:: Today's soundtrack:  A Perfect Circle "The Noose" ::

As mentioned before (Rant 22), when a movie is on the cable channel rotation, it gets pretty hard to ignore. So it came to be that I was unable to avoid watching, Ghosts of Mars.

For those of you who have not had the "pleasure", this film is sort of about a prison work camp on Mars where they mine. A crew opens up a shaft and out pours all these ghosts of the original inhabitants of Mars, who take little time in possessing everyone they can and force them to either self-mutilate or kill each other. I honestly don't know what John Carpenter was thinking at the time of making a pile of intestinal scrape such as this, I mean, I love Halloween and In the Mouth of Madness. The baddies I'm supposed to be scared of look like the Urakai at a KISS concert for crying out loud. And as I watch this poorly directed excuse for cinema, I come to the realization that films that take place in space should not try to pull off the horror genre. There are only 3 films that are the exception to this and those are Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon. If you aren't one of these movies, then I'm sorry you suck. Just look at some of these offenders:

Jason X: The prospect of a Six-Million Dollar Jason going on a killing spree looked promising, er, sort of. I think the whole film was just an excuse for a writer to include his personal fantasy of a semi-hot android sex-bot-turned-bad-ass-warrior babe. Let's face it, the Jason franchise had hit a low. "Ooooh, look it's Friday the Thirteenth, but in space! It's different!" Didn't they learn anything from Jason takes Manhattan that taking Jason out of Crystal Lake is risky business? And unless Freddy Krueger is there to liven it up, just don't do it?

Alien 3: Boy, did this film suck. In the first 10 minutes of this film immediately erase the satisfying ending that Aliens left us with and it goes further downhill from there. The dog-esque alien was kinda neat, but that's all it had going for it. Alien 4 was even better, and that says something.

Leprechaun in Space: Need I say more?

Not only are these movies exponentially bad, but they just aren't scary. I'm sorry, but they're not and I don't see what they were trying to prove with the outer space setting. Maybe it's just me though. Maybe I just have a hard time be frightened of something that takes place in a situation so far removed from any reality I'll know. Hmm, maybe that's it...

William (lost in time, and lost in space)