In honor of the passing of Lou Gossett Jr (RIP), gonna watch some Enemy Mine on #VHS. This is another one that my brothers and I watched ad infinitum on cable when we were kids. Let's see how it holds up, shall we?
The ship to ship combat sequence was pretty meh, definitely looking like a bunch of models zooming around, but that's okay, it's not really that kind of SciFi movie, that's just the setup.
And here are some puppets! Bug puppet gets got by tentacle puppet. Scary stuff.
Most of the effects look pretty silly when you get right down to it, and the sets have a very Star Trek vibe (i.e. a bunch of papier mache rocks around a sound stage) but the costume/creature design is very good, especially for the era where it would have been totally acceptable to just like, give him some funny ears and call it good.
Got his leg ALL fucked up, but his alien buddy saved him in the nick of time and we get to see the thing the tentacle belongs to, which is kind of like an ant lion dragon.
Quaid is grateful to be saved, and now the friendship can really flourish.
Alien's English is really coming along, but I'm true American fashion, Quaid has seemingly given up learning the alien dialect at all 😂
(Obviously they had to speak English rather than have the whole movie in fake alien with subtitles, but still.)
Goddamn I remember these meteor sequences seeming very intense, but now they look like what they are, which is someone just off camera firing Roman candles in the general direction of the actors while they try to act terrified.
Ant Lion dragon things snuck up under the shelter and almost got Gossett! They got away by throwing some coals in its mouth and running like hell. But the shelter looks to be a total loss, it's snowing and Alien Gossett is about to give birth. Things are looking rough!
Gossett alien is giving birth but they are not gonna make it. Giving Quaid the speech about how he has to take responsibility for the kid and raise him up right.
Quaid was nearby killed, battery reached and his people don't trust him because he was speaking the alien language, so he's stolen a ship, blown a big ass hole in the wall of the space station and going after his (foster) kid, cowboy style!
'80s movies really had a blueprint, didn't they?
Even for what qualified as a very thinky science fiction movie of the era, problems are solved by lone badasses going rogue and punching their way to a solution.
Alien child rescued, and it looks like it's all going to work out.
The final fight scene is pretty cheesy, just like I remembered, since it focuses on the bad guy repeatedly putting the alien kid in a dumpster and Quaid taking him out lol. Hard to make that look anything but silly.
And that's it! A pretty fun movie with a little too much cheese to stand as an all timer, but definitely one of the more thoughtful sci-fi actioners of its era.
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