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)"Honorable Mention “There are some things man was not meant to adapt to musical theatre…” The finest H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ever made was the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent black and white version of The Call of Cthulhu. No questions asked. It took an enormously complex story line, with a series of flashbacks nested one […]
Read more "A Shoggoth on the Roof (2000)"Honorable Mention Over the weekend, I watched two films based on H.P. Lovecraft’s tale, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” It is, of course, not only one of his best-known tales but also one of his most highly regarded. But of all his stories, it is also quite probably the one which has been adapted most often. […]
Read more "Markham (2020)"(aka, Two Year Vacation) Honorable Mention Of all the wacky and inventive comedies made by Czech master animator, Karel Zeman, I think The Stolen Airship may have been his wackiest and most inventive. And that is saying a lot. Zeman is perhaps best remembered for his film The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, where he […]
Read more "Ukradená vzducholod [The Stolen Airship] 1967"(aka Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat; Demons 6: De Profundis) Honorable Mention It is hard to convey just how bizarre this film is. Although, if you’ve seen Luigi Cozzi’s next film, Blood on Melies’ Moon (which he didn’t get around to until 2016) then you’ve got some idea of what to expect. What we’re […]
Read more "The Black Cat [Il gatto nero] (1989)"(aka, Necronomicon: Book of Dead) Honorable Mention It helps if you remember that several filmmakers tried to make Lovecraft films before the Eighties. Despite the fact that Lovecraft wrote his stories back in the Twenties and Thirties, it wasn’t until the Sixties that his works finally reached the general audience. While there had been an […]
Read more "Necronomicon (1993)"Honorable Mention Ummmm… Where to even begin on this thing? Well, let’s try Luigi Cozzi: The film everyone remembers Cozzi for was the wild and rather enjoyably silly Star Wars rip-off Starcrash. It is also the real high spot of his career, although he did create a number of interesting Spaghetti Sci Fi and horror […]
Read more "Blood on Méliès’ Moon (2016)"Honorable Mention As many of you already know, when Universal filmed their version of the classic tale of Dracula back in the early Thirties, they shot a Spanish language version of the film on the same sets after shooting was done for the day. The star of this after-hours version was a Mexican actor named […]
Read more "El misterio del rostro pálido [The Mystery of the Ghastly Face] (1935)"Honorable Mention This British film sometimes gets listed as a science fiction film, and I suppose you could compare it to many of the techno thrillers which would become common within a decade or so, where a piece of new technology — or an exaggerated new technology — would be the heart of a much […]
Read more "The Brain Machine (1955)"Honorable Mention Apparently the Hacker movie is alive and, if not exactly well, is at least still breathing. Although that is only one of several threads in this complex little film. I’ve written extensively about the Polonia Brothers, the twins from Wellsboro, Pa., who’ve made dozens of films — mostly horror — for very minimal […]
Read more "Smart House (2023)"
rivets on the poster 