8-ka de shinda kaijû no 12-nichi no monogatari [The 12 Day Tale of the Monster that Died in 8] (2020)

Wikizilla described this one as the first black and white Kaiju film since the original Gamera in 1965. Well…I guess. Maybe. You might call it that. If you absolutely had to. Now the reality is that this is instead a strange found footage film made during the height of the pandemic which just happens to […]

Savannah Electric Monochrome Dystopia [The Savannah Resistance; Savannah Electric] (1985)

I never thought I would see this film. And now, not only have I seen it, but I’ve seen two different versions of the film. When I first heard of it, under its original name, Savannah Electric Monochrome Dystopia (which I still prefer!), it was almost a myth, one of those tiny independent films you […]

Strawberry Mansion (2021)

It is very difficult to classify Strawberry Mansion. It has a science fictional setting, a very retro near future where the protagonist drives a first generation Corvair and works as a tax auditor, assessing how much people owe for their dreams. On the other hand, some would describe this as more of a fantasy, as […]

Crumbs (2015)

Things have fallen apart. There was the war and other catastrophes, but the real problem is that everyone just lost interest in living. Only a few children have been born since the war, the population has fallen catastrophically. The world is dying. Everyone clings to the last shreds of the old world: a record album, […]

Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens (1972)

I never thought I would see this one. In fact, I’d heard it was lost, and nobody seemed to have seen it for years. Heck, most Science Fiction film critics haven’t even heard of this one. What’s next, Iron Bread? It definitely came as a shock when Glen Ivory, a member in good standing of […]

Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

Let’s see… A surreal Ethiopian Cyberpunk comedy shot on a nothing budget? Even better, we’re talking a strange and phantasmagorical film with a mind-boggling set of plot twists; a movie which is inventive, absurd and surreal; an endlessly complicated film which dances nimbly through countless layers of reality while inflicting one bizarre new situation on […]

Last and First Men (2020)

Darkness. The sound of wind. Eerie music. Clouds against a bright, monochrome sky. And something huge, a vast slab of concrete like a monolith, which we gradually see has a very different shape. And then a voice, speaking for the very last of the Human race, Two Thousand Million Years from now, speaks to us, […]

Hiso hiso boshi [The Whispering Star] (2015)

Dripping water. A pot of tea, a screw lying loose on the floor, moths trapped inside the light fixture, clothes in the washing machine. Space travel is slow, time-consuming, and there is little to distinguish one day from the next. But that doesn’t matter if you are a robot. Yoko Suzuki is an android whose […]

Phantasm: Ravager (2016)

(Warning: Spoilers ahead!) Phantasm would seem to be the Platonic ideal of a movie — or a movie franchise — that was exactly the sort of borderline, off-beat, non-traditional science fiction film this site is always looking for. And yet I have never reviewed any of the films in the series. Until now, that is. […]

Protopartículas [Protoparticles](2009)

It is one of those images you just can’t forget once you’ve seen it: a man in some sort of space suit, taking out the trash on an ordinary city street. And it is the very first image that Chema Garcia Ibarra offers us in Protopartículas. What we have here is another brilliant minimalist Black […]

rivets on the poster

“The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.” — Orson Scott Card

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