Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Wednesday, January 8th, 2025
After seeing THE WILD ROBOT I decided to bite the bullet and watch 2024’s other automaton-related animated feature, TRANSFORMERS ONE, the first theatrical Transformers cartoon since 1986’s seminal-ish THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE.
It may seem odd that I didn’t want to see this in the theater, because here are the Transformers movies I did bother to see on the big screen, often in 3D and/or IMAX: TRANSFORMERS, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, BUMBLEBEE and TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS. That’s right, all seven of the live action ones, even though only the next to last one I consider to be Actually A Good Movie. The rest I mostly just find fascinatingly crazy, but I’ve learned to enjoy watching them. I started as their enemy, but later joined them, like Skyfire. Like so many others of my generation I had the Transformers cartoon and toys imprinted on my brain as a child, and there is some residual lure to the concept in there, even if I don’t hold it sacred. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Barrer, Brian Tyler, Brian Tyree Henry, Eric Pearson, Gabriel Ferrari, Hasbro, Isaac Singleton Jr., Jon Hamm, Josh Cooley, Keegan-Michael Key, Laurence Fishburne, robots, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Vanessa Liguori
Posted in Reviews, Action, Cartoons and Shit, Family, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 7th, 2025
If Stephen Norrington had only ever been a special effects guy he still would’ve made a mark. He worked under Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Jim Henson. He did the Grand High Witch makeup in THE WITCHES, and designed creatures for Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He played the Gump in RETURN TO OZ. He helped make the aliens in ALIENS and ALIEN 3, the robot in HARDWARE, the creature in SPLIT SECOND. I only know about him, though, because he later directed four movies, one of which was motherfuckin BLADE.
But the first one was DEATH MACHINE (1994), a low budget killer robot movie I watched once about a quarter of a century ago when I found out it was by the guy who did BLADE. I think I thought it was okay, but I retained no details in my memory, so now I have returned to it via the fancy-ass special edition blu-ray from Kino Lorber. I watched the director’s cut (which is 106 minutes, as opposed to the 100 minute U.S. version or 122 minute foreign version), which may or may not have been why it went over a little better this time. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but it’s an interesting one with a cool robot puppet, a cyberpunk world and a hell of a look for a ‘90s b-movie that went straight to video. Cinematographer John de Borman is the guy who did THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON and THE FULL MONTY, but from the look of it I’d have assumed he was a music video guy, somebody that would’ve worked with the Scott Brothers or Russell Mulcahy or even David Fincher.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andreas Wisniewski, Brad Dourif, Ely Pouget, John Sharian, killer robot, Martin McDougall, Rachel Weisz, Richard Brake, Stephen Norrington, William Hootkins
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 25 Comments »
Monday, December 30th, 2024
I’m not fully acquainted with the filmography of John Sayles, but I’m pretty sure THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET is an outlier. It was 1984, so Sayles had already had his Roger Corman/exploitation beginnings (writing PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, ALLIGATOR, THE HOWLING and THE CHALLENGE) and moved into directing his indie dramas (RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7, LIANNA, BABY IT’S YOU). Here he makes his only ever sci-fi movie as a director, but it’s not all that commercial. Supposedly the story came to him in a dream.
The most sci-fi part is the opening cockpit lights and bleeping sounds as the mysterious extra-terrestrial played by Joe Morton (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) crash lands on earth. He loses a leg in the process and hops around in an abandoned church until he somehow grows it back. Since he’s missing one shoe we see that his feet have three big clawed toes, like a dragon, but otherwise he looks human. In the city he finds a replacement shoe in a garbage can and I wondered if he understood that was garbage or if he just assumed Earth has public shoe dispensers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Cobbs, Caroline Aaron, Daryl Edwards, David Strathairn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ernest Dickerson, Fisher Stevens, Giancarlo Esposito, Harlem, Jamie Tirelli, Joe Morton, John Sayles, Leonard Jackson, Liane Curtis, Michael Mantell, Reggie Rock Bythewood, Steve James, Tom Wright
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 6 Comments »
Thursday, December 5th, 2024
STING is a 2024 killer spider picture, but it’s not the French one that I already reviewed. That’s INFESTED. This one is set in New York City but hails from Australia. I remember seeing a trailer and being interested, I think I heard not-great things when it came out, but then when I saw it was on Hulu I noticed that the writer-director was Kiah Roache-Turner. That’s the guy that did WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) and WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021), two fun movies about people roaming a post-apocalyptic world with cars powered by zombie breath. Well shit, yeah, I’ll watch his spider movie.
