There is a steadily growing sub-genre of the post-Apocalyptic film centered around groups of survivors hiding in a shelter together. One could point at A Quiet Place as one of the more successful examples although it isn’t quite as confined as most of them (or perhaps one might say that the family’s confinement isn’t purely physical). […]
Read more "Hidden (2015)"“Only one thing worse than a dragon… Americans.” I love this movie. This is without question the most insanely whacked out post-Apocalyptic future ever imagined. I mean, the whole world devastated by the return of an ancient, long-forgotten, now legendary species: Dragons. Yes, dragons. The idea is brilliant. In some totally mad and wildly entertaining […]
Read more "Reign of Fire (2002)"[Also referred to — inaccurately (even if it is in bigger type on the DVD cases and posters and advertised that way on Amazon) — by its tagline, Live, Die, Repeat] Tom Cruise isn’t normally a star one associates with science fiction film, so it is remarkable, to say the least, that he made two […]
Read more "Edge of Tomorrow (2014)"The operative word here is “Meh.” I would have a hard time saying exactly what went wrong, but perhaps the real problem is that it wasn’t going to take much to go wrong. The first film was incredible. You had a clever and unexpected idea; a weird new world that existed secretly beneath ours, with […]
Read more "Men in Black: International (2019)"It’s as if someone tried to make a copy of a John Woo film and crammed in all his signature quirks. After all, the Catholic Seminary-trained Woo loves to put Christian symbolisms in his films, so here we have a Catholic funeral, at a chapel crammed full of Catholic art and a huge crucifix, complete […]
Read more "Face/Off (1997)"For a moment there, I’d thought I’d found a lost Fifties Sci Fi short film. Only the stills looked awfully familiar. I’m not sure how many of you still remember 8mm film: I don’t mean the Super 8 format that so many young filmmakers grew up using, but the original format, with those shoebox sized […]
Read more "War of the Planets (1958)"Katsuhiro Ôtomo has been called the god of Anime, and it seems fitting, even if in his long career he’s only directed two full-length animated films. Akira seems almost the font that all later serious anime came out of, a film whose look, plot, characters, pacing and just about everything else has been borrowed, reworked […]
Read more "Steamboy [Suchîmubôi] (2004)"(aka Da zai nan, Hong Kong Calamity, The Big Calamity, Guan Gong da zhan wai xing ren, Kuan Yu Battles with the Aliens, and probably a lot more I’ve missed) There are some films so insane that you can’t NOT watch them. War God is just about the Platonic ideal of unmissable insane films. After […]
Read more "Zhan shen [War God] (1976)"This one has basically been pitched as an evil version of Superman. “Evil Has Found Its Superhero,” as the tagline proclaims. But, for the most part it plays out as yet another evil child movie like The Omen (or, if we get away from cheesy modern horror for a moment and go back a little […]
Read more "Brightburn (2019)"This is one of the great classics of Science Fiction film. Which doesn’t stop me from taking a moment for a purely personal note: This marks my Eight-Hundredth review since I published my first (Nothing But The Night) on January 28, 2016. It seemed a fantastic dream at the time and now it just seems […]
Read more "It Came from Outer Space (1953)"
rivets on the poster 