This was a strange one. I really wanted to like this movie - Peter O'Toole in his greasy perverse professor mode (trying to clone his late wife!), Vincent Spano as his fresh-faced assistant, Mariel Hemingway as the strong-minded young lady with her heart set on the professor, Virginia Madsen as the fellow college student that Spano falls hard for.
But nothing really works here. O'Toole comes across like a huge arrogant jerk, no better than the "villain" of the movie (David Ogden Stiers!). Spano is way over the top, especially in the coma scene. Hemingway is the real light of the film, she's fantastic, but she's too little in it and her motivations make no sense. Madsen is also a nice grounding force, but the movie tries its best to kill her off! Ugh.
It's not all that funny, the clone-my-dead-wife plot is nonsensical and goes nowhere, and the relationships all feel very artificial and forced. It's like an acting exercise. Also, the title is meaningless: nothing gets created. This is interesting, but hard to recommend.
By contract, I hated this trash. Poor Pierce Brosnan, how in hell did he get roped into this? The plot is interesting: anthropology professor new to LA discovers a group of wandering Inuit spirits who are attracted to violence. But once they know he knows, they come to claim him. In his dying breath, he somehow transfers all his memories to a young doctor. She is burdened with two sets of memories and ends up commiserating with the anthropologist's wife. Or something.
The interesting portion revolves around the nomadic evil spirits, who don't show up on film, and who cause maximum chaos everywhere they travel. They are interesting but the film does little to nothing with them. Brosnan is given absolutely nothing to do and no reason to do it - his sudden obsession with the spirits makes no sense in the context of the movie and infuriates the viewer. The leather punks are supposed to be menacing, but they're comical. The movie ... is terrible.
The one interesting angle here is that it's tremendously atmospheric, and that's entirely the product of director John McTiernan, who also made Predator (!) and Die Hard (!!). He does what he can, I guess, but this one was doomed from the start. Avoid.
Wow - John Stamos's first film! And you can tell - he is flat as a board from start to finish. Zero charisma. Instead, this movie belongs to Vanity - she is mysterious, tough, interesting, and worth watching. It's too bad this movie wasn't smarter or funnier and gave her something meaningful to say or do.
Also worth watching is Gene Simmons as a hermaphroditic villain named - I kid you not - Velvet Von Ragnar. He is so far over the top in every scene, it's hard not to like him just a little. Otherwise, this is deeply subpar in every way. I would argue that Laser Mission is a tier above this.
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