With a cast that includes someone from The Enterprise (Linda Park who played Ensign Hoshi Sato), someone from The Next Generation (Marina Sirtis looking like a dimestore manikin under all that make-up), Star Trek: Voyager (Tucker Smallwood was Species 8472 on Voyager & a Zindi on Enterprise), the target audience for Spectres (2004) would seem to be fans of television sci-fi.

But the film is so tame it could've been produced for the PAX channel.

Marina Sirtis is a grating actress in a grating role & I've no idea how she can even get roles she's so gag-me. Some viewers surely must be thinking, "That old lady must have terrible back aches & seriously needs breast reduction surgery."

Lauren Birkell as the haunted daughter is much the best actor here, & it must've been strange for her if she realized she was much better than her terrible elders; still, the poor kid wasn't enough to save this dog.

The story has perhaps one point of semi-originality -- the idea of a multi-ghost haunting a place with all its past reincarnations. Seems like an interesting story really could have been made out of that.

Nothing that happens has even momentary suspense, & the mother/daughter relationship just completely misfires because Sirtis's performance is so uninteresting.


Just about as big in the turkey department is It Waits (2005) about a leathery winged Satan-like demon (looking a bit like a rubber action figure) harassing a woman in the woods.

Why it's got wings who can guess; it doesn't fly, as fluid wing-flapping was well beyond the skills of the CGI staff, which I assume was composed of one high school kid who offered to do the animation for free.

Danny (Cerina Vincent) & her boyfriend (Dominic Zamprogna) are supposedly All Alone in the middle of effing nowhere when trouble erupts. Even so, the script reaches with painful stretches for extra characters to get wacked & squirty. The film looks cheap, is badly acted, & written worse.

However, Cerina Vincent in the tightest possible t-shirt she could squeeze her tits into has a nice bod & acts tough enough that this film ought to fit really tidily into the "girls with guns" fetish arena for guys who use such films for some wacking of their own & who won't mind there's not much of a story to go with it.

"Danny" & her comic relief African Grey have a terrific time forest rangering & boozing it up & being morose. But Danny's gonna have to get her act together to survive the leathery-winged demon who escaped from the cave. Bad as that sounds, it's actually worse.

Turns out it originated as a cable telefilm, which doesn't invariably doom a film to stupidness, but for the Sci-Fi channel the odds certainly are stacked against intelligence. So instead of It Waits let's retitle this one It Blows.


I was likewise unimpressed byThe Others (2001). It was visually tepid & fuzzy, with a script more confused than mysterious.

A young mother (Nicole Kidman being especially dull) is raising two photosensitive children, a great excuse for "old dark house" cinematography.

For the bulk of the film it's a pretty standard haunted house movie, having at least one twist that should not be revealed, in case you actually want to waste your time seeing it.

Its couple of plot gimmicks work if no one told you about them in advance, & in a cinema environment that usually thinks of supernatural films as having to be either all-special-effects-no-stories extravaganzas, or slash-em-ups, The Others at least tries to be worthwhile, so I enjoyed it even if only moderately.

Still, it bewilders me anyone thinks it's actually a finely done film. At best it could be regarded as a pallid imitation of M. Night Shyamalan, & even he's pretty lame most of the time constructing moody illogical films reliant on the "surprise!" ending that are rarely at all surprising.


I first saw a sampling of Stephen King's Golden Years (1991) when it was newly a television series or mini-series. I never saw it in its entirety until it came out on dvd. I thought it just plain sucked bad, & made no bloody sense at the end -- & little enough sense at any point during the story.

It's about a geezerly lab worker (Keith Szarabajka) who gets soaked in chemicals during a lab experiment (rather like for the origin of comic book character The Flash) & in consequence begins day by day to slowly grow younger.

The government wants to experiment on him, the intended series being more a copy of The Fugitive that could've had him wandering the bye ways of America due to the one-armed man's crimes instead of a lab explosion.

It was deservedly cancelled before a climactic episide could be filmed. Six episodes were completed. In order to fabricate something for dvd, they just hastily grafted a stupid ending onto it to Ęget the damned thing over with, a fragmentary seventh episode. It utterly failed as an ending, & the episodes leading up to that ending were pretty damned tedious.

With a heroic effort to find anything to praise about it, I rather liked the performance by the mad scientist (Bill Raymond). It otherwise couldn't've been much worse if Stephen King had directed it himself.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl