Before we get going on this one, it's time for some "boring life and times of the Lick Ness Monster" story hour. It's been three weeks since my last review. During that time, most of my spare moments were spent writing and refining a story for a podcast's horror fiction contest. This story, according to the contest's official rules, had to be original, previously unpublished, scary, and between three and four thousand words in length. Take one guess as to what my biggest hurdle in that equation was.
It wasn't coming up with an idea, or having the willpower to actually WRITE the damn thing. Nope. It was the LENGTH. In case you haven't noticed, I have a real problem cutting myself off and, you know, not being a boring, blubbering idiot. I fretted and fretted over that four thousand word limit, to the point where I had to make no less than six different sweeps through the story just to delete extraneous crap in order to shoehorn the entire plot in. As a result, the whole thing feels like a super sped-up version of what I was attempting to do, and I'll be very surprised if any of you see a story entitled "I Want to Die" (and it's just as life-affirming as that title lets on) in the quarterfinals of the "How Stuff Works" horror fiction contest. It didn't go too well.
But now I'm back in my element. It's apparent to everyone who has kinda-sorta followed my reviews that they've gone through a biggie-sizing over the years, starting off as four-five paragraphs of (crappy) gushing and eventually metamorphosizing into the picture-laden recaps that detail almost every nuance of the film in question that you know and loathe today. And that's just the way I like it.
So, here we go with Critters 4, where the Crites attack...IN SPACE! I find it somewhat disturbing that something like 85% of all modern horror franchises feature the inevitable "we're out of ideas, let's throw the villain(s) in space" entry. It was shot back-to-back with its predecessor, and it also has the return of Don "Fuckhead" Opper in the role of Charlie. You know, the original Gremlins movie had drunkard Murray Futterman as a supporting character and brought him back in a quasi-starring asskicker role in its sequel. But Murray Futterman was, you know, cool, and played by Dick freakin' Miller. How this guy managed to somehow get pidgeonholed into all four of these films, I'll never know.
Except that all four movies have either been produced or written by his older brother.
What else? The flick was directed by Rupert Harvey, co-writer of Critters 3 , and that's as deep as I'm digging into his filmography. And, as crappy as this movie is, it's got a pretty memorable cast. All of the Critters movies have had a knack for finding actors long before they became prominent - the first had Billy "jerkoff guy from Titanic" Zane, the second had...I dunno, Lin Shaye, and the third had LEONARDO DICAPRIO as a secondary hero and love interest to the main heroine. This one has Brad Dourif, a man who should be more than familiar to any casual horror fans watching this flick as the voice of Chucky and bit player in approximately 5,000 other horror films, and Angela Bassett, a hot tamale who would go on to be a pretty big star in the '90s, including an Oscar-nominated turn portraying Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It, as well as the vagina-fest [i]Waiting to Exhale[/i] and Wes Craven's [i]Vampire in Brooklyn[/i]. In this film, she has a completely out of nowhere nude scene where a guy stares at her while showering for about a minute straight in a sequence that winds up going completely nowhere. Yup. It's there.
THE MOVIE!!
If you'll recall, Critters 3 ended with Charlie finding and destroying all of the Crites terrorizing an apartment complex with the exception of two Crite eggs. In a somewhat bizarre twist ending, Charlie was contacted by Ug (Terrence Mann), his old bounty hunter friend, and told to load the eggs into an intergalactic space pod. Well, it's here where the non-action picks up, as Charlie - true to form - completely botches this simple task, loading the eggs but also somehow locking himself inside the vessel before it cryogenically freezes him and takes off. This guy's likability quotient hasn't gained any traction in the two years since the previous film.
Flash forward to the year 2045, where the pod is discovered by our group of primary characters. One thing I love about horror movies set in space is how they always - and I mean always - put together a team of astronauts who seem to completely detest each other. This movie is no different. The crew manning this salvage ship is comprised of space pirates who want to capture the pod to turn it in for a huge reward. Your lead douchebag is Rick (Anders Rove), who immediately identifies himself as an a-hole due to his unmistakable sleazy hairstyle. There's also a young teenage kid named Ethan (Paul Whitthorne, who kinda looks like Zachary Ty Bryan from Home Improvement), computer expert Al Bert (Dourif), second-in-command Bernie (Eric DaRe), and pilot Fran (Bassett). Of these, Ethan and Fran are the only ones who don't immediately stand out as future Crite food, although it's always fun to watch Dourif in action. No matter how bad or cheesy the movie, this dude always gives it his all. If you want a stronger endorsement, he actually managed to make Rob Zombie's Halloween movies watchable. I'm not sure there can be higher praise than that.
Anyway, it's here where we get a bit of back story. The Intergalactic Council from the first three films has now been dissolved, and in its place is Terracorp - a super-duper mega evil conglomerate whose CEO is, amazingly enough, Ug. He now goes by the name of "Counselor Tetra," and in a video message to our group of pirates tells them that he is prepared to offer them "triple salvage" for returning the pod to one of their waiting space stations. More importantly, his glorious mullet from the first three films is now gone. Rick's assholery rises to new levels here, as he attempts to hold out for more money, only for the rest of the crew to bring him to his senses.
