Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)

When April O'Neil goes shopping for gifts at the local flea market, she happens to pick up a magical sceptre that transports her back to 17th century Japan.  I guess that's the kind of thing you can expect to happen when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles and their mutant rat sensei.

Fortunately, when your best friends are a bunch of teenage mutant ninja turtles, you can be pretty sure they will hurl themselves back in time to try and rescue you, even if that means throwing themselves into the middle of a civil war four hundred years in the past.

As a sop to hand-wringing over violence in "a kid's show", the second TMNT film jettisoned the grittier elements of the franchise in favour of slapstick hijinks, and promptly lost over 40% of the box office garnered by the first.  If your first thought is "maybe we should swing the tone back toward more serious and try to shore up the franchise", well you are clearly not a 1990s film executive from Golden Harvest, because their response was "let's just rush out another bit of schlock as cheaply as possible to milk the last dregs out of something that's obviously run its course".

This goes about as well as you can expect, by which I mean "not very".  The turtle costumes and fight choreography are obviously inferior to the prior films, and the plot and dialogue certainly aren't going to make up for any weaknesses on the technical front, because ... well, they're rubbish.  Unfunny slapstick and witless banter is the order of the day.

A waste of your time.

The Shield, Season 5 (2006)

Vic Mackey and his Strike Team have got away with a lot in their chequered careers, up to and including murder, but they are finally well and truly in the sights of Internal Affairs.  Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh is absolutely dedicated to the task of breaking down the team, revealing their corruption, and sending them to jail.  Ironically this is all happening just at the time that Vic & Co have decided to try and stay on the straight and narrow, but that's certainly not going to matter if someone finds all the skeletons that are already in their closets.

Just in case that wasn't enough to worry about, the team (and all the other officers at their precinct) have to deal with budget cuts and a new captain whose only interest is in filling a chair until he can max out his pension.

The Shield is a show that builds on what has happened before, without labouring the point too heavily with exposition.  Characters develop and evolve over time, and what they've done stays with them and impacts their own perspectives and the opinions of those around them.  It's a solid show, and stronger in season five than it was in season one.  Definitely worth a look if you're in the market for some not exactly "white hat" cop show action.

Tangled (2010)

An old woman named Gothel jealously conceals a magic flower that allows her to restore herself to youth.  Due to an accident, however, the flower is discovered and used to heal the Queen, whose pregnancy has hit life-threatening complications.

When Gothel discovers that the Queen's daughter now has the same magic power as the flower - though only in her hair, and only if it is never cut - so she abducts young (Rapunzel, of course), locks her in a hidden tower, and raises the child as her own.

18 years later, the King and Queen still mourn their child, and young Rapunzel is going a bit stir crazy being locked up all the time.  Which is when devil-may-care rogue Flynn Rider stumbles into the situation and - much to his initial chagrin - finds himself acting as tour guide for Rapunzel while dodging both the king's guards and his own former colleagues.  Shenanigans, as they say, ensue.

Tangled is a fine animated film, with plenty of funny moments (often courtesy of animal characters Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse) for both young and old.  You might possibly pick a small bone or two with exactly how the happy ending comes about, but it's a pretty minor thing.

I give this 95% of a Frozen, which is pretty high praise indeed.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Season 2 (1981)

Season one of Buck Rogers featured the titular 20th Century hero waking up five hundred years in the future and then helping to protect the Earth from menaces both human and alien, with the help of a diminutive robot named Twiki (and also Colonel Wilma Deering, but as I mentioned in my review, poor Erin Gray seemed to get shuffled out of the limelight rather a lot).  It was amiable light entertainment in the form of an episodic science fiction TV show.

I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but season two jettisons series creator Glen A Larson at the same time as it pillages his earlier Battlestar Galactica for ideas.  Buck, Twiki and Wilma are now crew members aboard a space ship, which is venturing out in search of Earth's lost colonies (in Galactica, the survivors of the "12 colonies" were looking for Earth) and running into all kinds of myth-inspired weirdness like satyrs (Galactica also drew heavily on such themes).  Really all that's missing is a race of implacable robotic enemies.

Alas, this change of direction doesn't gel at all, and is accompanied by some truly dreadful scripts.  The season kicks off with two tiresomely drawn out and tedious two-parters, and while none of the remaining episodes are anywhere near as dull as those ones, they're frequently very silly in their efforts to be 'more serious' than season one.  It's easy to see why ratings plummeted and the show was cancelled.

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

Pest exterminator Alex Mathis finds himself in hospital after a neurotic customer gets him bitten by a venomous spider.  Alex is a glass half full kind of guy, but he's also got an empty wallet. So when the hospital mortician reports that something that "looked like a spider, except it was too big" just bit him, Alex volunteers for a little quid pro quo action.  He'll get rid of the critter in exchange for them writing off his bill.

As you can tell from the image above, Alex just took on a much bigger job than he thinks.  The football-sized spider he's initially chasing is not at all an ordinary arachnid, and it's going to grow very big, very fast.

About twenty minutes into watching Big Ass Spider!, I had to take a moment to tweet my confusion over how well done it was.  I was expecting something of the level of an Asylum creature feature: and as much as I adore Gatoroid vs Mega-Python, I don't pretend it's well made.  Big Ass Spider!, however, seemed to be put together by people who actually cared about what they were doing.

