Year:  1968
Genre:  Sci-Fi, Cult, Classic
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jane Fonda, Anita Pallenberg, John Phillip Law  
Director:  Roger Vadim
Run time:  98 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I have a hard time picturing Jane Fonda as anything other than the grandmotherly fitness instructor on so many workout videos.  I’ve even reviewed some of her workout videos, and to me, that’s who Jane Fonda is. A very fit grandma with big hair and a friendly smile. Maybe the oldest person alive who can still make yoga pants work for her.

     So when I started watching Barbarella, on Blu-Ray July 3^rd from Paramount Home Entertainment, it took me a while to reconcile THAT Jane Fonda with the current Jane Fonda. The Jane Fonda in Barbarella is not going to bake you cookies and gush over your performance at your piano recital. She’s going to get naked, dance around and have sex with everyone she meets. This is Jane Fonda circa 1968, and I was surprised to discover that she was, at that time, the hottest woman in the world! 

     Now of course, when Barbarella isn’t having sex or running around in skimpy outfits, the rest of this movie is god-awful. It’s just a lot of cheesy science fiction talk and flying around with an angel and a spaceship that looks like electronic brass knuckles for some reason. But naked Jane Fonda? In high-definition? That’s why Barbarella became a cult classic in the 70s, and that’s why it’s the best thing being released today!

Year:  2005
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Clarke Duncan
Eye candy:  Scarlett Johansson in that white jumpsuit is stellar.  In HD!
Director:  Michael Bay
Run time:  136 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Without a doubt, The Island is Michael Bay’s best movie.  In fact, it is head and shoulders above the rest (the rest including Transformers, Transformers 2, Bad Boys II, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and the Playboy video documentary Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall).  This is also the only Michael Bay movie for which I have written a positive review, ever.

     I am tempted to say that The Island works despite the ham-handed direction of Bay, but I think he deserves a little more credit here.  The problem I (and most critics, I think) have with Bay in general is that he gets an idea for some huge action scene (cars transforming into machines and blowing up a city!  An asteroid exploding!), then appears to build the movie around the explosions and car chases and ludicrous excess.

     In The Island, he doesn’t do that.  Instead, the long, ludicrous action scenes appear to be inserted into the plot because he can, not because they are the plot.  And the action scenes here ARE cool.  The car chase on the expressway with the giant iron…whatever they are…coming off the back of a flat-bed truck and colliding with armored cars is genuinely awesome.  Then, of course, a couple of little flying motorcycles show up, and the whole scene becomes Michael-Bay-excessive once again.

     The Island is similar enough in structure to movies like Logan’s Run that it’s tempting to call it a rip-off.  But I don’t think it is – Bay creates a plausible, creepy sterilized world in the first half of the movie, and it’s a different vibe than other similar films.  A lot of this is thanks to some stellar acting performances from Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, as well as bit parts by Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi. 

     McGregor and Johansson are two inhabitants of a massive underground bunker.  They have jobs and a routine, and must obey a set of rules – most of those rules are designed to make sure they don’t have sex with each other.  The denizens of this sterile world exist with one special desire.  To be chosen to move on to The Island, a paradise where they can live out their days in peace, outdoors.  The reason they are confined to this bunker is that there was a Great Contamination, and the outside world is no longer safe for human life.  Or so they are told.

     Little cracks begin to appear in the cover story, and only one inhabitant of the giant facility has a brain that is developed enough to question his surroundings – Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor).  He soon finds out that the “lottery winners” who are chosen to go to “The Island” are being killed instead, and their organs are being harvested.  The inhabitants of the facility are not survivors of some kind of apocalypse, but rather clones of real human beings who are being kept alive in case their human counterparts need a spare liver or lungs.  Or, in the case of the women, in case they want to have a baby without going through all that irritating pregnancy.

     The premise of the movie raises some interesting ethical dilemmas, and there is a little bit of exploration on that front – but much later.  There is no time for exploration halfway through, because as soon as we discover the real nature of the facility, Lincoln Six Echo escapes with Jordan Two Delta (Johansson), and the explosions and chases must begin in earnest.

     The Island is really two movies – a creepy sci-fi thriller, and then a futuristic car-chase action film.  Both parts work, and the disconnect between the two isn’t jarring enough to really hurt the movie.  As with all Michael Bay movies, the action sequences are spectacular, and (in this case) not so excessive that they ruin everything.  And as with all Michael Bay films, they are meant to be seen in high definition. 

