The 1980s must have been an interesting time to be an actor in New York City. It was a mythic age, before Law & Order began filling multiple lines in the CVs of innumerable performers in the five boroughs. Instead, the city seemed to be crawling with itinerant Italian filmmakers, drunk on dreams of ripping off the latest American sci-fi hit and making some dollars on the cheap. Fabrizio De Angelis, Enzo G. Castellari, Sergio Martino, Luigi Cozzi, and more, made The Big Apple their home away from home in the ’80s. If it wasn’t possible to make it on Broadway or on TV, there was always bottom-feeding cinema. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Contamination”
Tag: Alien Flick
October Hammershow: Quatermass 2, aka Enemy From Space
Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is a man who gets things done. He’s very serious, very driven, and doesn’t need any sleep. That’s not an exaggeration. I kept track during the first part of this film, and Quatermass goes approximately 72 hours without getting any shuteye. It’s an impressive feat of endurance on his part, or just something that the filmmakers didn’t pay close attention to. Continue reading “October Hammershow: Quatermass 2, aka Enemy From Space”
October Horrorshow: Ghosts of Mars
John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors. He’s not on the Mount Rushmore of filmmakers, but his best films can be thought of as eminently watchable. They are respected. They are known and successful enough that a lot have been remade. But he also has some films that are not so good. It would be easy to blame Carpenter’s poorer quality films on budget, but that does not compute. Carpenter worked magic with the measly budgets he had in Halloween and Escape from New York. Rather, something happened in the late 1980s, starting with Prince of Darkness in 1987, that precipitated a steady decline. There were still sparks of life in his films, but that eminently watchable quality of his films seemed to fly away. In its place was substituted cheapness, sometimes of rank quality, and this turn was inexplicable from a filmmaker who had done so much with so little throughout his career.
I knew Ghosts of Mars was going to be trouble before the opening credits. Viewers are treated to a voiceover explaining the situation on Mars in the 22nd century, while at the same time captions flash on the screen providing even more information. It’s a jumble of sci-fi exposition, and the lack of care taken in this introduction is not a good sign. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Ghosts of Mars”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Battle Beyond the Stars
Roger Corman was absolutely shameless. There wasn’t an idea he wouldn’t steal, nor a corner he wouldn’t cut to save a buck, in any of the dozens of films in which he had a part. He is hailed as a pioneering and legendary filmmaker. He launched the careers of numerous, better filmmakers and is showered with credit for their talents. And he did all this, and more, while cranking out a relentless stream of awful films. Terrible, unwatchable, dreadful sins against the art of cinema. And sometimes, he managed to make a shitty movie that was worth a damn. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Battle Beyond the Stars”
Empty Balcony: Alien Nation
There is a nasty amount of racial tension in America right now, accentuated by President-elect Trump’s impending inauguration next month. I hate that current events are affecting my perception of Alien Nation, the 1988 sci-fi film from director Graham Baker and screenwriter Rockne S. O’Bannon, but they are. Really, the filmmakers bear most of the blame, here. A huge part of the fictional universe Graham and O’Bannon crafted deals with refugees assimilating into American culture and having an effect, both positive and negative, on native demographics. Boy, I really need to find a way to flip off the politics switch in my brain when I’m watching movies. Continue reading “Empty Balcony: Alien Nation”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Independence Day: Resurgence, or, Who Are the People on the Boat?
This fucking movie, I swear to God. More than once while I was watching Independence Day: Resurgence did I utter that profaneness. It’s just such a silly movie. It’s also breathtaking in scale, as evidenced by a moment when the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which also happens to normally be in Dubai, is dropped on London. This is a movie whose aspirations for an international audience are plain to see. There’s the requisite inclusion of token Chinese characters, and even a scene where a Chinese city is sucked up into the sky. That’s how one can know the Chinese have arrived as a world power. We are now destroying their cities in apocalyptic movies. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Independence Day: Resurgence, or, Who Are the People on the Boat?”
October Horrorshow: Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Clowns are creepy. But I didn’t realize this until I got older. Back when I was a kid, I remember my old man and his brother loading up our families in a van to head out to Richfield Coliseum to see Ringling Bros. We only went a couple of years — at most three in a row. Hardly a family tradition, but there are still parts of those outings I remember vividly, and clowns creeping me out is not one of them. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Killer Klowns from Outer Space”
October Horrorshow: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
In the canon of the Alien franchise, it’s always been assumed that if the aliens made their way to civilization, they would be an unstoppable force, toppling everything we’ve built. Such was the case among the small pocket of colonists in Aliens. But that film took place in the future, far away in time and place from contemporary earth. The first Alien vs. Predator film took place in modern times, but writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson went to some lengths to ensure there was no plausible chance the aliens could threaten civilization, placing the action in his film on a remote Antarctic island under 2,000 feet of ice. Why such reluctance to show aliens tearing up Times Square, say, or climbing the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge? Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem”
October Horrorshow: Predators
It seems that, for this year’s Horrorshow, I can’t get enough of the Alien and Predator franchises. Maybe I should slow down. It’s not like these things grow on trees. Aliens and predators are a finite resource.
Predators, from 2010, is the first standalone Predator flick since Predator 2 in 1990. In between were the two Alien vs. Predator movies, but I have a hard time fathoming how the flagship title was dormant for so long. There weren’t even any straight to video entries or bad SyFy productions. The predators are excellent horror/sci-fi antagonists. In the right circumstances, they can even be the good guys.
The predators look mean, what with their large stature and menacing mask, and that’s before viewers see the horrible countenance hidden therein. The fact they are aliens who traveled here from the stars just to hunt us is unsettling. We’re supposed to be the top of the food chain. Check that. The predators aren’t here for food. They’re hunting us for sport. That’s an upsetting of the current order that is hard to contemplate outside the realm of fiction. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Predators”
October Horrorshow: Alien vs. Predator
Alien vs. Predator, the 2004 film that brought together the two franchises for the big screen, has its roots way back in the 1980s. In 1989, Dark Horse Presents ran a short Aliens vs. Predator story for three issues, written by Randy Stradley with art by Phill Norwood and Karl Story, which served as an introduction to a standalone miniseries Dark Horse subsequently published. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Alien vs. Predator”