I’ll help you scrape the burned rubber off your hood (7/13/01)
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Evolution. [Ivan Reitman, 2001.]
Them Again: when a meteor crashes into the Arizona desert and a rapidly-multiplying alien slime oozes out, takes up residence in a conveniently-situated honeycombed labyrinth of caverns, and begins using its more densely-coded DNA to unfair advantage, accelerating its evolutionary progress from protozoa to giant apes in the space of ten reels, lower-caste community-college scientists David Duchovny and Orlando Jones see the opportunity to exploit this heavensent research topic to escape their exile in the academic bush leagues — at least, if they can keep the extraterrestrial menace from devouring the earth. In this endeavor they are assisted by somewhat klutzy CDC babe Julianne Moore, and opposed, more or less, by the bumbling military, led by a general [Ted Levine] who is still bearing a childish grudge against Duchovny for the minor mishap with an experimental anthrax vaccine [whose side effects apparently included memory loss, erectile dysfunction, and hyperflatulence] which bought him his one-way ticket to Palookaville. After various misadventures occasioned by the periodic escapes of the rapidly-mutating aliens from the caves into which they have been none-too-successfully hermetically sealed [Jones takes a giant mosquito up the ass; a flying lizard swoops through the shopping mall with a shoplifter in its clutches; a mutant alligator takes up residence in the golf course pond], our heroes, who [like the writers] must have seen a lot of movies on the late show, realize the aliens will thrive on the predictable military solutions of napalm and nukes, but will suffer a fatal allergic reaction to the selenium contained in a familiar brand of shampoo, and end up racing through [yes!] the storm drains to administer a Head and Shoulders high colonic to The Mother of All Blobs to save the world: it’s product placement they can’t stand. — Though this is not, actually, the best gag in the movie; that distinction probably belongs to the scene in which Duchovny moons the General through the windshield of a Jeep, summing up the relations of science to the military once and for all.
Maybe not as funny as
Tremors, but the monsters are better: mostly variations on the theme of dinosaur, but also plants, insects, and scary apes. Anyway, any movie that casts Dan Ackroyd as the governor of Arizona can’t be all bad. Check it out.
____________Athena Massey’s body parts (7/13/01)
