Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Thursday, September 17th, 2026
HOPE is the new movie from the great South Korean director Na Hong-jin, his first since the horror movie THE WAILING nine years ago. Before that he did two really excellent, bleak crime movies, THE CHASER (2008) and THE YELLOW SEA (2010). This shows some of the detail, personality and mastery of those films, but it’s Na’s version of going into blockbuster mode – a big, action-packed monster movie. And though it shares some of the matter-of-fact horrors of his previous movies (it’s not the anti-septic death and destruction we’re used to from PG-13 Hollywood), it’s pleasant by comparison, because it’s very funny, and even a little warm at times. (Other times it’s mean as hell.)
Oddly, a movie it kept reminding me of was TREMORS, because it’s about the quirky residents of this small, rural area called Hope Harbor gathering their resources to deal with some crazy shit involving a monster. The lead is the police chief, Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, THE WAILING), who in the opening scene pulls up to the spot where some guys found a dead cow with giant claw marks on her. His second cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, HUMINT) has gathered some of the boys and their hunting rifles – there’s a great running joke that Bum-seok keeps being surprised by how many illegal guns everybody has – and they tell him about sightings of a tiger in the area. He’s incredulous until they insist and tell him detailed stories about it, but later we find out they were just fucking with him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Cameron Britton, Eum Moon-suk, Hoyeon, Hwang Jung-min, Im Hyun-sik, Lee Sang-hee, Michael Fassbender, Na Hong-jin, Taylor Russell, Zo In-sung
Posted in Reviews, Action, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 5 Comments »
Friday, September 11th, 2026
August 23, 1996
I don’t remember knowing anybody else like this, but I loved THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU at the time. It was a big summer movie, hugely expensive by New Line Cinema standards, but it was sci-fi horror, and rampant with outstanding Stan Winston makeup effects. It had more of Fairuza Balk fresh off of THE CRAFT, but this time she grows cat fangs. I knew that Ron Perlman (CRONOS, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) was under the makeup of the goat man called “The Sayer of the Law,” and Mark Dacascos (CRYING FREEMAN) was the leopard man Lo-Mai, but I didn’t know who Temuera Morrison (BARB WIRE) was yet so I didn’t know it was motherfuckin Jango Fett as the dogman Azazello. A great character I’ll come back to in a bit.
The crucial thing about the movie is that it was defiantly, extravagantly weird. Watching it now I realize how much of it tonally and texturally reminds me of NIGHTBREED, but since it starred two big time movie stars it wasn’t marketed as weirdo shit. It was marketed toward a mainstream crowd, and they didn’t like it. Nor did any of the other crowds. But sometimes you gotta stay away from crowds.
There are many possible criticisms of the movie, a few I might even agree with, but the popular one that to this day infuriates me is the claim that Marlon Brando is bad in it as Dr. Moreau. Unsurprisingly he won the Razzie and Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst Supporting Actor, so for the record that’s the company you keep if you hate this performance. The way they talked about it at the time it seemed like it wasn’t a performance, it was documentary footage of Marlon Brando misbehaving. Why is he on set wearing white makeup and a weird hat, riding a popemobile, making weird speeches, playing a piano duet with a little mutant pal? How unprofessional! He was supposed to be the normal version of this character. Why did he do it unlike anything we’ve ever seen? Why must he be so captivating and bizarre and hilarious? What an embarrassing bungle, that they accidentally did this. I want to talk to the manager. I’m calling the cops. I’m going to sue.
Gary Thompson in Philadelphia Daily News: “with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter.” Oh, you think so? You think so? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk, H.G. Wells, John Frankenheimer, Marco Hofschneider, Mark Dacascos, Marlon Brando, Richard Stanley, Ron Perlman, Stan Winston, Temuera Morrison, Val Kilmer
Posted in Reviews, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 27 Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
August 23, 1996
SOLO is a sci-fi action movie starring Mario Van Peebles (EXTERMINATOR 2, DELIVERY BOYS, RAPPIN’, JAWS: THE REVENGE, POSSE, FULL ECLIPSE, GUNMEN, HIGHLANDER III, PANTHER) as an android super soldier. General Clyde Haynes (Barry Corbin, MY SCIENCE PROJECT) explains the idea upfront: “He’s proficient at all types of combat. He has no family, no friends, not even a Social Security number. If he’s wounded beyond repair, we throw him away. No guilt, no worries, no medical benefits. No one will cry when Solo is gone. We’ll simply build another one.” (Personally I think it’s rude that he says that right in front of him.)
