To feel affection for the grade-Z science-fiction films of the Fifties, especially as their descendants get ever more deluxe, is perfectly natural and no cause for shame. (A Not-Guilty Pleasure.) To set out in the 21st Century to make a grade-Z science-fiction film of the Fifties, purportedly shelved and now salvaged, is another matter. It is, from whichever end you choose to look at it, the height of unambition or else depth of ambition, striving for badness, winking at badness, absolving badness. Director R.W. Goodwin, a veteran of the X-Files series, does a decently good job of the badness, as well as a decently good job of suppressing his smirks over it. At feature length, the joke inevitably wears thin, but it can be unexpectedly plumped up again at a moment’s notice, as when, for example, the townsfolk and the invading monster come together at a screening of The Blob at the local bijou. The joke there, or at least the funny part of the joke, is not that the movie-within-the-movie mirrors the movie-without (a monster amok at a movie theater); the joke, rather, is the attractive notion that anyone ever would have been moved to scream out loud at a thing like The Blob. You still might be better off watching The Blob itself or one of its actual contemporaries, wherein, for all the achieved badness, the filmmakers were trying their level best. That’s not only nobler; it’s funnier. Eric McCormack, Jenni Baird, Robert Patrick, Dan Lauria, Jody Thompson. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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