     The Blu-Ray of The Island is wonderful, the action sequences are sharp and that much more exciting as a result, and the underground bunker takes on even more sterility and becomes creepier as a result.  The only problem with the HD is that occasionally Scarlett Johansson looks more like a mannequin than a human being…but then, it’s only occasionally and the rest of the time she looks like Scarlett Johansson – in high def!  The Island is made for the Blu-Ray format, it looks tremendous, and it’s the only Michael Bay movie (up to this point) that I will advise anyone to buy.

Year:  1995
Genre:  TV series, Drama, Science Fiction, Adventure
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:   Colette Stevenson, Alan Scarfe, John Bach, C. David Johnson, Stephen Lovatt, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Andy Marshall
Run time:  22 episodes (1 hour each, 1 season)
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Colette Stevenson provides Mysterious Island with its eye candy, but her hotness is seriously offset by the fact that her character on the show, Joanna, spends the whole show with her husband Jack.  Jack is played by that guy who was Chuck Tchobanian on Street Legal (C. David Johnson), and there you have maybe the only two stars on the show who are even vaguely recognizable to the average Canadian viewer.

     The other actors did some stuff too.  Gordon Michael Woolvett was in Andromeda, Stephen Lovatt made a few appearances on Hercules and Xena, and Alan Scarfe guest-starred on a couple of episodes of Star Trek.  Andy Marshall was recently in four episodes of Soul, whatever that is, and John Bach was a bit actor in two of the Lord of the Rings movies.  Anyone remember who Madril was?  Not me.

     At any rate, recognizable or not, these are B-grade actors at best, in a C-grade series that makes little sense.  I have never read the Jules Verne book (Mysterious Island) upon which this series is based.  But having watched many of the 22 episodes on the Complete Series DVD, out June 14th from Alliance Films, I can only assume it’s a dreadful book.  Or, which is more likely, the TV series has almost nothing in common with the book.

     The series opens with a married couple and their kid, an old army captain and his former slave, and a foreign reporter being captured during the U.S. Civil War.  They are scheduled to be executed but escape via hot air balloon.  Then the balloon is shot down over the ocean by a creepy loner mad scientist living on a deserted island so he can experiment on the castaways.

     And so begins the series.  The castaways never get to see Captain Nemo (until the very end), but they quickly realize something is amiss on this island.  Something is also, of course, amiss in the what-year-is-it-here test – the U.S. Civil War is in full swing.  I know, because I recently watched Ken Burns’ masterful Civil War documentary, that this places the show between the years of 1861-1865.  Captain Nemo, the mysterious weirdo on an island, has closed-circuit television cameras set up everywhere, remarkably powerful submarines, and several other gizmos that seem to me to be out of the realm of the technology available in the 1860s.

     The biggest problem with the series though, is that 90% of it feels like padding.  sure, there’s a tiny bit of plot development from episode to episode, but so little I kept forgetting it was going anywhere.  When you have some unseen diabolical madman unleashing earthquakes and landslides toward these people, is there any need to have them get into extra trouble on their own?

     For example – a landslide, triggered by an earthquake, triggered by Captain Nemo, traps the Australian reporter under a giant boulder.  The captain and the ex-slave run off in one direction to find something helpful, but get poisoned by some gas in the ground and must help each other back, heroically.  Then the ex-slave and the young boy run off in another direction to get some other help, and the kid gets his foot caught in rocks in a puddle as the tide is coming in.  Which leads to more help and more heroics.

     And that ends up being the whole some.  One character gets trapped somewhere, somehow, under something.  Then the others put their collective minds together in order to help that one character out of the dilemma.  And…then…it ends, as Captain Nemo shows himself, explains his diabolical (if a little nonsensical) plan, and then he leaves.  The end.  Mysterious Island ran only one season, in 1995, and then it was done.  Mercifully.

Year:  2001
Genre:  Sci-Fi, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Brendan Gleeson, Frances O’Connor, William Hurt, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Adrian Grenier, Ben Kingsley (voice), Robin Williams (voice), Chris Rock (voice), Ashley Scott, Kathryn Morris, Ken Leung, Michael Mantrell
Director:  Steven Spielberg
Run time:  145 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     A.I. is one of those movies where the story behind it, for movie nerds, might actually be more interesting than the movie itself.  A long-in-the-works project for Stanley Kubrick that was shelved when he died, the film was resurrected by Steven Spielberg and given…as it were…new life.

