The Host did something that seemed terribly unlikely back in the Nothings: it breathed new life into the giant monster movie. And what life! After a brief intro that hints at the creature’s origins, we move from our first glimpses of the creature to a wild monster rampage down a crowded river walk in a matter […]
Read more "The Host [Gwoemul] (2006)"Years ago, the Simpsons did a brief parody of the then-current string of original crew Star Trek movies, a clip from some ridiculously numbered Trek movie entitled “So Very Tired”. Sigh. After only three movies, somehow it seems it should be Chris Pine sighing and saying, “Again with the Klingons”. Let’s get this straight. When the […]
Read more "Star Trek Beyond (2016)"Perhaps the best part of this film is the opening. A helicopter lands, soldiers grab the nearly comatose people inside it, carry them between two long lines of soldiers and dump them through a triangular, high-tech door into a tiny elevator. The way in which this scene is shot – with a lot of (slow and […]
Read more "Chosen Survivors (1974)"I suppose it is a tribute to the makers of this film that somehow one fails to take in just how absurd the basic premise is until the film is over. Okay, we’ve got Sentinel, your hugely successful videogame company; Kincaid, your stock issue evil genius CEO trying to make the world a better place by murdering […]
Read more "Beta Test (2016)"Think Film Noir Time Travel thriller and you’ve got the basic idea. Mind you, it’s all wrapped in up such a beautiful package that you wouldn’t want to dismiss it that quickly. Physicist Jim Beale thinks he’s made the next great breakthrough, the one which, like Tesla’s work on electricity, will completely transform our wold. […]
Read more "Synchronicity (2015)"A monster arrives from space, then spends the rest of the film going around eating people. Which does, yes, sound somewhat familiar. Mind you, we’ve got John Agar as the sheriff, although the former Mr. Shirley Temple is probably the only person you’ve ever heard of in this little film. He, of course, after a promising […]
Read more "Night Fright (1967)"This is a singularly ugly film, shot with incredible beauty. Dead Man’s Letters is by far the best known of Konstantin Lopushansky’s films here in the U.S. It is also the least of them – at least of the ones I have seen. It is neither as harrowing as the absolutely brilliant and indescribable Visitor […]
Read more "Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986)"This is that rare exception, the sequel that is often hailed as being better than the original. Mind you, despite its popularity – and iconic status – the original version wasn’t one of the better films of the fifties Sci Fi boom. On the whole it is a nicely minor film with a few memorable […]
Read more "The Blob (1988)"Perhaps this is one of those sequels that needs to be seen before the original film. After all, there’s nothing here that wasn’t done better in the first film – or in the 1988 remake. In fact, the general sense one gets of the film is of a certain tiredness of it all. It is […]
Read more "Beware! The Blob [Son of the Blob](1972)"(aka: Dark Planet: Rebellion; The Inhabited Island: Mêlée; The Inhabited Island: Skirmish) This is part two of the recent adaptation of a novel by the Russian SF writers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, a film I suspect may have been made at the same time as part one. While the first film (see my review here) ended […]
Read more "Obitaemyy ostrov: Skhvatka [Inhabited Island 2: Rebellion](2009)"
rivets on the poster 