It’s hard to believe that this is a Fifties film. It certainly doesn’t look like most of your typical Fifties SF films: for one thing, it is in color. I’ll admit that is hardly unknown, and even some fairly early films like Flight to Mars (1951) were in color, but it is certainly rare for that staple SF […]
Read more "4D Man (1959)"Curt Siodmak is best remembered for writing Donovan’s Brain. He actually had a rather long and busy career writing screenplays with the occasional novel or short story thrown in, but let’s face it, people rarely notice who actually wrote their favorite movies — even though we pay a lot of attention to who may have […]
Read more "Hauser’s Memory (1970)"I find it rather disturbing: We keep hearing, in movie after movie, TV series after TV series that we are on the brink of some massive ecological cataclysm that will wipe out the entire human race “Real Soon” (to quote Dr. Lizardo). And yet, even the most alarmist models of global warming usually end up […]
Read more "Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)"Wow! It is very hard to write about a really good movie. A bad one? that’s easy. There are always lots of things that make a movie bad, and they are usually the same bad things from movie to movie. Acting? Dialogue? Story? The fundamentals of editing, sound recording and composition? But a truly good […]
Read more "The Tangle (2019)"This one was made by A.I.P. Now, I know what you’re thinking: American Independent Pictures, the same company that churned out hundreds of low budget films by Roger Corman, Bert I. Gordon, Edward L. Cahn, Larry Buchanan and others like them. And you would be wrong. Instead, we are talking about Action Independent Pictures, which made a lot […]
Read more "Space Mutiny (1988)"This is one of those films where you pretty much know what you get just by looking at the cast and crew list: Fred Olen Ray directed? Marc Singer starred? Brinke Stevens gets prominent billing? It was produced by Roger Corman’s New Horions Pictures? It must be a cheap SF/fantasy action film with plenty of […]
Read more "Droid Gunner [Cyberzone] (1995)"First of all, let’s make sure everyone is clear on one thing: This is not, I repeat, not, the film continuation of Joss Whedon’s Firefly. On the surface, at least, this is yet another neo-noir thriller, with Matthew McConaughey playing to type as Baker Dill, a grungy, down-on-his-luck owner of a fishing charter business, whose […]
Read more "Serenity (2019)"