Soul Man Vs. the Martians: War of the World’s 2: The Next Wave
On a recent vacation I visited a local Blockbuster to find a movie for my then girlfriend’s parents to watch inbetween endless games of Boggle and chasing down copious amounts of Frangelico. Uninterested in Blockbuster’s selection of new releases, my wandering eye for cinematic trash came upon a box cover with a cheaply digitally drawn image, looking similar to the graphics of a scientology book, of an alien ship blowing up something or other. To my surprise, it was a sequel to War of the Worlds; instantly my curiosity level was raised.
I turned over the box cover to see what else this obvious cash-in had to offer, and found a picture of the Soul Man himself C. Thomas Howell, who apparently was not only the star, but the director as well. “But who is that slightly pudgy frog eyed guy standing next to him?” I thought to myself. Oh my god, it’s Kid from Kid ‘n Play! From those awful House Party movies of the nineties! Now my curiosity was definitely peaked and I had to give this one a go.
The movie starts off nice and campy, just how you want it to; a 20 second montage of shots depicting the original Wells story (or, more likely, the Spielberg version) opens the flick and then the story jumps to two years afterwards. The hero of the original story, George Herbert (played by Howell), has been living in a shack in the woods with his prepubescent son, waiting for the day the Martians will return. On his ham radio, George hears the sound of the Martians (which sounds more like an early modem) and leaves his son to go tell the local scientists his discovery.
There George learns things he never knew about the Martians; that people might not have been killed when the Martians zapped them, but rather may have been taken prisoner inside the Tripods. But he also learns a secret even more shocking; the Tripods are not the ships for the aliens, but rather the aliens themselves! And the aliens are transporting the living into their bellies, escasing them in layers of ectoplasmic skin, and sucking out their blood. George returns to his cabin to retrieve his son, but it’s too late, as the boy gets zapped as soon as George arrives.
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