I made the decision to check out Apollo 18 last week. It had been sitting on the ole’ Netflix queue for a while and let me tell you, it should have stayed there.  Wow, did it suck.

If you haven’t seen it, Apollo 18 is a sleep inducing found footage horror film about two astronauts being attacked by giant spiders on the moon. Spoiler warning, they die, and by the end of the sluggish 90 minute film you’ll be glad to see them go.  Well… assuming you are still awake or haven’t gone off to do something more exciting, like cleaning out the junk underneath your bed.

If Syfy had made this movie and just called it Moon Spiders it would have been 100 times better.

While I can’t recommend Apollo 18, this did get me to thinking about horror movies that take place in space.  There is of course the Alien series; and a personal favorite of mine, the often overlooked and poorly reviewed Event Horizon. But then there are the times when a long running franchise seems loses faith in its established formula and attempts to breathe new life into itself by sending its primary antagonist into space.

First Space, then Da Hood!

OH LOOK! I’ve made a list of them! By my count this has happened four horrendous times.

Critters 4 – 1992

Of all of the film series to make the jump to space Critters makes the most sense.  The Critters were from outer space, after all and all of the films involved shifting alien bounty hunters.  Space just made sense as a place for the story to go.  Supporting character Charlie from the previous films accidentally gets locked into stasis with the last two eggs of the carnivorous fur balls that have been terrorizing  people throughout the series.  He wakes up on a space station to discover that it is the year 2045.  Critters get lose! Oh no! How could that have happened?

The original Critters and its three sequels were favorites of mine as a kid.  They combined violence in comedy in a way that any nine year old boy can get true entertainment out of.  They represent the odd movie monster that gets less threatening from film to film, with each  installment dropping of some of their abilities.  My guess is due to budget restrictions.   In the first movie they could shoot poison darts, grow larger depending on how much they ate, and could combine together into a giant man eating fur ball.  By the last installment all they did was kill and eat.

Aside from the Critters of the fourth film being the least threatening, the stakes in this film are also at their lowest.  Where as in the previous films the Critters could have been a threat to the Earth, these ones could only be a threat to the people on the space station.  A grand total of seven people.

Best IN SPACE moment:

The space station they are on is so old that may explode at any time, and the computer program that runs it is malfunctioning and does the opposite of what ever the crew asks it to do.  So apparently at some point in the near future we are going to start packing space stations with explosives and never bother with software maintenance.  Sounds like a smart plan.