The Relic (1997)

It starts like a tongue-in-cheek episode of Law & Order with Tom Sizemore's suited cop joining forces with Linda Hunt's museum director and Penelope Ann Miller's evolutionary biologist to investigate grisly urban deaths, and for as long as the investigation lasts, it is fun 90s horror nostalgia full of sassy lines and smirks, but the second half - once the hideous reptilian monster from South America is revealed - plays out in the near-total darkness of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History's afterhours, and it doesn't matter how many times Penelope Ann Miller's biologist is able to find time to put her hair up and don glasses at a computer, the results of her scans of Brazilian leaf eggs - revealing a dizzying confluence of genetics, South American mythology, and something about hypothalami and DNA and a "Kothoga" - never help and merely drag out to overlong the shadowy goings-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Striking Distance (1993)

With 25 minutes to go, Bruce Willis' Detective Tom Hardy casually drops that he was closely connected with each of the three female victims of the serial killer he is hunting, a detail you'd think even the most dejected, alcoholic cop traumatised by his partner's and his father's deaths might have mentioned sooner (and even if he suspects the killer of all these people is someone on the force), but this wooden police procedural, almost so bad it's good, is more about cramming in the clichés, not about clever plotting, so Tommy's new partner, a woman he remains unkind to until she offers sex, is the next to be kidnapped, and a distinctly uninteresting denouement ensues that suggests ultimately that the connection Hardy had with the victims was a passing coincidence afterall.

★★☆☆☆

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