I want to like Galaxy Lords more than I do. That happens sometimes. The first thing you notice about the film is the look. Everything takes place against a green screen. While that’s all too common these days,here the backgrounds are extremely colorful and a touch unrealistic, giving the whole film a unique and very […]
Read more "Galaxy Lords (2018)"Maybe I was just in a good mood. Maybe this time I’d found a much better print. Or perhaps it was because it was a day when I really needed a Fifties-style Sci Fi film, –even one made in 1962. At any rate, I enjoyed The Day Mars Invaded Earth this time around. When I first saw […]
Read more "The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962)"The biggest claim to fame of The Flying Ghost Ship is that Hayao Miyazaki served as one of the key animators and designed the giant, city-trampling robot. Its opening sequence reminds me a lot of the original Scooby Doo: Where Are You?: it starts with Hayato and his family out for a cruise in their […]
Read more "Sora tobu yûreisen [The Flying Ghost Ship] (1969)"As I’ve noted before, it is very hard to review a truly great film. Bad films? Why the review almost writes itself. You have so many things that really bugged you about them that the hardest thing is stopping. The average film isn’t much more difficult, as they provide lots of both good and bad […]
Read more "Summer Wars [Samâ uôzu] (2009)"There sure were a lot of post-Apocalyptic films in the Seventies! I really wouldn’t even want to guess how many. We tend to think of the genre as starting with Mad Max and The Road Warrior, but it goes the whole way back to the silent era, and they were pretty heavy on the ground […]
Read more "Ravagers (1979)"It came as a bit of a surprise that I actually liked this one. I didn’t think much of Joe Begos’ first film, Almost Human, about a man who is abducted by aliens then returns years later as something no longer human. It was meant as an homage to those old Eighties unstoppable killer films, […]
Read more "The Mind’s Eye (2015)"Wow. 2019 really was an epic year for Independent film. As I’ve noted, we had a ridiculous number of utterly amazing films playing this year, of which the best I’ve seen so far were The Tangle, Prospect, Das Letzte Land, A Living Dog and Cosmos. So I now have another film to add to the […]
Read more "Color Out of Space (2019)"Don’t be fooled by the VOD listing on Vimeo with the 2019 date. This is vintage Polonia Brothers, from 2001. If you had any doubts about that, you need only note that one of the three leads is John Polonia, who died in 2009. In fact, this is a fairly remarkable film for them because […]
Read more "Dweller [Alien Dweller] (2001)"Some movies have the same rigid formality as a classic Greek Play or Japanese Noh Drama, whose traditional structures only allow for minor variations on the basic story framework. When we’re talking about Nineties direct to video movies, clearly Hologram Man was such a film. Everything you’d expect from a Nineties DTV action movie is […]
Read more "Hologram Man (1995)"It isn’t exactly what I would call an obvious idea. Combining a Kaiju Eiga film with…Jaws? I suppose Steven Spielberg’s big fish is technically giant and monstrous, but that isn’t quite the same thing. However, Jaws has one of those classic plots which has been borrowed and retooled so regularly that I suppose it was […]
Read more "Kyôryû kaichô no densetsu [Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds] (1977)"
rivets on the poster 