Scott Stewart
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With a screenplay by Cory Goodman and directed by Scott Stewart (“Legion”), it’s shamelessly derivative sci-fi, evoking memories of “The Searchers,” “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max,” “The Matrix” and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, among others.
The film shifts from sci-fi-land to a western motif when, a la John Ford's The Searchers, Bettany's niece Lucy (Lily Collins) is kidnapped by the head-honcho vampire, an awfully witty cowboy (Stetson and all) played by Karl Urban.
A sort of futuristic fantasy western with "The Searchers" as its granddad, "Priest" is an action adventure that will attract fans of the graphic novel and folks who like fantasy in general.
The parallels to cowboy movies are both obvious — Bettany’s search is meant, embarrassingly, to evoke “The Searchers” — and vaguely racist.
It appears that turning the John Ford / John Wayne classic "The Searchers" into the church-vs-vampire adventure " Priest " was not an altogether god-awful idea.
If you’ve guessed that the movie plot I’ve described matches The Searchers, you’d be right – and wrong.
The basic plot is pretty much a direct rip-off of the classic suburban ghost story " Poltergeist " (1982), and there are also elements obviously poached from the likes of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978), " Signs " (2002), "Paranormal Activity" (2007) and countless other titles.
We're reminded of one superior movie ("Poltergeist"), then another ("Paranormal Activity"), and another ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind").
Stewart borrows liberally from two schools of horror: the classic Poltergeist / Close Encounters era and the more current Paranormal Activity films to craft a horror that somewhat resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone .
Daniel and Lacey can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from “Paranormal Activity” (surveillance cameras), “Night of the Living Dead” (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where “The Truth,” or at least “The Conspiracy is Out There”).
Where Legion and Priest attempted to offer the sort of action/horror blockbuster experience of a Resident Evil flick (low-hanging fruit…), Dark Skies instead takes the sci-fi premise of an alien abduction story and conveys it in the crescendo format of Paranormal Activity and all its many copycats within the found-footage horror (not so coincidentally, the movie is produced by the makers of PA, Sinister, Insidious, etc…).
Nothing coming after quite tops it in a film that borrows liberally from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, Signs, and even The Birds.
Scott Stewart, of the San Francisco special effects house The Orphanage, makes his directorial debut with Legion, and it's something of a mess, unsuccessfully combining elements of Night of the Living Dead with The Terminator .
And on many occasions, it’s a blatant rip off of “The Terminator.”
Michael -- who noisily arrives on Earth in a dark inner-city alley, in the first of many elements borrowed from "The Terminator" -- has defied God because he believes humanity is worth saving.
Not only does the flick end with a voice over monologue, it’s also a complete rip-off of The Terminator, right down to the (ridiculous) badass bandana wrapped around Charlie’s head.
Things go Night of the Living Dead-meets-The Terminator at an isolated highway diner when an elderly patron starts babbling obscenities about death before mutating into a wall-crawling, scraggly-toothed menace.
It is a terrible shame that the movie now must carry with it a negative stigma because it's a whole lot better than that, earning the right through its very intelligence and air-tight grasp of informed genre filmmaking to be uttered in the same breath as 1993's "Fire in the Sky" and 2002's " Signs ."
Maybe it’s because the aliens’ motives don’t feel real, or maybe it’s the way the film was shot, but at the end of the day you may as well go watch Fire In The Sky on Netflix and see what a real scary alien movie is all about.
It is a terrible shame that the movie now must carry with it a negative stigma because it's a whole lot better than that, earning the right through its very intelligence and air-tight grasp of informed genre filmmaking to be uttered in the same breath as 1993's "Fire in the Sky" and 2002's " Signs ."
The basic plot is pretty much a direct rip-off of the classic suburban ghost story " Poltergeist " (1982), and there are also elements obviously poached from the likes of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978), " Signs " (2002), "Paranormal Activity" (2007) and countless other titles.
John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, the Robert R. McCammon-scripted Twilight Zone episode "Nightcrawlers," every dead flick George Romero has ever done, and more come to mind and bubble over into random play in Legion, making this more a horror-geek trivia game than an actual horror movie per se.
With impressive environments that immediately remind one of futuristic sci-fi film from "Blade Runner" to "Dark City" to "Equilibrium," it's clear that we're in for a movie that's far bigger in scale than anything we might be expecting.
That quest, set in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has won its age-old crusade against the planet's vampire hordes and walled itself away in a Dark City-esque blacklit metropolis, involves Bettany's superhuman Priest (his face tattooed with a cross) defying the law by venturing outside the city to investigate the supposed vampire-related death of his brother (Stephen Moyer) and abduction of his niece, Lucy (Lily Collins).
This feeling continues on into the early sequences set in a walled metropolis called Cathedral City, a damp, dirty cyberpunkish place that suggests a production designer (Richard Bridgland in this case) who was torn between ripping off Brazil or Dark City , and so decided to split the difference (either way, it still ends up being the umpty-leventh film to copy Blade Runner ).
For about 75 minutes, "Legion" is a solid, pulpy B-movie along the lines of 1986's "Maximum Overdrive" and 1990's "Tremors," a horror actioner wherein a group of disparate people are forced to hole up in a desolate setting and protect themselves from an outside threat closing in.
It's plenty derivative of everything from Sergio Leone Westerns to Francis Lawrence's "Constantine," but somehow all the divergent pieces are combined into something that's quite entertaining in its own way.