In Hollywood there seems to be a disturbing trend of rebooting or re-imagining films for newer audiences unacquainted with their previous incarnations. This is especially true in the science fiction and horror genres. Over the past few years, some really great films from my past have been given this honour by the geniuses in Hollywood. […]
In the 1960s I can remember rushing to get to the TV to watch the BBC Science Fiction series, Out of the Unknown. The one-hour episodes, largely in black and white, contained drama based on short stories from many of the authors of the so-called Golden Age, including Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, William Tenn, Frederik Pohl, John Brunner and Ray Bradbury. Though repeated a year or two later, since then they have never appeared on TV screens and unfortunately for various [...]
Just released on DVD, this is a Russian State sponsored movie about the first time a human went into space. The event occurred in 1961 and Yuri Gagarin, had he still been alive, would have reached his 80th birthday but he died aged only 34 following a plane crash in 1968.
Werner Herzog’s 1979 film has been remastered for this Blu-ray release by the British Film Institute and while it has some similarity to FW Marnau’s 1922 silent black and white original, it remains a world apart from that and from the world we live in today. Both are dated and both have become curiosities we can look back on with some amusement and horror. As will be explained, the true horror of Nosferatu was not in vampire but in the abysmal treatment of the animals [...]
The tag line for the series is 'Live to fight – Fight to live'. Written and created by Susan E. Clarke and produced by iDave Productions, the premise for this series is that a few people in the world have a unique set of information locked into their DNA that they are oblivious to. They have no idea they are special, or that they have powers that could be used for the good of humankind. As usual there is a war coming and these people, once they realise they have powers [...]
Science Fiction tends to stick in the mind more so when there are a lot more standard movies at the cinema, and 2013’s offerings were varied and impressive. Thor: The Dark World was released after Avengers: Assemble impressed cinema-goers who enjoyed how much was put into the special effects and one-liners from bulked-out Thor and tricksy anti-hero Loki. Star Trek: […]
Matt Kowarsky (George Clooney) and Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are stranded in space when their shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Telescope suffers a disastrous encounter with catastrophic orbital debris. That’s the premise – and that’s the story. Sandra Bullock is an actress I can take or leave – normally leave – and here […]
As anyone who’s watched an episode of Survivor will know, life in the great outdoors really sucks if you don’t have a decent fire for warming your bones and cooking your evening dinner. According to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire (1981), now out on Blu-ray, this was a truth equally evident to prehistoric man 80,000 years ago. But unfortunately […]
