Nullness

A charmless, sluggish, joyless spectacle lacking thrills or horror, the Raven offers nothing and has absolutely nothing to say. Cusack gives little effort in raising his Poe beyond a slightly witty curmudgeon, but fails even this, as his wit is witless and his charm suffocating in wood. The "Poe-themed" crimes are an artless display lacking neither the campy fun of a Hammer death nor the sleaze of Saw-inspired torture: like the movie itself, they serve no purpose but to further PLOT, and when PLOT is as half-hearted as it is in the Raven, it is not long before the audience is snoring in sleep.

After a perfectly fine Masquerade Ball sequence, the film's thrilless plot begins rolling, and it is as fresh and enticing as moldy toast. Tired sequence after tiring sequence follows, full of mediocre mystery, devoid of either realism or originality. The (obvious) villain, once he is (obviously) revealed, gives the dull, canned reasons for the murders any viewer of average-intelligence expected all along. No interesting conflict is addressed, no true or heroic or even interesting mountain must Poe climb- the audience is left feeling as hollow as the film's heart, and even the James Bond-influenced closing credits can't save them from feeling like they have experienced a goofy pockmark of clichés. Goofy, yet not goofy enough to be enjoyable. But sadly perhaps just goofy enough to annoy, and turn some off Poe forever.

Any superficial enjoyment the usual snarky MST3K crowd of Hollywood- pandering mall-snobs could find in an independent movie like Galaxy Invader should be abated a bit by how downright depressing it is. The alien is really only a plot device, a MacGuffin to propel the story into one dealing with human ignorance and greed, and an examination of the little tyrant of a dysfunctional family. This is one of the most bleak and depressing depictions of a family I have ever seen, with an enabler of a mother, a cowering, toady son, and two daughters that hate their father, who rules over all in a torn shirt that symbolizes his own ethical laziness and moral bankruptcy. There are some fine, funny scenes in Galaxy Invader, such as when a dummy spirals off a cliff at stunning velocity, but all the funny scenes are soured by what came before them, be it the senseless depravity carried out on an alien life form or the spectacle of a sweaty, enraged father wrestling to the death with his own son.

The overall ambiance of Galaxy Invader is one of hopelessness and desperation. Where meeting an alien being should elicit a scene of joy and wonder, or in a Hollywood movie some schmaltzy E.T. crap, here in an independent feature we are given a vision of a close encounter that seems startlingly disturbing and ugly and born of dull dark reality, the beer-soaked jungles of gristly redneck life. The invader at the center of Galaxy Invader doesn't come from another planet: it comes from the galaxy of our own bitter, corrupt hearts.