The film is set in space and has a fast-paced, B-movie style that throws out various theories about what has happened to the missing crew members. It is often compared to the influential horror classic Alien, with its focus on practical effects, suspense, and the exploration of the darker aspects of human nature.

Pandorum stars Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid and was directed by Christian Alvart, a German filmmaker known for his work in the serial killer genre. The movie has been described as a “midnight movie in the guise of a big-budget special effects thrill ride” that offers a unique and unsettling take on the horror-in-space genre.

Review by Ben Dover:

Well, stick me in a hyper sleep chamber and call me Ripley! Just when I thought space horror couldn’t get any more claustrophobic, along comes “Pandorum” to prove that in space, not only can no one hear you scream, they can’t hear you scratching your head in confusion either.

Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star as two spacemen who wake up from hyper sleep with a worse case of brain fog than me after my afternoon nap. They’re on a ship big enough to house the population of Earth, yet it feels more cramped than my first apartment. Go figure.

The plot? It’s darker and more twisty than a rat’s intestines. Our amnesiac heroes stumble around in the dark, trying to figure out where they are, why they’re there, and who forgot to pay the electric bill. Meanwhile, they’re being hunted by what looks like the result of a three-way between Gollum, a xenomorph, and a pro wrestler.

Foster spends most of the movie sweating more than a snowman in July, while Quaid growls and scowls his way through his scenes like he’s constipated. The tension builds slower than my arthritic joints in winter, but when it hits, it hits harder than my ex-wife’s lawyer.

The set design is impressive, I’ll give ’em that. The ship looks like what would happen if H.R. Giger designed a haunted house. It’s all grimy corridors and creepy shadows, with more pipes than a organ factory. You half expect the Nostromo crew to pop around the corner at any moment.

The action, when it comes, is a frantic mess of shaky cam and quick cuts. It’s like trying to watch a kung fu fight in a strobe light after downing a bottle of Jack. But hey, at least it keeps you on your toes… if you can see what’s going on.

Now, let’s talk about those plot twists. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say this flick takes more turns than a politician’s promise. By the end, you’ll either be slack-jawed in awe or scratching your head so hard you’ll need a toupee.

Is “Pandorum” a masterpiece? Nah. Is it good sci-fi horror? Yeah, actually. It’s got more atmosphere than Mars and enough existential dread to make Jean-Paul Sartre reach for the Xanax. It’s the kind of movie that’ll have you checking under your bed for space mutants… and maybe questioning your own sanity a bit.

So, if you like your sci-fi with a heavy dose of “what the hell is going on?” and don’t mind feeling like you need a shower after watching, give “Pandorum” a spin. Just maybe keep the lights on. And a therapist on speed dial.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go reassure myself that my basement isn’t actually a spaceship and those noises are just the pipes. Probably.

Notes:

Gross worldwide:
$20,648,328

Budget
$33,000,000 (estimated)

Runtime: 1hour 48 minutes

Waking up in this world seems horrific.

Ben Foster insisted on eating live insects instead of using special F/X or dead ones

‘Pandorum’ is the first film in a proposed trilogy, but it is doubtful the sequels will ever see the light of day due to the first film’s low box-office performance.

The ships name is Elysium though the story shares nothing with 2013’s Elysium movie. The name ‘Elysium’, means a place or state of perfect happiness.

Pandorum supposedly refers to Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome. It is a psychotic break which takes place amongst ship’s captains when they become convinced a mission is cursed, essentially a descent into madness brought on by the pressures of life in space impinging on an individual’s sense of paranoia. This is a completely fictional condition.

Quotes:

Bower: It’s safe to wake up now.

Payton: I can’t remember any of my life before this flight began.

Critics Consensus:

Critics 29% Audience 49% Rotten Tomatoes

Despite some mixed reviews, Pandorum has developed a cult following among fans of science fiction and horror films set in the vastness of space. Its blend of practical effects, suspenseful atmosphere, and exploration of the darker aspects of human nature make it a standout entry in the genre…

Trailer:

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“After the Dark” is a science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by John Huddles. The film follows a philosophy class at an international school in Jakarta, Indonesia on the students’ last day before heading to college. The teacher runs a thought experiment where the class must decide who would survive an apocalyptic scenario and be allowed into a fallout shelter. 