     There are lots of moments in the movie that will feel very familiar to Kubrick fans, and many others that are quintessential Spielberg.  Which kind of gives A.I. a bizarrely schizophrenic feel that I rather enjoy.  While the tone of the film and the subject matter is dark and bleak and very Kubrick, the sentimentality and schmaltzy silliness (and there’s a fair bit) are vintage E.T. Spielberg.

     The story of A.I. is basically an updated Pinnochio story in a Soylent Green world.  Haley Joel Osment is David, a robot boy programmed to love unconditionally, and when his “parents” discover that their real, flesh-and-blood son is still alive, they abandon David in the woods like an unwanted dog.  He thinks that all he must do to be accepted back into his family is become a “real boy”.  His travels take him through a robot-hating torture performance a-la-Thunderdome, and a sex-for-money city populated by other robots, and he befriends a robotic gigolo (Jude Law).

     I like A.I., but maybe more for the story behind it and the flashes of Kubrick than for the movie itself, which gets bogged down in sentimentality and tear-jerkiness a little too often for my liking.  But whether it’s Kubrick OR Spielberg, the one thing I know is that a Blu-Ray of this movie is essential.  When I got my new HD TV and Blu-Ray player last year, I bought two Blu-Rays on the way home – Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.  Both these directors demand to be seen in high definition.

     And now that Paramount Home Entertainment is giving us a chance to see A.I. in HD, it’s well worth it.  If you have it on DVD already, it deserves an upgrade and looks absolutely amazing.  If you don’t, there are better Kubrick movies (2001, Full Metal Jacket) and Spielberg movies (Saving Private Ryan, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to get on Blu-Ray first.  But I hope everyone gets around to A.I. eventually.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Sci-Fi
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel, Crystal Reed, Neil Hopkins, David Zayas, Donald Faison
Eye candy:  Thompson , Daniel , Reed 
Directors:  Greg Strause, Colin Strause
Run time:  92 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The phrase “inspired by Michael Bay” is not, in a critical sense of the phrase, high praise.  In fact, I mean it for the most part as an insult.  I suspect that the people behind Skyline have seen three movies in their lives – Cloverfield is one of them.  The other two are Michael Bay films – Independance Day and Bad Boys.  How do I get Bad Boys out of this?  Look at the picture up top.  The DVD cover.  Remind you of anything?  And when you see that scene in the movie, you’ll be reminded even more.  The spinning camera around the tough-posing twosome on the roof…it’s there.

     Now, here’s what stuns me.  Skyline is basically an independant movie.  Indie film makers who shot the whole thing for half a million bucks, then added 10-20 million more in post-production effects.  What kind of indie film maker is inspired by Michael Bay?  How often does that happen.  That’s like an aspiring saxaphone player being inspired by Kenny G, or an up-and-coming chef being introduced to his craft by McDonalds.  It breaks my mind.

     But, that’s what we get with Skyline, a run-of-the-mill alien invasion flick with irritating characters, a silly script, zero character development and no plot developments either.  Instead, there are a lot of explosions, a few fighter plane aerial battles, and a ton of other special effects that do, admittedly, look truly amazing even for a $20 million budget. 

     That being said, however, special effects alone can’t make a movie good.  Just look at…the career of Michael Bay.  And just because Skyline looks amazing FOR a movie that cost only $20 million, that doesn’t make it Avatar.  (Avatar being the only movie I can think of that succeeds solely on the basis of special effects, despite the script, premise, and plot.)

     The biggest problem I have with Skyline is that the action takes place almost entirely within one building.  The alien menace lands, the few implausibly attractive people left alive are confined to a penthouse apartment in a luxury apartment building, and then…the explosions start.  Every time our protagonists make an escape attempt, the aliens are too quick, or too numerous, for them to succeed.

     I don’t mind that we don’t know what the aliens want, or where they come from, or anything more about them.  Like Cloverfield, the film is shot from the perspective of the small group of people, and it’s right that we know what they know.  But unlike Cloverfield, there are no new developments in the story of the characters.  Oh, an attempt is made to introduce them to us, early in the movie for about fifteen minutes.  But just watching characters joke around with each other doesn’t help me feel like I know them.  Or care if they die.

     And at no point in Skyline did I care if anyone died.  It was entertaining enough, but often I found myself just waiting around for the next helicopter explosion scene.  Wait – I just lied a little a sentence ago.  At the very end of the movie, I DID care, very much, whether someone died.  The final scene is so ludicrous, and so cheesy, and so painful, that I was desperately hoping for EVERYONE to die, so the credits could roll and I could move on with my life.

