Archive for August, 2019

And I for one welcome our new insect overlords

 

 
 

Yes, yes. A much more obvious choice this time. One might even say bleeding obvious

 

Fun fact: deciding which of my embarrassing roster of unaddressed 50s SF films to tackle for this Roundtable took longer than writing this review.

 

 
 
 

THEM! (1954)

 

…in which Mankind’s meddling with atomic power comes back to, uh, bite him…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

UFOs Over Mumbai

I’m one part behind in the anniversary roundtable, but…

WAHAN KE LOG

It’s a cause for celebration when a B movie delivers on its concepts as spectacularly as Wahan Ke Log does. Especially given Wahan Ke Log is an Indian B movie and must shoehorn in its disparate genre element alongside all of the requisite singing, dancing and romancing. For this, all it asks in return is that you suspend — or completely abandon — your disbelief and fill in the inevitable gaps left by budgetary shortfall with your imagination. Like the best Indian popular films, it exhibits an expansive generosity in its sincere desire to entertain. At the time of Wahan Ke Log’s release, science fiction was an unexplored genre in mainstream Indian cinema and was, to the extent that it was seen at all, solely the purview of the country’s B movie industry.

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Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.

Cold spaghetti never tasted so good

The Great Silence

How did it take me so long to get to this movie? The spaghetti western The Great Silence is considered by many to be one of the best efforts of the genre, and I think they’re on to something there.

Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.

…also some men; but who cares about them?

 

 
 

This may not seem like an obvious choice to some of you, but trust me—this thing has been on my, ahem, “shortlist” of films to review since the silent movie Roundtable of 2008
 
Overlong film + far too long to ponder it = massively overlong review; sorry!

 


 
 
WOMAN IN THE MOON (1929)

 
Hard science collides with pulp fiction in Fritz Lang’s last silent film.
 
Working in collaboration with “father of rocketry” Hermann Oberth, Lang succeeds in bringing to the screen a startlingly accurate prediction of mankind’s eventual journey to the moon.
 
Pity about the surrounding material…
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Pssst: Please let me know if the images are too dark: I had a lot of trouble with the contrast in this one.

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

Fatty Harry

McQ

John Wayne temporarily hung up his cowboy hat in the 1970s to ape Clint Eastwood in the tough cop movie McQ, and it worked as well as you can probably imagine.

Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.

Ain’t that a kick in the head?

I wrote a little something for the Diabolique website.

While living in France, and after having directed a British TV episode that resulted in him being surrounded by a yard full of chickens that went insane and dropped dead, director Samuel Fuller decided to write Brainquake, a bonkers pulp novel about a Mob bag man who finds himself on the run with a deadly dame.

“When he needed a little extra scratch, or maybe it was just because he was feeling inspired, he wrote Brainquake, a fever dream pulp novel that begins with a baby apparently murdering someone and includes, among other things, a former French Resistance fighter tormented in his dreams by the disembodied jaundiced head of Charles De Gaulle, screaming at him for being a coward.”

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Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.

A bloody fun place to stay for a while

Motel Hell

The horror-comedy Motel Hell manages to mix the two different extremes into a pleasantly satisfying dish.

Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.

The china anniversary syndrome: Part 3

 
The third part of our year-long anniversary presents an opportunity that some of us are sorely in need of…
 
This time around, the Roundtable will be focused on those films that we always meant to get around to…that surely by now we should have gotten around to…that were THE ENTIRE REASON we founded our sites in the first place…
 
…but you know…it’s been a pretty hectic twenty years:
 


Please join us throughout August for Part 3 of our 20th anniversary celebration!
 

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!