blood creek

Best of the New Releases: Pandorum
I was not expecting to like Pandorum. I presumed it would be just another generic sci-fi/horror hybrid with Paul W.S. Anderson's name attached as a producer. Thankfully, it is not. Pandorum is actually a surprisingly effective, worthy entrant to the arena of films about space madness. Dennis Quaid kind of dominated the trailers, but the real star is Ben Foster, a gent I wish I saw in more leading roles, as a man who wakes aboard a massive, barren spaceship wondering where all the crew and passengers have gone.

It's got a lot of enigma to it, and while parts of the ending may not be as unforeseen as director Christian Alvert may have wanted, it still goes out on an impressive bang. Good production design avoids feeling like other claustrophobic spaceship movies where people keep running down narrow corridors; though the creature design is a little reminiscent of the Reavers from Serenity. Still, it's an entertaining, above-average genre hybrid that should satisfy those who typically like such things.

Joel Schumacher has a couple of solid films to his credit -- Falling Down, The Lost Boys, Veronica Guerin and a few more -- and even his failures prove to be stylish at the very least (The Number 23, those Batman sequels that shall remain nameless). So what is his name doing on something as skimpy and unremarkable as Blood Creek (a.k.a Town Creek, a.k.a Creek, and not to be confused with this 2006 Canadian horror of the same name), which is being dumped in second-run theaters as we speak?

We open with a black-and-white prologue set in the 1930's, marking Nazi occult expert Michael Fassbender's arrival at a modest West Virginia farm that happens to have a perfectly good rune stone beneath its barn. Cut to present day and switch to color -- EMT Henry Cavill finds himself greeted by his long-lost brother (Dominic Purcell), who disappeared in the woods up around Town Creek and was presumed dead. He's heading back there, definitely with some guns and with or without his brother's help. Cavill gives in and comes with, though what they find up at that farm makes their agreed-upon no-questions-asked policy a hell of a lot harder to abide...