“Human beings have only four preferences: TV, cinema, food and gossip” You know you are watching an Indian film when the scenes featuring the hero riding on a big flying bike only appear in the final dance number… For those of you coming in late, back in 2010, the enormously successful Indian producer and director, Shankar, […]
Read more "2.0 (2018)"This one was a pleasant surprise. I’ll confess I didn’t expect too much of it: it was produced by Robert Emenegger, who made a whole bunch of super cheap movies within a year or two of each other in the early Eighties. He also gave us Warp Speed (1981), a creepy haunted space ship movie which […]
Read more "PSI Factor (1980)"Honorable Mention (I guess) As strange as it may sound, the one genre that most frequently gets confused with science fiction is the occult movie. As I said, it’s strange. One can, in fact list quite a few such films if you work at it: offhand, Jmeno kodu: Rubin [Code Name: Ruby] and Yesterday Was a Lie […]
Read more "Les soleils de l’Ile de Pâques [The Suns of Easter Island] (1972)"(aka Hanuman pob Jed Yodmanud, The 6 Ultra Brothers vs. the Monster Army) This is the rarest of all Ultraman films. And there’s a very good reason for that. Now you can’t say you weren’t warned. After all, any time the title song includes the line “Watch this wonderful movie” — a sentiment apparently offered […]
Read more "Urutora 6-kyodai tai kaijû gundan [Hanuman vs. 7 Ultraman] (1974)"Minoru Kawasaki is one of the quirkiest and most original of Japanese Directors. His works often have an absurd and surreal edge to them. He gave us a world where anthropomorphic animals work unnoticed alongside human beings in otherwise normal business offices (Executive Koala) or where a giant squid becomes a wrestling star (The Calamari […]
Read more "Autâman [Outer Man] (2015)"Okay, let’s see if we got this straight: This is the first Godzilla copy made in Denmark. It is also the only one. At least so far. This really isn’t that much of a surprise, although it does seem that everyone seemed to be making Godzilla copies at the time. Reptilicus was created by the […]
Read more "Reptilicus (1961)"(aka Reigo: King of the Sea Monsters) This one came as a surprise. Mostly because I did not expect much from it. Not long ago, I reviewed Raiga: The Monster from the Deep Sea [Shinkaijû Raiga] which was this film’s…perhaps “follow up” is closer to the mark than “sequel.” Frankly Raiga isn’t that great. Particularly […]
Read more "Shinkaijû Reigô [Reigo, the Deep-Sea Monster vs. the Battleship Yamato] (2005)"The giant bug comedy is one of those sub-sub-genres which seems to produce consistently poor results. True, there have been a few sterling examples (well, mostly Brett Piper’s Arachnia. And Eight Legged Freaks) and a few quite entertaining lesser films (Lavalantula, Mosquito). But for the most part, it is a vast, bug-filled wasteland. So, after recent […]
Read more "Infestation (2009)"I have to admit it makes my day when I open a new DVD and find inside a short full-color mini-comic book. Not only is it a fun little extra, but it suggests that someone put in some overtime creating extra layers of depth to its world. More than most SF films do, perhaps. This […]
Read more "Sentinel 2099 SE (2018)"Okay, let’s face it, this one is barely science fiction. Not that that changes the fact that it uses its rather curious premise to build a very solid drama, where the hidden secrets of the characters are, ultimately, far more important than the strange circumstances afflicting them. Liam wakes up after a car crash with […]
Read more "Radius (2017)"
rivets on the poster 