In 1940, Boris Karloff was still riding on the fame he got from his series of great Universal Horror films, and was hard at work making movies. It was one of the busiest — and most successful — periods of his career. Mixed in with all the other projects, he made an impressive number of […]
Read more "The Man with Nine Lives (1940)"As I sat down to write this, I found myself thinking about all the best known films out there featuring a severed head kept alive in a lab, like The Head (1959), The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), The Madmen of Mandoras (1963), and, of course, Reanimator (1985), and realized that Professor Dowell’s Testament isn’t […]
Read more "Zaveshchaniye professora Douelya [Professor Dowell’s Testament] (1984)"Well, I wasn’t ready for that. Look, I’m sure most of you have seen a few really low-budget films along the way. After all, when it comes to science fiction, there are a lot of them out there. And if you’ve seen a few of these films from the Sixties and Seventies then Flesh Feast […]
Read more "Flesh Feast (1970)"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)"(aka, Lent in the Month of March, Mars en carême) Think of it as a French version of Local Hero — but with Martians. I suppose it would help if I explained that I happen to own a couple of books on Science Fiction Film from the 1970s — after 2001 and The Planet of […]
Read more "Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens [Don’t Play with Martians] (1968)"Honorable Mention (mostly) Before I get started here, I need to say a few words about Janne Waas. Janne is perhaps the single best online Science Fiction film critic working today. Perhaps the best in any media for that matter. He’s trying to write about every major (and minor) science fiction film out there on […]
Read more "Red Snow (1952)"(AKA Nezulla) Back in the Fifties, the Japanese film production company Daiei planned to make a movie in which a vast plague of rats attacks Tokyo, ending with one last, Godzilla-sized rat on a rampage. This is not that film. Not even close. Instead we have a low budget, guy-in-a-suit rat monster movie, where the […]
Read more "Saikyôjû tanjô Nezura [Nezulla the Rat Monster] (2002)"If you asked me what The Lake reminds me of more than anything else, my first thought would be a certain Science Fiction film from 1956. However, after a moment’s consideration, I would instead say the sort of serious TV drama NBC was making back in the Nineties. After all, we have the tough, talented […]
Read more "The Lake (1998)"(aka Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear) If there’s one thing we need to learn from this film, it is that jealous monkeys are bad news. Looking at Monkey Shines, I find that it seems to have hit almost every horror movie trope of the Eighties. We have our serial killer, our dream scenes, the […]
Read more "Monkey Shines (1988)"I was somewhat amused to note that IMDB lists this one as a “romance” (as well as Horror and SF): After all, we’re talking about a comatose patient who has developed impressive telekinetic powers, thanks to his current state, and is using them to harass anyone who gets too close to the nurse he has […]
Read more "Patrick (1978)"
rivets on the poster 