(aka Transmutations) What we have here is: Clive Barker’s first feature film credit (for story and screenwriting). Only he hated the results and disavows it. One of the first films from Charles Band’s Empire Films. Only it wasn’t actually produced by Empire and Band merely distributed it. And we might also note that it is […]
Read more "Underworld (1985)"Noise. Little sounds, rustling, rattling, the constant chatter and tympani of the world around you, distorted, amplified, harshened, suddenly unfamiliar. Music. Sharp, discordant chords, rasping and buzzing. Images. Strange and disconnected; city streets, bustling people, and a young woman wandering through it all alone. There have been a few films which tried to give us […]
Read more "Under the Skin (2013)"It has been a particularly good time for Russian Science Fiction Cinema. I suppose it started with Inhabited Island/Dark Planet (2009), a surprisingly intelligent blockbuster film based on the works of the popular Soviet era SF writers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Whatever the case, we’ve seen a number of smart and well-made big budget (for Russian […]
Read more "Sputnik (2020)"Creature from Black Lake has the uneasy distinction of being one of the first of the long series of Bigfoot movies spawned by the release of the Patterson footage of the creature. Bigfoot (1970) was probably first, followed in ’72 by cult favorite, The Legend of Boggy Creek. However, by ’76, the Bigfoot movie craze was […]
Read more "Creature from Black Lake (1976)"Basically, even though this one wasn’t made for TV, we are talking about your standard TV style detective story about a serial killer. Only there’s more nudity. It’s a fairly crowded corner of the film world and there are a lot of gimmicky detective stories in the Seventies and Eighties. This time around, it is […]
Read more "Blind Date (1984)"Let’s see… A surreal Ethiopian Cyberpunk comedy shot on a nothing budget? Even better, we’re talking a strange and phantasmagorical film with a mind-boggling set of plot twists; a movie which is inventive, absurd and surreal; an endlessly complicated film which dances nimbly through countless layers of reality while inflicting one bizarre new situation on […]
Read more "Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)"(aka Monster Problems) Okay, I’m impressed. As always, when you watch a good film it is hard to find the right words to describe it. Only bad films are easy. Here we have a film that is at once an epic quest, a love story (with complications) a coming of age story (even if our […]
Read more "Love and Monsters (2020)"It’s basically Die Hard. In Space. With Bruce Campbell. On a TV budget. Now I should add that Bruce has Alan Rickman’s role as the deadly supercriminal villain, while the rather bland Joseph Culp (Robert’s son) is McClane. TV budget, remember? But, as you’d expect from a Nineties TV movie, the sets are cardboard (well, […]
Read more "Assault on Dome 4 (1996)"I am quite fond of the sort of film where you have to sort out the pieces and figure out how they fit together. The only problem is that, to be at all satisfying, the pieces have to fit together, more or less, by the time you are done. Well, at least if it’s science […]
Read more "Alien Domicile (2017)"This is a movie about a big octopus. Oh. You guessed that. The story is fairly simple: some fishermen catch a strange octopus, a really, really big one comes to take it back. There is more to it than that — the scientists pursuing it for some reason or another, the last surviving fisherman trying […]
Read more "Big Octopus [Dà zhangyú] (2020)"
rivets on the poster 