One issue with this two billion dollar program comes out in the first mission we see, an attack on an airstrip being built for rebels in an unnamed South American country. (No, not Val Varde, I think I would recognize it.) When Solo sees that civilians are being forced to build the airstrip it clearly upsets him, and he overrides his commands to avoid blowing them up. (Also he takes home a tarantula as a pet.) There’s a great part where the humans detonating the bombs on the outskirts have given up on Solo and abandoned him, then there’s a thunk on their helicopter and he’s hanging from the bottom.
Afterwards his creator (?), the young hotshot scientist Dr. Bill Stewart (twentysomething Adrien Brody!) can sense his trepidation, and is impressed that a program somehow has emotions. (Disclaimer that I feel like I need to include in every other sci-fi review now: this is a completely not real sci-fi concept that has poetic meaning in fictional stories, but if someone today is telling you it will really happen they are a scammer, a mark, or a kook, in my opinion.)
The General and especially his asshole colonel Frank Madden (William Sadler, BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY) are pissed at Solo, who argues that he’s programmed to prevent harm to noncombatants. Madden, of course, claims the civilians count as combatants because they’re “working for” the rebels. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abraham Verduzo, Adrien Brody, Barry Corbin, Buddy Joe Hooker, David Corley, Demian Bichir, Mario Van Peebles, William Sadler
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Monday, September 7th, 2026
After spending nearly a decade making the literally gigantic FX extravaganzas GODZILLA VS. KONG and GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, director Adam Wingard has returned to the territory of YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST – horror/action/thriller hybrids where he doesn’t have as much money but can kinda do what he wants. This time he’s armed with that blockbuster experience and a bigger small budget (three times as much as THE GUEST) courtesy of A24, so he and his long time writer Simon Barrett (FRANKENFISH) had a chance to really let ‘er rip. I thought. Maybe next time.
I hope other people will get more out of it than I did. It has many of the elements for a movie I could love. Adria Arjona (TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS, HIT MAN, but mainly Bix from Andor) is very charismatic as Celeste, a cynical war vet who purposely isolates herself in a desert town, living in and managing a trailer park, her only loves in the world the daughter she has partial custody of and the illegal stockpile of guns in the cabinet. She’s not ready when her more responsible ex (Jacob Scipio, WITHOUT REMORSE) drops off young Daisy (Blake Kennedy) on an unscheduled weekend. She missed the text about it because she was out shooting jack o’lanterns. So compared to everyone else she is pretty ready for the other unexpected guests, the rampaging super soldiers who escape from a nearby secret military site and start killing everybody. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Wingard, Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Drew Starkey, Eric Wareheim, Jacob Scipio, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall, Reginald VelJohnson, Simon Barrett, super soldiers
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 9 Comments »
Friday, September 4th, 2026
August 9, 1996
John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM L.A. is a movie that I still like, but (kind of like THE FRIGHTENERS) not as much as I did at the time. Come to think of it maybe part of that was that Carpenter had been, up to that point, almost entirely a video experience for me. When I saw BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in the theater I was too young to be aware of who the director was. ESCAPE FROM L.A. was the first time I was purposely watching a John Carpenter film on the big screen, excited to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, his theme music blasting through the then-state-of-the-art THX sound system.
But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.
