This is the fourth of Alvaro Passeri’s films I have seen. And so far it is the only one which disappointed me. Passeri was a veteran special effects expert from the Italian film industry who decided in the mid-Nineties to make his own movies. The five he created were all made on ridiculously small budgets, […]
Read more "Flight to Hell (2003)"I’d almost forgotten. I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I last saw Them!, but you think I’d have remembered. But then, it seems to be something that happens with the great classics — even if it is just an incredible classic of the Fifties genre of giant monster movies: We keep forgetting just […]
Read more "Them! (1954)"(aka, Ice Crawlers) One of the curious features of the modern B-Movie is the number of special effects experts who have gone on to direct movies. Offhand, one thinks of people like David Allen, Chris Wallas and Brett Piper, although their number even includes a legend like Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001, then went […]
Read more "Deep Freeze (2001)"As far as I can figure out, Not of This World was produced for Syndication by Paramount, a few years before the earliest version of UPN. At the time they were busy syndicating shows to their various affiliates, which leads me to suspect this one might have run in late night or Saturday non-Prime Time […]
Read more "Not of This World (1991)"(aka, Unknown Origin) As I’ve mentioned before, if you can’t find one of the films Roger Corman produced, there’s usually a reason. In fact, now that his early films like Not of This Earth are finally out on DVD, one might note that there is almost an inverse relationship between how hard it is to […]
Read more "The Alien Within (1995)"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)"(aka, The Lucifer Rig) One way to tell how old you are is how you react to the moments when everything pauses in films like this and the screen blacks out for an instant. Now if you shrug, say “it’s a TV movie,” and ignore it, then you probably grew up in the early days […]
Read more "The Intruder Within (1981)"It’s a very good sign when a movie has a poster by Drew Struzan. I honestly don’t know why this was true. Maybe his rates went up after he painted his classic Star Wars posters, maybe he was selective about the films he illustrated, maybe we tend to forget that his first posters were for […]
Read more "Dreamscape (1984)"Now as I’ve noted before, there have been a lot of interesting science fiction films coming out of Russia lately, films which have somehow made it into our mainstream video market, whether on disk or streaming. Some of them are more or less copies of our American big budget efforts, while others are quite good […]
Read more "Kolskaya sverhglubokaya [Superdeep] (2020)"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)"
rivets on the poster 