Let’s say you’re a low-budget filmmaker in the mid-60s, you love weird horror, and you’ve just gotten your hands on some cool Soviet sci-fi footage, stuff that looks a hundred times more expensive than anything you can shoot in California. What do you do? If you’re Curtis Harrington, you spin that into Queen of Blood,…
Tag: science fiction
Eve of Destruction (1991) – Review
Ah, the early ‘90s, a golden era of action schlock, where filmmakers thought slapping some robotics onto a generic thriller plot would make it cutting-edge. Eve of Destruction is one of those movies that thinks it’s being cool and futuristic but ends up feeling like the cinematic equivalent of a malfunctioning fax machine: loud, outdated,…
Pinocchio in Outer Space (1965) – Review
Some movies defy expectations, and then some movies defy basic comprehension. Pinocchio in Outer Space falls squarely into the latter category. This baffling Belgian-American animated sci-fi morality tale asks, “What if Carlo Collodi’s wooden boy tangled with giant alien crabs on Mars?”
Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985) – Review
Once upon a time in a galaxy not-so-far away (specifically, the 1980s), someone asked: “What if Star Wars, He-Man, and Heavy Metal had a baby… and that baby was raised in a video rental store?” The answer, dear reader, is Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, a movie so boldly bonkers, so gloriously awkward, and so utterly…
Eliminators (1986) – Review
1986’s Eliminators plays like somebody dumped a box of mismatched action figures on the floor, yelled “movie!” and started filming. Imagine if a sleep-deprived screenwriter watched The Time Machine, Robocop and an Indiana Jones film back-to-back, then rewrote them all in one delirious weekend with a $15 budget and a stack of VHS tapes from…