'Alien: Romulus' spews acid on new faces

    

  The events in Alien: Romulus occur between the time of the original Ridley Scott’s Alien and Aliens, James Cameron's follow-up. That makes Romulus both a sequel and a prequel, or, a midquel or interquel if you want to get technical about it.

  Whatever you choose to call this eighth installment, Alien: Romulus brings a younger cast headed by Cailee Spaeny into the mix while reviving the movie's main attraction: hideous, acid-spewing creatures that can grow inside humans.

   Director Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don't Breathe) provides plenty of jolts, although he can't entirely reinvigorate the basic Alien formula: Monstrous creatures knock off humans in confined corridors that are often sealed by locked doors. You might call this “hatch-and-latch” cinema.

   Adjustments have been made with the addition of an artificially created person named Andy (David Johnsson) and the presence of Rook,  a mangled droid that looks and sounds like the late Ian Holm, who played Ash in the first installment. And, yes, Rook makes for a creepy self-referential addition.

    In this version, dribbles of emotion trickle into the story from the relationship between Andy and Rain; she regards the child-like android as a brother. About midway through, a change in Andy's programming turns his personality from benign to rentless, a shift Johnsson makes the most of.

   Romulus gets a considerable boost from the boiler-room aesthetic that began with the original, which delivered a welcome counterpunch to sleek futuristic space operas.

    Space remains a source of minerals. The movie opens in the Jackson Mining Colony, home to scores of grizzled workers. The company that runs the place treats its employees like indentured servants.

   The story picks up when Tyler (Archie Renaux) invites Rain to join him on a rogue mission to salvage spare parts from an abandoned space station that's divided into two sections, Romulus and Remus. The group wants to escape the mining life for a freer part of the universe. Rain hopes to flee the darkness and see the sun.

  A corporation (evil, of course) had been conducting genetic experiments in the Romulus part of the station. If you don't know why all the station's residents are dead, you've never seen an Alien movie.

   Oh yeah, one space traveler (Spike Fearn) hates synthetics, the movie's term for droids; another is pregnant (Isabela Yolanda Moner), allowing for the appearance of a grotesque ... 

   Never mind. No sense spoiling Alvarez's finale, although you may see it coming.

   The proliferation of alien monsters effectively upgrades opportunities for tension. Alvarez has emphasized that the actors  mostly worked with animatronics or puppets rather than computer-generated effects. I suppose that’s another virtue.

    Slime and gore aside, corporate exploitation seems like a worn-out theme. Moreover, the movie's fresh faces, bizarre genetic twists, and strong atmospherics only carry Romulus so far -- better than some recent Alien movies, but not as good as first two.

    And, look, the previous Alien movies haven't left much unsaid.

    As for the big reveal during the movie's concluding battle, I chuckled. I don't think that was the response the movie was looking for.

The moral: Be careful who you rob

Don't Breathe is effective, but not without some of the baggage of contemporary horror.

I'm generally of two minds about most contemporary horror. On one hand, it's easy to admire the extreme efficiency and imaginative daring that's required to freshen a well-worn genre with brutal, new twists.

On the other hand, I'm usually wary about the degrading violence that can crop up in such endeavors, and I often find myself wondering why I'm being asked to watch characters who are being terrorized in obviously twisted ways.

The new movie, Don't Breathe, may be more of a thriller than a display of gory horror, but it's the latest example of a movie that struck both nerves with me.

The good news: Director Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead) has made a movie that boasts imaginative twists (the perpetrators of a crime become victims) while setting off a chain reaction of taut suspense.

The premise: Three would-be burglars encounter a fierce homeowner, a blinded Iraq war veteran who has some $300,000 hidden away in his Detroit home. The money is a payout the man won when his only daughter was killed in an automobile accident.

The trio of robbers (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) have been invading homes with some degree of success because Minnette's Alex has a father who works for a security company. Alex knows when homes will be vacant and how to stymie security systems.

As the three young people confront the blind vet (Stephen Lang), they're constantly trying not to run into him. They'll turn a corner, and he's there -- armed, dangerous and serious about killing these invaders. The creak of a floorboard can prove fatal. The ability to remain frozen becomes imperative.

To add additional flavor, Alvarez sets the movie on a street where all the houses but one are abandoned. Alvarez uses the worst parts of Detroit to set a tone. It's worth remembering that what's happened to some of Detroit's neighborhoods constitutes a real horror, one that Alvarez might have used to greater thematic advantage.

