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)"(Literal Translation: The Fall of Varema) A year after L’urlo debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Camillo Bazzoni released his third and final science fiction short film. While L’urlo is still highly regarded, La caduta di Varema — and the first film in the trilogy, L’Invasione — are more or less forgotten. As I pointed […]
Read more "La caduta di Varema"This is the film Camillo Bazzoni is remembered for. Which is rather strange when you remember that it was the second of a trilogy of science fiction shorts he directed between 1965 and 1967 and might even be seen as a sequel to his short L’Invasione. Admittedly, you do not need to have seen the […]
Read more "L’urlo [The Howl] (1966)"One of my frequent references, in the search for interesting science fiction cinema, has been Phillip Strick’s book, Science Fiction Movies (1976), which includes a lot of films most casual SF viewers have never dreamed of, let alone seen. One of the many little known treasures he talks about was a trilogy of short films […]
Read more "L’invasione (1965)"I miss Hal Roach. Okay, I’m sure he was long gone before I seriously started watching movies, but I grew up with Laurel and Hardy, The Little Rascals and other series by Hal Roach running on the TV constantly. I’m not sure how much he actually had to do with the final product, but he […]
Read more "The Tin Man (1935)"Ummm… Okay… And then this happened. Look, I need to say this: I’m really impressed with Matthew Cooper’s films. Particularly At the Mountains of Madness, which is near perfect. Admittedly, Markham is a first effort and it shows, but his second film has a clever story, great editing, and some pretty decent CGI monsters. And […]
Read more "When the Earth Gives Up the Dead (2022)"Honorable Mention I have to admit that the idea of a Japanese Lovecraft adaptation seems rather a curious notion, even if I did watch Ryo Shinagawa’s excellent, if rather strange, almost-animated Lovecraft anthology. It isn’t that the Japanese haven’t made plenty of horror films, it is instead a question of the very distinctive style of […]
Read more "Insumasu o ouu Kage (1992)"There seems to be a desperate final stage a lot of entertainment corporations gradually reach, a point where they seem incapable of anything new or creative, but instead return to their greatest hits and relive them over and over again. In fact, looking at the current state of things in Hollywood, it seems like most […]
Read more "Beyond the Resonator (2022)"If you missed my review of Václav Mergl’s “Krabi,” you will need a brief catch up. At a time when you could find a lot of talented and innovative animators behind the Iron Curtain, Václav Mergl still stood out. He wasn’t much like the animator most of us who are familiar with the era will […]
Read more "Laokoon (1970)"Honorable Mention “There are some things man was not meant to adapt to musical theatre…” The finest H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ever made was the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent black and white version of The Call of Cthulhu. No questions asked. It took an enormously complex story line, with a series of flashbacks nested one […]
Read more "A Shoggoth on the Roof (2000)"
rivets on the poster 