I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
This film has been included for two reasons; firstly, the horror genre is regarded as Speculative Fiction, and secondly because the Director is Danny Cannon , director of the Judge Dredd movie.This film is a great disappointment after IKWYDLS, and not just because of the absense of Buffy Gellar. Kevin Williamson wrote the vastly overrated Scream films as a parody of the terribly cliched slasher genre of films, and IKWYDLS was his serious [and vastly superior] attempt. This sequel, however, was not written by Williamson and is completely inferior to even the pathetic Scream flicks.
In other words, this is everything the Scream films mocked - and they were terrible in comparison to the original IKWYDLS.
The Faculty
This is a genuine Kevin Williamson film, unlike the terrible film reviewed above. Director Robert Rodriguez [ From Dusk Til Dawn ] has done an excellent job, in contrast to Mr Cannon's efforts above.The plot of the Faculty is simple; the staff of a small-town Texas school are taken over by mind-controlling alien parasites, and only a motley handful of pupils can can save the world. And in a stark contrast to other films of the genre, and a touch typical of Williamson's work, the script actually acknowledges that the mind-controlling parasites genre was begun by Robert A. Heinlein 's The Puppet Masters.
Beyond the excellent script and direction, the film is also to be commended for the magnificent cast. The school pupils are a bunch of typical Williamson teen actors, but with the exception of Clea DuVal [the invisible girl in Buffy ] and Elijah Wood [ Deep Impact ] none of them have been in anything this reviewer has seen before. Though the new girl, blonde and innocent Laura Harris, went on to feature in Dead Like Me , while Josh Hartnett is known for Halloween H20, Sin City .
The teachers are a different matter. The headmaster is Ms Crane from Cheers, her deputy is Piper Laurie [ Carrie, Twin Peaks] - but the other teachers are the real surprise. Yes, the old fogies on display include
This indeed illustrates the generation gap between the established [30-something] Hollywood actors and the up & coming [teenage!] stars currently clogging our video screens!
Cat-Girl Nuku-Nuku
This is not a hard-edged thriller in the mould of Akira and Ghost in the Shell - it has a more juvenile quality to it, which makes the tone of the film all the more disturbing.The story is simple. A top electronics designer in futuristic Tokyo leaves his wife [rich-bitch daughter of his employer] and job - and takes his son and a fembot with him. The ex-wife sends her henchwomen after them, to bring back ] her son. However, the fembot [now with the brain of a cat - don't ask] is there to save him from the evil feminazis!
The film is about a man's desire to raise his own son, but the anti-female element to it is almost more than this reviewer can bear. The child's mother is deemed to be a bad mother because she is a career-woman, not a housewife - she has servants cook and clean for her, and refused to raise the child in a traditional Japanese family. Yes, in typical self-serving Japanese style the manga-makers have attempted to foist their Nippon culture on the world.
However, there is an uplifting element to this piece. The dubbing into English used the talents of a variety of different-accented actors, and the humourous side to the show is greatly enhanced by the fact that one of the main characters is apparently a Scouser!