The students are forced to make life-and-death decisions with serious consequences as they debate factors like profession, age, and gender in determining who gets to live. The film explores philosophical questions around morality, survival, and human nature as the thought experiment unfolds.

Review by Ben Dover:

Goodness gracious After the Dark, you terrible practice in artistic navel-gazing and stressed otherworldly posing. This supposed metaphor for creativity and reality’s nature hides behind serious sci-fi philosophies, only to fall down an endless rabbit hole of self-indulgent pseudo-intellectualism that borders on parody.

From the start, essayists/chiefs John Clusters and James Pordan stake their elevated reasonable desires – following a pessimistic educator who stirs in an apparently dystopian Jakarta and is compelled to fight with the dim limits between apparent reality and something…more. It’s a reasonably high-idea situation ready for rich, mind-twisting investigation of humanity’s existential condition.

Unfortunately, the execution is so hilariously ham-fisted and graceless that any potential philosophical reverberation is suffocated in a downpour of horrendously on-the-button representations and painfully harped on discourse. The teacher and his alternating band of characterless student originals don’t really take part in philosophical talk as they cudgel a large number of discourses of bloated, guilelessly formed ideas about the idea of truth, presence, and unrestrained choice. All of it is blunt anvil drops, a sign of astonishing self-importance.

The visuals are about as dull and one-dimensional as it is possible to get for a movie that is supposed to be about questioning the fabric of reality. The bombed-out Indonesian urban hellscape our “heroes” traverse appears to have been art directed by a remedial CGI trainee, with backgrounds that are distinctly reminiscent of poorly rendered late-90s video game cutscenes. So much for vivid world-working to highlight the story’s dangerous view of the material plane.

A career-worst performance by the normally competent Bonnie Wright as the embodiment of existential enlightenment or…something is at the center of this melancholy, thematically overwritten slog. The previous Ginny Weasley steps through many scenes frowning in profound alarm as though ceaselessly stricken by heartburn, her line conveyance so crude that it undermines any planned significance. Like such a huge amount in After the Dull, it signals fiercely at importance accomplishing nothing looking like cognizance.

The sheer, interminable tedium that it forces the audience to endure is the final, unforgivable sin of this aimless exercise in self-serious faux-philosophy. It never breaks away from its mind-numbing rinse-and-repeat cycle of protagonists waxing poetic on the ethics of reality before being entangled in yet another torturous scenario, despite its grandiose reflections on the malleability of time and consciousness. It’s an onanistic long distance race of persistence burdening narcissism that basically never appears to end.

The idea that ambition and empty philosophical posturing do not automatically constitute worthwhile art is truly exemplified by films like After the Dark. It collapses into an unintentionally comedic void of vapid inanity because it is so thoroughly enamored with its own delusions of grandeur. This is a misguided, dreary, and insufferable piece of self-satisfied cinematic tedium. A transcending landmark to exhaust scholarly masturbation.

The entire movie boils down to (spoiler) the professor is banging his A student (keep in mind this is a high school) do yourself a favor and skip this drivel that could have just been called Professor Murder and the X-Men school., I am still upset that I had to watch it.

Notes:

Gross worldwide
$1,770,376

Runtime: 1 hour 47 minutes
(editors. note: about 1 hour and 30 minutes to long.)

Quotes:

Kid to professor: This is just a pseudo Nazi science experiment.

Philosophy is to real life as masturbation is to sex.

Critics Consensus:

Critics 67% Audience 43% Rotten Tomatoes

After the Dark is an impressively smug and pseudo-intellectual piece of film making wrapped in a grade 11 intro to philosophy level of meaning and allegories…

Trailer:

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Review By Ben Dover:

Goodness The Nines, you egotistical, smug little riddle box of a film. The kind of self-indulgent whimsy and pseudo-intellectualism that gives avant-garde cinema a bad name is evident in this 2007 mind-bender that is impossible to resist. It claims to be a multi-layered, reality-bending investigation of identity, truth, and existence itself. However, in reality, it is nothing more than a derivative exercise in style that has absolutely no substance at all. It is a dizzying succession of trite metaphysical musings that appear to be profound revelations.

