Honorable Mention Strange. I never thought of William Devane as an action hero. But I suppose on Television in the 1970s almost anything was possible, particularly when it came to TV movies. For example, it came as a bit of a shock when I realized that this movie came out two years before the film […]
Read more "Red Alert (1977)"Oh, wow. This is an insanely great little film. Why in the world haven’t I heard of this one before? Somehow it manages to combine the Y2K “virus,” Frankenstein level mad science, brain downloads, and the digital end of the world (in the year 2000) with… Eight bit videogames? It’s also a bit hard to […]
Read more "Midnight Science (2021)"Honorable Mention It has always seemed strange to me that Peter Lorre, who had a long career of playing interesting and often sinister characters, somehow got labelled as a horror icon later in his career, in movies like The Raven, or that episode of Route 66 he did with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. […]
Read more "Mad Love (1935)"As I noted in my review of The Man with Nine Lives (1940), the late Thirties and early Forties were one of the busiest moments in Boris Karloff’s career, as he took on an impressive number of projects at different studios. And many of these were mad scientist films. Before I Hang was one of six […]
Read more "Before I Hang (1940)"Okay, it takes a while to get going. In fact, we are over a half an hour into the film before that monster finally makes an appearance. But it is not exactly wasted time as we learn a lot about the troubled relationship between Lizzy and her alcoholic mother Kathy. They are on a trip […]
Read more "The Monster (2016)"(aka, Skeleton on Horseback) If anyone remembers Karel Capek here in the United States, it is for his play R.U.R. Not that many people have actually read it, they’ve just heard that he coined the word “robot” in it. And that’s a bit of a shame as he was a remarkable playwright, novelist, essayist and […]
Read more "Bílá nemoc [The White Plague] (1937)"It’s Thanksgiving night and one of the most important days of the year is about to begin: Black Friday! Well, it’s important if you happen to be running a big, strip mall Toy Store, and your bosses expect you to make a lot of money before the store closes for the day. A lot of […]
Read more "Black Friday (2021)"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 […]
Read more "Deadly Weapon (1989)"As strange as it may seem, there are a few Classic science fiction films I have not seen. This was one of them. Blame it on that final gruesome scene, a fragment of which I saw on cable TV while someone was flicking around the dial. Or blame it on the disturbing storyline, which I […]
Read more "The Fly (1986)"This seems to have been my week of watching borderline SF films, with viewings of such films as a ghost story turned alien encounter (High Desert Kill); a wacky screwball comedy with a mad scientist (The Boogie Man Will Get You); and a shaggy dog Gothic horror with a bogus bit of science at its heart (The […]
Read more "Dr. Renault’s Secret (1942)"
rivets on the poster 