There are certain films which stick with you for years. I don’t just mean our favorites, but any film whose images, ideas or artistry touches something deep within and remains with us long after we’ve seen it. For me, a lot of these films have been short films, often of the more experimental persuasion, like Plug […]
Read more "X (2005)"Fifty-two minutes. It’s a rather strange length for a film. I found myself thinking of the Japanese horror film, Metamorphosis (2011), which came out a few years later: it was Fifty-Four minutes. Both films were independents, and both debuted at film festivals, which makes it even stranger. I wonder if there’s a market in Japan […]
Read more "The iDol (2006)"You really have to feel for Zeke. Raised by a drunken and abusive father, his mother left and doesn’t want anything to do with him, and he is constantly bullied by a group of older students. But things really get bad when he accidentally finds a top secret death ray which the military inadvertently lost […]
Read more "Deadly Weapon (1989)"Something has gone very wrong. We’re never told exactly what it might have been, but civilization is gone and all that remains are a few scattered survivors trying to eke out an existence in the wastelands, the gangs, and the zombie-like supplicants (apparently so named because they go around on all fours like they’re begging). […]
Read more "Molly (2017)"We start out in a gentle sort of way, with the passengers and crew aboard an airliner en route to its destination, whom we get to meet and know before… (Drum roll) The sky sharks arrive! Which we knew was coming, even before we saw the trailer. And it’s even cooler that there are Nazi […]
Read more "Sky Sharks (2020)"What would we ever have done without Kenneth Tobey? After all, he was the one who dealt with that plant man in the Arctic, that prehistoric beast in New York City, and the giant octopus in Los Angeles. But there’s a new monster in town, so it’s time to call in Col. Patrick Hendry (Kenneth, […]
Read more "The Naked Monster (2005)"Before we do anything else, we need to get one thing straight: Strayer’s Chronicle is not a Japanese rip-off of the X-Men. Not even of The New Mutants or Alpha Flight. I know, it looks like one. We’ve got a group of angsty young teens with strange mutant powers. However, instead of wrestling mightily with […]
Read more "Sutoreiyâzu kuronikuru [Strayer’s Chronicle] (2015)"(aka Dead City) There are, of course, various levels of cheap. At the bottom, we have the sort of thing so many directors started out doing, using their phones or home video cameras (or, back in the ancient past, Super 8) without much in the way of props or costumes, while the films made by […]
Read more "Legion of the Night (1995)"By now it should come as no surprise that I have a soft spot for Russian Science Fiction films. They tend to be darker, smarter and more complex than our American efforts, with a slightly pessimistic outlook on our world which reflects a society which has gone through one disaster after another. And it probably […]
Read more "Chernovik [A Rough Draft] (2018)"Radiation. We all know what it could do in the Fifties: make things bigger or smaller, or invisible, or telepathic, or capable of seeing through things, or even, in extreme cases, turn them into giant monsters. But it is strange to learn that its curious powers lasted into the 1980s. After all, a big radioactive […]
Read more "The Children (1980)"
rivets on the poster 