(Literal Title: 28 1/2 Delusional Giant) I never thought I would see this film. I suppose I could blame Mamoru Oshii for this: after all, his rather strange career has gone in a lot of very odd directions since he made the films which are hailed as his big classics: The Ghost in the Shell […]
Read more "28 1/2 mousou no kyojin [28 1/2] (2010)"(Literal translation: The Flying Saucers) Honorable Mention I’ll confess that Mexican cinema is one of those areas I haven’t spent much time exploring. Which, of course, means that I keep finding a few interesting films to watch. Heck, some of them, like El monstruo resucitado [Monster](1953), are quite good. Fortunately, I don’t have to do all […]
Read more "Los platillos voladores (1956)"(Literal translation: Opening Fire. aka, Jungle of Death, En busca del astronauta Maya. Literal translation: In Search of the Mayan Astronaut) I suppose it doesn’t help that I could only find a singularly bad rip of this rare Mexican film that actually had any sort of subtitles. And those were auto-translated auto-subs. But I still […]
Read more "Abriendo fuego (1985)"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)"(Literal Title: UFOs in Zacapa) Before we get started, there’s something here we need to point out: O.V.N.I. is an acronym for what we would call a UFO. It’s used in several languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese and even Spanish, which are close enough to each other that the acronym is the same in all […]
Read more "Ovnis en Zacapa (2015)"This is one of the rarest of Toho’s Tokusatsu films. But what the heck, I managed to see it anyway. Mind you, while I didn’t exactly see it in the worst way possible — after all, the quality of the film itself was quite good — I came fairly close. I couldn’t find any subtitles […]
Read more "Shuto shôshitsu [Tokyo Blackout] (1987)"It’s true. I’m always interested in some new oddity when it comes to science fiction films. I suppose it helps that I’m willing to overlook low production values in favor of writing, inventiveness or even the mere rarity of a film. After all, I’ve seen an awful lot of the safe SF films out there […]
Read more "Operazione Vega [Operation Vega] (1962)"Now those of you familiar with Japanese mythology (or who are obsessive Toho monster fans) may have heard of Yamata no Orochi. This was the monstrous, eight-headed dragon god the legendary hero, Susano-o fought to save a girl who was about to be sacrificed to it. This story appears in the classic 1959 Toho epic, […]
Read more "Yamata no Orochi no Gyakushu [Eight-Headed Giant Serpent’s Counterattack] (1985)"Honorable Mention This one deserves a place here because it is routinely identified as a Science Fiction film in most Western sources. It is also more or less impossible to find even the simplest plot summary of the film, or any sort of details. However, it would take an incredible stretch to identify this one […]
Read more "Ekstrasens [Psychic] 1992"It would probably help if we started with N.G. Mount. He was a French Video Store owner named Norbert Moutier who made a series of absurdly cheap films, generally with horror and science fiction elements — and a healthy amount of gore. While he talked about them as a commercial enterprise and marketed them on […]
Read more "Dinosaur from the Deep (1993)"
rivets on the poster 