It is one thing to watch a movie and think you’ve seen it before. It is something entirely different to watch a movie for the first time and know that you’ve seen it before. In 1998, with the American Godzilla on the way, Full Moon Features made two Kaiju Eiga of their own (under their […]
Read more "Planet Patrol (1999)"The biggest claim to fame of The Flying Ghost Ship is that Hayao Miyazaki served as one of the key animators and designed the giant, city-trampling robot. Its opening sequence reminds me a lot of the original Scooby Doo: Where Are You?: it starts with Hayato and his family out for a cruise in their […]
Read more "Sora tobu yûreisen [The Flying Ghost Ship] (1969)"Okay, I’ll admit it. I love Giant Robots. Particularly the monster-sized, city-destroying variety, complete with missiles, laser beams, giant power swords and lots of working parts. So I will admit to a certain weakness for this one. After all, we have not one, but two Monster Robots, which aren’t only enormously detailed, but which actually […]
Read more "BraveStorm (2017)"I have to admit it makes my day when I open a new DVD and find inside a short full-color mini-comic book. Not only is it a fun little extra, but it suggests that someone put in some overtime creating extra layers of depth to its world. More than most SF films do, perhaps. This […]
Read more "Sentinel 2099 SE (2018)"James Cameron once described Gunhed as one of his favorite B-Movies. I have to agree with that assessment. Yeah, I know a lot of people out there have called this one terrible, or claim that they can’t understand the plot. Frankly, that puzzles me, as it seems to be a mostly straightforward sort of affair: […]
Read more "Ganheddo [Gunhed] (1989)"What a strange film. And I don’t mean that in a good way. Gintama is the live action film adaptation of one of the many anime series out there, this one about an Edo era Japan where space aliens have come to Japan. While they originally came as visitors, that slowly changed and the Samurai […]
Read more "Gintama (2017)"I was certain that I wasn’t going to like this one. After all, the trailers looked…silly. So it does come as a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed it. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but it’s generally a bad sign when the sinister alien monster in the trailer grabs the arc whip of […]
Read more "Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)"The History Channel seems a strange place to find a science fiction film, even in Canada. But that is where this unusual mocumentary debuted. A British/Canadian co-production, it uses the familiar format we’ve seen in so many History Channel documentaries, mixing interviews with survivors and experts, visits to important locations and “archival” footage, with narration […]
Read more "The Great Martian War 1913 – 1917 (2013)"Back in 1978, a virtually unknown young musician named Jeff Wayne shocked everyone when he released a concept album based on H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. And not just any concept album, but something unprecedented: the one that defined what a concept album was supposed to be. He’d been a producer and had […]
Read more "Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of ‘The War of the Worlds’ (2006)"This is not a movie I would ever have imagined myself seeing in the theater. But stranger things have happened, and by some freak chance, I won two tickets to a limited pre-release showing. Mazinger Z got its start as a Manga and then an Anime back in 1972. It was the first to feature […]
Read more "Mazinger Z: INFINITY (2017)"