Okay, the c.g. complaint, I still get that. There are shots that look bad for the time, and that was 30 years ago. On the other hand, I’d guess it’s around 30 seconds of screen time, and lit murkily enough that it doesn’t look as shiny and ridiculous as most of the similarly budgeted stuff from the same era. One of those shots is underwater at night. What I found interesting on this viewing was that as the movie ages it looks and feels much more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK than it seemed to at the time, when it felt too current. The arc of time is starting to merge them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.J. Langer, Bruce Campbell, Cliff Robertson, Debra Hill, Georges Corraface, James Lew, Jeff Imada, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Michelle Forbes, Pam Grier, Peter Fonda, Robert Carradine, Shirley Walker, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Valeria Golino
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 17 Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2026
Big Willie Weekend, 1996
I was hesitant to watch PHENOMENON again, but it’s fine. It’s a corny but harmless drama/romance with sci-fi elements, directed by Jon Turteltaub (3 NINJAS, COOL RUNNINGS, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING) from a script by Gerald Di Pego (SHARKY’S MACHINE).
It stars John Travolta in his post-PULP-FICTION I’m Back period. GET SHORTY made the comeback seem permanent, but then nobody saw/liked WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, and it was followed by the middle-of-the-road sappiness double whammy of the angel movie MICHAEL and this. So it took doing his first John Woo movie to put a little more gas in the tank, at least for those of us wanting him to do movies we perceived as cool. PHENOMENON was a pretty big hit, though, and I didn’t hate it.
It’s set in a vast land of aged white farm houses with big porches, and with rusty pickup trucks parked nearby. This is what we learn from the opening credits montage and the very sentimental but not painful score by Thomas Newman (THE PLAYER) telling us how majestic and shit it is. Good ol’ wholesome small town utopia.
Travolta plays George Malley, a humble mechanic who enjoys gardening and has lots of friends who will hang out with him at the bar on his birthday. Unfortunately they do not include the furniture-making single mother he keeps asking out, Lace (Kyra Sedgwick, SINGLES). Maybe next time. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Forest Whitaker, Gerald Di Pego, John Travolta, Jon Turteltaub, Kyra Sedgwick, Robert Duvall
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2026
July 2, 1996 (in video stores)
Until now I had never seen THEODORE REX. Obviously I always intended to see it – I’m not a heathen. But I took my time, and also I always got it confused with TAMMY AND THE T-REX. Thankfully this Slam Evil Summer series gave me motivation to finally see it, so now I know what it’s all about, at least to the extent that one can know that just from watching it.
I need to come up with a name for this type of movie. It’s most similar to SUPER MARIO BROS., which also has dinosaurs and cyperpunky stuff, so I’m kinda thinking DinoPunk, Dino Noir, something like that. But they’re fantasy world-building movies, usually set in a dystopian future or alternate world, they’re usually sold as kids movies and have some aggressively juvenile humor (often perpetrated by buffoonish henchmen with wacky voices) but otherwise don’t really seem like they’re made that much for kids (like, this one has a murder investigation complete with dinosaur autopsy). Also for some reason they tend to feature souped-up garbage trucks. But the most distinguishing feature is that they’re a big mess that seems full of the sort of colorful gimmicks and special effects I love (matte paintings and huge soundstage sets depicting stylized cities, animatronic creatures) but none of it really coheres and the whole thing is a slog. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Armin Mueller-Stahl, Bud Cort, Carol Kane, DinoPunk, George Newbern, Joe Dallesandro, Jonathan R. Betuel, Juliet Landau, Peter Kwong, Richard Roundtree, Robert Folk, Stephen McHattie, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Family, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, June 30th, 2026
SUPERGIRL is a fairly straight forward modern super hero movie, and I think a pretty good one, though (to quote the great philosopher Dalton) opinions vary. It follows SUPERMAN in James Gunn’s new Detective Comics Comics movie universe, but it’s directed by Craig Gillespie (FRIGHT NIGHT remake) and written by Ana Nogueira (an actress and playwright).
