One has to wonder after enduring two hours of this mess whether its audience of 1966 was in on the joke or whether it was only the movie that thought all its mod design, dreadfully long scenes that went nowhere and dialogue that rarely made any sense were the pinnacle of mid-sixties cool. Read More

This was one of those films that I wanted to like a lot more than I did. The premise had the potential for lots of grim chills. A ship load of prisoners bound for an island prison sinks after hitting some rocks. The survivors take refuge on a nearby island dominated by a lighthouse, a lighthouse that should have warned them about where these rocks were, but for some mysterious reason, the light was out! Read More

The future will be one of loud shirts, go go boots, and swinging bachelor pads that look like they were left over from an Italian sex comedy. At least that’s what I got out of this movie. I know, it sounds like Utopia to me, too! Read More

Boris Karloff runs around with a gimped-up arm and makes faces to show us that he has turned from a genteel novelist to a serial killer who likes to slash the pretty girls that work at the local strip joint somehow named “The Judas Hole.” (Okay, I just looked this up and it means something like “peep hole”. I guess if nothing else, this movie taught me some cool new slang.) Read More

A remake of Cat-Women of the Moon that premiered a scant three years after Cat was first released (give us some time to heal for God’s sake!), Fire Maidens From Outer Space is a British version set on the thirteenth moon of Jupiter instead of Earth’s moon. It’s also about a half hour longer, worse, and more annoying to sit through than its “inspiration” ever thought about being. Read More

Dr. Jekyll And Sister Hyde is a Hammer Films remake of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic about a doctor that goes and drinks some of his own bilge water in an attempt to do some kind of experiment. Obviously, I have never read the book because, well, it’s a book, but do I have a little experience with some of the themes in this movie. I’ve watched Abbott & Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde so I think I can safely say that I’m well versed enough in the story to qualify as a “film scholar” on the subject. Read More

When this was released in the U.S. it was retitled The Devil’s Bride, probably because The Devil Rides Out really doesn’t make any sense, but there wasn’t any bride the devil was trying to get either. Oh, there was some wimpy looking girl that the bad guy constantly harassed but I never got the feeling that he was after anything other than just another disciple. In fact, the title is really the only lame part of this film from Hammer starring Christopher Lee. Read More

Anytime I watch a movie and the opening credits roll by saying that it is based on a play, I cringe. If you’ve ever been to a play the one thing that is the hallmark of the form is that the characters talk and talk and talk some more. I suppose that some stories lend themselves to this type of format (the wordy, boring format), like courtroom dramas or character pieces or some other thing I’d never want to see in a million years, but the alien invasion movie isn’t one of them. Read More

Here’s what I’m going to recommend to sensitive British chap Bill, the star of this BBC miniseries: a little less time giving me lectures about how we shouldn’t have a bunch of satellites in space protecting our national security and a whole lot more killer plant fighting. It isn’t bad enough that Bill is unable to contain his socialist/commie views to himself for the full two and a half hours of things, but once he decides to unload on us, he just pulls it straight out of his bum! Where else would his theory that everyone on Earth had been blinded not by killer meteors in league with killer plants (the most common sense explanation) but by some weapon up in space equipped with blinding radiation that went haywire and fried everyone’s optic nerve? Did your teachers ever tell you about the smell test? Basically, it posits that if the answer you came up with smells like it came from inside Bill’s left wing bum, then it probably did! Read More

You know, for being chunks of rock whizzing through the air, filmmakers sure do give meteors a lot of credit when it comes to contributing to the end of civilization as we know it. I can recall films where meteors (or comets) have been blamed for such various debacles as making the dead walk the earth, turning people into dust, causing all electrical devices to rebel against their human masters (especially that semi with the Green Goblin on the front), and causing plants to run around eating people. This non-exhaustive tally does not include the movies where meteors do more routine damage like causing tidal waves and blocking out the sun with the debris they kicked up on deep impact causing Armageddon to ensue. Read More