There once was a time when Disney only made “G” rated films. I suppose that might be hard to believe for those too young to remember all those low-budget Disney family films (with Kurt Russell as a teenager!) but it was a huge shock when they released their first PG film, The Black Hole. They didn’t […]
Read more "My Science Project (1985)"This was one of George Pal’s last SF films, and opinion is greatly divided on it. I am in the camp that thinks it is a minor classic. It was one of the first — or perhaps the first — of that now familiar subgenre, the paranoid thriller about rogue telepaths. One of the scientists […]
Read more "The Power (1968)"This is a movie that gained instant notoriety for a single moment. I refer, of course, to that infamous scene where, as a result of an attack by a powerful telepath, or “Scanner”, a man’s head explodes in a gory spray of blood and flesh. Which is somewhat ironic as that only happens once, even […]
Read more "Scanners (1981)"(aka Man of the First Century) Okay, I’ll admit it. I was disappointed by this one. I’m a big fan of Czech Comedies, particularly Czech SF comedies. There is a wild absurdity about them that you won’t find in anyone else’s comedies. And I am also a big fan of Oldrich Lipsky’s Czech comedies as he […]
Read more "Muz z prvního století [Man in Outer Space] (1962)"If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend that you check out the short film Super 8 Daze, by Rob Hampton. He’s a professional filmmaker who made a lot of short documentary films about pop culture, things like The Gong Show, The Planet of the Apes and those classic Aurora model kits kids my age […]
Read more "King Kong (1978)"And here we have yet another Alien copy put out by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. I think he might merely have distributed this one as it doesn’t have as much recognizable stock footage. Certainly it doesn’t look much cheaper than most of his cheap copies, even if the space ships and space stations do […]
Read more "Star Crystal (1986)"A giant glowing ball from Outer Space falls to earth, then rolls over people, reducing them to people-shaped piles of ash. Which makes this one sound far more interesting than it really is. After a brief, narrated introduction about its legendary arrival as a ball of fire from the sky — an arrival there couldn’t […]
Read more "The Cremators (1972)"(aka Demon) This one is almost impossible to sum up. This is partly because any attempt is going to carry even the most circumspect summary into spoiler territory. However, it is also because this is a film that starts in one place and then moves into stranger and stranger places which seem to have little […]
Read more "God Told Me To (1976)"When you watch an Indie film, you never quite know what to expect. Case in point: Destroyer of Worlds, a film which ran at this year’s Miami Sci Fi convention. When Samual Dawes, its director and co-writer sent me a screener, he asked me to keep in mind its low budget and that his crew […]
Read more "Destroyer of Worlds (2018)"The basic idea sounds quite promising. Steven Soderbergh made a strange thriller movie revolving around the legendary writer Franz Kafka, which stars Jeremy Irons, with Ian Holm as the sinister Dr. Murnau, Armin Mueller-Stahl as a policeman, and Alec Guinness in one of his final roles. Add to this plenty of dreamy black and white cinematography, some […]
Read more "Kafka (1991)"
rivets on the poster 