I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this one. I’ll admit it. I suspect the inspiration here may have been It Came from Outer Space: It starts about the same way, with a bright light falling from the sky and landing in the desert with a big explosion. We hardly need to be […]
Read more "The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)"Think Nouvelle Vague James Bond, directed by Jean-Luc Goddard and you won’t be far wrong. Picture elegant, misty black and white film; bleak modern architecture contrasted with Art Nouveau and carnival rides; a stunning collection of classic cars; and some of Antoni Gaudi’s best known works. The familiar image of an H-bomb blast runs backwards, […]
Read more "L’inconnu de Shandigor [The Unknown Man of Shandigor] (1967)"I sometimes find myself wondering what went wrong with some of these films. After all, they had so much to work with here! I suppose that’s why it comes as no surprise that this was a TV movie — or that it was a Canadian/Czech co-production. Now, just to be clear, we aren’t talking about […]
Read more "Downdraft (1996)"What do you know. They made a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark in Poland. It really isn’t a surprise, as everyone seems to have copied that film, with countless imitations from the US alone, including The Jewel of the Nile, King Solomon’s Mines and High Road to China, and many more from Italy (The […]
Read more "Klatwa doliny wezy [Curse of Snakes Valley] (1988)"Raiders of the Lost Ark has to be one of the most copied films of all time. You don’t have to look too hard to find copies made in the US — offhand one thinks of The Jewel of the Nile, King Solomon’s Mines and High Road to China, but it isn’t much harder to find […]
Read more "Sky Pirates (1986)"Honorable Mention (Maybe. I Think. Who can tell?) This is a seriously strange film. I have no idea what to think about it. But it has earned a mention here because it is a sequel — or more-or-less sequel, or some sort of strange alternate reality continuation or something even more tenuously connected — to […]
Read more "The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper (2014)"Mulgoe combines two very different types of movies: the lavish historical epic of the sort that the Chinese film industry has been making lately, built around political machinations, a serious threat against Imperial power and a heroic figure who steps in to support the Emperor at great cost –and the monster movie. I have to […]
Read more "Mulgoe [Monstrum] (2018)"