The late Lord Blake, attacking the unenviable task of evaluating Benjamin Disraeli’s skill as a novelist, recalled the Oxford concept of the “alpha/gamma” grade. Long story short, a reviewer would award this grade when confronted with brilliance mixed with baffling incompetence.

That’s how I’m feeling about Millennium right now. The concept has similarities to the inferior Freejack (though it’s been years since I watched that): humans from the 30th century are retrieving people from airline crashes right before they die, leaving the flow of history uninterrupted. Our main characters are an NTSB investigator (Kris Kristofferson), an operative from the 30th century (Cheryl Ladd), and a physicist (Daniel J. Travanti, best known as Captain Furillo from Hill Street Blues).

Things are bad in the 30th century. The environment is severely degraded and all of humanity is barren. The people of the 30th century intend to use time travel to take people from the past who won’t be missed and then send them into a far future where the Earth is (presumably) more livable. That hangs together as far as that goes but I would think that a society which has mastered time travel could also master space travel and drop a colony somewhere. Pale blue dot and all that.

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This concludes a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

We spent the whole day chasing a path to Chicago. All the improvisations between 10:20 AM and 4:35 PM were dedicated to catching the Capitol Limited, our best option. It eluded us. If we’d known that at 10:20, we’d have said the hell with it, canceled the outbound trip, booked Southwest out of Newark, and called it a day. Of course, you can’t know that. By the time we knew that the Northeast Regional (train 125) was delayed we were already in Metropark. This wasn’t avoidable. Also, we wouldn’t have been eligible for a full refund if we’d bailed out that early.

Next year it’s likely that we’ll fly out and take the train back. There’s more flexibility in flying out the day before; even if things go bad there are more options. Another possibility is the westbound Pennsylvanian. It departs New York around 10:40 AM and arrives in Pittsburgh at 8 PM. It has a guaranteed connection with the Capitol Limited, which arrives a minute before midnight. Four hours to kill in Pittsburgh isn’t awesome, but it’s time enough for a decent meal downtown.

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The B-movie credentials for Lifeforce are staggering. Director? Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist). Producers? Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the venerable Cannon Films, producers of countless first-run B-grade action flicks (a genre that doesn’t quite exist any more). “A Golan-Globus Production” always produces a lusty cheer at B-Fest. Dan O’Bannon (Alien) wrote the script. Henry Mancini does the score. It’s adapted from a book titled Space Vampires. Throw in Patrick Stewart, Peter Firth (Hunt for Red October), Michael Gothard (For Your Eyes Only) and you’ve got actors to work with.  Does it deliver?

In a word–yes. This is such an ’80s film: grand sets, bad hair, self-important people standing around pontificating, gratuitous (if tasteful) nudity, overuse of electrical effects. I liked it. The creature effects are excellent throughout. There’s a bunch of creepy weird stuff too. It’s not overwritten nor does it lag. It also gets credit for the proper use of “desiccated” in a feature film. Patrick Stewart has a limited role but he sells it as only he can.

It’s weird watching and realizing there was serious money involved. Reportedly Cannon put up $25 million–considerable for 1985–and got about half of it back at the box office. The money’s on the screen–the destruction of London in the third act is way more convincing than you’d expect–but the story is goofy. It’s something of a soul-collection plot, but on a totally different scale from Dark Side of the Moon or Ghost Ship, and definitely superior to the former.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

If you’re just joining I recommend reading the older posts first, so that you know how things got to this state. We’re now racing to BWI on a MARC commuter train, chasing the last Southwest flight to Chicago.

Jammed into a seat on a MARC bi-level surrounded by commuters isn’t the best way to purchase plane tickets, but sometimes life is shit. MARC delivered us to the BWI station a little before 6:00 PM, and we hopped the shuttle bus to the airport. Check-in and security went smoothly enough and after locating our gate we found a place to eat dinner while I booked a hotel in Chicago for the night. The flight would land at 9:25 and we’d be at the hotel before 11.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

In yesterday’s episode we were sitting in the cold at Metropark in Iselin, New Jersey, awaiting a late Northeast Regional (train 125), our connection to the Capitol Limited in Washington, D.C.

