“The Angel of Death is my superior officer.”

Justin’s rating: Honestly, I’d rather listen to Corey’s album “Former Child Actor”

Justin’s review: Corey Feldman’s career has always fascinated me. Here you have a guy who became a major child actor in the ’80s with titles like The Goonies, License to Drive, and The Lost Boys. But rounding into the ’90s and adulthood, Edgar Frog and Tommy Jarvis here struggled to make a successful transition. Thus we witnessed a slow spiral into lesser projects, perhaps bottoming out with his role as “Sara’s Gynecologist” in The Toxic Avenger IV, while continuing to work hard and capitalizing on his past success.

As we transition into 1998’s Legion, we revisit a Corey Feldman at a time in his life where he wasn’t getting callbacks for Gremlins 3 or Friday the 13th Part IX. This TV movie was probably a weekend job that put him in some pretty solid B-tier company, including  Terry Farrell (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), musician Rick Springfield, Trevor Goddard (Mortal Kombat), and Parker Stevenson (Baywatch).

It’s 2036, and a six-year war is bringing out some radical new ideas, like recruiting special ops from death row escapees to infiltrate an enemy facility and fight some a bio-engineered soldier. Yeah, it’s another “grunts in space” entry, with little in the way of originality as our varied group gets bumped off one-by-one by an unseen opponent.

The premise makes no sense — none of these people are trained to work together and the objective is as vague as the hand-drawn schematic that’s displayed alongside it — but nobody’s aiming for anything above “adequacy” here.

I feel like I’ve seen so many of these kinds of flicks where a meager budget buys a few paychecks, some uniforms and chunky guns, and one (1) monster mask to be revealed later on. Then all you’ve got to do is find some sort of industrial facility to play movie laser tag with the lights off and have your cast split up so that they can be picked off slowly.

Feldman is wholly present and forgettable as a computer hacker, but the only genuinely good performance is Goddard with his smarmy semi-evil snarking. Unfortunately, he’s like the first guy killed, so… way to go, movie. Farrell does a shade of her “Space Action Barbie” here, but she’s a unlikable as the team’s commander who often comes across like a substitute teacher trying in vain to keep an unruly kindergarten class under control.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect that much from a TV movie (I couldn’t find out what station this originally aired on), but I know I’ve seen so many better back in the day. Other than some of the names on the top billing, I have no idea why Legion got tossed my way a few times as a suggested review.

Intermission!

• Oh check out that cutting-edge PS1 spaceship CGI!
• Executions in the future use a cremation chamber
• The PA announcer is remarkably chatty
• Nothing like eight solid minutes of character backstory read out to you
• That schematic does not look military issue
• So many of the stunts are shown close-up so that they don’t actually have to pull off the stunt
• Innuendo Girl and Religious Fanatic Girl are really hitting their one notes hard
• “It doesn’t move like anything human” you can tell that from a little motion detector thing?
• “Our job is to survive.” “Our job is to WIN!”
• Everyone needs to stop talking over each other in ADR
• You think you picked up the maggots on a motion detector?
• “You’re pulling a Rigel again!”
• So much posturing and pointless talking
• “Jezebel!”
• “Armed with the weapons of man but the instincts of a lizard!”