Just like he did in WYRMWOOD, Roache-Turner uses an absurd and inexplicable sci-fi disaster to set up the scenario he wants to tell a story within. A news broadcast tells us we’re in the midst of the worst ice storm in New York state history, and that it’s believed to be connected to the asteroid shower that came unusually close to Earth. During the opening credits a tiny rock from space shoots through an apartment window and a dollhouse inside the apartment.
The rock cracks open and a spider crawls out and through the floors of the miniature home. The sequence is very stylized, and foreshadows that this spider will grow to this scale in relation to the actual building, so I wasn’t sure until after the credits that yes, this literally happened in the story – a spider fell from the stars, like the Blob or the Body Snatch plants or Venom in SPIDER-MAN 3. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alyla Browne, Australian cinema, Danny Kim, Jermaine Fowler, Kiah Roache-Turner, Noni Hazlehurst, Penelope Mitchell, Ryan Corr, spiders
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, November 27th, 2024
FANTASTIC PLANET (La Planète sauvage) (1973) is a wholly unique experience in animated features. It was made a couple years before I even was, and to this day they don’t make ‘em like this. Soon, though. One of these days it’s gonna catch fire the way anime giant robots did, or fairy tale musicals, or computer animated comedy adventures with a high concept and it’s funny but then it’s serious but don’t worry also it’s still funny, yet surprisingly sweet. Have you seen any animated movies like that? I’ve seen a couple.
That’s gonna be the pattern with FANTASTIC PLANET, too – every entertainment conglomerate and their sister company is gonna come up with their variation on a bizarre alien world with strange creatures and plants, set to kinda funky psych music, animated with cut-outs of ink and colored pencil drawings, looking like the cover of an old sci-fi paperback that you read and can’t quite figure out which scene they’re depicting there. That’s what the people want so there will be a hundred movies like that and they’ll all blend together and be okay but never as good as the original.
This is the story of a guy named Terr (Jean Valmont, IS PARIS BURNING?), who lives on the planet Ygam. He’s an Om, which is Ygam for human – they were transplanted here, like mogwais (if you, like me, believe the GREMLINS novelization). He narrates the story and in the opening scene he and his mother are chased by Draags, the blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoids who are the dominant species on Ygam. Relative to a Draag, Oms are tiny, maybe bigger than a bug to us, but smaller than a mouse or a smurf. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Rene Laloux, Roland Topor, Stefan Wul
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024
EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP (a.k.a. GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER) is from 1966 and it’s the seventh Godzilla picture. The title monster is a giant lobster, and there are other members of the kaiju community involved, but the central conflict is actually unrelated to them – it’s about a fairly random group of people who stumble across The Red Bamboo (a terrorist army – like, with uniforms and everything) and use the monsters to disarm them for the sake of the world.
It happens like this. Ryota (Toru Watanabe)’s older brother Yata (Toru Ibuki, GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER)’s fishing boat was lost during a storm on the South Seas. He’s presumed dead, but Ryota thinks he’s alive because a psychic at Spirit Mountain (Noriko Honma, STRAY DOG, SEVEN SAMURAI, YOJIMBO) said so. He wants to take a boat out to the uncharted area where he thinks he’s shipwrecked, but he doesn’t have a boat, and he’s kind of a rube, so when he sees a dance marathon on TV where the grand prize is a yacht, he goes there.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chotaro Togin, Godzilla, Hideo Sunazuka, Jun Fukuda, Noriko Honma, Toho
Posted in Reviews, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, November 5th, 2024
I’m no scholar of the works of Francis Ford Coppola. I agree THE GODFATHER I and II and APOCALYPSE NOW are amazing, and I’ve recently grown into a BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA zealot. I enjoyed THE CONVERSATION and THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLEFISH and THE COTTON CLUB and DEMENTIA 13 and obviously CAPTAIN EO. I’ve had some of his wine, too – we get those little cans of Sofia for Oscar parties. But like most people I’m not really up on the experimental shit he’s been up to b’twixt the 21st century. In fact the last time I saw a new FCC joint was JACK in 1996.
But hell, I wasn’t gonna miss MEGALOPOLIS! You know the legend. He conceived it in the ‘70s, he’s tried to get it off the ground many times across the decades, now he finally did it with his own $120 million. Amazing. Whatever it is, you gotta respect what he did. Become a rich guy just to make a true indie on the largest possible scale. Pretty much all rich guys waste their money in far stupider ways.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Francis Ford Coppola, Giancarlo Esposito, Grace VanderWaal, James Remar, John Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Nathalie Emmanuel, passion project, Shia LaBeouf
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, October 29th, 2024
THE INVASION (2007) is the fourth (and final, the way civilization is going) official movie adaptation of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. I actually reviewed it for The Ain’t It Cool News when it came out, which is one way I can prove it exists. It’s documented! Anyway I after I watched the other three I figured I oughta complete the set.
