Morgan Hunter Movies

Philippe Mora, the genre filmmaker whose marsupial-themed Howling III and alien-abduction hit Communion solidified his reputation as a director of clunky, substandard fantasy, returned with this space-set remake of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. True to form, it's a clunky mess, with Harold Pruett as a young prospector named Ben (complete with a lovable canine sidekick), who teams up with gambler Armand Crile (Rutger Hauer) and a shifty engineer named Horton (Brion James) to look for Au79, a valuable ore also called "Precious." Mora throws in everything but the kitchen sink with sabotage, explosions, crazed hijackings, and a few tacky aliens in an obligatory cantina scene. He also includes a lame CGI monster and some campy humor (as if Don Stroud as a long-haired Asian robot wasn't campy enough). Brion James steals the show as the cynical Horton, and even gets to sing, while Mora makes a cameo appearance as a scummy merchant. Despite its outer-space setting, the science fiction elements pretty much fall by the wayside once the cast leaves the moon and gets to Asteroid 18, which may as well be Bronson Canyon in an old B-Western. While it is true that most science fiction movies are basically frontier Westerns at heart anyway, this one forces the issue in such a way that one can only wonder why Mora didn't just do a straight ripoff of Sierra Madre rather than adding the unnecessary spaceships. Probably because low-budget sci-fi rents and low-budget Westerns don't. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Near the end of The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey, in his Oscar-winning performance as crippled con man Roger "Verbal" Kint, says, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." This may be the key line in this story; the farther along the movie goes, the more one realizes that not everything is quite what it seems, and what began as a conventional whodunit turns into something quite different. A massive explosion rips through a ship in a San Pedro, CA, harbor, leaving 27 men dead, the lone survivor horribly burned, and 91 million dollars' worth of cocaine, believed to be on board, mysteriously missing. Police detective Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) soon brings in the only witness and key suspect, "Verbal" Kint. Kint's nickname stems from his inability to keep his mouth shut, and he recounts the events that led to the disaster. Five days earlier, a truckload of gun parts was hijacked in Queens, NY, and five men were brought in as suspects: Kint, hot-headed hipster thief McManus (Stephen Baldwin), ill-tempered thug Hockney (Kevin Pollak), flashy wise guy Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), and Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), a cop gone bad now trying to go straight in the restaurant business. While in stir, someone suggests that they should pull a job together, and Kint hatches a plan for a simple and lucrative jewel heist. Despite Keaton's misgivings, the five men pull off the robbery without a hitch and fly to Los Angeles to fence the loot. Their customer asks if they'd be interested in pulling a quick job while out West; the men agree, but the robbery goes horribly wrong and they soon find themselves visited by Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), who represents a criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze. Soze's violent reputation is so infamous that he's said to have responded to a threat to murder his family by killing them himself, just to prove that he feared no one. When Kobayashi passes along a heist proposed by Soze that sounds like suicide, the men feel that they have little choice but to agree. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi