I found this one rather odd. It is already a somewhat rarer offering as it was made by Paramount. They did put out quite a few horror films during the Thirties and Forties, but were never as prolific as Universal — although several of their films are notable, like Murders at the Zoo, The Uninvited […]
Read more "The Monster and the Girl (1941)"Film — as an Avant Garde art form? That is essentially what the director, Marcel L’Herbier, is doing here. This film was made at the height of the Paris Avant Garde of the Twenties, with a handful of Marcel’s friends from the world of art providing the mise en scène — including Fernand Leger, René […]
Read more "L’inhumaine [The Inhuman Woman] (1924)"This one has long been one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Now, as I’ve pointed out before, the true guilty pleasure film is not the terrible film we laugh at and enjoy because it is so awful. It is a film which we know is not a great film — or perhaps even a good […]
Read more "Starship Invasions (1977)"Ugggh. There is nothing worse than a bad film trying to be a comedy. Unless it is a bad film trying to be a Science Fiction comedy. I’d heard about this one some time ago as “Attack From Mars”, which was the video title and it does describe the film. Sorta. Almost. As if they […]
Read more "Midnight Movie Massacre [Attack from Mars] (1988)"(aka Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear) If there’s one thing we need to learn from this film, it is that jealous monkeys are bad news. Looking at Monkey Shines, I find that it seems to have hit almost every horror movie trope of the Eighties. We have our serial killer, our dream scenes, the […]
Read more "Monkey Shines (1988)"You just can’t escape One Million B.C. Now we all know that a vast number of cheap SF films have pillaged that classic 1940 film for its enthusiastic giant lizard effects, but who in the world would want to make what is virtually a super-cheap remake? Okay, the details are mildly different. No “dinosaurs”, for […]
Read more "Prehistoric Women (1950)"Noise. Banging, clunking, grinding, metal on metal, screeching and shuddering. We have this strange notion that space travel would be perfectly silent. After all, there is no noise in the vacuum of space. Yet big machines are still going to make vibrations that will carry through the fabric of the space vessel and fill it […]
Read more "Prospect (2018)"(aka Meteor Monster) Today I learned that falling meteorites look just like burning sparklers. Or at least, that’s what the one in Teenage Monster looks like (and, in fact, that is what they used for the effect!). But fortunately, we get it out of the way right off the bat so we don’t have to […]
Read more "Teenage Monster (1958)"It is always a pleasure to find yet another reminder that clever writing matters more than hundreds of millions of dollars of effects. In fact, there is only one effect in this film, and it is one of the simplest imaginable. Instead, what we have is something very simple — two men sitting in a […]
Read more "They’re Made Out of Meat (2005)"Mad scientists just aren’t like the rest of us. Just to give you an example, most of us aren’t willing to test out some new scientific development on ourselves, no matter how sure we are that it is going to work. And if we do, and we end up as some half-man, half ape thing, […]
Read more "The Ape Man (1943)"
rivets on the poster 