Year:  1999
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Michael Easton, Cynithia Preston, Karl Pruner, Judith Krant, Michael Rawlins, Matthew Bennett
Guest stars:  Martin Sheen, Titus Welliver, Jayne Heitmeyer, Art Hindle, Xenia Seeberg, Victoria Snow, Anthony Zerbe, Kristin Booth, Lisa Ryder, Clint Howard, Adrian Hough, Chad Allen, Sara Botsford, Kim Coates, Nick Mancuso, Laura Harris 
Creator:  Art Monterastelli
Run time:  16 hours, 8 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Total Recall 2070 is what I like to think of as a “blender” TV show.  Take everything you know about science fiction, throw it in a blender, and hopefully what comes out makes at least a little bit of sense.  The show is based partly on the movie Total Recall (in that there’s a company called Rekall that gives people vacations in their brains).  It’s also partly based on the movie Blade Runner, the Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (also the basis for Blade Runner), and the Philip K. Dick short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which inspired the movie Total Recall.  Make sense so far?  OK, bear with me.

     Individual episodes appear to be inspired by things as diverse as I, Robot (the Will Smith movie based on the Isaac Asimov short story), The Andromeda Strain (the James Olsen miniseries based on the Michael Crichton book), and a few episodes of The Outer Limits.  With me to this point?  Alright, let’s continue.

     The star of the series is Michael Easton, who plays a cop in the future who is for some reason named David Hume.  David Hume is ALSO the name of a famous 18th-century Scottish philosopher who founded the school of Empiricism along with John Locke and George Berkeley.  Empiricism is a philosophy that states that all ideas and beliefs a person holds must come directly from their experience and evidence – particularly sensory evidence that one can touch, see, smell or hear.  (Hence the term “empirical evidence”.)  Perhaps Hume’s most famous quote is “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”, suggesting that desire predicated human behaviour more readily than did reason.

     Why do I bring this up?  Because it has absolutely nothing – nothing – to do with the TV show.  Now, I suppose there could be a simple explanation for this.  Perhaps the character was named by people who had no idea who David Hume was, and it was just a strange coincidence.  But I doubt it.  Hume is a famous enough figure in Western Philosophy that someone, somewhere along the line would likely have caught it.  I suspect that the reason the main character in Total Recall 2070 is named David Hume is that someone wanted specifically to make a reference to Hume, and then forgot somewhere along the line WHY.

     Like I said, it’s a blender show.  And the name David Hume was thrown into the blender along with Philip K. Dick stories and science fiction movies and dozens of other books, TV shows and films.  Now, here’s the weird thing.  Although it’s a terrible, insane mishmash of a million different styles and themes and ideas, it almost works!  The show lasted only one season, 22 episodes (all of which are on this one DVD box set coming out February 22nd from Alliance Films).  But I think that had it continued its run a little while, it may well have caught on.  There is something strangely compelling about the program despite its lack of focus.

     I think the vast majority of the charm comes from the relationship between the central characters – the inappropriately named David Hume and his cop partner, Ian Favre.  Hume is a tough-guy, old school cop.  And since the show is set in 2070, the “old school” in this case means “the school of 100 years ago”.  Hume is no fan of the androids that are all over the world, working for human beings and sweeping the floors.  He suspects them, you see.  And yet, he is partnered with one such android, Favre (Karl Pruner), who exhibits human emotions and occasionally has his feelings hurt.  The dynamic between the two really works, and is by far the most interesting thing in the show.

     Less interesting is the office politics constantly being played by the superior officers, or the sex between Hume and his wife (the smoking hot Cynthia Preston), which for some reason happens during EVERY show.  We get it – they love each other and have lots of sex.  Amazingly, I got pretty bored with it pretty quick.  Actually, the very first scene of the very first show involves naked boobs.  This bodes well.  I then saw NO naked boobs for the rest of the series.  Weak.  But I would say it’s a testament to this show’s strange watchability that I didn’t get bored watching the whole mess of a “complete series”.

Year:  2004, 2005
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Sorbo, Laura Bertram, Lisa Ryder, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Lexa Doig, Steve Bacic
Eye candy:  Bertram, Ryder, Doig, and of course Brandy Ledford who appears all over this review.
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Okay, I’m going to get my complaints out of the way first, when it comes to Andromeda Season Five, out January 4th from Alliance Films.  And by that I mean that once more, I’m going to harp on the legacy of the departed Gene Roddenberry.  This show and Earth: Final Conflict were two of those shows that purported to have been created “by” Roddenberry, in that they were created out of notes he wrote that were discovered after he passed away.  This is much like saying Beethoven was responsible for “My Humps”, because he once sketched a picture of a lady’s ass while working on his 5th Symphony.  It’s something of…a stretch.