The three burglars are locked in the house by the veteran, who has a vicious Rottweiler and secrets that are best discovered in a theater. Let's just say, the basement (where else?) provides a stage for some disturbing sights.

The characters are given only rudimentary motivations, but Don't Breathe shouldn't (and won't) be confused with a character study. It's a thrill machine that wants to work an audience over -- and it does. We're locked in the house with the invaders and the infuriated veteran who's trying to get rid of them.

All well and good for those who like their suspense tainted with horror, particularly if it doesn't involve supernatural mumbo jumbo.

But then there's the sick part, which includes a wince-inducing scene involving a turkey baster. No, I'm not going to say more.

Put another way: Alvarez doesn't quite transcend the genre trappings he so gleefully embraces, but if you like this sort of thing, you'll find yourself in capable hands.

A gory (what else?) ' Evil Dead' remake

Everything feels amplified in this new edition of a 1981 cult favorite.
In 1981, director Sam Raimi made a small splash with a cultish horror movie called The Evil Dead. Raimi followed with a 1987 sequel that added more humor to what had become a landmark mix of shock, gore and murderous invention.

I'm not sure that The Evil Dead deserves to be enshrined in anyone's horror hall of fame, but it clearly demonstrated that Raimi -- who reportedly made the movie for a meager $50,000 -- had serious chops.

Raimi, of course, went on to enlarge his sphere of influence with several Spider Man movies and most recently with the commercially successful Oz the Great and Powerful.

Now comes another rendition of The Evil Dead with Raimi serving as one of the movie's producers. Directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Alvarez and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, this edition follows the basic arc of the original.

You know the drill: Five young people travel to a secluded but rundown cabin in the woods, where they begin to confront an unseen evil force that turns them into hideous zombies.

The special effects have been updated for the kind of maximum impact that technological advance and a larger budget allow. In an odd (and perhaps telling) way, this version of The Evil Dead isn't better than original: it's only louder, more amplified in every regard.

The unsuspecting need to know that The Evil Dead movies are designed to flood the screen with gore, which means they're not for the squeamish.

In the case of the new movie, we're talking about severed limbs, severed heads, geysers of spewed blood and copious projectile vomiting. There's more, of course, but I think I've given you "taste" enough to get the idea.

And let's be real here. Audiences who enjoy this kind of entertainment are prone to evaluating the level of gory creativity that the filmmakers are able to bring to their efforts. And when a chainsaw appears, the presumption is that you know the jagged history that links chainsaws to big-screen horror, that you'll smile to yourself about the way the movie is connecting to its big-screen horror lineage.

In general, the acting in this installment surpasses that of the original, although it should be noted that we're not talking about a high bar. It's worth a passing mention that Bruce Campbell, who starred in the original, joins Raimi in serving as one of the new movie's producers.

In this outing, Jane Levy plays Mia, the character whose drug addiction prompts her cohorts to gather at the cabin in the first place. They've all pledged to help Mia kick a long-time heroin habit.

Mia's brother (Shiloh Fernandez) emerges as the main character in this gruesome ensemble with Lou Taylor Pucci portraying Eric, the young man who discovers the book that contains the incantation that jump starts the gory proceedings. It's often said that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover. An exception might well be made in this case: The cover of this eerie book of the dead is made out of human skin.

Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore round out the cast, mostly in the role of victims.

The 2013 edition of The Evil Dead contains a fair sampling of the kind of obviously dumb behavior that allows audiences to feel superior to every character. An example: Everyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows that exposure to risk increases exponentially if one stupidly ventures into a basement. You don't necessarily want to be wandering around a fog-shrouded forest, either.

For the most part, Alvarez directs with more seriousness than humor, although certain parts of his gore fest drew laughter at a preview screening.

With some updating, a few alterations of plot and a modest bow to the Exorcist movies, the new Evil Dead resists becoming a precise rehash of the original, and its final encounter with evil is so luridly bloody, it demands to be watched with a certain stunned amazement.

Was there any reason to make another Evil Dead movie? Not really.

And that's the rub: This one's been amped-up, revamped and super-charged for contemporary tastes, but it can't possibly replicate the giddy (if certifiably guilty) sense of discovery created by its 1981 predecessor.

Put anther way, The Evil Dead is unredeemed and unashamed trash. One presumes its audience wouldn't want it any other way, but that may not be enough to kick it onto the plus side of the ledger.