This one is basically an Action movie. Terrorists kidnap the son of a young, single mother, Xia Tian, and threaten to kill him unless she brings them all the data on the scientific research she has been doing. It’s a familiar situation. But the research is about time travel, and when everything goes wrong, she […]
Read more "Reset [Ni shi ying jiu] (2017)"It came as a bit of a shock, seeing this one not long after I watched Roger Corman’s 1982 Mutant [Forbidden World]. The earlier film may be a cheap Alien ripoff, but it still had a few truly strange moments in it that lifted it from the rut of cheap ripoffs. Yes, it isn’t too hard […]
Read more "Lords of the Deep (1989)"(aka, Insect; Invasion of the Bodysuckers) It is a really bad sign, when the army shows up to put you under quarantine, and the guy in charge hands your official notice to a soldier in a HazMat suit to deliver to you. This is one of those sadly neglected SF/horror films from the Eighties, which came […]
Read more "Blue Monkey (1987)"How can you sum this one up… A human contender fights alien monsters in a big, sporting competition. That was easy. This one was one of the final handful of films Charles Band made at Empire films before it collapsed, and like Robot Jox, it got tangled up in the resulting mess and wasn’t released […]
Read more "Arena (1989)"(aka, Gezora, Ganimes, and Kamoebas: Decisive Battle! Giant Monsters of the South Seas; Yog: Monster from Space) This is one of the stranger Kaiju Eiga films Toho made. One might almost be tempted to say the strangest if it weren’t for Godzilla’s Revenge and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Although, as you’d expect, many of the […]
Read more "Space Amoeba [Gezora, Ganime, Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaijû] (1970)"(Warning: explicit content ahead! And spoilers.) There’s a moment in Mike Judge’s brilliant dystopian comedy, Idiocracy, that comes to mind: when the hero, “Not Sure” tries to hold a private conference with the girl who was put into suspended animation with him, his guards want to know why he wants to go into the bushes […]
Read more "The Shape of Water (2017)"“Welcome to the Garden of Eden. We play God here.” Roger Corman: he started in the Fifties, making crude but interesting SF and Horror films for next to nothing. In the Sixties, he moved into far more polished (and expensive) Gothic Horror films. In the Seventies, he moved away from directing, instead producing a wide […]
Read more "Mutant [Forbidden World] (1982)"This is one of those films that are hard to believe. Hard to believe, that is, that anyone would ever make such a film. Seriously. I mean, a giant monster from outer space shows up, a bird the size of a battleship, and starts causing all sorts of chaos, and what does it look like? […]
Read more "The Giant Claw (1957)"It is familiar territory. Or at least that’s how it seems. A blonde barbarian warrior wanders through the savage lands, fighting dinosaurs, the Fire People and savage Ape men. But just when you’re thinking, oh, yet another Conan the Barbarian ripoff, we suddenly find out that wasn’t the movie they were stealing from at all. […]
Read more "Yor, the Hunter from the Future [Il mondo di Yor] (1983)"(aka, Monster of Blood) It’s really amazing. Look at all they had to work with here: a scientist accidentally exposes himself to a deadly biowarfare virus that turns him into a blood-sucking mutant. The government sends troops in to seal off the town. The locals get so angry and frightened they nearly riot. And, in […]
Read more "Panic [Bakterion] (1982)"
rivets on the poster 