     Okay.  Now for the good stuff.  Season Five of Andromeda features the “acting talents” of Kevin Sorbo, and the eye candy coupled with “acting talents” of Lexa Doig, Lisa Ryder, Laura Bertram, and newcomer Brandy Ledford.  Ledford takes over for Doig, playing the artificial intelligence being created by the perverted guy to be as hot as possible.  (Doig, I believe, was on maternity leave.)  Ledford was a Penthouse Pet, as well as a hardcore actress who did some terrific girl-girl pictorials for such classy mags as Genesis, Club International and Hustler.  And then she made her foray into television, upping the eye candy quotient and lowering the “acting talents” quotient of Andromeda and later Baywatch: Hawaii.

     And now for more complaints.  After providing the world with so very much wonderful pornography for so many years, Brandy Ledford left the skin-showing behind and discovered that Jesus was a lot more fun.  The interest of men everywhere in Brandy Ledford instantly waned.  And now I have no idea where she is.  She has disappeared, just as Andromeda has disappeared.  But we’ll always have this final season, Season Five, to remember how hot Brandy Ledford once was, and how silly Kevin Sorbo has always been.

Years:  1989, 1990
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Adrian Paul, Jared Martin, Lynda Mason Green, Rachel Blanchard
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     War Of The Worlds (at least, the silly TV version of it) lasted only two seasons.  The actual War of the Worlds has lasted a lot longer.  More than a hundred years, in fact – through books, radio, movies, video games, more movies, musicals and Tom Cruise.  Perhaps the most forgettable “adaptation”, if you can call it that, was this television series.  Season Two (the final season) comes to DVD October 26th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

     Don’t expect a TV version of the Spielberg movie.  Or the 50s movie.  Or the 30s radio broadcast.  Or the Chilean radio broadcast of the 40s.  No, instead expect a cheesy sci-fi show from the late 80s that is very similar to the other cheesy sci-fi shows of the late 80s.  Aliens have landed, they have taken human form, and they aim to conquer the world somehow.  That’s all you need to know, because really that’s all there is.

     The aliens, from one episode to the next, continually come up with new ideas to enslave humanity.  They cut off a town’s water supply (although how this would enslave humanity I’m not exactly sure).  They take over the body of a military guy and use him to blow up a building.  They’re like the Wile-E-Coyote of the sci-fi world – oh, that giant slingshot didn’t work?  I guess I’ll go with a giant catapult.  If that fails…there’s always the cannon-on-a-rope trick.

     The only people who can stop the alien invaders are, of course, the four stars of the show.  And so they do, one plan at a time, like that sheepdog who keeps Wile E. away from the sheep.  A couple of the actors are recognizable – Adrian Paul, who went on to star in the TV adaptation of the Highlander series (which might actually have been worse), and Canadian actress Rachel Blanchard, who starred in Road Trip, Seventh Heaven, and the TV adaptation of Clueless (which was certainly better).

     Blanchard was only about 13 or 14 when this series was made, too young to be eye candy and too old to be cute.  But she really is the star of this second season, and the best thing about it.  Which isn’t saying much, I know, but she really was a fine young actress.  Then the series ends in a really weird and desperate way – I think they were told they were being cancelled just before starting the final episode, and had to cram a desperate finale into an hour without much thought for what had come before.  Oh well.  At least it was over.

Year:  2001, 2002
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Leeshock, Von Flores, Anita La Selva, Jane Heitmeyer, Kevin Kilner, Melinda Deines, Guylaine St-Onge, Alan Van Sprang, Helen Taylor
Eye candy:  Heitmeyer, St-Onge, Deines, Taylor, La Selva
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Season Five of Earth: Final Conflict is the best one yet.  Which means that it’s passable.  The Taelon aliens are basically gone after Season Four, so they have to be replaced by aliens called Atavus.  The Atavus are bent on destroying all of humanity, so the “conflict” part of the show is pretty cut and dried.

     The Atavus, you see, are animalistic aliens.  You can tell because they punctuate every sentence with guttural sounds and growls.  That’s also how you can tell they’re evil.  They apparently want to have sex with everyone, all the time, and they demonstrate this by licking their lips and looking women up and down a lot.  At least they don’t talk like the Taelons, with that faux-soothing obnoxious voice. 

