A farmer digs up an alien spaceship, and before you know it, vicious aliens are running about, killing people and generally making a nuisance of themselves. A small group of survivors hole up in a small house and try to find some way to escape… Let’s face it: it’s very familiar territory. Curiously, despite all […]
Read more "The Awakened (2009)"(aka, Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters; Godzilla; Gojira: Kaiju Wakusei) Sometimes you have to wonder if Netflix has any idea what they are doing. It’s frustrating enough that their “original” films are simply not available anywhere else, not even on DVD (I know if I had made a film I would find that one particularly painful), but whatever […]
Read more "Godzilla: Monster Planet (2017)"For those of you who came in late, Christopher R. Mihm is one of the most prolific “garage band” filmmakers out there. He and his crew of volunteer helpers have been making unique ultra-low budget SF and horror movies for over an decade now. Made mostly of duct tape and cardboard, they are some of the best […]
Read more "Danny Johnson Saves the World (2015)"Ahhh, yes. There was a time when you could count on the Italian film industry to produce some of the most bizarre and absurd science fiction movies anyone ever made; the sort of films that leave you wondering “What th’ *bleep* do they think they’re doing?”; films like The Giant of Metropolis, Wild, Wild Planet, The Raiders of […]
Read more "Rats: Night of Terror [Rats — Notte di terrore](1984)"It’s always strange when you run into someone in the “wrong” place. In this case, it’s the writer/director, Scott Dikkers. He’s the cartoonist responsible for the very strange and low-key cult comic strip, Jim’s Journal, which once appeared in College papers all over the country, and the editor (and chief writer) of the humorous news […]
Read more "Spaceman (1997)"Looking at his most recent set of films, it seems to me that Christopher R. Mihm has felt the need to find new avenues to explore with his growing collection of “new old, good bad” films: they include a hard-edged and noirish revenge thriller; a children’s film; a post-apocalyptic spaghetti “Midwestern” currently in production; and this […]
Read more "The Late Night Double Feature (2014)"It’s amazing how much you can do with so little. Here we have a very simple film, a mere four minutes long, and yet it still manages to come up with a few clever ideas and to wring a smile or two out of us. Something goes wrong with Ray’s mini-Hadron collider, and the end […]
Read more "The Palindrome Paradox (2013)"This is a very solid piece of work. Here we have a retro-Eighties short SF film, which manages in a very short span — a mere 21 minutes — to establish two interesting characters, build a fascinating future, throw in a bit of conflict, a few fights, and a trip to the moon in a […]
Read more "Moonshot (2016)"(aka, Project Shadowchaser) This is what you get when you combine Die Hard with your typical android-on-the-loose direct to video movie of the Nineties. We’ve got a high-rise hospital in a big, unspecified city of the future: a team of mercenaries seize control of the place and take everyone hostage. The FBI need help, so they […]
Read more "Shadowchaser (1992)"[aka, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Across America (video title)] There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood that comes to mind, where Ed and a friend are viewing a studio’s collection of stock footage, and Ed points out how the unrelated odds and ends of film could be edited into a real movie, about the Army fighting […]
Read more "Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992)"
rivets on the poster 