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)"Honorable Mention It has always seemed strange to me that Peter Lorre, who had a long career of playing interesting and often sinister characters, somehow got labelled as a horror icon later in his career, in movies like The Raven, or that episode of Route 66 he did with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. […]
Read more "Mad Love (1935)"I’m really not sure what to make of this one. Certainly the blurb on the posters isn’t any help. Whatever else we’re talking about here, it isn’t “A Science Fiction Road Picture.” Admittedly, that term “road picture” has strayed a bit from its origins with the endless series of “Road To…” movies Bing Crosby and […]
Read more "The Rising Light (2013)"It would help if I started off with a few comments about Ansel Faraj. Faraj was one of those kids who dreamed of becoming a film director when he grew up. However, instead of going off to film school, he made movies. A lot of movies, actually. I first encountered him in his 2014 film […]
Read more "The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2015)"(aka Doctor Mabuse Strikes Back, Doctor M. Strikes Back) For some strange reason, Jess Franco has a bit of a cult following. I suppose it is natural as he made a lot — and I do mean a lot — of trashy Euro horror films, often with lots and lots of female flesh on display. […]
Read more "Dr. M schlägt zu [The Vengeance of Doctor Mabuse] (1972)"Film — as an Avant Garde art form? That is essentially what the director, Marcel L’Herbier, is doing here. This film was made at the height of the Paris Avant Garde of the Twenties, with a handful of Marcel’s friends from the world of art providing the mise en scène — including Fernand Leger, René […]
Read more "L’inhumaine [The Inhuman Woman] (1924)"It seems almost impossible, and yet there it is: A movie, in the twenty-first Century, without a word of dialogue in its first hour. The silence of this film is almost painful. Early on, there is only the faintest hint of a score, and a sudden noise is enough to make the audience jump. We […]
Read more "A Quiet Place (2018)"You get to take your pick… Is it the possible leak from a nuclear reactor failure or a biology lab’s attempts at breeding bigger crabs that have created the swarm of bigger and more aggressive crabs that are attacking animals and even people on an island in Florida? In a way it doesn’t really matter, […]
Read more "Island Claws (1980)"The Saharan Flu has wiped out most of the human race. Only a handful of chosen survivors have been put into small, self-contained habitats to wait out the end of the epidemic: While they are all isolated in their own separate bunkers (to prevent the spread of the disease among them) and are in different […]
Read more "Domain (2016)"(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!) Not long ago, I noted that the mad scientist film seems to have disappeared. It never was exactly a realistic sort of concept, and as modern film has skewed away from non-realistic styles like expressionism and surrealism, it seems further and further out of place. But that didn’t stop Ridley Scott. Curiously, […]
Read more "Alien: Covenant (2017)"
rivets on the poster 