     As well as replacing aliens, the show also replaced its male lead, again, in the fifth season.  This time, it’s Dean McDermott, in his pre-Tori Spelling days.  Really, they keep replacing these actors because Jane Heitmeyer gets tired of making out with just one guy.  It’s in her contract.  But at the end of the season it looks like they’re going back to the guy who was the star of season four.  It doesn’t really matter either way.  This show is still not very good.  But it appears to be getting better.  Oh.  Never mind.  It’s over.

Year:  2003, 2004
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Sorbo, Laura Bertram, Lisa Ryder, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Lexa Doig, Steve Bacic
Eye candy:  Bertram, Ryder, Doig
Creator:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I have discovered, after four seasons, the one thing that bugs me most about Andromeda.  Season Four comes to DVD October 19th from Alliance Films.  With other sci-fi shows, like Star Trek, not every episode was earth-shattering.  And by that I mean, not every episode actually involved the potential shattering of the Earth.  Star Trek had episodes that dealt with saving just one person, or maybe one small colony on one small planet.  Sure, some of the threats were bigger, but not every episode can involve the fate of the entire universe.

     However, on Andromeda, there seems to be a decided lack of imagination when it comes to finding ideas for episodes.  Every single one involves the fate of the Entire Commonwealth!  Sometimes the Entire Universe!  It’s usually one wingnut guy, who has managed to get his hands on some kind of super-weapon, who threatens to take down the Entire Commonwealth!  Sometimes it’s a shadowy conspiracy involving three or four guys and their super-weapon who threaten to take down the Entire Commonwealth!

     It seems to me that if the Commonwealth, the governing body of the entire universe, is so shaky that one lone maniac with a weapon can destroy it, it isn’t doing a very good job of governing.  And if the only person in the entire universe who can save the Commonwealth from one week to the next is Kevin Sorbo…I think they have really, really big problems.  Not that I have anything less than the utmost confidence in Kevin Sorbo, but shouldn’t there be a crisis team in place that takes all that weight of just the one guy?

     Hercules aside, though, the Andromeda team appears to have real troubles solving the Commonwealth-threatening crises.  They fight amongst themselves.  They whine a lot.  They question everything and everybody.  Even the totally hot twin babes who come aboard!  Why would anyone, ever, question totally hot twin babes?  Well, they came through it all OK, and saved the universe again.  I just kinda wish there would be one episode where instead of the universe, they saved a kitten from a tree.  Or something.

Years:  2001, 2002
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, United States
Language:  English
Guest stars:  Tom Arnold, Michael Rooker, Tanya Allen, Jeremy Sisto, Sherilyn Fenn, Cameron Daddo, Zachery Ty Bryan, Gabrielle Miller, Zack Ward, Kim Coates, Jeremy London, Dennis Haysbert, Jonathon Schaech, Kerr Smith
Eye candy:  Catherine Mary Stewart, Kimberly Warnat, Allen, Michelle Beaudoin, Fenn, Irene Bedard, Helene Joy, Meghan Ory, Crystal Buble, Gabrielle Miller
Run time:  16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Seventh Season of The Outer Limits is the last one, the show ended in 2002.  As the final season of the show, it’s a little disappointing.  The guest stars are just not of the caliber as those of earlier seasons.  This is a show that got Alyssa Milano naked!  A show that featured Ryan Reynolds and Cynthia Nixon before they were famous!  Joe Pantoliano!  Ralph Macchio!  Marcia Cross!  Daphne Zuniga!  OK, I’m really stretching!

     But I’m also really stretching when I list this season’s guest “stars”.  Really, the biggest name is Tom Arnold?  Who’s barely in the first episode?  Who else is there?  Jeremy London?  There’s also Zachery Ty Bryan, who was the oldest kid on Home Improvement.  I think.  And Kim Coates, who I like, but who’s most famous for the six episodes of CSI:Miami in which he appeared.  And the six episodes of Prison Break in which he appeared.  The most recognizeable face here could be Gabrielle Miller, who is the incredibly hot actress who played Lacey on Corner Gas.  Love that woman.

     The episodes are still interesting – but the show had really run its course by the end of the fifth season.  There’s not much left to do here, and the episodes feel repetitive (especially if you’ve recently watched the first six seasons, as I have).  The episode where the kids (the Home Improvement kid included) get abducted from their classroom and sentenced to execution by some giant alien is very, very similar to the episode a few seasons ago where the entire town gets abducted by aliens and is forced to vote to decide their fate – and the fate of all mankind.  Each episode has that ring of familiarity, because at least a portion of each HAS, in fact, been done before by this series.

