoths, you half expect Meatloaf – in full vampire make-up – to step out of a side alley and give us a chorus of “I Would Do Anything for Cash (But I Wouldn’t Appear In This Schlock for Any Other Reason)”. Jonathan Norton
BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)
Director: Roger Christian
Reviewed: SFX#80
“First the good news. There were fears that, with its L Ron Hubbard heritage, Battlefield Earth would partly serve as a recruitment drive for the Church of Scientology. It doesn’t. Then again, maybe it does. It fails so miserably on just about every other level, there’s no reason to assume it would succeed as a propaganda vehicle either.” Dave Golder
TOMB RAIDER (2001)
Director: Simon West
Reviewed: SFX#81
“A cast more concerned with maintaining their accents than giving anything resembling a performance doesn’t help. Even Lara’s breasts act unconvincingly, perhaps because they’re fake.” Rebecca Levene
PSI FACTOR (1998)
Director: Various
Reviewed: SFX#83
“Calling Psi Factor X-Files-Lite doesn’t quite do it enough injustice.” Dave Golder
CONFESSIONS OF A TRICK BABY (1999)
Director: Matthew Bright
Reviewed: SFX#86
“It’s as exciting and appropriate as a greetings card depicting images from a post-mortem.” Guy Haley
MERLIN: THE RETURN (1999)
Director: Paul Matthews
Reviewed: SFX#88
“Rik Mayall’s hair acts him off the screen.” Meg Wilde
ROBOCOP 3 (1993)
Director: Fred Dekker
Reviewed: SFX#88
“It’s best to avoid RoboCop 3 altogether. Peter Weller certainly did.” Dave Golder
ROLLERBALL (2002)
Director: John McTiernan
Reviewed: SFX#92
“‘Reimagining’ is a Hollywood buzzword of late. Let us now coin the word ‘de-imagining’.” Nick Setchfield
INVINCIBLE (2001)
Director: Jefery Levy
Reviewed: SFX#93
“The suspicion begins to grow that all the flashing lights and rapid cutting are designed to obscure the fact that the actors are really rubbish at kung fu.” Ian Berriman
PLUTO NASH (2002)
Director: Ron Underwood
Reviewed: SFX#96
“Describing the movie’s 2084 setting, the publicity notes say that, ‘Amazingly, life isn’t all that different from the way we live now!’ That’s not amazing. That’s lazy.” Eddie Robson
GABRIEL AND ME (2001)
Director: Udayan Prasad
Reviewed: SFX#96
“As the eponymous Angel Gabriel, Billy Connolly brings all the passion and conviction that recently won him such universal acclaim in the Lotto ads.” Pat Reid
SCOOBY-DOO (2002)
Director: Raja Gosnell
Reviewed: SFX#99
“This takes an iffy concept and comprehensively reboots it into a very bad idea. Rhollocks.” Nick Setchfield
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