Zaveshchaniye professora Douelya [Professor Dowell’s Testament] (1984)

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 […]

Pokhishcheniye charodeya [The Kidnapping of a Wizard] (1989)

Here’s another potent reminder of why I’ve always loved Soviet era Science Fiction films. Now I’ll admit that part of the reason is the same reason I’ve always loved foreign made Science Fiction Movies: that they are often free of the old cliches which infect so much of our own output. While it is true […]

Kamikaze (1986)

You never know what you are going to find next. After all, there are a lot of incredible movies out there no one has ever heard of. Consider for a moment the 1986 French comedy, Kamikaze: The first thing you’ll notice is that it was produced by Luc Besson. Now this is actually more remarkable […]

Le monde tremblera [The World Will Tremble] (1939)

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 […]

Hide and Seek (1984)

A series of mysterious computer disruptions occur in a number of completely unrelated systems — including a bank, a power company, and a nuclear reactor. This baffles the authorities and the technical experts, as it seems that someone has hacked the unhackable control program that is at the center of the software they all use, […]

The Rejuvenator [Rejuvenatrix] (1988)

If there was one thing there was no shortage of in the Eighties, it was science fiction tinged effects heavy horror films. I suppose you could blame Alien, although all you have to do is look at the title of this film and it is obvious what one of the main inspirations was. Not that […]

Deadly Weapon (1989)

You really have to feel for Zeke. Raised by a drunken and abusive father, his mother left and doesn’t want anything to do with him, and he is constantly bullied by a group of older students. But things really get bad when he accidentally finds a top secret death ray which the military inadvertently lost […]

Shark Encounters of the Third Kind (2020)

I could try to explain the plot of this one, but your head would probably explode. Let’s just say we have treasure hunters, a sunken treasure ship which probably doesn’t contain Nazi gold, sinister aliens, mind control, a psychologist who specializes in alien abductees, and, of course, sharks. Sharks who are being used by the […]

Skeeter (1993)

As I sit down to write this, I find myself thinking of the much-loved horror comedy, Mosquito (1994). Which you’ll admit is no particular surprise when we’re talking about two monster movies about giant mosquitoes which came out a year apart, even if the two have absolutely nothing in common. Mosquito is a classic B Movie, […]

Amityville Island (2020)

There are movies where you have the suspicion that a group of filmmakers were up far too late, after too many movies, pizzas and beers, and threw together the most absurd idea for a movie they could think of… And somebody made the mistake of writing it all down before they slept it off and […]

rivets on the poster

“The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.” — Orson Scott Card

serious