The Giant Behemoth was one of the last giant monster-on-the-loose films of the 1950's, a decade that saw all manner of creatures born of the two biggest scientific issues of the decade- space exploration and nuclear weapons. Behemoth fell into the second category, a genre started with the excellent Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and elaborated upon with Godzilla and Them! However, by the time Behemoth rolled before the cameras, the concept of atomically created monsters had already worn thin. Nevertheless, Read more [...]

Doris Wishman was born on June 1, 1912, in New York City. She was still a child when her mother died. Her father was a hay and grain salesmen who raised her and her five other siblings. Wishman studied for a while at Hunter College where she studied several subjects including acting. She worked as a secretary and a movie booker until she met and married a man by the name of Jack Abrahms. After Abrahms died, Wishman wanted to do something in her life that would keep her busy instead of being a grieving Read more [...]

'Akira' is an astonishingly influential film, easily as much so as cinema's touchstones Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction. Its impact is made more difficult to judge, though, given that it was made more than sixteen years ago, and didn't make an initial impact outside of Japan. Oddly, this made its influence even more profound, benefiting from 'word of mouth' and the influx of cheap VHS at the end of the Eighties. It's also gained enough of a following to warrant being digitally remastered, at a cost Read more [...]

The real history of the medium is frequently chaotic and bizarre (as is the medium itself), and to cover it in depth would take hundreds of pages (I've been threatening for years to write such a book), but that's not the function of this primer. My goal is merely to give you, the reader, an idea of what happened and when. Significant events have been left out of this (I'm not even going to think about documenting the politics of early US fandom or the recent Evangelion debacle), and portions of the Read more [...]

Pam Grier made many movies in the 1970s, but 'Coffy' as much as anything, is the one role on which her reputation as the Queen of blaxploitation rests. After a bit part in a Russ Meyer movie (his classic 'Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls'), Jack Hill, former Roger Corman protege and director of the creepy cult favourite 'Spider Baby', "discovered" her and gave her two strong roles in his popular chicks-in-chains movies 'The Big Doll House' and 'The Big Bird Cage'. Then Hill wrote and directed 'Coffy', Read more [...]

There’s an amusing disclaimer in the credits for Fast & Furious 6, along the lines that the stunts in the film are dangerous and shouldn’t be tried at home. Even the most fanatical petrol-head might struggle to recreate the bit where Vin Diesel shoots out through the nose-cone of a burning cargo plane, so the advice can only prompt guffaws. In its way, though, this absurdity demonstrates just how far the series has come - from The Fast and The Furious, a $38m-budgeted, definite-article-encumbered Read more [...]

I really love bad movies. The lower the budget and more ridiculous premise the better. If you throw in some awful acting and bad special effects (and those are just a given) then you have the icing on a really bad B-movie cheesefest that doesn't disappoint-unless you are expecting something good, then it will probably disappoint. My favorite bad movies are of the monster variety-especially when they involve sharks. Bad shark horror movies are easy to come by and they never fail to make me laugh. Read more [...]

What's weirder, that the former Governor of California might appear in "The Toxic Avenger," or that there's a 21st Century remake of the freaky underground favorite in the works? The original "Toxic Avenger" was a low-budget, gross-out comedy about a nerd who mutates into a gnarly superhero and takes on the bad guys of Tromaville, NJ. Although it's not clear which part Arnold Schwarzenegger is in talks to play, this is indubitably an odd move for the former Terminator. Heck, it's an odd move to Read more [...]

Dr. Decker comes back from Africa after a year, presumed dead. During that year, he came across a way of growing plants and animals to an enormous size. He brings back a baby chimpanzee to test out his theory. During the early 1950s, America was awash with giant monster movies such as Gordon Douglas's Them! and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which then inspired Japanese studio Toho to kick start their kaiju-eiga with Gorjira in 1954 before moving on to movies such as Rodan, Varan, Mothra and (to Read more [...]