dannorder

I've always been an advocate that a significant part of rating a movie should be determining how well it succeeded at what it was trying to do. As a '90s adult comedy film, with the look of a straight to rental video tape, this actually did a good job trying to be exactly what it set out to be. A bunch of different scientists work on different experiments. There's a sexual hologram program, real X-Ray specs like in the comic book ads (where the clothes appear invisible), a mind control device and the main one, a transporter. And things really go nuts when one doctor decides to mix the experiments into one replicator. If a man gets zapped by the resulting machine, he changes sex. If the victim is already a woman, it makes them youthful. Oh, and, by the logic of adult comedies, it also makes it so if they have an orgasm, they will revert to a prior evolutionary state... in this case, an alligator humanoid (which they recognize at one point is not at all right but handwave it away). Oh, and if that alligator bites someone, they turn into a zombie, because why not? Some of the characters are paper thin, but some of the others are surprisingly well thought out, for the premises, anyway. I think there are six different topless women and quite a few that stay clothed. There's a bit more plot than is normal in movies like this, but it's a joke of a plot. If you want to watch hard science-fiction, it's of course it's not going to be good at that. But it has comedy action, characters you will root for or despise, and it occasionally treats the gender bender theme as something more than just eye candy. If this is a type of movie you want to see, it's a good version of what you're looking for.

Whenever a movie misses the mark, it's a cliche to blame the acting. Yes, exceptional acting can elevate bad writing. That's not the problem here. The acting (for the most part) is fine, they just could only elevate this dreck so far. The biggest problem with this film is that this has to be the least scary villain ever. No, not the RV. OK, yes, the RV is kind of the villain, but I mean the serial killer haunting the RV. Somebody, or multiple somebodies, made a horrible, horrible decision on this one. He's a guy in laughably bad clothing with long hair but a bald head, who, in his first appearance, is dancing and swaying around like a a drunken hippie uncle, and he really doesn't get much better than that. Even when he's doing sort of awful things, you just can't take him very seriously. A couple of his victims show up as ghosts at various points. They look pretty scary covered in blood and with their freaky eyes. But they just stand around and then disappear. By the same logic, the killer, who we learn was shot and killed, should be all covered in blood with one or more holes in various places. Nope. The plot never effectively communicates menace, which should have been easy with the varied deaths and the isolation. At most you occasionally are kind of shocked that they just offed a major character unceremoniously, but when the other characters don't have dialog that makes them seem like they even care, it's difficult for the viewer to work up any emotional investment. They are not particularly lovable guys you want to see survive, but they are not really bad guys either. It'd be cute to say that the RV itself is better written than these dweebs, but it's not written all that well either. It would have been easy to take any of them and written things so the audience actually cared. As far as the horror itself, there are a few effective scenes where they telegraph that something bad is going to happen soon, but even they aren't as effective as they could have been. Working with this kind of crazy premise, they really could have gone a dozen different ways: straight comedy, seriously bizarre oddity of nature that follows no rules, all too real serial killer doing psychotic things, melodramatic tearjerker drama with a weird horror backdrop, scary ghosts back from the dead doing frightening stuff (which is the default in these movies, really), man-vs-nature lost in the desert with added horror, and more. Instead they take a couple things from each, blend it up, and you get a nice glassful of slime. And then they actually decide to show a glass of slime, because.... well, why not? They're throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, but nothing does, there's tomato sauce everywhere... and, hey, now that's a scene too. Why? Who cares.

Everyone compares this to Totally Killer, which has a fairly similar lackluster plot but a bit more charm. Of course this started filming before that one, so it's not actually a rip off of a movie that ripped off other movies based on ones before that, it just feels like it. This one stars Madison Bailey as Lucy, a girl from the future whose entire life has been lived in the shadow of a sister killed before she was even born. (They explain later that the parents were so set on a replacement child that they got IVF treatments, which they really should have explained earlier.) Bailey is one of the film's few redeeming qualities. In the beginning, she is trudging through life with parents who are already dead inside and don't seem to care about her. They go to attend a totally implausible vigil for the sister's murder (more than two decades later, an out of the way barn is piled several feet high with photos and stuffed animals). Lucy wanders off and, as happens in these movies, finds a machine in the middle of nowhere and gets sent back in time. The cast of characters becomes a murder mystery, but there's so little characterization of most of them that they become non-entities. If you think about it later, some of what is going on is extremely troubling, but we're supposed to not really think about it (can't really explain that better without spoilers). Smart high school kids are also, of course, experts in the practical application of time travel. Despite that, a tech geek character is confused by the existence of smartphones, which first came out in the '90s and started becoming popular one or two years before the movie is set. At one point (in the trailer, so not a spoiler) the killer does a major case of teleportation, being knocked to the floor in a store in the mall and left there as the heroes run away at high speed, only for him to be waiting casually at the bottom of an escalator. I wondered if this was going to be explained as part of the plot, but no, it's just a major goof. Everyone just assumes the killer would only kill certain people in the correct places at specified times and is otherwise completely unconcerned about their personal safety the rest of the time, even when they see first hand that time is playing out a little differently this time. But, hey, it's a heart-warming story of sisters meeting each other for the first time and forging a familial bond, despite the fact that, as they even discuss, it could result in a paradox that destroys all of time and space. Good: Madison Bailey and Griffin Gluck. Bad: Everything else? Well, it's not bad, really. You just have to turn off your brain and go with the flow.