     I still like The Outer Limits.  I’m glad to have Season Seven, because I’m a completist and I now have all seven.  And I’ll probably revisit all of these in a few years, and when I do I’ll start at Season Seven and work backward.  That way, I’ll have a fresh take on Season Seven, as though these are the original episodes.  And I’ll probably like them a lot more.  But for now, the box sets have been released in way too quick a succession.  Season Seven is the last release, out October 5th from Alliance Films.

Year:  2002, 2003
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Kevin Sorbo, Laura Bertram, Lisa Ryder, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Gordon Michael Woolvett, Lexa Doig
Eye candy:  Bertram, Ryder, Doig
Crea0tor:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Perhaps the most amazing thing about Season Three of Andromeda, on DVD September 14th from Alliance Films, is that the people involved in the show apparently never watched Seasons One and Two.  The Andromeda (these shows are always named after the ship…or vice versa) is now constantly being called the “most powerful ship in the universe”.  In the first two seasons, the ship was several hundred years old.

     This requires a huge leap in logic – even if I can suspend my disbelief to the point where I accept that the pace of new technologies and sciences in the distant future has slowed to a crawl, it’s still a stretch to think that over the course of several hundred years, no one has been able to improve upon what must be the cutting edge of science – space travel.  Am I to assume that all the scientists managed to cnoquer space and time, create time travel and space travel, and then just stopped?  Focussing their energy and brainpower on a more efficient lime juicer?

     Even if I could wrap my brain around that one, I would still find it hard to believe that a ship hanging around for a few hundred years has not suffered from substantial wear and tear.  Is planned obsolecence a thing of the past in the future?  In that case, we’re gonna make tremendous advancement as a civilization!

     But it isn’t just the inconsistent descriptions of the ship – there’s also Trance (Laura Bertram) who appears to be an entirely different character this season.  There’s the elite team of soldiers who shows up to help then disappears then reappears again as though they had been entirely forgotten for an episode or two.  And there’s always Kevin Sorbo, who doesn’t make sense at the best of times.  Skip it!

Year:  2000
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, United States
Language:  English
Guest stars:  Chris Elliott, Molly Ringwald, Stacy Keach, Antonio Sabato Jr, Adam Goldberg, Christina Cox, Laurie Holden, Bruce Boxleitner, Keith David, Corbin Bernsen, DB Sweeney, Meat Loaf
Eye candy:  Cox, Tanya Reid, Deanna Milligan, Holden, Jill Teed, Jessica Steen
Run time:  16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Alliance Films releases the sixth season of The Outer Limits on September 7^th.  It’s just like the first five seasons, in that there’s a whole bunch of guest stars and a whole bunch of sci-fi episodes, and just like the last few seasons in that there’s no longer much nudity or freaky stuff.

     That’s OK, because the show is still good, and I can always throw on a few episodes of The Outer Limits and enjoy myself.  It doesn’t much matter that the first episode of the season is basically a cheesy one-hour episode of The Running Man starring Molly Ringwald.  Or that the biggest star in all of Season Six is Meat Loaf.  The show’s still good.  And it’s on DVD now.

Year:  1999
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada, United States
Language:  English
Guest stars:  Joe Pantoliano, Cynthia Nixon, Ralph Macchio, Roddy Piper, David Kaye, Malcolm McDowell (voice), Bruce Harwood, Tabitha St. Germain, Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek, Marcia Cross,  Michael Ironside, Kevin Conway, Kevin Nealon, Daphne Zuniga, Daniel Baldwin, Nathan Fillion, Amanda Plummer (in a clip from a previous season)
Eye candy:  Nixon, Leslie Hope, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Susannah Hoffman, Polly Shannon, St. Germain, Cross, Jenny Levine, Sarah-Jane Redmond, Zuniga, Jessica Steen, Angeline Ball, Megan Gallagher
Run time:  16 hours, 45 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The Outer Limits is a great TV series to have lying around your house.  I now have the first five seasons, and I often throw in a disc when there’s nothing on television and I have no movies to watch.  A rare occurence, but it’s nice to know that regardless of what season and what disc I choose, I will be entertained and get at least two good sci-fi episodes out of four.  That being said, the DVD sets are getting weaker as they go on.  Not because the episodes are getting worse – they are as good as ever.  But there is much less nudity on the Season Five DVD set (out August 3rd from Alliance Films) than there was in Season One.  It was pretty exciting to flip through the episodes of season one to see if, say, Alyssa Milano got naked (she did).  Now, no one gets naked.

