Total Retribution

Overview: A gaggle of refugee actors from a small-town community theater battle malevolent robots, dino-chicken monsters, and pudgy zombies on a space station. Also, a ghost-pale woman wanders around naked, then she blows up the Earth, or maybe she saves it, that part is pretty vague. Somehow this is all a deep, insightful moral lesson about man's hubris or whatever.

Directed By: Andrew Bellware, 2011

The Case For: Anyone in the movie business who has ever been told "we'll get it in post" needs to see this movie to know what the worst-case scenario is.

The Case Against: The only things this movie really has to offer are sex and violence, but the sex is limited to pasty, unappealing nudity, and the violence involves Nerf guns and the fakest fake blood we've ever seen.

Trillaphon: Coming this fall...based on the critically acclaimed graphic novel...a non-stop cinematic thrill ride...a tour-de-force...Aeon Sux.

Hydrogen: No, Total Retribution, although I like your title better. This isn't one of those movies you can just sum up with a pithy fake title, though. It's sort of an all-nude stage revue adaptation of System Shock 2, as far as I can tell.

Trillaphon: L-l-look at you, stripper. A pathetic c-c-c-c-creatu-u-r-r-re of nipples and butt cleavage, panting and sweating as you run through my c-cor-r-ridors-s-s.

Hydrogen: This movie has to hold the all-time nudity record for something that's not actually a porno. Twenty solid minutes of the female lead wandering the ship completely naked, for no reason.

Trillaphon: Let's not forget the production company trailer consisting of a nude woman opening Pandora's box and pulling a spraypainted nerf gun out of it. We've done plenty of movies that open with the Here's Some Titties Gambit, but flashing boobs before second 1 of actual movie is some next-level shit.

Hydrogen: "A naked lady opens Pandora's box and pulls out a really fake-looking space gun" is probably the closest we're going to come to any kind of plot summary for Total Retribution, incidentally.

Trillaphon: Yeah, there's some bits and pieces about robots and zombies and wacky religions, but it's all pretty incoherent. The alternate title is Earth Killer, which sort of hints at the underlying plot about a space gun that can blow up the Earth, but we can't figure out if the Earth gets blown up or not, which is sort of an important point.

Hydrogen: No, clearly you didn't get it, there's also time travel and she's a robot with amnesia and there's some deep philosophy about the fog of war and man's inevitable destruction at his own hands in here. That, and naked women and robot dino-chickens.

Trillaphon: Her nudity is a metaphor for how we are all naked inside. Inside our clothes.

Hydrogen: The best acting in the whole movie is suspiciously from that one lady who was yelling for help because she was trapped in a cage.

Trillaphon: "HELP, HELP, THESE GUYS SAID THEY'D PAY ME 50 BUCKS TO BE IN A MOVIE, BUT THEY LOCKED ME IN HERE AND THE SMELL IS OVERPOWERING! GET HELP!"

Hydrogen: Non-consensual method acting, the latest craze.