Several reviewers have compared this film to those produced by horror great Jacques Tourneur. Somehow, it isn’t exactly what you’d expect of a film about a scientist turning a panther into a man. But it does more or less fit. What makes it even more interesting is that this was the first of the series of […]
Read more "Terror Is a Man [aka Blood Creature] (1959)"It isn’t enough to say they don’t make movies like this anymore. The only place anyone ever made films like this was in Mexico, and even they didn’t make that many. This is one of the silliest movies ever made. Ever. It is also a lot of fun. I think the general idea here must […]
Read more "La nave de los monstruos [The Ship of Monsters] (1960)"Sometimes the story about a film is more interesting than the film itself. Back in 1989, Dean Alioto figured out a clever new way to make a low budget SF film. He convinced a friend to give him $6500, hired a few Improv actors and, after several weeks of rehearsals, made one of the first found footage […]
Read more "U.F.O. Abduction (1989)"Once again we find ourselves in MST3K territory. The Sixties were not a great time for science fiction. Horror films had taken over, audiences became more demanding, and the effects had to compete with real footage of our space program. The naive simplicity of the Fifties got caught in increasing paranoia and the very […]
Read more "Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966)"This is a fairly strange film, which takes some bleeding edge biological speculations and spins them off wildly into the stratosphere of weird ideas. It was made for TV, a year before Ringu launched the current J-Horror fad, and it was an adaptation of a popular Japanese horror novel. The book then inspired a graphic novel and […]
Read more "Parasite Eve [Parasaito Ivu] (1997)"Somehow, when I first heard of this one, it sounded remarkably like the series of German SF films of the Thirties, which started with F.P. 1. Like them, we have the big, near term science fictional invention – in this case a prototype aircraft – a Thirties modern research facility, and at the heart of the […]
Read more "The Net [Project M7] (1953)"The Mill Valley “50 Greatest” DVD sets always seem to include one or two films that are actually halfway interesting. This is one of them. Somehow this one struck me as what one might have got when you combined one of Hammer films’ psychological thrillers with a science fiction film. At least, one from the […]
Read more "Prey [Alien Prey] (1977)"An alien crash lands in a junkyard. A lot of people try to kill it. Most of them die. There’s more to it than that, but that does mostly sum it up. There’s a pitch black sense of humor at work here, with the sympathetic characters and heartwarming story arcs getting killed off first, with the ingenuity […]
Read more "Alien Opponent (2010)"This is your basic 90s buddy cop revenge flick. Well, almost. The curious aspect here is that it is set against a detailed cyberpunk background with a lot of well-thought out technological developments, including cybernetic implants, unintentionally lethal VR videogames, virtual drug “analogs”, clones, assassin drones, super-soldier drugs, a cyber technology police department and, of course, […]
Read more "Terminal Justice [Cybertech P.D.] (1996)"This is a strange, strange, strange little film. It is as far from the Disney model of animation as it is possible to get, and it makes Ralph Bakshi’s edgy underground films look remarkably…conventional by comparison. At least as far as his animation style goes. It also borders on being pornographic – let’s call it […]
Read more "Mutant Aliens (2001)"
rivets on the poster 