You’re having dinner at home with a few guests and your old friend and neighbor, Don Carlo, shows up talking about how he plans to destroy you all. Good ol’ Don! I suppose it would be a socially awkward moment — if anyone noticed, that is… So, naturally, Don goes off to his mad scientist […]
Read more "Doctor of Doom (1979)"“Seth Ickerman” — who is really the French directing duo, Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard — first came to my attention with the “trailer” for a film called “Ickerman,” which featured a dazzling combination of a high-tech future, a touch of Film Noir, and a lot of movie nostalgia. I still hope they will get […]
Read more "Blood Machines (2019)"Honorable Mention This one is strange. And rather disturbing. A young man keeps having these weird seizures where he howls and jumps about uncontrollably. It’s as if something is taking him over and it keeps getting worse. Then he starts transforming — at first just an arm or a leg — during these fits into…something. […]
Read more "Henge [Metamorphosis] (2011)"A lost Godzilla film from the peak of the Heisei era? A precursor of the animated Godzilla: Monster Planet? A little known Godzilla short film? Well…not quite. It was in fact filmed for a Godzilla theme park ride, but does feature a wild final battle between Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra, shot old-school by Toho with men […]
Read more "Kaijû puranetto: Gojira [Monster Planet of Godzilla] (1994)"It is one of those images you just can’t forget once you’ve seen it: a man in some sort of space suit, taking out the trash on an ordinary city street. And it is the very first image that Chema Garcia Ibarra offers us in Protopartículas. What we have here is another brilliant minimalist Black […]
Read more "Protopartículas [Protoparticles](2009)"After Godzilla: Final Wars brought Toho’s Millennium series to an end, with no future Kaiju films in sight, a number of small, giant monster films came out. Most of these, like The Return of Monster X: Attack the G8 Conference or Gehara: the Dark & Long Hair Monster, are parodies. So it is a welcome […]
Read more "Wakusei daikaijû Negadon [Negadon: The Monster from Mars] (2005)"The French Nouvelle Vague short film, La Jetee, occupies an interesting place in science fiction cinema. It is hailed as a great art film and formal experiment — and yet at the same time it is held to be a SF classic. There are only a few films you can say that about. It uses […]
Read more "Missing Pages (2006)"It was the end of Godzilla. Again. For the third time, Toho’s series of Godzilla had come to an end, this time with the release of Godzilla: Final Wars. But that didn’t change the fact that there were a lot of people out there who still loved giant monster movies. So, in that decade before […]
Read more "Chohatsu Daikaiju Gehara [Gehara: The Dark & Long Hair Monster] (2009)"I can’t remember too many films I’ve seen lately that are as minimal as this impressive short film. It offers stark images, little movement of camera — or even of its characters — and no dialogue. Instead, most of its grainy, black and white images could easily be stills and it is all held together […]
Read more "The Attack Of The Robots From Nebula-5 [El ataque de los robots de nebulosa-5] (2008)"It’s a strange world. After all, there is our long history of encounters with Kaiju, those pesky giant monsters who have emerged from the Earth after disasters and nuclear war, or whom we’ve found while exploring other worlds. …And in case we had any trouble deciding just which strange world we’re supposed to be in, […]
Read more "ZillaFoot (2019)"