Honorable Mention I’m not entirely certain where to file this film. It is a war film? A political satire? An action film? Well, maybe. It is all of those things and more. But is it a science fiction film? That’s a lot harder to answer. More than anything else, it reminds me of the French […]
Read more "Az eröd [The Fortress] (1979)"(Literal Translation: The Fall of Varema) A year after L’urlo debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Camillo Bazzoni released his third and final science fiction short film. While L’urlo is still highly regarded, La caduta di Varema — and the first film in the trilogy, L’Invasione — are more or less forgotten. As I pointed […]
Read more "La caduta di Varema"This is the film Camillo Bazzoni is remembered for. Which is rather strange when you remember that it was the second of a trilogy of science fiction shorts he directed between 1965 and 1967 and might even be seen as a sequel to his short L’Invasione. Admittedly, you do not need to have seen the […]
Read more "L’urlo [The Howl] (1966)"One of my frequent references, in the search for interesting science fiction cinema, has been Phillip Strick’s book, Science Fiction Movies (1976), which includes a lot of films most casual SF viewers have never dreamed of, let alone seen. One of the many little known treasures he talks about was a trilogy of short films […]
Read more "L’invasione (1965)"The Tingler was William Castle’s finest moment. Most of you are probably familiar with the films he made in the late Fifties and early Sixties, where he coupled his flair for advertising with a series of gimmicks which supposedly added to the experience of watching the film in the theater. Of these gimmicks, the one […]
Read more "The Tingler (1959)"Life is strange. I Married a Monster from Outer Space, despite its rather silly title, is one of the better films of the Fifties Sci Fi cycle: it offers not flying saucers attacking, or creatures on the loose, but something more intimate: paranoia, alienation, the fear of insanity, and that unsettling feeling married people have […]
Read more "I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)"(aka, The Star Diaries) This is frustrating. Here we have a brilliant and extremely funny Science Fiction television series, one which ranks right up there with the best science fiction comedy series ever made, like the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, and yet… No one knows about it. Not in the […]
Read more "Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot [Ijon Tichy: Space Pilot] (2007)"Honorable Mention It has always seemed strange to me that Peter Lorre, who had a long career of playing interesting and often sinister characters, somehow got labelled as a horror icon later in his career, in movies like The Raven, or that episode of Route 66 he did with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. […]
Read more "Mad Love (1935)"[Mild Spoilers] To start in a less than obvious place: This happened back in 1986, when CBS announced their latest TV movie, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue starring, of all people, George C. Scott. Yes, the same George C. Scott who seems to be playing the same stolid and […]
Read more "Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)"(aka, Mr. MacKinley’s Flight) This is a strange, strange film. I mean, really, really strange. And in all the best ways. Poor Mr. MacKinley. He’s about as grey and average a guy as you could hope to find in the advertising industry. Except that he dreams of one day having lots and lots of children […]
Read more "Begstvo mistera Mak-Kinli [Escape of Mr. McKinley] (1975)"
rivets on the poster 