You need to pay attention to Ed Kirk. If you haven’t noticed him yet, he just released Future Soldier, a beautiful micro-budgeted feature film which is more polished and better constructed than a lot of the science fiction films out there — including some which are far more expensive. While this is his first feature […]
Read more "Future Soldier (2023)"This is one of the most fondly remembered BBC TV movies in their long and varied history. And I feel like a bit of a grinch because I just don’t share the enthusiasm that it has generated. Somewhere in in the more perfect future of 2130, after a devastating catastrophe that no one quite understands, […]
Read more "The Flipside of Dominick Hide [Play for Today: The Flipside of Dominick Hide] (1980)"If you had to slap a convenient label on this film, you might call it the Destination Moon of the Soviet Union. Like any other hasty label, that really doesn’t sum this film up: after all, it didn’t inspire a long string of other films and usher in a wave of new Soviet Science Fiction […]
Read more "Polyot na Lunu [Flight to the Moon] (1953)"It’s amazing that it took until 1997 — a full thirteen years — for someone to figure out that the one thing that was missing from The Terminator was… Dinosaurs. One of the best parts of low budget films is that they don’t have the studio hanging over their shoulder, making demands and telling them […]
Read more "Future War (1997)"I’ve always loved animated science fiction films, particularly those which are set in outer space. Unfortunately, they are quite rare. Well, outside the world of Japanese anime, that is. Very few were made in the English-speaking world, but for some reason a number of quite interesting examples came out of Europe. Or it might be […]
Read more "Fiul Stelelor [The Son of the Stars] (1985)"This is the fourth of Alvaro Passeri’s films I have seen. And so far it is the only one which disappointed me. Passeri was a veteran special effects expert from the Italian film industry who decided in the mid-Nineties to make his own movies. The five he created were all made on ridiculously small budgets, […]
Read more "Flight to Hell (2003)"(Literal title: The Golden Grain) What would you get if you combined Star Wars with The Princess Bride? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be Fantastic Games. Not even if you threw in a bit of The Neverending Story. Or switched out Star Wars for its extravagantly silly Italian rip-off, Starcrash (1978). Although you would […]
Read more "Il chicco d’oro [Fantastic Games] (1998)"(aka, Crazy Rabbit) It is often hard to explain why we get obsessed with finding certain films. I think I stumbled across a reference to it on Letterboxed…or was it that some search or other led me to its page on IMDB? I honestly can’t remember. But, when you are talking about a film which […]
Read more "Feng kuang de tu zi [Mad Rabbit] (1997)"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)"Well, I wasn’t ready for that. Look, I’m sure most of you have seen a few really low-budget films along the way. After all, when it comes to science fiction, there are a lot of them out there. And if you’ve seen a few of these films from the Sixties and Seventies then Flesh Feast […]
Read more "Flesh Feast (1970)"
rivets on the poster 