Jennifer O'Dell in Sometimes They Come Back... For More (1998)

Clips

Pics

Review

And sometimes they come back, like this series, for less. Why does Stephen King allow his name to be used in conjunction with this derivative crap? Never mind, I think I know the answer to that. It has dead presidents' pictures on it. If you want to make Shawshank Redemption 2 as a buddy movie with Van Damme and Rodman replacing Robbins and Freeman, Big Steve will give you the green light if you give him the other green stuff.

To be honest, this film had some potential. The first few minutes had some real tension in a rip-off-of-John-Carpenter's-The-Thing way. People working in a renegade Antarctic research/mining station are eliminated one by one, because one of the crew members has gone inexplicably ballistic. For a half hour, while they maintained the shadowy mystery, this was a fine low budget film, marred only by the presence of phony snowdrifts which were really white sheets draped over mounds of dirt. If you have to make a low-budget film, the best way to hide it is to locate it in a setting that is small and can't change - like an Antarctic research station. I mean, the actors were competent, and the film stock was good, so what the hell could James Cameron do any different with a zillion dollars? It's just a grungy headquarters and a permafrost landscape, kind of like the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Unfortunately, when the mystery revealed itself, it managed to be about the cheesiest possible explanation. It turns out that the killer is the son of Satan, and he needs to kill and then re-animate the bodies to do his father's bidding, and to open portals from hell to earth, institute a new order ... you know the drill. And, as if that weren't enough cheese, it turns out that the guy sent by the army to rescue the party is, by sheer unexplained coincidence, another one of Satan's kids, who has turned against his father's ways and wants to stop his half-brother. (Hey, different mom. That can make all the difference.) And then they have cheesy altars far beneath the surface, bodies that appear to be dead but still hang out, and other bodies which we thought were alive but turned out to be dead and working for Satan. Then pretty much everyone in the cast turns out to be related to Satan in some way, like his uncle Irving on his mother's side, a tailor who specializes in custom clothing to accomodate Satan's tail through his pants. It's like the Satan family reunion. And then they all play Family Feud against the Brady Bunch, and I don't know what else. It turns out in the end that Satan's good son, who is more than a millennium old, falls in love with Corky from Murphy Brown, and she knows he's Satan's thousand year old kid, but she's going to be with him anyway, because she really loves the big lug.

So now I realize why IMDb viewers rate this among the worst 100 movies ever made. Anyway, it does feature nudity, in non-Antarctic flashbacks, from Jennifer O'Dell, who's now kindasorta famous as the star of The Lost World on TV.

Written by: Scoopy...Scoopy.net