By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator TerrorVision is a 1986 Empire Pictures film about a suburban family who accidentally receive an alien monster through their satellite dish. The monster arrives via transmission, materialises in the television, and starts eating family members. The family is a collection of 1980s suburban archetypes taken to their extreme limits: a swinger couple redoing their home in the worst taste imaginable, a grandfather who has built a nuclear bunke

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator The Sweeper is a 1996 direct-to-video action film starring C. Thomas Howell as a vigilante cop who joins a secret organisation of police officers who execute criminals rather than arrest them. He is initially enthusiastic. He gradually has moral doubts. The film is a genuinely competent mid-90s DTV action thriller that takes its subject matter seriously and delivers exactly what its audience wanted — a man shooting people while questioni

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Cypher is a 2002 Vincenzo Natali film starring Jeremy Northam as a bored suburban accountant who takes a corporate espionage job and rapidly loses track of who he is, who he's working for, and what is real. It is a genuinely intelligent, cerebral science fiction thriller that ended up straight-to-DVD because distributors had no idea how to market a smart film starring people known for other things. Lucy Liu co-stars and is excellent. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Submerged is a 2005 Steven Seagal film in which Seagal plays a mercenary hired to rescue hostages from a submarine. He spends much of the film sitting in chairs. Other people do the action. Seagal delivers his lines in the particular mumble he developed around this period — a low, gravelly sound that requires subtitles and conveys absolute confidence that whatever he is saying is correct. The film was shot in Bulgaria. The submarine is m

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman is a 2000 sequel in which the mutant killer snowman from Jack Frost (1997) follows the sheriff who defeated him to a tropical island resort. He reconstitutes himself from the ocean water. He cannot be killed by heat because he has evolved. He can produce murderous baby snowmen from his body. The film takes place almost entirely on a sunny beach, which creates a visual comedy the filmmake

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Bloodfist VIII: Trained to Kill is the eighth entry in a Don Wilson martial arts franchise that began in 1989. By the eighth instalment the series had completely abandoned any connection to previous films and was simply a vehicle for Don Wilson to fight people in a new setting. This one involves a Navy SEAL mission, a mole in the organisation, and a considerable amount of kicking. Don Wilson kicks people with great professionalism. He ha

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Python is a 2000 Sci-Fi Channel original film about a giant python that escapes from a military transport and terrorises a small California town. The CGI snake is enormous, moves at impossible speeds, and eats people in sequences that the budget cannot fully support. The cast includes Casper Van Dien, Jenny McCarthy, and Robert Englund, which is an extraordinary collection of people to have in one direct-to-video snake film. None of them

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Wake of Death is a 2004 Jean-Claude Van Damme revenge thriller in which Van Damme's wife is murdered by a Chinese Triad leader whose son she tried to protect. Van Damme then kills everyone involved with the systematic efficiency of a man who has been making action films for 20 years and knows exactly what audiences want from him. The film is competently made, genuinely brutal in places, and represents Van Damme's late-period DTV work at

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Komodo vs. Cobra is a 2005 Jim Wynorski film in which a group of activists travel to a remote island to expose illegal military experiments and discover that the experiments have produced a giant komodo dragon and a giant cobra. The two creatures eventually fight each other. The CGI is the creature feature equivalent of a child's drawing of a lizard. The human cast exists to run between the creatures looking frightened. This is exactly t

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Raptor Island is a 2004 Lorenzo Lamas film in which Navy SEALs pursue a terrorist to a remote island and discover it is inhabited by velociraptors. The raptors are CGI. The CGI was produced with a budget that suggests the raptors were rendered on a laptop during lunch breaks. Lorenzo Lamas shoots raptors with great commitment. The raptors respond by dying and then appearing again in subsequent scenes. Continuity was not the priority. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Virtual Combat is a 1995 direct-to-video film in which a virtual reality fighter escapes into the real world and begins killing people. Don 'The Dragon' Wilson must stop him. The film was made during peak mid-90s virtual reality hysteria when Hollywood was convinced VR would change everything immediately. The virtual reality sequences were filmed with green screen and look approximately like a screensaver. The real world sequences are a

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator The Order is a 2001 Jean-Claude Van Damme film set in Jerusalem involving a secret society, ancient scrolls, stolen artefacts, and Van Damme running through the Old City being shot at. It is competently shot on location with genuine production value and a story that takes its historical elements seriously. Van Damme co-wrote and co-produced and was clearly invested in making something with more substance than his usual DTV output. The re

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Shark Attack 2 is a 2000 Nu Image film in which a marine biologist investigates unusually aggressive great white sharks off the South African coast. The sharks are a combination of stock footage of real sharks and CGI that could generously be described as impressionistic. One shark jumps approximately 40 feet out of the water and onto a boat. Real sharks cannot do this. The film is not concerned with what real sharks can do. It is concer

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror is the fifth entry in a franchise based on a Stephen King short story. By the fifth film the franchise had completely exhausted its original premise and was simply placing young people in cornfields near a murderous cult and killing them in creative ways. This instalment stars David Carradine as a cult leader and Alexis Arquette as a troubled young man drawn to the corn. It was shot in 18 days. It

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Solo is a 1996 Mario Van Peebles film in which Van Peebles plays an experimental military android who develops a conscience, refuses to massacre a village of innocent civilians, and goes rogue into the Central American jungle where he befriends the very villagers the army sent him to kill. He then has to fight the army. The film is essentially a remake of Predator crossed with Short Circuit, made with complete sincerity and a genuine pol

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Project Shadowchaser III is a 1995 direct-to-video film in which a damaged android terrorises a space station. It is the third film in a series that began with a Die Hard on a hospital rogue android premise and by the third entry had moved the action to orbit while keeping everything else the same. Frank Zagarino plays the android with the expressionless menace he brought to the first two films. The space station sets are ambitious for t

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Top of the Food Chain is a 1999 Canadian sci-fi comedy about a small town being invaded by aliens who are drawn there by the town's spectacularly high rate of accidental death and general stupidity. A government scientist arrives to investigate. The film is a pitch-perfect parody of 1950s B-movie science fiction — the performances are calibrated exactly to the era being spoofed, the production design recreates the period aesthetic with l

Dive into the Swamp of Nostalgia Crocodile 2: Death Swamp is a 2002 film that takes you on a wild ride. Picture this: a plane full of bank robbers crashes into a swamp. But wait! This swamp is home to a giant crocodile. Yes, you heard that right! The survivors, along with a rescue team, must navigate not just each other but also a crocodile the size of a school bus. Talk about a bad day at the office! The CGI crocodile? Oh boy! It moves with the grace of a creature that has n

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is a 2001 direct-to-video sequel that replaces the original film's Andrew Divoff with John Novak as the Djinn. This is a significant downgrade. Divoff's Djinn was genuinely menacing. Novak's version is menacing in a more budget-conscious way. The film is set on a college campus where a student accidentally releases the Djinn from an ancient stone. Wishes are granted with horrifying consequences. The

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Dracula II: Ascension is a 2003 Patrick Lussier film that serves as a direct sequel to his Dracula 2000 and was shot back-to-back with Dracula III: Legacy. Medical students in New Orleans acquire what they believe to be Dracula's corpse and keep it in a warehouse while conducting experiments on it. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect. Jason London leads a cast doing genuinely committed work in a film that takes its mythology seriou