There are some movies where it comes as no surprise that Troma films decided to distribute the film, even though they didn’t actually make it. I mean who else in their more or less right state of mind would ever decide to distribute a film like Nightmare Weekend? I’m not sure there is any right […]
Read more "Nightmare Weekend (1986)"Mainland China has not produced many horror films. Not that I’m sure Beauty Head of the Haunted House is a horror film. In fact, it is about as unclassifiable as any genre film can be. Certainly there are horror elements, but there are also a lot of other things which do not neatly fit into […]
Read more "Xiong zhai mei ren tou [Beauty Head of the Haunted House] (1989)"Honorable Mention I think it would help if I started with another Shaw Brothers film I saw not too long ago: The Black Lizard, a ghost story involving a lizard monster. It had Mario Bava-style atmospheric lighting (heavy on the green), ghosts, monsters, special effects, and had clearly been patterned on the Euro Horrors and […]
Read more "Wu du tian luo [The Web of Death] (1976)"There are a lot of obscure — and often borderline — science fiction films from before the 1950s I still haven’t gotten around to watching. Sometimes it’s because they can be very hard to find, and sometimes it is just because I decided to watch something else instead. But if there’s anything that will get […]
Read more "Le monde tremblera [The World Will Tremble] (1939)"It seems strange to me how so much of our popular media was seen as disposable by those who oversaw its production. Newspapers made no effort to preserve their comic art; the owner of Western Publishing actually cut up Carl Barks’ Donald Duck originals because he wanted to be sure no other company would copy […]
Read more "The Andromeda Breakthrough (1962)"Deep below a big warehouse, with the NSA watching, a group of young scientists, led by the mysterious Mr. Landau, have made an incredible breakthrough. And, of course, with a title like Paradox, we know this is going to involve time travel. They test the machine by sending one of them, Jim, ahead an hour… […]
Read more "Paradox (2016)"Bragging rights. That was how Jamie Lee Curtis summed up her role in Virus: when a fellow actor complains about how awful the bad film they did was, she can always show off her clips and say, oh yeah? I was in Virus! Now I’m not convinced Virus ever reaches such epic heights of badnesss. […]
Read more "Virus (1999)"The French Nouvelle Vague short film, La Jetee, occupies an interesting place in science fiction cinema. It is hailed as a great art film and formal experiment — and yet at the same time it is held to be a SF classic. There are only a few films you can say that about. It uses […]
Read more "Missing Pages (2006)"You’ve probably misunderstood the title of this film. In this case, “Creatures” refers not to the typical Hollywood monster we’d expect in a film called “The Creatures,” but instead might better be translated as “creations.” Although that really doesn’t convey the sense that’s here as well: “creature” as something one controls, like a slave. One […]
Read more "Les créatures [The Creatures] (1966)"It is hard to even begin to write about this one. After all, what we have here is a very strange Art House Science Fiction movie, jam packed with incredible imagery and following a decidedly non-linear course through what seems almost a simple story — if it weren’t so complicated. A man has been sent back in […]
Read more "Cycle (2012)"
rivets on the poster 