I, TONYA put Gillespie on the map, or at least is the credit people always put after his name, but I think what qualified him for this was CRUELLA, a movie I watched way after the fact and didn’t review but thought was a surprisingly stylish and clever version of the Misunderstood I.P. Villainess subgenre. Here he brings similar sensibilities to the sturdy foundation of the 2021 mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. Like THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU this is a pretty humble, self-contained space western, specifically a space TRUE GRIT, though moreso in the comic (since it’s narrated by an adult version of the precocious young protagonist). After Ruthye (Eve Ridley) loses her entire family to scumbag brigands she goes to a saloon and offers a sword made by her late father (Ferdinand Kingsley, DRACULA UNTOLD) to whoever will help her track down his killer, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts, BLACK BOOK, RUST AND BONE, THE DROP, THE OLD GUARD). Kara Zor-El, street name Supergirl (Milly Alcock, UNTITLED TAKASHI MIIKE FILM) is there, and not interested, but drunkenly helps the girl not get robbed, so the next morning Krem steals her ship and shoots her flying dog Krypto with a poison dart. That’s how Supergirl and Ruthye end up traveling together on a space Greyhound. Supergirl needs to find Krem in three moonfalls to get the antidote to save Krypto; Ruthye tags along because she wants to kill Krem. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ana Nogueira, Craig Gillespie, David Corenswet, David Krumholtz, DC Comics, Emily Beecham, Eve Ridley, Jason Momoa, Matthias Schoenaerts, Milly Alcock
Posted in Reviews, Comic strips/Super heroes, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, June 24th, 2026
DISCLOSURE DAY is not related to the 1994, Seattle-set reverse sexual harassment/VR thriller starring Michael Douglas called DISCLOSURE, it’s merely Steven Spielberg (WAR HORSE) attempting to ride that film’s coattails. Also it’s his late career return to the subject of beings from other worlds, this time not dealing with close encounters or wars of but with how humanity as a whole handles the knowledge of their existence.
I went to this assuming I would like it because it’s Spielberg, but knowing that a movie with the same trailers and a no-name director probly wouldn’t have even gotten me into the theater. It didn’t look that exciting to me, so I was impressed to be immediately thrown into a conflict already in progress. Dr. Daniel Kellner (the mastermind himself, Josh O’Connor, CHALLENGERS) has already stolen secret files and “the device” from his employers, who have retaliated by kidnapping his girlfriend Jane (Maid Marian herself, Eve Hewson, BRIDGE OF SPIES), and are attempting an exchange. He manages to use this small extra-terrestrial object to escape with Jane and call his contact Hugo (Unicron himself, Colman Domingo, ZOLA) before going to hide out at a convent under the watch of Sister Maura (40-year-old Mattie Ross herself, Elizabeth Marvel, G20). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, David Koepp, Elizabeth Marvel, Emily Blunt, Eve Hewson, Josh O'Connor, Steven Spielberg, Wyatt Russell
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 23 Comments »
Thursday, June 4th, 2026
THE ARRIVAL is a mid-budget summer of ’96 sci-fi movie written and directed by David Twohy, who already had writing credits on CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE, WARLOCK, THE FUGITIVE (no big deal), TERMINAL VELOCITY and WATERWORLD, but had only directed TIMESCAPE (1992) starring Jeff Daniels. He wrote this specifically for Charlie Sheen (GRIZZLY II: REVENGE, NEVER ON TUESDAY, DEADFALL), who plays sort of against type as Zane Zaminsky, SETI researcher. I mean, he’s 99% regular Charlie Sheen, but I think he’s trying to throw some nerd into the mix. He has horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly spiked hair like D-FENS from FALLING DOWN, but he completes the look with a precisely sculpted goatee.
This was from a period between SPECIES (1995) and CONTACT (1997) when sci-fi movies were really interested in the brave scientific heroes who sit patiently at those giant satellite dish things listening for messages from space. Just in case. TWISTER’s hot shot storm chasers would give them the Dawn Wiener treatment, but they are important in their own way, and also think they’re cool because they like to howl like wolves and they’re good at rolling their office chairs back and forth between different computers.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: aliens, Buddy Joe Hooker, Charlie Sheen, David Twohy, Leon Rippy, Lindsay Crouse, Richard Schiff, Ron Silver, SETI, Teri Polo, Tony T. Johnson
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
