Filmdoom: Screamers 2: The Hunting

[note: this man is not in Screamers 2: The Hunting]

WARNING!! I will be reviewing lots of Straight-To-DVD movies on this blog. Usually I make it a point not to reveal SPOILERS, but from time to time, when I don't particularly like a movie and I assume nobody else is going to ever actually watch the movie, I'll SPOILER the shit out of my review. If you really think you're going to watch Screamers 2 someday, DON'T READ THIS. Thank you.


The Plot: So it starts on the planet from Screamers part 1 with some guy running from screamers into a shack where he hits a button on a machine just before being killed by screamers. Then it goes to a space ship that has left Earth to answer the distress signal that Mr. Dead Guy apparently turned on a minute ago. And they head to screamer planet to look for survivors. And yes, it's a total rip-off of Aliens, right down to the mission commander secretly being there to download and bring back all the planet's data on screamer technology. Except instead of giant awesome looking aliens, we get to watch puffs of dirt moving straight at people and exploding slightly.

Kickass: Near the end of the picture they finally show the human-shaped screamers. They're actually pretty kickass looking when the screamer claws rip out of their faces and their eyes turn all black and spinning razors and spikes pop out of their hands. There's not neeeaaaarly enough of it in this piece of crap, but when it's there it's pretty fucking awesome.

Oh, and they have a hard-on for punching through people. The first guy that gets killed gets punched through his chest, same with the second guy, one chick gets punched through the head. It's awesome! And that sums up all the good parts of Screamers 2. About 4 minutes total of footage is pretty cool.

Also, Bishop from Aliens shows up late in the picture wearing a badass looking sci-fi suit. I guess the film's producers were trying to make absolutely sure nobody missed that they were blatantly ripping off Aliens.

Meh: None of the characters have any semblence of a personality. I couldn't tell you one of their names, or even describe any of them to you, except the two chicks. And that's just because one chick was sort of hot and the other chick talked with an unrecognizable super weird accent and looked like a child sculpted her face from silly putty.

Most of the sets are actually really cool looking for a low budget sci-fi sequel to a movie most people didn't see and the rest have never heard of, but it's obvious that at some point halfway through pre-production, they either ran out of cash or just stopped giving a shit. Right at the end the decently hot chick is plugging two fairly nice looking sci-fi spaceship batteries into these metal funnels that were clearly purchased from a Home Depot and just glued to the set without anyone trying to make them look halfway futuristic. This shit happens all through the movie. They show this amazing looking CG backdrop of the screamer factory, but in the next scene the bad commander steals screamer tech from what looks like your dad's work bench in the garage. The rifles look cool and high-tech but the pistols look like two pieces of plastic whittled into a somewhat gun-like shape, spray painted and glued together. Seriously, the whole movie is like this.

Shitass: Aside from it being just a slow, boring, shitty movie? Okay, the first and most important thing... the screamers look like shit. Although part 1's screamers looked like someone just took a circular saw and welded extra bits to it, they were actually pretty cool looking. In part 2 you don't even see a screamer for most of the movie. You just see dirt puffing up as they run through the ground and then a bad CG effect pops up and is visible for a half a second before it explodes in a small and very unsatisfying way, while little horribly fake looking CG robot parts fly past the screen. When you do see the screamers, they just look like nondescript metal things that move really slowly or, more often, not at all.

They killed Robocop. I admit it's been a long time since I saw the first Screamers, but I'm pretty sure it ended with Robocop escaping the planet and there's a teddy bear in the ship that has a screamer inside. In part 2, pretty early on they make it a point to bring him up and say, "His ship reached Earth but then exploded in the atmosphere." Come on. Robocop survives however long on screamer central, has one final huge dramatic adventure, escapes and one tiny crappy little teddy bear kills him RIGHT when he reaches Earth?! That's just fucking rude. And stupid, because Robocop killed about a jillion screamers before that, so how is ONE small screamer going to be a hassle for him, much less kill him just as he gets where he's going? Later on, Bishop says, "Oh, he must have blown his ship up, rather than let a screamer reach Earth where it would multiply and kill everyone." I love you, Bishop, but that's retarded. Here is what I believe happened: 30 seconds after Screamers 1 ended, Robocop accidentally destroyed the final screamer by rolling over on it while he was napping. Later, when he reached Earth and realized there were no screamers left to kill, he destroyed his own ship so that he could go to the afterlife and re-kill all the screamers just because he's that much of a bad ass.

The End: Remember the end of part 1? This one more or less ends the exact same way. Except instead of a screamer in a teddy bear, it's a screamer-hybrid character that I knew was a screamer-hybrid since the second he was on screen. To the movie's credit, he's different from the other part-human screamers, which they show you early on to trick you into thinking he's human. But then to the movie's pathetic shame, one of the other (obviously not a screamer) characters freaks out and accuses him of being a screamer, yelling, "He never sleeps! He's one of them!" So yeah, they make it a point to trick you into thinking there's no way he can be a screamer and then one of the characters points out that he obviously is a screamer. WELL DONE. Not that it mattered because it was obvious the entire time anyway. And it ends up with just him and the halfway hot lady escaping in the ship. OH MY GOD HE'S A SCREAMER NOOOOO! WHAT A HUGE SURPRISE! Oh, and she's pregnant with a screamer baby, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Verdict: Even though it was boring and the regular screamers looked like shit, this still could have been a fun movie if it had actually had a script. You want to rip off Aliens? Great. Do it, because Aliens was a kickass movie. Rip it off all day long, but you have to have some actual dialogue at some point if you want anyone to stay awake. As an example, here is an actual page of dialogue from the script of Screamers 2: The Huntening:

EXT. ALIEN PLANET - DAY

LEADER GUY and DECENT LOOKING CHICK exit the spaceship and look around. Their RIFLES look really cool, but their PISTOLS look really cheap and sloppily made.

Leader Guy: Let's go.
Decent Looking Chick: Okay. Where to?
LG: We'll follow the distress signal.
DLC: Okay.

They use a really terrible looking SCI-FI PROP to follow the signal.

LG: We have found the signal, but nobody is here.
DLC: I wonder where the survivors are.
LG: I don't know.
DLC: What should we do?
LG: Let's go look somewhere else.
DLC: Okay.
LG: Let's go.
DLC: Okay.
LG: Okay.

INT. JACK'S ROOM - NIGHT

PAN ACROSS THE ROOM JACK is sitting on the couch. Across the room is a TV showing a really boring sci-fi movie. JACK takes a CROWBAR from his lap and beats himself to death with it. His spirit rises up from his body in a REALLY CHEESY CGI EFFECT and shoots straight up, through the roof of his HOUSE and into the sky! Everything goes really misty until we see JACK standing on a CLOUD wearing a WHITE ROBE.

ROBOCOP: Hello, Jack.
JACK: Hi, Robocop.
ROBOCOP: Want to help me kill a shitload of screamers?
JACK: Robocop, you had me at hello.
ROBOCOP: Hahahaha!
JACK: Hahahaha!

THE END