Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

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Taken 2 (2012)

Liam Neeson is good in these Secret Service agent slash loving family guy roles, so its no wonder the Taken series got a sequel, but this is pretty rudimentary stuff with only headache-inducing, not thrilling, action sequences (so frenetically filmed you can only give up caring what is happening) and more than excusable amounts of idiocy as the heroic American family do things like let off hand grenades across Istanbul as a means of triangulating their location, and plotting thin and often discombobulating with one character left unconscious on a concrete floor behind enemy lines for a long stretch but who is in a later scene is flippantly described as "Okay" - and, anyway, it is surely not a good sign in these kinds of movies if you find yourself not caring much if the family survive or not.

★★☆☆☆

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X-men: The Last Stand (2006)

The third installment of the X-men series dutifully upholds the superhero filmmaking law which states a third installment superhero movie must be so unrestrained it collapses from its own bombast.

★★☆☆☆

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