By dividing the increasingly complex narrative into a triptych of unabashedly high-concept vignettes, director John August makes his puckish intent abundantly clear from the very first frames. We begin in the world of a horror movie that looks like a haunted house and quickly transition into a glib behind-the-scenes satire of Hollywood vapidity before reaching its climax in a ridiculously obvious investigation of reality, truth, and omnipotence that looks like the Creator. All of it is very self-consciously meta and uses thematic gamesmanship in a wink-wink way.

August callously bludgeons viewers over the head with his Themes and Big Ideas, rather than using this unconventional structure to craft an organically mind-bending experience. Through each agonizingly prolonged conversation, one can practically hear his snickering condescension – “Get it? Get it? We are revealing the very nature of existence itself! Isn’t this delightfully intellectual? It’s like a first-year philosophy student who just discovered Descartes and can clearly smell his own farts of self-satisfaction in the movie.

Ryan Reynolds, who is hopelessly miscast and whose perpetually smirking charisma is woefully unsuited for the dramatically demanding mental gymnastics required, is at the center of this aimless wheel-spinning. The limitations of the former Van Wilder as a thespian consistently undermine any cultivated sense of narrative gravity or emotional resonance, and he struggles throughout the entirety of the film to sell the grand existential profundities.

Even though The Nines has a lot of annoying flaws and shows too much self-indulgence, there is still something admirable about its broad reach. It is a movie that dares to Dream Big by breaking with conventional storytelling and evoking significant psychosomatic epiphanies in its audience. Beyond reiterating a collection of tired meta clichés and uncooked brain teasers, it simply lacks the ability to carry out those lofty goals. a failure nonetheless despite its admirable failure of avant-garde boldness.

Release Notes:

The Nines was inspired by writer/director John August’s experiences on his TV series D.C.. He developed the script further over the years, partially making it a quasi-sequel to his short film God (also featuring Melissa McCarthy). The movie was shot over 22 days in LA and two days in New York.

Critics Consensus:

Critics 64% Audience 61% Rotten Tomatoes

The Nines doesn’t solidify as well as writer/director John August would hope for, Ryan Reynolds’s and Melissa McCarthy’s strong performances makes each of the film’s intriguing segments worth watching.

Trailer:

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Review By Ben Dover: Richard Kelly’s Magnum Opus of Unintelligible Madness

clears throat dramatically and adjusts monocle

When a filmmaker dares to craft a sprawling, post-apocalyptic neo-noir satire that tackles everything from parallel dimensions to the Apocalypse, the results are bound to be…polarizing, to say the least. And Richard Kelly’s 2006 cinematic behemoth Southland Tales is about as polarizing as they come – a dizzying, hyperactive assault on the senses that doubles as a mordant commentary on modern America. Or at least that’s what I think it’s trying to do. Frankly, the whole thing is so utterly bonkers, it’s a wonder it even got made in the first place.

Where does one even begin with this cinematic train wreck? The plot? Don’t make me laugh. Kelly seems to have crammed every conceivable sci-fi/conspiracy/musical/action/romantic subplot imaginable into a single film, resulting in a dizzying, often incoherent narrative that makes the most convoluted Christopher Nolan mindbender look like child’s play. Parallel universes, neo-Marxist political uprisings, pop star-turned-action hero protagonists – it’s all here, whirling together in a blender of pure, unfiltered madness.

And the cast…oh, the cast. Kelly has the gall to enlist the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Justin Timberlake to navigate this labyrinthine nightmare, and the results are about as graceful as a newborn giraffe taking its first steps. It’s as if the director instructed his actors to channel their inner ham at all times, resulting in a symphony of overacting that would make even the most ardent thespian wince.

But perhaps the most baffling aspect of Southland Tales is its visual aesthetic – a neon-drenched, hyper-stylized fever dream that marries the garish excess of Blade Runner with the gaudy kitsch of a low-budget music video. Kelly seems to have raided the costume department of a failed Broadway production of Barbarella, splashing the screen with a dizzying array of shiny metallic jumpsuits, goofy hairstyles, and eye-searingly bright colors. It’s as if Salvador Dalí and Michael Bay co-directed an acid trip.

