Imagine, a cult film that spawned an entire genre of trashy films… The Psychotronic Man was one of those one man band films, where the director, Jack M. Sell, also shot the film, edited it and co-wrote the script with his star, Peter Spelson (who also produced.) It stars no one you ever heard of, […]
Read more "The Psychotronic Man (1979)"This has, of course, been billed as a “lost” Fifties science fiction film. Not that the label really fits. Destination Space was instead the pilot for a television series that never got made. Long time television character actor Harry Townes got a rare starring role, with John Agar second billed and Edward Platt (“The Chief” […]
Read more "Destination Space (1959)"One of the biggest mistakes first time filmmakers make is that their ambitions overwhelmingly exceed their capabilities. Fortunately, no one ever warned Derek Pearson about this. Pearson spent five years and about $60,000 creating his backyard movie. An inventor, struggling to recreate something that happened in his lab earlier, is unaware that his girlfriend is […]
Read more "Event 16 (2006)"The 1970s were the age of the TV movie. The American networks brought a remarkable number of interesting horror and science fiction films to the air for more than a decade, with a little help from producers like Dan Curtis, writers like Richard Matheson, and even the young Steven Spielberg behind the camera. Of course, excellent films […]
Read more "A Cold Night’s Death (1973)"Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something truly strange turns up. Soviet SF has a tendency to be a little dry, more intelligent than similar US efforts, with a fondness for hardware-heavy portrayals of space travel, vague socialist futures where everyone is happy together (and therefore politics don’t matter) and sometimes, a turgid […]
Read more "Amphibian Man [Chelovek-Amfibiya] (1962)"A science fiction film by the guy who wrote Pontypool??? Generally, that seems to be what most people have to say about Ejecta. After all, there have been almost as many movies about people who’ve been abducted by evil grey aliens as there have been zombie movies. Okay, maybe not quite that many, but still, […]
Read more "Ejecta (2014)"Roger Corman. I would be hard pressed to point to any other name which is on so many good films and yet still causes a shiver of dread when it shows up on the film you happen to be watching. Sometimes it is hard to believe that the young guerrilla filmmaker, whose ultra cheap films always had that […]
Read more "Battletruck [Warlords of the 21st Century] (1982)"Do mad scientist films actually qualify as science fiction? One of my favorite films is Georges Franju’s Judex (1963), a film that combines amazing black and white compositions, steampunk-ish inventions, a pulpy plot borrowed from a 1916 French serial, and just a hint of tongue in cheek humor. Eleven years later, he created another, very similar […]
Read more "Nuits rouges [aka, Shadowman] (1974)"“Here we go again…” Who needs a multi-million dollar budget? For a mere $18,000, comics artist Rob Schrab and a bunch of his friends created this insane little short, repurposing whatever trash they could find to create a film with its own distinctive look: think what you’d get if you took the future world imagined […]
Read more "Robot Bastard! (2002)"It would be easy to dismiss Paris Qui Dort as yet another trick film in the vein of Georges Méliès, albeit one that came almost a decade later. But this well-made short SF film is the work of one of the most interesting French directors of the silent era, Rene Clair. Clair directed a number of somewhat […]
Read more "Paris Qui Dort [aka, The Crazy Ray, At 3:25, While Paris Sleeps] (1924)"
rivets on the poster 