There’s been an interesting trend in Indie SF lately. If you look at films like Yesterday Last Year, Lea: Light Engineering Android, Young Ones, Melocotones, or The Infinite Man, you will note that, despite their SF elements, they are primarily movies about people, and the science fiction is part of the human story. Naturally, the sort of people who […]
Read more "The Gateway [Alpha Gateway] (2018)"(aka Godzilla: Battle Mobile Breeding City Godzilla: The City Mechanized for the Final Battle) This is, of course, a sequel to last year’s Godzilla: Monster Planet, which was the first Godilla animated feature and a curious hybrid of a very familiar Anime conventions — the shipload of survivors on the run from a terrible menace, the […]
Read more "Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle [Gojira: kessen kidô zôshoku toshi] (2018)"(aka, Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror Planet of Horrors, Quest) This one was Roger Corman’s first attempt to make an Alien rip off. it would not be his last. But it is also one of the better ones. A hand-picked crew is sent on a rescue mission by the Master of their planet. A spaceship […]
Read more "Galaxy of Terror (1981)"(aka, Blue Steel) You know you are in trouble when a movie starts with almost fifteen minutes of: narration; the hero’s wordless daily routine; a dancing robot; and a board (i.e., “bored”) meeting; and random people in a car arguing, with just a quick break for the hero getting arrested and starting to explain his […]
Read more "R.O.T.O.R. (1987)"This one has been a favorite of mine for a very long time. Now, I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for any movie with dinosaurs in it. But not all dinosaur movies are created equal: one can point at a few, incredibly expensive and incredibly awful examples, too terrible to be saved by their excellent […]
Read more "The Land That Time Forgot (1974)"It seems almost impossible, and yet there it is: A movie, in the twenty-first Century, without a word of dialogue in its first hour. The silence of this film is almost painful. Early on, there is only the faintest hint of a score, and a sudden noise is enough to make the audience jump. We […]
Read more "A Quiet Place (2018)"I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. The first half hour or so more or less makes sense — and is actually reasonably well done for a very low budget film. At the eve of the millennium, a mysterious blonde woman and her daughter flee the mysterious group of commandos who are […]
Read more "Alien Blood (1999)"I was certain that I wasn’t going to like this one. After all, the trailers looked…silly. So it does come as a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed it. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but it’s generally a bad sign when the sinister alien monster in the trailer grabs the arc whip of […]
Read more "Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)"A genius teenager with a cute but highly intelligent robot. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing you can end up in the wrong movie. Before you know it, the crazy neighbor has blown away the robot, and the cute teenaged girl next door has been killed by her abusive father. So naturally, […]
Read more "Deadly Friend (1986)"Someone called this Fred Olen Ray’s best movie. I’ll admit that sounds a lot like saying your car is the fastest production model Trabant. Fred was one of those directors who was busy making cheap SF and Horror in the Eighties, like Roger Corman, say, only much, much cheaper. Much, much. But unlike the only other […]
Read more "Deep Space (1988)"
rivets on the poster 