I never had the slightest doubt, when I first learned about Trava: Fist Planet, that I would have to watch this short anime OVA. . Or that I would have to watch it soon. After all, this was a dry run, a warm-up — or, if you would, a test drive — for what would […]
Read more "Trava: Fist Planet (2003)"If there’s anything you can count on with The Asylum it is that you really can’t count on them. Sure, they’ve made quite a few enjoyable films along the way, in that pulpy low budget made for SyFy sort of vein, the sort of non-challenging film which you can consume without worrying about being bombarded […]
Read more "Transmorphers: Mech Beasts (2023)"Ahhh. Fertile ground. I’ve been digging and searching for Soviet Era animated films — particularly the science fiction ones — for a long time now, and it never fails to amaze me that I can still uncover films and even talented directors I’ve never heard of before. For whatever reason, animation followed a very different […]
Read more "Krabi [The Crabs] 1976"I liked this one a lot better when I first saw it. That happens. Astro Boy started life as a manga created by the man who is perhaps the most highly respected Japanese cartoonist of all time, Osamu Tezuka. Astro — or “Tetsuan Atom” (“Mighty Atom“) as he is known in Japan — was so […]
Read more "Astro Boy (2009)"I don’t know. I think the Japanese were willing to release almost anything on VHS back in the Eighties. Of course, from my point of view, this isn’t a bad thing. Consider the curious case of Ichiro Ômomo: back in 1983, he created a short, 8mm student film, about Mighty Lady, a giant robot-like lady […]
Read more "All About Mighty Lady (1984)"Now we all know what happens when you build a super powerful A.I: It suddenly becomes fully sentient and decides that the only way to make the world a perfect place is to kill all the humans. Unfortunately, however, the people who design these systems apparently aren’t aware of this. They obviously have never watched […]
Read more "Robotapocalypse [Robot Apocalypse] (2021)"A few years back, I wrote an essay on Giant Robots in the Movies for Clarkesworld magazine. While I tried my best to discuss every single one of these movies (well, up until the sudden boom of direct to DVD CGI Mecha of the late Nothings and early Twenty-teens, when they became too thick on […]
Read more "Invader (1991)"The opening scene of this film (featuring aliens, big machines and a giant green monster) is followed by a title card announcing, “Five Billion Years Later.” Which is a fairly good warning just what sort of movie you’ve got yourself into. Now, if you have any doubts about who The Killer Robots are, when we […]
Read more "The Killer Robots and the Battle for the Cosmic Potato (2009)"I think a few words are in order about guilty pleasures. Let’s face it, we all know that there are films out there which we love unreservedly, and find ourselves watching again and again despite their flaws. In fact, the sad truth is that we love them far more than we love a lot of […]
Read more "Judge Dredd (1995)"It’s always a bit worrisome when a famous director — or for that matter a writer or artist — decides to go back and revisit the works that made him famous. Perhaps it’s an attempt to relive the glory days. Perhaps it is because someone is willing to pay a lot of money for another […]
Read more "The Next Generation: Patlabor (2014)"
rivets on the poster 