Movies

Saturn 3 (1980), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) Two elaborate Space Fantasies which show the perils of trying to look cool. In Saturn 3 there's a guy, a girl, a mad scientist and a killer robot in a cave, but it's a really cool looking cave, and the robot is one of those very slow monsters you can't get away from that has obvious extreme vulnerabilities - its vital fluids are pumped through transparent plastic tubing looping around its body which it could just snag on a bracket and that would be it, but nobody thinks of grabbing a handful and pulling. Kirk Douglas was a great actor, and I have seen him do it many times, but he's got nothing to work with here. Ernest Borgnine could have done this. Farrah Fawcett as the girl seems to be working on her appropriate level though. In The Chronicles of Riddick there is this really cool guy who wears sunglasses and every line he says is "a line," like "remember when he said that 'line' and then punched that guy?" only everybody's lines are "lines" like they said "what would be the COOLEST thing they could say here?" - for EVERY line. Everything about it is about what would be the coolest thing that could happen, the coolest shot to shoot of it, the coolest armor or giant building, and it goes around the circle and comes back to where you started and crosses over the line and becomes Stupid again. It was written and directed by the same guy so I have to assume it came out the way he wanted it, but it seems more like they found an old bike gang revenge script they could get cheap and just puked money on it, then hired a lighting crew and dialog coach from a TV soap opera to make everything seem kind of cheap. At one point I thought "It's good that all those scenic artists and construction people got so much work from this." Tip - spend some money on a writer. 4/10 and 3/10 respectively.