     The vast number of guest stars on this show makes it a virtual certainty that someone in every episode is recognizeable.  Whether that person is a former star (Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid, for example) or a future star (Marcia Cross, Desperate Housewives, or Cynthia Nixon Sex And The City), they’re in there.  Much like The X-Files, which got weaker and weaker the more they focused on aliens, so too did The Outer Limits.  The episodes that take place in space are pretty lame.  But the ones that take place on Earth, about a scientist serving a life sentence in prison, or a doctor trying to revive brain-dead patients, or a murderer involved in full-body transplants, they are fantastic.

     I can’t sit down and watch all 16 hours of this show at one time.  It’s overwhelming, and there are enough bad space-themed episodes to make it irritating.  But for the most part, the show remains excellent despite the lack of nudity.  That’s really the only bone I have to pick with The Outer Limits Season Five.  There are episodes that cry out for nudity, but there is none.  One episode in particular, where a self-aware spaceship voiced by Malcolm McDowell, gets the human operator of his ship to have sex, over and over, with the smoking hot human operator of another self-aware ship, so they can have a kid to keep the spaceships alive.  The gorgeous operator of the other ship is Polly Shannon, and the episode features constant sex.  But no nudity at all.  How chicken.  Other than that though, The Outer Limits is great.

Year:  1998
Genre:  Sci-Fi, TV series
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Leeshock, Von Flores, Lisa Howard, Richard Chevolleau, Leni Parker, Anita La Selva, David Hemblen
Eye candy:  Surprisingly little, for a sci-fi series
Crea0tor:  Gene Roddenberry
Run time:  15 hours, 46 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The “good” alien in Earth: Final Conflict is named Da’an.  Which is a pretty lame name.  One that could have been dreamed up for an alien by putting strange-sounding names into a computer and running a program that would spit out “alien” sounding names.  Da’an!  Zo’or!  See, Da’an is the “good” one, “Zo’or” is the evil one…even the name of the alien race itself, the “Taelons”, sounds appropriately alien-ish.  They look like…well…aliens.  The bulbous, hairless heads, the soothing, monk-chanting type voice.  It’s all so – usual.  The aliens, their voices, their names, are exactly what one would expect from aliens.  This is fine, but it just feels wrong.  Every moment I see an alien on this show, I feel like it has been designed by a committee and tested through a focus group.  Is this what everyone thinks aliens are?  Good.  Then let’s proceed.

     But it isn’t just the aliens themselves that feel like the product of a focus group.  The cast, the plot, the writing all feel like they have come out of a giant computerized alien-dialogue generator.  In Season Two, out July 27th from Alliance Films, there is a pretty major casting change.  William Boone (Kevin Kilner) was the square-jawed, all-American (or, in this case, all-Canadian) hero of Season One.  In Season Two, he turns up dead, and is replaced by another square-jawed all-American hero, Liam Kincaid (Robert Leeshock).  Why?  I suspect that the focus group behind this show decided that Kilner was too old and therefore not young-and-sexy enough.  So they replaced him with a younger version of the same guy.

     Now, I suspect that these committees were still at work throughout the run of the series, and are still pulling the strings now that Earth: Final Conflict is on DVD.  On the DVD cover of Season Two, the picture features Kevin Kilner, and not Robert Leeshock.  Why, I wondered.  Kilner is in Season Two only as a body floating in some liquid for a moment in the first episode.  Then he is gone.  Why is he on the cover?  I think it’s because the focus group determined that HE was a more recognizeable face, and a bigger star, than was Leeshock.  So better play up HIS involvement while you have a chance.  I guess this means the 1998 focus group was wrong.

     This show claims to be the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, the man behind Star Trek.  His is a big name in sci-fi, and following his death this show and Andromeda both bore his name.  I guess he had jotted down some ideas about aliens and spaceships before he died, and using his name was a good way to get nerds to tune in.  For one or two episodes, anyway.  But the man was dead.  And he didn’t write Earth: Final Conflict.  A focus group did.  And the show sucked as a result.  One more thing – wouldn’t a focus group come up with the idea to add some hot chicks?  If there’s one thing every sci-fi show ever has, it’s hot chicks in tight clothes.  Nerds love that.  Earth: Final Conflict is surprisingly devoid of eye candy.