(aka, Message from Outer Space, Space Ninja) One of the first cloned copies of Star Wars which came out after the release of the George Lucas classic was Message from Outer Space, a strange and colorful Japanese film whose most memorable element was its spaceship in the form of a square-rigged sailing vessel, complete with […]
Read more "Swords of the Space Ark (1981)"I’ve always loved animated science fiction films, particularly those which are set in outer space. Unfortunately, they are quite rare. Well, outside the world of Japanese anime, that is. Very few were made in the English-speaking world, but for some reason a number of quite interesting examples came out of Europe. Or it might be […]
Read more "Fiul Stelelor [The Son of the Stars] (1985)"I’ve seen quite a few Chinese Science Fiction films lately, but most of them left me rather unsatisfied. So it seems a bit of a shock to find a beautiful, comedy about a man who is stranded on the moon and forced to find some way to survive there. Now, I’ll admit that most of […]
Read more "Du xing yue qiu [Moon Man] (2022)"You learn what you are up against in the first few minutes of Mercano the Martian. Mercano — a little, green, squiggily-animated Martian — has just stolen a computer and run away from the police. They follow him down into the subway, only one of the cops — who is afraid of heights — slides […]
Read more "Mercano, el marciano [Mercano the Martian] (2002)"Supervillains. It’s not exactly obvious to the uninitiated, but there are two distinct types of supervillain: The Bond villain and The Comic Book villain. It seemed a strange coincidence when two studios came out with movies with supervillains as heroes at the same time, but Despicable Me‘s Gru is clearly the Bond-iest of Bond Villains… […]
Read more "Megamind (2010)"You have to remember that Filmation was once one of the undisputed rulers of Saturday Morning. They produced a vast flood of animated cartoons, a few feature films, and even a handful of live action TV shows over their twenty-six year career, all but one of these productions proudly made in their entirety in the […]
Read more "Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All (1982)"Lately, Animation and I have had a very complex relationship. It hasn’t exactly been a good one, not for some time now. I suppose, in a way, you might blame Pixar. Not that it’s exactly their fault, it is more that everyone else had to copy them and all the money went into computer animated […]
Read more "Misiunea spatialã Delta [Delta Space Mission] (1984)"Genres are more fun when you can mix and match them. Consider Attack of the Unknown: we have a tough and experienced SWAT team making a major bust, only things don’t go as planned and one of their team gets killed. And, even worse, the FBI insists on taking over. But the team is given […]
Read more "Attack of the Unknown (2020)"I have never seen a Polonia Brothers film that recycled this much footage from another of their films. If you know who they are, then you realize this is no idle claim. They started out shooting their own homemade DIY Shot on Video films back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, became cult icons […]
Read more "Invasion of the Empire of the Apes (2021)"(aka, Titanium) Not all planets are created equal. Yet many harsh and barely livable planets have been colonized by the “Free Worlds League” of the distant future, like the planet XT-59 (which is apparently called Titanium in the version I saw), where all the colonists have been placed in a highly controlled, high-tech city. It’s […]
Read more "Vychislitel [The Calculator] (2014)"
rivets on the poster 