(Mild spoilers) You can’t say that the basic notion isn’t familiar: Child disappears, the Sheriff thinks the mother is responsible, mother goes off to find her child. Nor does it seem all that unusual that we have weird lights in the night, scratching sounds in the walls and other sinister goings-on. This could still just […]
Read more "Dark Light (2019)"Okay, I’ll admit it. I have a weakness for monster movies. Particularly giant monster movies. Now you don’t watch monster movies for their dramatic depth or their literate scripts. You watch them for thrills and chills and some absurd fun. We need to be absolutely clear here: Spiders isn’t great cinema. It wasn’t meant to […]
Read more "Spiders (2000)"Triclops has what must be Brett Piper’s finest hour. Now, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Brett is the last of the great stop-motion animators, a meticulous craftsman who creates some of the finest B-Movies anyone has made since the Fifties. And in Triclops, we get to see the titular beast — […]
Read more "Triclops (2016)"Edward Everett Horton, one of the most avuncular actors of the Thirties and Forties, as a mad scientist? It’s one of those thoughts you can’t dwell on for too long for fear it’ll cause serious brain damage. I suppose we could argue that he’s not so much “mad” as a bit obsessive, but that doesn’t […]
Read more "The Body Disappears (1941)"“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough […]
Read more "Il demone di Laplace [The Laplace’s Demon] (2017)"Honorable Mention This is one of those rare instances when Orson Scott Card’s rivet test fails us. After all, there is no shortage of rivets on display in Zathura and yet it clearly is not science fiction. Instead, it is in many respects a film about SF — or perhaps it would be more correct […]
Read more "Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)"It’s been a year since Maisie disappeared. Her family has gathered for a memorial service, but strange things start happening when they return to the family home afterwards — mysterious lights, odd noises, things moving just out of sight. Something is out there in the woods, something that snatches the family members away one at […]
Read more "Dark Encounter (2019)"