In the end, Southland Tales stands as a towering monument to unbridled ambition run amok – a cinematic Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the disparate limbs of every genre imaginable. It’s a film that dares the audience to not only keep up with its manic, labyrinthine plotting but to also somehow find coherent meaning amidst the visual cacophony. And for those brave (or foolish) enough to accept the challenge, the results are equal parts exhilarating and utterly maddening.

Critics Consensus

Southland Tales, while offering an intriguing vision of the future, remains frustratingly incoherent and unpolished… 41% on RT.  Read critic reviews

Trailer:

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Let’s start with the plot, or lack thereof. Apparently, in the 17th century, five families with supernatural powers made a pact of silence. Wow, what a riveting premise! I can already feel the excitement building up… or not. It’s like they took a bunch of clichés, threw them into a blender, and hit the “predictable” button. Bravo, filmmakers, bravo.

Now, let’s talk about the characters. Oh boy, where do I even begin? We have a group of young men who belong to a New England supernatural legacy. But instead of being interesting or relatable, they come across as a bunch of pretty faces with zero depth. It’s like watching a group of mannequins trying to act their way through a movie. And don’t even get me started on the dialogue. It’s so cringe-worthy that I had to cover my ears to protect myself from the sheer awfulness of it all.

But hey, at least the special effects are impressive, right? Wrong! They’re so over-the-top and cheesy that I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. It’s like the filmmakers raided the bargain bin of visual effects and decided to use every single outdated trick in the book. I mean, come on, guys, it’s 2006, not 1986!

In conclusion, “The Covenant” is a daft and forgettable supernatural thriller that tries too hard to be cool and ends up being a laughable mess. It’s the kind of film that makes you question the state of modern cinema and wonder if there’s any hope left for humanity. But hey, if you’re in the mood for some unintentional comedy and want to witness a train wreck of a movie, go ahead and give it a watch. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And now, for your viewing pleasure (or pain), here are some links to the sources I used for my review:

• [Rotten Tomatoes – The Covenant](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/covenant)
• [IMDb – The Covenant](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475944/)
• [YouTube – The Covenant Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q0XgJ0h3fI)

Remember, folks, sometimes it’s better to skip a movie and save yourself the agony. Stay away from “The Covenant” unless you’re in dire need of a good laugh.

Below are AI images for The Covenant from Fotor

Trailer

Now, picture this: a desolate research station in Antarctica, a bunch of bearded scientists, and a shape-shifting alien entity that makes you question who’s who. And leading this frosty expedition is none other than a young, hot Kurt Russell with a beard so magnificent it deserves its own billing.

The plot is a masterclass in paranoia and suspense. The alien entity takes over the bodies of its victims, turning this frosty paradise into a twisted game of “Guess Who’s Human.” You can trust no one, and the tension is so thick you could cut it with a flamethrower. The isolation of the Antarctic setting adds an extra layer of dread—there’s no running to the neighbor’s house for help when the neighbor might be a shape-shifting nightmare.

Kurt Russell, our fearless hero, delivers a performance that’s both rugged and charismatic. His beard could probably survive an alien invasion on its own, but Russell’s no slouch either. The way he handles the escalating madness is like watching a masterclass in survival. It’s no wonder they say, “In beard we trust.”

The special effects by the legendary Rob Bottin are a visual feast of grotesque transformations and otherworldly horrors. The practical effects still hold up today, proving that sometimes rubber and goo can be more terrifying than pixels. The creature designs are nightmare-inducing, and each transformation scene is a gruesome work of art.

The dialogue is filled with that classic ’80s swagger, and the characters’ reactions to the unfolding horror are refreshingly genuine. No one cracks jokes or delivers cheesy one-liners; they’re too busy trying not to become alien chow. The tension is palpable, and the fear feels real.

In conclusion, “The Thing” is a frostbitten masterpiece that’s aged like a fine bottle of whiskey. It’s a horror experience that lingers in your mind long after the credits roll, and Kurt Russell’s beard deserves its own place in the horror hall of fame. If you haven’t experienced the chilling terror of “The Thing,” grab a blanket, turn down the lights, and prepare for a cinematic deep freeze that’ll leave you shivering with fear.

Above AI images created by AI Photo Generator ― Perchance