This one stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and is the Hollywood debut of acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (DAS EXPERIMENT, DOWNFALL), as well as the first movie written by David Kajganich, who later wrote A BIGGER SPLASH, SUSPIRIA and BONES AND ALL for Luca Guadagnino. But it was kind of a fiasco, losing money and getting poor reviews, universally considered the weakest of the four versions. I’m sure we would’ve noticed it was kinda sloppy even if it hadn’t been widely reported that producer Joel Silver thought it wasn’t working and spent $10 million on reshoots written by the Wachowskis and directed by their guy James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN). It was delayed over a year and moved from a confident June release to a resigned August one.
And, would you believe it? It doesn’t really work. But it has its moments.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam LeFevre, Daniel Craig, David Kajganich, James McTeigue, Jeff Wincott, Jeffrey Wright, Jeremy Northam, Joel Silver, Malin Akerman, Nicole Kidman, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Roger Rees, Veronica Cartwright, Wachowskis
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 23 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2024
Abel Ferrara’s BODY SNATCHERS (1993) was my first body snatcher invasion movie. I saw it when it was new on video, and I knew it had been poorly received, so I figured my ignorance of the original and the original remake must’ve helped me to enjoy it more than everybody else. But watching it now with a deep appreciation for the other ones, yeah, it’s still good anyway. So maybe I liked it better because I’m a unique individual with my own feelings and not a plant programmed only for survival. Or because I was ahead of my time – it seems to have a pretty good reputation now.
The title sequence is admittedly chintzy compared to the one in Kaufman’s version. Something about the long sequence of the title flying through a crude starscape and letter-by-letter turning from red to black, set to the score by Joe Delia (MS. 45, FEAR CITY, THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT), was putting me in mind of a Stuart Gordon/Brian Yuzna type movie, but that might’ve been my subconscious remembering that this was actually from a screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli, rewritten by Ferrara’s guy Nicholas St. John. Gordon was supposed to direct but couldn’t get a commitment from the studio to actually make it until leaving to do FORTRESS. He told Fangoria that his version was originally designed as a sequel to the Kaufman version and went into more detail about how the pod people are plants. “It’s not like they have a brain in their head. The creature’s consciousness is throughout its whole body, so that if you destroy the head, it doesn’t kill or stop it.” That would’ve been fun! But what Ferrara did is good too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Abel Ferrara, Billy Wirth, Christine Elise, Dennis Paoli, Forest Whitaker, Gabrielle Anwar, Kathleen Doyle, Keith Smith, Meg Tilly, Nicholas St. John, R. Lee Ermey, Stuart Gordon, Terry Kinney, Tom Burman, Tonea Stewart
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, October 15th, 2024
For their 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, director Philip Kaufman (writer of THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES) and screenwriter W.D. Richter (later did BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA) updated the Don Siegel film and/or Jack Finney story into a chilling paranoia tale for their era. But it has held up incredibly well, remaining one of the more unsettling alien invasion movies in existence. The original was a low budget indie production, this is a much slicker production, but they were allowed to keep their gut-punchingly pessimistic ending, and that goes a long way.
This came out the year before ALIEN, and its opening has a similar combo of timeless practical effects and matter-of-factness about mysterious threats from the dark reaches of the universe. The credits play over a gorgeous sequence of strange plants on some planet somewhere – transparent tubes, whisps of smoke, I don’t know what – as their seeds float up and drift through space, as mentioned in the Siegel film.
In San Francisco the seeds land on some wild plants and, over time, produce some sort of slime. I have no idea how they did the shot of tiny tendrils reaching out from a leaf. Small pink blossoms sprout on top of other plants, and a woman notices one and plucks it off. She is Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams, SHOCK WAVES, DAYS OF HEAVEN), she works at the health department and has an interest in plants and says she thinks it’s a grex. “That’s when two different species cross-pollinate and produce a third completely unique one.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: alien invasion, Art Hindle, Brooke Adams, Dell Rheaume, Donald Sutherland, good remakes, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin McCarthy, Leonard Nimoy, Philip Kaufman, Russel Hessey, Veronica Cartwright, W.D. Richter
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
