Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Thursday, March 27th, 2025
Today instead of one regular-sized review I have two fun-sized looks at movies I saw in theaters last week. They are not making much money and might not last long, but I support the theatrical experience (please clap).
ASH is a low budget sci-fi movie produced by Shudder and directed by Flying Lotus, who I’m a little familiar with as a musician, but I have to confess I couldn’t make it very far into his previous cinematic effort, KUSO (2017). This doesn’t happen to me often but it was just too gross with its pervy opening segment about pustules and stuff. By comparison this one is normal and tolerable, but it still makes sense coming from the same director.
Eiza González (BLOODSHOT, CUT THROAT CITY, AMBULANCE) stars as Riya, a space traveler of some kind who wakes to find her ship in emergency mode, her entire crew dead (including one with a kitchen knife in his chest), not remembering what the fuck happened, or even who she is at first. She medicates herself to calm down (a patch that lights up when she puts it on her neck – nice future tech), wanders out onto the desolate planet where they’ve landed, looks up at cosmic mandalas in the sky, has little scary blips of flashbacks and begins to slowly remember some of the events leading up to this, including bonding with crew members Clarke (Kate Elliott, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT), Kevin (Beulah Koale, DUAL), Davis (Flying Lotus himself), and the captain, Adhi (oh shit, it’s Iko motherfuckin Uwais, MERANTAU, THE RAID, HEADSHOT, BEYOND SKYLINE, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, TRIPLE THREAT, SNAKE EYES, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Paul, Beulah Koale, Eiza Gonzalez, Flying Lotus, Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Looney Tunes, Shudder
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2025
ZEIRAM is a goofy but entertaining Japanese sci-fi movie from 1991. I always thought it was based on an anime or manga, but now I’ve learned that the six episodes of Iria: Zeiram the Animation were a tie-in that came out the same year, like CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: DARK FURY or VAN HELSING: THE LONDON ASSIGNMENT. But obviously there is some anime influence going on with some of the futuristic armor and weird creatures and stuff, which are given more consideration than the plot, so it might as well be a live action anime adaptation.
Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida, who later played Gojira in GODZILLA, MOTHRA AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK) is the name of a villainous alien on a rampage. He looks like a guy with a Boushh-style slit mask and a wide brimmed hat. The hat has a little kabuki-white face on the front that sometimes looks like a doll head, but in closeup appears to be a living person. Sometimes it extends on a long wormy neck. Eventually it’s revealed that he’s a “forbidden biological weapon,” and the “hat” is actually Zeiram, the rest is a biomechanical attachment. He’s basically a manta ray driving a mech! Spoiler. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Japanese sci-fi, Keita Amemiya, Kunihiro Ida, Mizuho Yoshida, Yukijiro Hotaru, Yuko Moriyama
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2025
THE GORGE is a movie with an appealing, simple premise, strong execution, great tone, and a fun mix of elements you don’t usually see together but that feel perfectly natural. It’s a romance within a monster movie, or vice versa, but not in a a jokey way at all (though that worked for LOVE AND MONSTERS). It’s funny because its two main characters know how to make each other laugh, but its outlandish situation is taken seriously.
It’s also a movie star movie, as most good romances are, with its two leads reaching new levels of onscreen charisma, though for some reason Apple made this for the small screen only. I guess that’s none of my business. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anya Taylor-Joy, Atticus Ross, C. Robert Cargill, Miles Teller, Scott Derrickson, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu, Trent Reznor, William Houston, Zach Dean
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Monster, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 12 Comments »
Friday, February 28th, 2025
Hey friends, I don’t usually post on Fridays, but I thought I’d squeeze in one more Oscar nominee review before Sunday’s awards – a double feature of Best Actress nominees. I’m rooting for Demi Moore to win for THE SUBSTANCE, but did you know that wasn’t her first body horror joint? Way back in 1982 she starred in Charle’s Band’s third film, PARASITE.
Supposedly it started as a remake (or rip off?) of THE TINGLER, and it’s about a scientist trying to get rid of a weird tingler type thing living inside his chest. But rather than doing the electrified seats gimmick they made it immersive by shooting it in 3D, with the help of Chris J. Condon, who also did JAWS 3D. It is available on a 3D blu-ray, but I don’t have the means to watch it that way, so I can only say that it looks like it has lots of good gimmick shots, like I enjoy.
(3D gimmicks: a snapping rattlesnake, a guy impaled on a pipe with blood pouring out of it, squirting a syringe, lots of guns coming at us, looking up at a creeper on the ceiling dripping slime and then falling at us, lots of sharp-toothed monsters gorily tearing out of people, etc.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 3D, Al Fann, Cailee Spaeny, Charles Band, Chris Hemsworth, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Demi Moore, Drew Goddard, James Davidson, Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Lewis Pullman, Luca Bercovici, post-apocalypse, Rainbeaux Smith, Robert Glaudini, Stan Winston, Tom Villard, Vivian Blaine
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Monster, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, February 26th, 2025
Yesterday we saw what Adrien Brody was doing 10 years ago (he was playing the villain in DRAGON BLADE). Now let’s jump back another decade-plus and check on his future director Brady Corbet (core-bay). In 2004, a long before Brody was felled by the Silk Road Protection Squad, his THE BRUTALIST director was rolling with a more high tech protection squad called International Rescue.
That’s right, before he was a director Corbet was an actor, and his third movie (after the edgy indies THIRTEEN by Catherine Hardwicke and MYSTERIOUS SKIN by Gregg Araki) was the Hollywood non-puppet remake of the ‘60s British “Supermarionation” TV show Thunderbirds. He’s not top-billed, but he’s the lead, playing 14-year-old Alan Tracy, son of Thunderbirds founder and leader Jeff Tracy (Bill Paxton, THE DARK BACKWARD). His thing is he goes to a boarding school and dreams/whines about wanting to grow up and join the team with his dad and his three older brothers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Edwards, Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton, Brady Corbet, Jonathan Frakes, Michael McCullers, Peter Hewitt, Ron Cook, Sophia Myles, Vanessa Hudgens, William Osborne
Posted in Reviews, Family, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 47 Comments »
Monday, February 3rd, 2025
There’s a point in Brandon Cronenberg’s first movie ANTIVIRAL (2012) where a TV interviewer asks a CEO if our fascination with celebrities has become unhealthy. Generally I hate when a dystopian satire has to have characters point out that it’s a dystopia (see ROBOCOP 3), but I understand why Cronenberg couldn’t resist – in his world fans are paying to be infected with celebrity illnesses. Their obsession is literally unhealthy!
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones, THE DEAD DON’T DIE) is a creepy man-bunned sales associate for the Lucas Clinic, industry leader in celebrity pathogens due to their exclusive line with Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon, DRACULA UNTOLD, FERRARI). One of Syd’s colleagues, Derek (Reid Morgan, CASINO JACK) gets samples directly from Geist, and the lab alters it to be non-contagious. Copy protection. Then Syd sits down with clients and lustily describes how something that touched their idol’s lungs will touch theirs, an ultimate form of intimacy.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brandon Cronenberg, Caleb Landry Jones, Canadian, Joe Pingue, Malcolm McDowell, Reid Morgan, Sarah Gadon, Wendy Crewson
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 3 Comments »
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 »
