Because simply loving them wasn’t enough, X-Files producer R.W. Goodwin chooses to actually make his own cheesy ‘50s sci-fi film with Alien Trespass, a saga too jokey and graphic to be taken as a straight homage, and yet also a touch too straightforward to function as loopy satire. The result of this indecisive approach is that his out-of-this-world tale – about an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth and attempts to stop the people-devouring monster that’s escaped from his spaceship – merely coasts along limply, lacking ribald tongue-in-cheek humor as well as the unironic self-seriousness that epitomized its spiritual predecessors, of which The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the most obvious. The prelude, in which a phony newsreel precedes (and hypes) the “feature presentation,” sets the off-kilter mood. Yet unlike with Grindhouse’s phony peripheral trappings, Goodwin’s intro can’t muster much in the way of laugh-out-loud humor or meta-cinema commentary. Instead, like the subsequent action, it just sits there, almost as lifeless and inert as the puddles of human remains that are left after the alien creature Ghota has eaten.

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Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday.  Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat.  Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him.  The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies.  By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen.  When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born.  Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen.  But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code:  although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code.  So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

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The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are often considered the two greatest acheivements of detective noir prior to the post-war era.  It's by no means incidental to their reputation that both starred the pitch-perfect Humphrey Bogart, nor that in both films, he portrayed a classic private eye created by one of the standout pulp witers of the previous decade.  Though both have been rescued from dime-novel oblivion by later critics who were able to pick out their substantial literary talents from the low-level hackwork that comprised much of 1930s pulp, Raymond Chandler's reputation has outstripped Dashiell Hammett's, and rightfully so; Hammett was an outstanding technician and a keen drawer of character, but he lacked Chandler's transcendent style, his keen psychological insight, and his stunning sense of place and time.  Still, he shared with Philip Marlowe's creator a love of language, and he was by far Chandler's superior in terms of complex, inventive plot, which made his books natural fodder for movie adaptations.

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