It’s amazing how many films came out on VHS and have never been re-released. Which isn’t to say that many — or even most — of them don’t deserve to languish in obscurity. But thanks to the wonders of Youtube, a lot of films that were just a whisper heard here or there, a comment […]
Read more "Futuropolis (1984)"I”m not a big fan of Soviet era animation. Now I’ll admit I haven’t seen much of it. And one does have to make exceptions for films like Fantastic Planet, which a French director made in Czechoslovakia because it was cheap. And, of course, there is The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and all the other incredible […]
Read more "Uzniki Yamagiri-Maru [Prisoners of Yamagiri-Maru] (1988)"If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend that you check out the short film Super 8 Daze, by Rob Hampton. He’s a professional filmmaker who made a lot of short documentary films about pop culture, things like The Gong Show, The Planet of the Apes and those classic Aurora model kits kids my age […]
Read more "King Kong (1978)"When you watch an Indie film, you never quite know what to expect. Case in point: Destroyer of Worlds, a film which ran at this year’s Miami Sci Fi convention. When Samual Dawes, its director and co-writer sent me a screener, he asked me to keep in mind its low budget and that his crew […]
Read more "Destroyer of Worlds (2018)"It is always a pleasure to find yet another reminder that clever writing matters more than hundreds of millions of dollars of effects. In fact, there is only one effect in this film, and it is one of the simplest imaginable. Instead, what we have is something very simple — two men sitting in a […]
Read more "They’re Made Out of Meat (2005)"It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a short film. In fact, there are untold numbers of them floating around, although few of them are really noteworthy. Many are poorly made, or worse, poorly written, some are vanity projects, and quite a few are nothing more than demo projects, showing off, say, the director’s exploding […]
Read more "Doctor Who Anime (2011)"It’s amazing how much you can do with so little. Here we have a very simple film, a mere four minutes long, and yet it still manages to come up with a few clever ideas and to wring a smile or two out of us. Something goes wrong with Ray’s mini-Hadron collider, and the end […]
Read more "The Palindrome Paradox (2013)"