Perhaps it would help if I started with a minor digression on the Quatermass movies. Now I’ve written extensively about them over the years — for example, in these essays at IRoSF and Clarkesworld — and have reviewed both the TV and Movie versions of Quatermass 2 (1957) and Hammer’s version of the first serial for […]
Read more "Quatermass and the Pit [Five Million Years to Earth] (1967)"It can be so hard to tell whether a zombie film is science fiction or not. Take The Return of the Living Dead: we have the usual government secret weapon, we have barrels full of zombies, and the usual accidental release. But this time around, those darn zombies don’t seem to have any physical constraints […]
Read more "The Return of the Living Dead (1985)"(aka, Terror in Space) This is one of the most incredibly stylish SF films ever made. We have a brooding, shadowy spaceship, full of strange angles and odd spaces, some of them large enough to leave its crew dwarfed within them. And this isn’t the aliens’ ship: this is the one our protagonists show up […]
Read more "Planet of the Vampires [Terrore nello spazio] (1965)"“Many stories are told of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s journey to the Frogstar. Ten percent of them are ninety-five percent true, fourteen percent of them are sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent of them are only five percent true, and all the rest of them are… told by Zaphod Beeblebrox” Somehow or other, listening to Alejandro Jodorowsky talk about […]
Read more "Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)"First of all, that’s “Quartermass,” not “Quatermass.” Dean R. Koonz isn’t quite the famous superstar horror author that Stephen King is, but I’m not sure which one actually sells more books. He’s had quite a few of his novels adapted for the big screen, although not as many as King. Mind you, those adaptations do […]
Read more "Sole Survivor (2000)"Let’s get this straight: The original Invaders from Mars (1953) was not a great movie. William Cameron Menzies made it on a tiny budget and it shows. But it does something that Tobe Hooper and a big budget couldn’t do. It seems hard to imagine now, but Tobe Hooper was once considered a promising young director. His […]
Read more "Invaders from Mars (1986)"Space travel is boring. There. We said it. Not that it is a real surprise: after all, those live TV broadcasts of space missions, where every trivial action required a complicated exchange with Mission Control, were already ripe for parody in 1979 when John Lurie threw together his No Wave film, Men in Orbit. But the […]
Read more "Space Trucker Bruce (2014)"
rivets on the poster 