With the sequel “Screamers: The Hunting” (2009), we get further away from the Philip K. Dick source material adapted into 1995’s “Screamers”: the 1953 short story “Second Variety.” But not as far away as you might think. “The Hunting” is that old-school type of cheap horror sequel that repeats the story from the original, starting with a narrative excuse to return the same territory.
Cliches present and accounted for
In this case, it’s a distress signal from the Screamers planet. A rescue expedition from Earth aims to grab the surviving humans and go; an approaching meteor storm that will destroy the planet provides the ticking clock. Plus, a building announces a self-destruct countdown later. Think of another horror, SF or military cliché, and the odds are good it’s somewhere in this movie.
For this straight-to-video sequel, Miguel Tejada-Flores returns to writing duties from the original but doesn’t tease out anything new from PKD’s story. He again tries to glean suspense out of the idea that one or more of the survivors could actually be a Screamer.
Granted, he delivers a great final-moment twist that lands much better than the original’s confusing ending. But most of the film is free of surprises.
The cast is on the flat side, but not embarrassingly bad, with horror-flick regular Gina Holden and future “Arrow” star Stephen Amell providing sex appeal. Lance Henriksen checks another SF franchise off his list and adds gravitas with a brief turn as the creator of the Screamers – someone who weirdly isn’t all that troubled about his Oppenheimer-esque invention (although he does emphasize the importance of not letting the Screamers get to Earth).
Everyone in “The Hunting” – except the requisite paranoiac who thinks everyone is a Screamer – is too disengaged from the serious stakes here.
Hit-and-miss special effects
That’s a cue that this is a special-effects-driven horror flick, and by that measure it’s hit and miss. When the Screamers zip along underneath the planet’s crust and burst through the air in threshing claws of violence at their victim, it looks fake but I know what director Sheldon Wilson’s flick is communicating with the visuals.
The practical creature effects, namely the Predator-like robot-human hybrids featured in the poster, fare better. But as is the case with the 1995 film, I can’t shake the sense that — while PKD’s story predates the big SF franchises — the “Screamers” films are following in the well-trod ground of “Terminator,” etc. (To be fair, “The Hunting” does predate “Terminator: Salvation,” which features a robot-human hybrid, by a few months.)
While the screenplay is too cranked out and redundant, “The Hunting” isn’t totally thrown together. I noticed good sound design work when the survivors are in an old factory tunnel and a storm rages outside. And western Canada ably – if generically – stands in for a rocky, sparse alien planet.
The production simply doesn’t have much money to work with. “Screamers: The Hunting” could’ve been better, it could’ve been worse … and it could’ve not existed without us missing much.
