Honorable Mention Strange. I never thought of William Devane as an action hero. But I suppose on Television in the 1970s almost anything was possible, particularly when it came to TV movies. For example, it came as a bit of a shock when I realized that this movie came out two years before the film […]
Read more "Red Alert (1977)"Honorable Mention How in the world do you even begin to talk about a film like Battle Heater? There are some many things that it is — or almost is — that it’s hard to know where to start. Hama (Akira Enomoto) is an electrician who gathers all sorts of electronic junk, repairs it and […]
Read more "Batoru hîtâ [Battle Heater] (1989)"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)"(aka, 360 Google Doodles/Spotlight Stories: Back to the Moon) Honorable Mention George Melies holds a special place in the history of Science Fiction film, as his legendary short film, A Trip to the Moon is generally held to be the first Space flight movie. It is often called the oldest science fiction film as well, […]
Read more "Back to the Moon (2018)"Honorable Mention This is an odd one. I struggle with finding some way to classify this one, but it just refuses to cooperate. I suppose you might label it a Giallo mystery — many have — but it doesn’t have any of the usual trappings of that Italian subgenre: we have no secret killer with […]
Read more "Circuito chiuso [Closed Circuit] (1978)"Honorable Mention Now those of you who have seen Travelling Salesman (2012) will recognize that the huge mathematical breakthrough made in Sneakers by the genius mathematician Dr. Janek is in fact a solution to the classic P=NP problem. Not that it is ever called that. Or that we are ever given more than the barest description […]
Read more "Sneakers (1992)"Honorable Mention The hacker movie. It is one of those subgenres which has come and gone, often morphing into either the spy film or the political thriller, the virtual reality film, the runaway A.I. film, the stalker film, or other equally unlikely categories of film. It has also had a somewhat tenuous connection to science […]
Read more "Open Windows (2014)"(Literal translation: The Flying Saucers) Honorable Mention I’ll confess that Mexican cinema is one of those areas I haven’t spent much time exploring. Which, of course, means that I keep finding a few interesting films to watch. Heck, some of them, like El monstruo resucitado [Monster](1953), are quite good. Fortunately, I don’t have to do all […]
Read more "Los platillos voladores (1956)"Honorable Mention There have been a lot of attempts to make scientifically plausible vampire stories. I’m sure you can probably think of some of the favorites: vampirism is a plague caused by a virus. Vampires are aliens. Vampires are mutants. Vampires are monsters who have existed alongside man since the beginning of time. And I’m […]
Read more "Thirst (1979)"Honorable Mention As I’ve noted before, the Heisei era at Toho, starting with the release of Godzilla 1985, was a rather strange time for Toho’s Tokusatsu films, one where it felt as if they were desperately trying to figure out what they were doing. After all, they started the era with the return of the […]
Read more "Zipang [Jipangu] (1990)"
rivets on the poster 