Sometimes you just have to say it straight out: This is the TV movie version of a Science Fiction Opera. An Opera about a gigantic spaceship on a trip to the stars. It gets better. Aniara started life as an epic, book-length poem published in 1956. And, I will note, written by a Swedish Nobel […]
Read more "Aniara (1960)"An editor once compared one of my stories to the speculative fiction of the golden age, and I have to admit that it is an era I particularly love. We’re talking about the days when a writer would imagine some strange situation — like a planet where the atmosphere turned to liquid every night — […]
Read more "She Devil (1957)"I think a few words are in order about guilty pleasures. Let’s face it, we all know that there are films out there which we love unreservedly, and find ourselves watching again and again despite their flaws. In fact, the sad truth is that we love them far more than we love a lot of […]
Read more "Judge Dredd (1995)"My first thought when I saw the opening of this movie was that The Son of Dr. Jekyll must have been the sequel to a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Louis Hayward. Well, that isn’t the case. Nor does Columbia Pictures appear to have made such a film without Hayward, prior to […]
Read more "The Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951)"(aka, The Lost Coast Tapes, Bigfoot) I’m beginning to understand why so many people grumble about found footage films. There are a lot of them out there. And they tend to have certain, shall we say, family resemblances. I still haven’t watched that many of them — at least not compared to the vast hordes […]
Read more "Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)"In the interest of full disclosure, I need to note here that I have never played the Resident Evil games and I definitely am not a huge fan of the franchise. I’ll even admit that I have a soft spot for Paul W.S. Anderson series of films starring Milla Jovovich, which are absurd, convoluted, silly, […]
Read more "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)"Look, I know this one is preposterous. An ocean liner, the Goliath, is torpedoed at the very start of World War II. It sinks but somehow a bubble of air gets caught in the hull. It sinks a thousand feet deep, but they manage to create enough pressure to keep the ship from collapsing on […]
Read more "Goliath Awaits (1981)"It’s amazing how many films which arrived amid paeans of praise have since vanished. It is even more remarkable that some of them debuted at the elite Cannes Film Festival and have since been long forgotten. But there have been a few, and what’s more, a few from Cannes’ glory days during the French New […]
Read more "Manden der tænkte ting [The Man Who Thought Life] (1969)"I have to admit I find the whole notion of Lionel Barrymore as a mad scientist rather…odd. Yes, he was a member of the legendary Barrymore family of great actors, and was considered to be one of the greatest actors of his age. But, he is best remembered for the grouchy old men he played in […]
Read more "The Devil-Doll (1936)"
rivets on the poster 