A lot of you aren’t going to like this one. The same ones who complain that nothing happens in some of my favorite horror films, I suspect. The truth is that there is a profound division within the horror fandom: There are some who want their horror films to be in their face, with plenty […]
Read more "Dark Was the Night (2014)"Explanations. Let’s face it, they’re always a problem. I mean, some giant beast goes stomping through your neighborhood and the next thing you know, everyone wants to know where it came from. What a nuisance. A lot of B Monster Movies have run aground on this problem, whether they tried too hard, or couldn’t be […]
Read more "Python (2000)"No movie can possibly be as bad as The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Not even The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. I know, I know, this is one of those films which gets tossed into the “Ed Wood” box. But, I don’t know, I’ve got a certain affection for the thing. If you asked me why, I’d […]
Read more "The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)"It’s a familiar setup, I’ll admit. We’ve seen a lot of movies like it, although they weren’t quite as thick on the ground in the early Seventies. But this is Australian version — and, I’ll note, the 1970s Australian version at that. The Big One is about to drop in the land down under and […]
Read more "Beyond Reason (1970)"(aka, Space Victory [literal title]) Why can’t we make films like this? Seriously. We used to be able to make fun, light-hearted action comedies stuffed full of interesting ideas. We made a lot of them back in the Eighties. And the Seventies. And the Sixties. Now, if we want a film like that, we have […]
Read more "Seungriho [Space Sweepers] (2021)"William Cameron Menzies didn’t direct many films. He was the man for whom the term “production design” was invented. It wasn’t just that he designed good sets or models, but that he would create a whole visual world in which the films he worked on took place, and he worked on quite a few highly […]
Read more "The Whip Hand (1951)"(Aka, The Emperor’s Sword) “A spaceship appearing in a historical play, how outrageous!” You know that you are in for an interesting ride when a movie starts with a scene in which one spaceship tries to, well, eat another one. Do I really need to mention that this one is a Japanese film? It’s actually […]
Read more "Taitei no ken [The Sword of Alexander] (2007)"It can be a bit of a surprise to revisit a film you haven’t seen in a long time. This is particularly true if you’ve learned — or watched — more since the last time you saw it. Queen of Blood is perhaps the best of the films Roger Corman spliced together from other movies […]
Read more "Queen of Blood (1966)"(aka Massacre Mansion, The Terror of Dr. Chaney, Eyes, Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood) It’s always interesting to see where people started out. This was prolific producer and director Charles Band‘s first horror film. In fact, it was only his second film, with the first a parody porno film ripping off Brando’s Last […]
Read more "Mansion of the Doomed (1976)"Buried deep in the bowels of the British Ministry of Defense bureaucracy at Whitehall, the mysterious agency D.M.O.A has survived for almost Sixty years, even if it has now dwindled to no more than two employees. But what does it do, and why is it still funded after all these years? And who is the […]
Read more "Waiting for Gorgo (2009)"
rivets on the poster 