Noise. Banging, clunking, grinding, metal on metal, screeching and shuddering. We have this strange notion that space travel would be perfectly silent. After all, there is no noise in the vacuum of space. Yet big machines are still going to make vibrations that will carry through the fabric of the space vessel and fill it […]
Read more "Prospect (2018)"(aka Meteor Monster) Today I learned that falling meteorites look just like burning sparklers. Or at least, that’s what the one in Teenage Monster looks like (and, in fact, that is what they used for the effect!). But fortunately, we get it out of the way right off the bat so we don’t have to […]
Read more "Teenage Monster (1958)"It is always a pleasure to find yet another reminder that clever writing matters more than hundreds of millions of dollars of effects. In fact, there is only one effect in this film, and it is one of the simplest imaginable. Instead, what we have is something very simple — two men sitting in a […]
Read more "They’re Made Out of Meat (2005)"Mad scientists just aren’t like the rest of us. Just to give you an example, most of us aren’t willing to test out some new scientific development on ourselves, no matter how sure we are that it is going to work. And if we do, and we end up as some half-man, half ape thing, […]
Read more "The Ape Man (1943)"Let’s make this clear: this one has nothing whatsoever to do with Bela Lugosi’s 1943 film from Monogram, The Ape Man. This is hardly unheard of when we are talking about horror films from the Thirties and Forties, as neither Doctor X nor The Spider Woman had much to do with the “sequels” that bore […]
Read more "Return of the Ape Man (1944)"I’d be hard pressed to identify an author whose work has been the subject of so many terrible adaptations as Kurt Vonnegut. I suppose his odd notions of justice and rather strange sense of humor has a lot to do with it. But I have to wonder if it is because there is something fundamental […]
Read more "Between Time and Timbuktu (1972)"Imagine, for a moment, that you’re in that classic Toho space-aliens-attack-the-Earth movie, Battle in Outer Space: all the important leaders are gathered, making their plans to fight the aliens… And a bunch of children come rushing into the room. Okay, this is a children’s film about an alien invasion, and we are given some justification for […]
Read more "Invasion of the Neptune Men [Uchu Kaisoku-sen] (1961)"