Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines: This is now and always was a weak stepbrother of the two James Cameron films, but with the two Cameron films fresh in my mind (and Joe blasting it really hrad) I decided to rewatch it anyway. I can’t entirely write it off; the big chase sequence early on manages to avoid ripping off the T2 chase too much by including Schwarzenegger hanging from that swinging crane, which is a decent touch; that being said, I’d still probably prefer to see what Cameron himself could have done with it. A second centerpiece sequence, when they visit Sarah Connor’s “tomb,” is slightly less successful. Schwarzenegger’s performance has a note of sadness and weariness about it which I kind of liked–heeeey, maybe it’s the best Arnie performance ever! I suppose it never mattered who played John Connor and at least Nick Stahl is a real actor unlike Edward Furlong, but pairing him with the annoying and snippy Claire Danes was never going to really work. There’s really only two sequences that I really hated–one is when the machines “rise,” which means a bunch of Hunter-Killer machines from the original film’s opening sequence bust into a military HQ and slaughter everyone in sight in about ten seconds, and the other is, of course, Judgment Day itself at the end of the movie, which would be bad enough if it didn’t completely undermine Cameron’s message in the name of making sure the cash cow franchise had more sequels, but is even worse because it has literally no emotional impact whatsoever. I didn’t need big special effects or anything, mind you, but it’s just forty seconds of nuke hits over sad music and a lame monologue! Pshaw!!! Odds that I’ll watch this movie ever again: very minimal indeed.

Alien^3: Ripley killing herself was and is actually a great ending, easily the only truly powerful scene in this film. Other than that…well, young David Fincher sure did come up with a nice wet-steamy-coppery-metal visual scheme before his movie got wrecked. What else? First, the middle-finger opening with the Aliens ending wrecked, followed by an incoherent story, a bunch of supporting characters which all seem interchangeable with their bald heads and Cockney accents, too many shots of tough guys trembling and crying and screaming before somebody pops a blood bag off screen, an “AIDS metaphor” which isn’t all that interesting, a climactic set piece consisting of POV shots of guys chasing through tunnels that barely makes sense, a lame hint of romance between Ripley and the Charles Dance character, and an alien that is either obviously a guy in a suit or a bad early CGI (was it?) creature that looks awkwardly green screened into several shots. Sigourney Weaver and her shaved head do okay but that’s small consolation for the rest. I never watched the “Assembly Cut” and probably never will; if I said the last time I saw this film that I wanted to be nicer to it, I take that back; it’s a failure.

Alien: Resurrection: Some of the stuff at the end with the human-alien hybrid monster kind of works, though Brad Dourif almost ruins it by weirdly cooing sweet nothings at the monster (“oh, you are a beautiful, beautiful baby”–WTF?!?) and its death is easily the grossest and goriest moment in a series that already had a lot of gross moments. Was this Joss Whedon’s idea? If it wasn’t, how much of the crummy dialogue was his? I’ve heard a lot over the years from Whedon apologists (who are numerous, even after all the accusations about the guy being a douche–“ever notice how nothing is ever Whedon’s fault?” was a meme on AV Club comments sections for awhile) but I just can’t be sure; if the weak script of this movie was actually him, then it rivals the fried-chicken-restaurant episode of Roseanne as the worst thing he’s ever written. Sigourney Weaver again does well (letting her play smug and sardonic was a terrific change of pace after the last three movies) but most of the supporting characters blow (nobody ever liked Winona Ryder in this movie), the action set piece halfway through is a messy failure (a two-part barn-burner involving swimming through a treacherous underwater section of a ship where it’s impossible to believe any of these people could hold their breath for so long, followed by an attempt to escape from alien eggs and warriors) and there’s just zero reason to care whether they make it to Earth or not. There are no visual improvements on the previous films, either. It’s even worse than ^3; I don’t feel like rewatching Alien: Covenant to see what the worst movie in this series is, but rest assured all three are worse than Prometheus.

Caddyshack: I’d forgotten Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney were the masterminds behind this, which echoes the fact that I often forget that Ramis wrote a lot of my favorite movie, National Lampoon’s Animal House. That’s two thirds of the writing trifecta responsible; if you didn’t know, Kenney (the “what the hell we s’posed t’do, ya moh-ron?” guy in Animal House and founder of the Harvard Lampoon) died shortly after it came out when he flew to Hawaii to do drugs with Chevy Chase and fell off a cliff while looking for his glasses, only to have people at his funeral say they’d wished Chevy had fallen off with him. Nobody really emerges as the star; Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield and Ted Knight are all…varying degrees of funny (the hero, played by the doof who married Aunt Jackie on Roseanne, is a total afterthought in the film). I like more of it than I don’t, but haven’t really returned to it much over the years; I can’t easily think of a huge stand-out gag in the entire film, just lots of little chuckles and a sort of amusing 70s-80s hybrid feel. Was the sequel worth a shit?