Heather Hanson Movies

Michael Bafaro's Sleeping Dogs features a thief named Harry Maxwell (Scott McNeil) breaking into a gem factory apparently staffed by underwear-clad supermodels and thuggish guards with really bad aim. He kills some of them while gay bad-guy Sanchez Boon (a woefully miscast C. Thomas Howell) shakes down someone from "The Agency." Boon rips a microphone out of the man's jaw with a pair of pliers and shoots him, going way overboard in the tooth-gnashing evil department, evidently so the audience will forget that he was Ponyboy from The Outsiders. Then there's a lot more shooting and Maxwell slides down the supermodels' table on his stomach with both guns blazing. He grabs one of the women, throws some explosives, punches out the woman, and rappels them from the roof to safety as more people shoot at them. Then someone blows up a helicopter with a rocket-launcher. This is all before they even get sent to the main location (a remote outer-space prison colony) with a topless cyborg (Ciara Hunter) and the mayhem really begins. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Not to be confused with the 1954 giant-insect film of the same name, the made-for-TV Them is more closely akin to the late-1960s television series The Invaders--and in fact, was produced as the pilot for an unsold sci-fi series of the 1990s. In order to save their own dying race, a band of aliens travels to earth, their to infiltrate and ultimate take over the planet by assuming human form. The viewer can be sure that the film's top-billed actors aren't aliens in disguise, but beyond that it is anybody's guess. If nothing else, Them can boast of better than average special effects, with the extraterrestrials moving with the speed of lighting (actually, they move with the lightning in a piggy-back fashion!) The film was originally aired on October 8, 1996, by the UPN network. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide