Highlighting the 2015 Indy PopCon
In its second year, the 2015 Indy PopCon attendance more than doubled from last year’s inaugural event. The convention is quickly gaining notoriety and this year had some highly regarded film industry professionals in attendance. It was a fantastic opportunity…
Unknown Island (1948)
This minor little prehistoric monster flick used to be shown on local TV quite often back in sixties when I was a kid. It was the first monster flick I saw in colour on TV. I enjoyed it back then…
The Lost Continent (1968)
One of my favorite rainy weekend movies, The Lost Continent also is one of the best ripe Hammer films of the Sixties. A freighter is blown off course and finds itself in a fog-shrouded part of the ocean where the…
The Last Dinosaur (1977)
The Last Dinosaur is a film that is meant to be fun and exciting. It succeeds at doing both. Maston is a big game hunter who hunts big game(go figure). Owning a company he is planning on going on an…
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
The Valley of Gwangi is a film that, through cult enjoyment of its quality, has managed to overcome the problems that made it “forgotten” in motion pictures to enjoy its present status as a fantasy classic. Originally written by King…
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
In the 1950s and 60s, there were practically zillions of giant radioactive monster films. Giant shrews, ants, spiders, dinosaurs and whatnot scared audiences and were immensely popular throughout the world. For example, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953) clearly led…
Conquest of Space (1955)
Classic sci-fi film from producer George Pal about astronauts on board a space station known as The Wheel. The Wheel’s crew is made up entirely of men. There’s no obligatory female crew member for all the men to make passes…
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)
Ray Harryhausen should have received top billing in this film, since his superb stop-action animation is the real star here. None of this nonsense about wise and benevolent aliens a la “The Day the Earth Stood Still”! Here, the aliens…
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Along with “invasion of the body snatchers”(1956) “forbidden planet”(1956) and “the fly” (1958),the best movie sci-fi offered in the fifties. Richard Matheson’s remarkable novel was adapted by himself,thus the movie is an accurate rendition.Differences are kept to the minimum,and are…
It Came from Outer Space (1953)
Does every SF movie made in the 1950s have to be an analog of McCarthyism? This is nothing more than a good SF movie made with a certain elan by Jack Arnold on a low budget. The desert, alas, is…
Garden of Love (2003)
This film is further evidence that Olaf Ittenbach is the current king of splatter and gore. There are directors who make scarier and more accomplished films than Ittenbach but no one currently orchestrates squashed skulls, severed limbs and general acts…
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
his science fiction classic is more relevant than ever, and I don’t mean its silly message about peace. Yes, yes, we’re all violent, silly, war-like humans, and we should all throw away our guns and atomic bombs posthaste if we…
The Time Machine (1960)
In 1960, filmmaker George Pal brought to fruition a visionary concept for a film based on a novel by H.G. Wells, about an inventor who builds a machine that enables him to travel through time, specifically into the future, where…
Silent Running (1972)
Universal Studios funded several low-budget productions in the early seventies. By far the best to come out of this program was ‘Silent Running’, an ecologically-minded ‘message film’ that stands out today as one of the truly great films of the…
Logans Run (1976)
In the year 2274, a faction of the human race, following global war and other apparent catastrophes that have ravaged the Earth, live together in a giant domed city, completely sealed off from the outside world. Here, in this bubbled…
Lust of the Vampire (1957)
This is notable for being the first Italian horror film, thus spearheading a rich Gothic vein which ran well into the 1970s (one of three strands of horror which emerged simultaneously – the others being the so-called “Mexi-Horror” and Britain’s…
Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)
Seeking locations to use for photographs for a series of horror books, a group stumbles on what they believe to be a deserted castle. The castle happens to have been the former home of The Crimson Executioner – a centuries…
3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964)
Tommy Noonan at least makes a better creative and funnier writer than he does as an actor. The problem with 3 NUTS IN SEARCH OF A BOLT is that it doesn’t go far enough. By that comment, I am not…
Raptor Island (2004)
Very entertaining and fast paced. Very Claustrophobic and if not realistic exactly, with a great deal of awareness that those situations are prone to happen, specially nowadays, with all the terrorism and plane crashes going on. Actually, I consider Rene…
Things to Come (1936)
This early sci-fi masterwork by Herbert George Wells with music by Arthur Bliss is a powerful piece of film-making. Adapted from Wells’ somewhat different work by the author, it presents a look at the human future with the subject of…