We just got back from a 4 night stay at the Rio Hotel for New Year's Eve, and I watched 18 movies in the room because it was free. Here's the first group.

Pandorum
"Upon rousing themselves from hyper-sleep, Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Bower (Ben Foster), a pair of crewmen assigned to work on a spacecraft, discover startling gaps in their collective memory -- including who they are and what, exactly, their mission was in the first place. The plot thickens when they realize they're not the only ones on board the ship. Cam Gigandet co-stars in this gripping sci-fi thriller." - Netflix

This was Mr. Troutbend's choice. It sounded too much like the original Alien movie, but it wasn't aliens chasing them around the giant spaceship, it was mutant human beings eating everyone, so that's different, right? In addition to the Alien aspect, here were elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Descent, another movie about the total destruction of planet earth. Overall, it was an okay movie, but I wouldn't watch it again.

Zombieland
Another Mr. T choice. This is a comedic zombie movie with Woody Harrelson. The whole world has deteriorated to zombies eating the few regular people who are left and people fleeing them to survive. Same basic story as any zombie movie, with some refreshing dialog, and a real enthusiasm for killing those zombies. Pretty good escapism if you like this kind of thing, maybe the best zombie movie I've seen, but that's not saying much, because the only other one I remember is Shaun of the Dead.

The Box
This movie is based on "Button, Button," a short story by Richard Matheson. It seems like a lot of sci fi movies are based on short stories instead of long ones, maybe it's easier to flesh out a plot to make a movie rather than trim one down.

The premise is a guy shows up at your door with a box. If you choose to push the button in the box, you will receive $1 million cash but someone, whom you don't know, will die. So of course Cameron Diaz pushes the button and all hell breaks loose. This movie stole my soul and scared the crap out of me. Some sci fi movies do that, which is why I don't watch a lot of them.

Set in 1976 there are some great old cars of that era, plus the home interiors are tacky to the max by today's standards, which I love. The production values on this movie aren't great. Sometimes a character would forget to limp or they'd lose their hick accent, and the music tended to be over-dramatic and irrelevant to the action at times, but gradually those elements added to the eerie quality of the movie and scared me all the more.

It was like watching an extended Twilight Zone episode, and I longed for Rod Serling to show up so I'd know it would end. To me, this was the ultimate movie experience; I ended up turning on every light in hotel room and wanted to hold my head and scream when it was over. I even had trouble getting it out of my head so I could fall asleep that night. It still gives me pleasurable chills to remember how I felt, and that's my idea of how a good creature-feature movie should leave me feeling.

Am I going to watch it again? Someday. When I recover from being so scared.