Let’s get this straight: this one doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I still managed to enjoy it. What we’ve got here is a dark, cyberpunk future, where London is flooded and Rutger Hauer is a seriously disturbed policeman on the track of a particularly nasty serial killer. It is also a buddy cop […]
Read more "Split Second (1992)"(aka,Max Headroom: The Original Story; Twenty Minutes into the Future) I always find it a touch amusing that one of the major sub-genres within science fiction (which tends to be a bit snobbish about being at its purest in print, as opposed to movies or TV) was born on the big screen. Blade Runner (1982) […]
Read more "Max Headroom (1985)"I suspect it may just be a momentary window of opportunity, but filmmakers these days have a number of new ways to market and distribute their work. Which is probably just as well when you remember how the excellent but not exactly everyday viewer oriented Blade Runner 2049 got stuck on the biggest screens available for weeks even though […]
Read more "Sync (2012)"When I saw the trailer, I knew I had to see this one. It had to be the most insane mish-mash of science fiction tropes I have seen since…well, since the last Hong Kong science fiction movie. In fact, more than anything else, this one reminds me of Future X Cops, which hits many of […]
Read more "Bleeding Steel [Ji qi zhi xue] (2017)"(aka, Monster From The Surf, Surf Terror) Back in the Sixties, there was a long string of Beach movies, most of them turned out by AIP, including all those Frankie and Annette films. This isn’t one of them. There were also a number of teen monster movies, starting in the late Fifties with I […]
Read more "THE BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTER (1965)"This is probably my all time favorite Godzilla Movie. Not the best, mind you, but the most insane and totally whacked out Godzilla movie ever made. First of all, it has everything. And I do mean “everything:” flying saucers, cute pets, time travel, the secret origins of both monsters, a terminator robot, a super submarine […]
Read more "Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah [Gojira vs. Kingu Gidorâ] (1991)"It was one of those rare, surprise successes. But could it be repeated? In 1953, BBC staff scriptwriter, Nigel Kneale, convinced the Beeb to let him write a SF/horror play to fill an empty Saturday night slot. It was a huge success, drawing a record audience, and inspired their competitors to make their own SF […]
Read more "Quatermass II (1955)"Bert I. Gordon seemed to specialize in making things big. In fact, most of his contributions to the world of low budget horror and SF seem to involve photographically blowing something up to giant size, whether insects or people or animals of one sort or another, In fact, his first Seven movies — every one he […]
Read more "The Food of the Gods (1976)"(aka, Jules Verne’s ‘Mystery on Monster Island’; Monster Island) The theory here is that this one is based on Jules Verne‘s Mysterious Island. As I’ve noted before, there seems to be no real connection between a Jules Verne movie and anything he actually wrote. But even by that standard, this one has remarkably little to […]
Read more "Mystery on Monster Island [Misterio en la isla de los monstruos] (1981)"It seems strange, but one of the seminal SF film and TV series remains little seen in the United States. I refer, of course, to the original Quatermass serials and the Hammer film remakes that followed. While he had minimal impact on American SF movies, Quatermass inspired a generation of British SF movies and television […]
Read more "The Uninvited (1997)"
rivets on the poster 