Sci-fighters

This really is a great B-movie. Roddy Piper delivers his best performance as an actor to date, ranging from comical to serious to romantic to heartbroken.

The story is very straightforward, but extremely fun and watchable. Considering the budget they had to work with, you really have to admire what they pulled off in this film.

It's very similar thematically to "The Hidden," from 1987. There's a great "unstoppable alien" thing going on here. The chemistry between Piper and the extremely beautiful Jayne Heitmeyer is great. She is fantastic as Dr. Kirbie Younger.

I'll be honest...if you're in to serious A-list films, this is no "Citizen Kane." But if you like great B-movie fun, you could do a whole lot worse than Sci-Fighters. It's B-science fiction gold!

I admit it. I thought this movie was going to be a total piece of crap. But I was wrong.

Adrian Dunn is a violent and very creepy convict serving out his sentence on a lunar base prison. When he kills a fellow inmate, he is infected with a nasty alien virus that the dead man had been carrying. Assumed dead, Adrian is shipped back to Boston for burial...but he awakens as a red eyed zombie inside of his body bag. When a rape victim turns up at police headquarters and identifies Adrian as her assailant, Cameron Grayson, aka Roddy Piper, flies into action! Turns out that Adrian was in jail for the brutal rape-murder of Roddy's wife, Katie. When the rape victim dies a horrible, explosive death, Grayson and his new friend Dr. Kirbie Younger realize that they are running out of time. Adrian is spreading his disease with every woman he rapes, and Kirbie is next on his list.

Okay, yeah. This movie is cheap looking, silly in places and suffers from an abysmal budget, but it's really not that bad! Roddy Piper is quite likable as Grayson, and Jayne Heitmeyer is a smart, resourceful ass kicker. And Billy Drago as Adrian Dunn is awesome! He really makes Adrian a sinister, creepy and somewhat pathetic monster, shuffling zombie-like through the dirty streets. His scene with a woman tied to a bed is really chilling. By film's end, he looks like a melted candle with the worlds worst case of acne. Icky! But really effective.

I've seen much worse movies than this one. "Sci-Fighters", despite its stupid and misleading title, is quite likable and enjoyable with well-drawn and involving characters. Worth watching for Drago's performance alone.

Yeah, pretty much the same plot we've seen in a dozen other such films in the past ten years; but if we know those films, it's because we watched them and enjoyed them; perhaps with some sense of guilt, like there ought to be something better to with our lives, but let's admit we were entertained.

Certainly this film is not among the worst of its ilk. In fact, it is generally well made, with sharp performances from all the actors, including the Rowdy One; and the script doesn't rub our noses in sci-fi-techno-babble, it just gets on with the story.

The big disappointment is the ending; it is rushed, badly directed, badly edited. It feels like it comes looping out of another film, there's no build-up to it at all.

Too bad; if the ending had been as impressive as the rest of the film, I would have given this 8 stars, if only for effort; now it has to live with 6.

That makes it a time waster, like most of the other films of its type - not bad, just not good enough to be memorable.

This wouldn't have been a bad movie if they had a script doctor go over the dialog a bit.

Essentially, the world has undergone a nuclear winter, and a convict escapes a lunar prison after being infected by an alien life form designed to convert the world over to methane, and does so by raping women and infecting them with alien-crabs. Or something. Roddy Piper plays a cop who put the convict away, and Jane Heitmeyer plays the hottie doctor trying to find a cure.

Pretty much, that's all the plot you need to hang the action sequences on. Piper gets into some fights, there are explosions, cheap special effects and some nude scenes. I'm sure this film was made on the cheap, but they got a lot out of a cheap budget.

Cops that shoot like the a-team. bad guy monsters that can't be killed and exhale methane. Probably some good movie in there somewhere if you can sleep through the boring bits.