Monolith

LAPD Detective Tucker (Bill Paxton) is a renegade slob cop who bends the rules to get justice done; his partner, Terri Flynn (Lindsay Frost), is a well-groomed officer who obeys the rules. The mismatched duo constantly squabble with each other on any possible topic, and it gets worse when they apprehend a scientist who viciously gunned down a small boy in broad daylight. The unfortunate kid was the latest host to a hostile "living energy parasite" under study by a shadow government agency evolved from the Air Force UFO task-force Project Blue Book; they're literally sitting on a giant, ancient spaceship embedded deep within the LA Basin. Power-mad bureaucrat Villano (John Hurt) has been murderously covering up the escaped entity's reign of terror, but when it takes over the body of Tucker, Flynn descends into the bowels of the Earth to exorcise her pal. The alien migrates into Villano and attempts to pilot its crippled craft away, and Tucker and Flynn leap from the sparking saucer at skyscraper altitude. Of course, they fall harmlessly in the water and live to argue happily ever after.

The E.T. manifests itself as a tangle of lightning bolts, but the $8 million MONOLITH budget ran short in the frantic, fragmented climax where most shots of the spiny spaceship seem to have been cut, and those scraps that remain are on the Ed Wood Jr. level of technical proficiency. Frost and Paxton deserve better; to embody the heartbreak of alien possession, Paxton is reduced to making silly boogeyman faces. Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr. also goes to waste as one of those movie police captains just-hours-away-from-retirement. Gossett's character gets shot by Villano's goons about a zillion times right after it's revealed that he's a fine husband and father. His is just about the only death not eulogized with the buddy-cop banter that makes MONOLITH crumble almost from the start. (Violence, profanity, substance abuse.) leave a comment