125 arrives at 1:40 PM, one hour and 35 minutes late. Its projected arrival in DC is 4:10, five minutes after the Capitol Limited departs. I’m not sanguine. Our chances hinge on 125 making up an unbelievable amount of time and/or Amtrak holding the Capitol Limited until we arrive.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

When you last left us, we had bailed out of a badly-delayed Trans-Bridge Lines bus at the Newark Airport with the intention of hopping a train down to Metropark to catch up our Amtrak Northeast Regional (train 125) coming down from New York.

This plan unraveled almost immediately. We arrived at the AirTrain station around 10:30 in a bit of a rush. Two New Jersey Transit trains were scheduled to reach Metropark ahead of 125. One departed at 11:00 AM, the other at 11:30. The second train would be cutting things a bit fine (~10 minutes). Newark advertises four-minute headways on the AirTrain, and it’s about a 10-minute trip from Terminal A to the train station.

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This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

I’m sitting on a bench at the Metropark train station in Iselin, New Jersey. It’s January 23. It’s very cold. I’m pondering how it came to this. Some form of cosmic retribution for the near-perfect runs on the Vermonter and Silver Star earlier in the month?

It started well enough, with Ken dropping us off at the Easton Bus Terminal a little before 8 AM. We planned to take the 8:10 Trans-Bridge Lines bus, which would deliver us to New York by 10:00, more than enough time to catch the 11:35 Northeast Regional (train 125) for Washington, D.C.

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Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts called “Planes, trains and automobiles,” playing homage to the classic John Hughes flick. The setting is our annual trip this past January to the Chicago area for B-Fest. Although at no time did our rental car burn down to the frame we encountered more than our fair share of problems before arriving on time for the festival. For the second straight year this was the plan:

• Trans-Bridge Lines bus from Easton to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal (PABT).
• Eighth Avenue Line subway down to Pennsylvania Station.
• Amtrak Northeast Regional to Washington, D.C.
• Amtrak Capitol Limited to Chicago.
• Rental car to Evanston, Illinois.

That’s not what eventually happened. Not even close. Stay tuned.

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Early on in the Avengers there’s a sequence where the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is interrogating some Russian mobsters. The scene is set in Russia. It opens with a freight train speeding past a warehouse. The freight train’s locomotive is painted in a black scheme with white stripes and markings. If you know your trains it’s very clearly a Norfolk Southern locomotive. NS engines aren’t found in Russia, but they’re found in Cleveland, where the scene was shot. Every time I watch that scene I think the interrogation is taking place in the United States, not Russia, because of that contextual hint.

Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I have no problem with the Asgardians, or Helicarriers, or any of that other stuff. That’s all fantastical and it’s fine. An American train in Russia? That’s an actual error (“bug”, if you like) and it pulls me out of the movie.

Below is erroneous from beginning to end. The more you know about World War II, specifically submarine warfare, the less you will enjoy it. Beyond factual errors there are some weird tone problems that make it difficult to watch at times. David Twohy (best known for Pitch Black and the Riddick movies) directed. Despite a fair number of recognizable performers (Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Dexter Fletcher, Jason Flemyng, Zach Galifianakis) most of the performances are middling to forgettable. This is one of the worst movies I’ve ever watched, and that’s saying something.

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Ghost Ship belongs to the venerable tradition of haunted ship movie (Alien being the best example), with the added twist that Satanic forces are specifically identified as the malefactors. Other examples are Dark Side of the Moon and the not-quite-brilliant Event Horizon. This genre, broadly, has a few conventions:

1. The protagonists are on a ship, either on a sea or in space, and cannot reasonably leave it.
2. In the course of the movie they encounter a second ship of unknown provenance.
3. An unknown evil entity boards from that ship, and the crew starts dying one-by-one.

In Ghost Ship, our protagonists are the crew of an oceangoing salvage tug who stumble upon an Andrea Doria-like ocean liner in the Bering Strait. It’s been lost for fifty years, and there’s a secret cargo which promises a big payday. There’s also a deadly secret and…pretty soon people are dropping like flies.

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