As it turns out, the back half of this film doesn't quite hold up to the fun of that initial twenty minutes.  Pretty much as soon as the spider gets big enough to openly attack humans in large numbers, that's about all it does, which is a tad repetitive and takes away some of the charm.  Still, it's not a long film so it doesn't overstay its welcome.

If you're in the mood for a goofy bit of giant monster fun, you would do a lot worse.  I certainly have, many times!

Californication, Season 6 (2009)

Hank Moody is back for another season of misanthropy and self-destructive behaviour, this time teaming up an with equally narcissistic middle-aged rock star to produce a rock opera version of his novel "God Hates Us All".

Californication has always walked close to the line "this is just tacky" with its drug and sex and alcohol-fuelled plot points, and it stumbles way over that line in this, its sixth season, with painfully awful sub-plots involving Hank's best friend pretending to be gay for career advancement, and said friend's ex-wife falling into the orbit of a crazed and screeching "feminist" of the type that exists only in the deranged imaginings of Gamergators and other such troglodytes.

Things still could perhaps have been salvaged, to some extent at least, if the main plot was executed better.  Season five had a strong conclusion (it is currently, in fact, be my pick for "you should pretend this was the last episode"), and there was opportunity for something solid to come out of Hank's partnership with over-the-hill rocker Addison Fetch, with their parallel stories of being angry young men who've boozed and screwed their way into self-loathing decline in both career and personal life.  Alas, the show's much more interested in stunt casting Marilyn Manson and having ladies show us their bosoms than in doing anything interesting with this premise.

I really can't recommend this.

Star Blazers, Season 1 (1979)

Earth is attacked by the alien Gamilons. Humanity fights back, but Gamilon bombards the entire planet, forcing everyone on Earth underground. Radiation from the bombardment sinks ever deeper into the planet, and forecasts are that this will mean all life on Earth will be wiped out in one year.

At this darkest moment, Earth receives unexpected help: a message from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar, offering a device called "Cosmo DNA" which will remove the radiation. However, since Iscandar is 148,000 light years away, Starsha also sends plans for the experimental Wave Motion Engine that, when constructed, will help whoever can travel to Iscandar. It will be up to Earth's last surviving starship captain, and a small crew of volunteers, to convert an old WW2 battleship into a spaceship and brave the long voyage to Iscandar in pursuit of Earth's last hope for survival ...

Star Blazers (or at least, the Japanese animated show from which it was adapted) feels like it was probably an inspiration for the later Star Fleet / X-Bomber.  They even both have a comedy relief robot.  This feels like a rather more downbeat show overall, however.  There is considerably more bickering and tension between the human crew, and it goes to some surprisingly dark places at times.  Unfortunately, it's undermined by some awkward writing and some very awkward voice acting.  If your main goal is entertainment value, Star Fleet is a better bet; I'd say you should probably only check out Star Blazers if you're an anime aficionado, as it definitely was an important work within Japanese animation.

Note: This review is going up on Saturday bonus review because I plan to watch and review seasons 2 and 3, but I already watched my DVDs of season 1.

Lifeforce (1985)

1986. A joint US-UK space mission is approaching Halley's Comet to conduct a close inspection of the famous rock.  Imagine their surprise when they discover what appears to be an artificial object some 150 miles long within the vast coma that surrounds the comet itself.

Naturally, they investigate, discovering a derelict alien ship filled with dead, human-sized bat things and what appear to be three nude humans in crystal cases.  There are two males and a female, but you can rest assured that it isn't the males the camera spends all its time on.  The astronauts load one of the dead bat-things and the three "humans" into their own vessel and head back to Earth.

So far, so sleazy knock-off of Alien, and this does in fact have the same screenwriter as that 1979 classic: Dan O'Bannon.  O'Bannon also wrote Return of the Living Dead, and the echoes between that film and this one is even more apparent than the connection to the acid-blooded xenomorph's debut.

"Echoes of other, better films" is actually a recurrent theme in Lifeforce, which leaps between SF and horror sub-genres with the deft grace of a pub crawl participant seeking their twelfth watering hole of the night.  Aliens!  Vampires!  Gothic asylums!  Zombies!  Swirly whirly ghost powered nonsense!  It's all an utter mess, frankly.

Eureka, Season 3 (2008)

Being the location of the world's most advanced scientific think tank means that the town of Eureka has to deal with more than its fair share of "situations".  But neither the big scientific brainiacs who run the show, or the more everyday members of the sheriff's department that tries to keep them safe are prepared for their newest challenge: a corporate high flyer who has been brought in to drive efficiency and improve their financial bottom line.

Though even if they successfully navigate this unexpected and unwelcome newcomer, it's not like things are going to be all that quiet, what with Sheriff Carter's bohemian sister turning up, ancient Egyptian curses, and the prospect of visitors who are Not Of This Earth.

In short: it's more of the same for our quirky cast of Eureka favourites, and if you have been enjoying the show to date then you will almost certainly consider to do so.  The plot's aren't always the most deep, but there's a good blend of humour and drama, and the on screen talent have plenty of charm.

This season also abandons the previously long-running "artefact" storyline, which I can't say I am at all disappointed about.  It never much clicked for me and just seemed to be more or less one of those generic "oooh mysterious" macguffin plots that could never pay off on all its "oooh mystery" foreshadowing.  This season instead replaces that with a couple of much more concrete multi-episode arcs.  I approve!