Our heroes soon make it to the waiting Terracorp station, finding it abandoned and without half of its survival supplies. Druggie Bernie immediately wants to raid the station's pharmacy, while Fran goes off to the showers for the AFOREMENTIONED nude scene. I always enjoy being able to watch big stars in their formative stages and the things that they were once willing to do just to be in a movie, and it's no different here. To be fair, Angela Bassett had a pretty damn fine ass in 1992. Had I discovered this movie in my teenage years (and before internet porn), this scene would have gotten some steady airplay in my VHS.
And now for a long-winded LNM bitching interlude. A few years back, I saw a movie from the mid '80s entitled Star Crystal that stands today as THE single worst movie I have ever witnessed. Maybe someday, when I'm feeling really, REALLY bored and masochistic I'll watch it again and scribe a full Horror Movie Mayhem review, but alas, that day has not yet come. I mention this film because it featured a group of astronauts communicating with a ship's talking computer named Bernice in a never-ending series of dialogue that takes up pretty much half of the movie's running time. Apparently Rupert Harvey and his team of writers thought this was a really good plot device, because the Terracorp station has a voice-activated computer named Angela that Dourif repeatedly spars with, and while not quite as grating as the scenes from Star Crystal, they still come across as never-ending and pointless. For some trivia information, Angela (talking computer, not Bassett - it's confusing, I know, so this is the last I'll mention it) is inexplicably voiced by Martine Beswick, a two-time Bond girl who, as Thunderball sidekick Paula Caplan, ranks as one of my top ten hottest chicks in film history.
Life lesson for the day: it's awesome to be as cool as Sean Connery.
35 minutes in, and it's time for Critters 4 to start rolling (pun intended). Asshole Rick takes it upon himself to open the pod against the wishes of Terracorp, which means that we're once again blessed with the presence of Charlie (yay) for much of the movie's duration. Of course, the eggs have hatched by this point, and we get the first death of the movie, as Rick bites it at the hands of the newly-birthed baby Crites. General horror movie rule: if a character is played by an actor named Anders, he's probably not going to survive. In the process, Charlie saves the life of Ethan (whom Al had sent to the cargo bay to keep an eye on Rick), setting up a friendship that the writers intended to be similar to the Charlie-Brad dynamic from the first two films, but instead comes across ten times as moronic. After a sequence inside the ship's waste disposal tank (don't ask), all of our characters finally meet up, where Charlie is finally told that he has been floating around in space for 53 years and everyone he knew is dead.
Al and Ethan are able to hack into the ship's computer system and discover a handy-dandy video that gives us Terracorp's evil plot. We are shown the rapid development of a creature called a "cephaloid," which Terracorp plans to use to completely eradicate life forms from a target area in order to use as development properties. I'm always amused by some of the plots that screenwriters manage to dream up for corporations to use in films, and this is one of the best/worst I've seen. One would think that it would be much easier to simply buy properties that DIDN'T require mass genocide instead of spending the approximately ten trillion dollars in research and development for this particular project, but what do I know? Terracorp is bad. It's been established.
Hey, remember how earlier Bernie (whose Jean-Claude Van Damme style ponytail conveys his sliminess) wanted to get all sorts of Iron Sheik-style medicine inside the station's pharmacy? Well, we FINALLY get the payoff to this angle, as he swipes a keycard and enters the massive pill storehouse. Of course, he is immediately killed by the two Crites before he is able to do his best Lindsay Lohan impersonation. Moral lesson from Critters 4: don't be a goddamn pill popper. This sequence is also approved by CM Punk.
In the process of killing one of the two now fully-grown adult Crites (with a Colt .45, no less), Charlie manages to blow the holy hell out of their escape ship. Derp.
But alas, we've got one more villain to take care of - yup, it's Ug/Tetra, who is none too happy that his evil plan has been thwarted. Before he can do away with Ethan, however, Charlie makes his reappearance, blowing his old friend away with the antique Colt. And...that pretty much wraps it up, with Charlie, Fran and Ethan getting the "sole survivor" honors. They escape in Ug's ship and the station explodes, killing all of the onboard Crites. Since there aren't any more Critters movies, I'll take this as a pretty good inkling that the damn things are finally extinct.
Final word: Me no likey. Critters 4 is generally regarded as the least of the series, and for good reason - compared to its sibling films, it displays a severe lack in charm, scares, and even the Critters themselves. To be fair, it's always good to see Dourif in action, and he singlehandedly manages to make this movie a bit more than a total disaster, and it's always good to see a series like this actually END. If you're looking for good, cheesy fun, however, stick with the other movies in the franchise - they're all much more whimsical and good-spirited than this one. * 1/2 out of ****.
So ends the Critters series in the life of the Lick Ness Monster, and it's now time to start swimming for the next island on the horizon. I can already see the glow - almost as if there's a big pot of gold up ahead...
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