Scott LeBrun Admittedly, director Steve Latshaws' "Dark Universe" is miles away from being particularly "good", but this viewer found that he himself didn't altogether hate it. It's a passable (if uninspired) story. Its characters and cast are mostly nondescript, and the special effects are variable. They range from slick (the morphing) to incredibly crude (the main monster). The script by co-star Patrick Moran (who plays Carlson) does include some pretty silly lines. But when all was said and done, I did have some fun with this.Martin Sheens' somewhat less talented brother Joe Estevez plays the owner / operator of a Roger Corman version of N.A.S.A. On its way home, his first spacecraft, the Nautilus, flies through a cloud of alien spores, which infect the astronaut on board (Steve Barkett) and continue to infect Earth life once the ship crashes back onto our planet. A secretive team assigned to investigate the crash hires young Tom Hanning (Bently Tittle) as a guide.There's enough enjoyably icky stuff to make this amusing for some fans of the genre. The scenes with the monstrous Steve and a mutated armadillo generate only laughter due to the effects being so corny. The movie does have one thing going for it, at least: a decent music score by Jeffrey Walton.Some of the cast pulled double duty, but the most notable among them is actually a real legend, Florida based exploitation filmmaker William Grefe ("Sting of Death", "Stanley", etc.) who appears briefly as Hannings' father.Five out of 10.

Aaron1375 I got this movie thinking that it would be a bad film, but I thought it was going to be a fun bad movie. Some good gore, horrible story and some boobs. Unfortunately, the only thing it did have was a horrible story! The gore was a no show and there was more topless girls in this segment that came on before the movie and lasted maybe five minutes than there was in this film. The monster looked like a fat Xenomorph from Alien, which is to say it looked okay for a cheap movie, but give me more nasty kills and less speculation, please! The story, a spaceship runs into trouble as it is about to reenter Earth's atmosphere. Seems the pilot gets infected with some kind of spore and transforms into a monster. Ship crash lands into a Florida swamp, thus the rest of the film takes place on the same area for the rest of the film. A place that is supposedly out in the middle of nowhere, a place where you have to hire a dumb guide though all the while I was thinking the interstate was probably just right out of camera range. Well the monster is on the loose as a group that is looking for the ship soon discovers. Well, they really do not discover it soon enough. The film is just to full of speculation scenes, I mean they seem to know this film is crap, but they do not ramp up the gore and other things that make a film like this thrive and instead treat us to swamp guide arguing with other people.So that is pretty much all there is to it. There was a point in the film where I thought it was going to start taking off as they did have an interesting aspect to their story as the orange spores soon begin appearing all over the swamp, but just as it looks like it is going to start getting more fun to watch, we get more speculation and more arguing. The ending seems very rushed, but I am going to say that this is also a good aspect of the film as it meant it ended quicker! The fact that Joel Estevez is the only actor I recognize really should have clued me in to how bad the film would be, but I still thought it would be a fun bad...it was not for the most part.

Woodyanders You know a film is basically destined to stink worse than dirty old socks when the eternally quality-impaired Fred Olen Ray and the comparably talent-barren Jim Wynorski are listed as executive producers (worse yet, Ray also co-wrote the "original" story!), longtime hack actor Steve Barkett receives special guest star billing for his quick pre-credits appearance as a doomed astronaut and Martin Sheen's terminally drab, anything but a chip off the ol' block brother Joe Estevez is the closet thing to a name actor in the entire cast. The horrendously derivative rag-bag premise writes a paltry check that the feeble film itself doesn't even come close to cashing: A huge, fanged, drooling dinosaurian beastie stows away on a spaceship which crash-lands in the dense, verdant, real ferny and swampy Florida bayou. Said bulky ugly creature proceeds to munch on lots of folks, causes several local animals to transform into murderous mutants (the ferocious killer puppet armadillo is pretty laughable) and even makes similarly infected humans metamorphosize into your standard blank-eyed, pasty-faced lethal zomboid ghouls.Steve Latshaw's flaccid direction fails to inject any sense of style or vigor into Pat Moran's threadbare script, which in turn serves as a horrible catalog of every last error one could possibly find in The Bad Movie Book of Serious Cinematic Sins. Said sins include a numbing surplus of dreary chitchat, painfully stilted dialogue (among the choice clunky lines are "I like to watch the news sometimes, but Tom he calls it propaganda" and "This boy scout isn't going to help us find anything"), too much meandering around the woods in circles filler nonsense, a grave lack of any inspired or interesting individual flourishes, a poky stab at narrative thrust and, perhaps the picture's grossest, most unforgivable mistake of all, an insipid assortment of tiresomely one-note stereotypical characters (feisty go-getter female reporter, pompous fat jerk scientist, arrogant macho dude trial guide, meek, skinny nerdy brainiac, shady, double-tongued corporate head and so on). The uniformly flat acting, Maxwell J. Beck's primitive cinematography (the laborious fade-outs and clumsy creature on the prowl POV shots are especially shoddy), cheesy computer morphing f/x, the hokey-looking, pitifully unconvincing monster and Jeffrey Walton's droning, insufferably overwrought score definitely don't help matters any as well. Only some welcome gratuitous nudity (ravishing brunette Blake Pickett in particular makes for a pleasingly ample eyeful sans shirt) and a clever Hitchcock-style cameo by Sunshine State B-movie institution William Grefe as a photo on a dresser effectively detract from the otherwise overwhelmingly substantial tedium and ineptitude that's in alarming abundance in this truly wretched dreck.

Dr. Gore *SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*A spaceship crashes in Florida. Apparently the astronaut on board went through a bad batch of the "Dark Universe" and is now a giant alien slug head. A bunch of people head out into the swamp to check it out. Alien kills some of them. Some other stuff happens. This was a typically lame B sci-fi movie. The only thing that mildly amused me was near the end:*SPOILER ON ENDING*So a woman is hanging out in a grass hut (?) and the alien pops his head in through the wall. We get to watch his alien head squirm around for a good thirty seconds. No other parts of the alien are visible. Just his head. Was he stuck? If he could bash his head in, why couldn't he just worm the rest of his slug body in? I'm guessing he couldn't because there was nothing else to him but his head. The rest of the alien body would have been too expensive to build. While he's stuck, the woman comes up with a plan to kill him using a previously unknown ally prevalent in the swamp environment: Marsh gas. She uses a flare gun to ignite the marsh gas to kill the beast. If marsh gas is flammable, why didn't she go up in flames too? Was it just flammable around the alien's slug head? Was his head dipped in gasoline? Am I thinking about it too much?