I stumbled on this one by accident. When I was writing my review of Michael Pohl’s short film, Ausgestorben, I tried to locate a DVD version of Pohl’s feature film, Vortex, which included the earlier short. I knew it was on the German version (which has no subtitles) but not on the American DVD. However, I was […]
Read more "Inferno (2002)"I just cannot believe this was a student film. Or, for that matter, a short film. The visuals are stunning. Sure, some of it was finding good locations, or redecorating them in surprisingly effective ways. But even big budget films struggle to look this good. It was made by a German film student named Michael […]
Read more "Ausgestorben [Extinct] (1995)"Short films are so hard to find. There was a bit of word of mouth going around about this film and director Michael Pohl’s earlier short film, Extinct, when I first started looking for films online. And here it is, about Fifteen years since I first started looking for Vortex, and over Twenty years since […]
Read more "Vortex (2001)"I’ve got a real soft spot for The Last Man on Earth. It’s far from perfect, but the first half hour or so is as close most movies ever come. But a year after it came out, Mario Gómez Martín directed this interesting short version of the novel that inspired the Vincent Price movie, Richard […]
Read more "Soy leyenda [I Am Legend] (1967)"When any new form of media arrives, there are always a lot of inventive ways devised to make use of them. Mind you, a lot of them don’t last very long. One of the odder ones — and, curiously, one that outlived the media type that spawned it — was the OVA. OVA stands for […]
Read more "Dragon’s Heaven (1988)"I wish this film really exists. Seriously. I love the lovely black and white cinematography, which looks like what you’d have seen in some super cheap Fifties horror film. I love the way this faux trailer has been edited, with the constant scare headline titles and dramatic bursts of movie you’d have found in any […]
Read more "ATTACK OF THE BRAIN LEECHES (2011)"Ah, yes, the anthology film. The truth is, it’s been around for a long time, one can even point at the silent horror classics, Destiny (1921, directed by Fritz Lang) and Paul Leni’s 1924 film, Waxworks, as two of the earlier examples. I really have no idea what movie was the first anthology film, nor […]
Read more "Monsterland (2016)"“The sky above Neo-Berlin has the color of a broken television.” A city, wrapped in darkness and smoke and drenched by eternal rain. Against this dark, grey background, we see blinking lights, dingy, badly lit signs in strange languages, and flying cars. It’s like it’s the Eighties once again and we’ve wandered into the one […]
Read more "Attack of the Cyber Octopuses (2017)"You can tell a lot about someone by what he does when he has a bit of spare time on his hands. Now most of are going to sit back and do something incredibly challenging like going fishing, or playing videogames, or watching football. But, if you are Brett Piper, perhaps the greatest living stop […]
Read more "First Men on the Moon (2017)"Buried deep in the bowels of the British Ministry of Defense bureaucracy at Whitehall, the mysterious agency D.M.O.A has survived for almost Sixty years, even if it has now dwindled to no more than two employees. But what does it do, and why is it still funded after all these years? And who is the […]
Read more "Waiting for Gorgo (2009)"
rivets on the poster 