After a Marvel-style flip through comicstrip panels, Huida Lin’s Boonie Bears: Back to Earth (Xiong chu mo: Chong fan di qiu) opens in space, with an ursine figure declaring, “Hello, everyone, I’m Superbear Bramble”, before swooping down to Earth “to take out the trash.” This costumed defender easily puts down a variety of creatures, all…
“Once upon a time, things made sense,” says young August Greenfield (Cate Hughes) in voiceover at the beginning of Spaghetti Junction. “My family made sense, and things seemed glued together, in their place. But then one night in July, everything changed.” Where August’s first four words are the conventional introduction to a fairytale, the…
My Stepmother Is An Alien first published by Little White Lies, and entry 144 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Hard to believe now, but when Jericho Stone pitched his original script to Paramount Pictures in 1981, it was a serious drama whose sci-fi frame provided an allegory for domestic child abuse – think something along…
Archenemy first published by Little White Lies strap: Adam Egypt Mortimer’s ARCHENEMY uses myths of empowerment and alienation to create a messily subversive maybe-superhero film We live in the era of the superhero. Those costumed crusaders have been all over our screens, mythologising the politics of our times, while exploiting adolescent dreams of empowerment. Yet…
Art is a collision of ambition, actuality and audience. Every year, an amateur dramatics group comprising employees of the Wiltshire and Dorset Bus Company stages a Christmas show for charity – but one year, their young writer Luc Hayward decided that he wanted to move on from their usual pantomime scenarios to a far more…
Honeymoon first published by VODzilla.co The opening image of Honeymoon is of tin cans on strings being drawn along the road by a car. For as its very title implies, director Leigh Janiak’s first feature – which she also co-wrote with Phil Graziadei – is concerned with marriage, or more particularly with what comes next…
Memory: The Origins of Alien first published by Little White Lies Not every documentary on a sci-fi horror hybrid made in 1979 opens with a modern staging of Aeschylus’ play The Eumenides on the numinous open-air ‘theatre’ of ancient Delphi, but then Alexandre O. Philippe’s Memory: The Origins Of Alien is engaged, as its very…
10 Great X-Certificate Films first published by BFI, and occasioned by the BFI’s release of Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959) in Dual Format (Blu-ray/DVD) Includes: Island of Lost Souls, La Ronde, Beat Girl, Psycho, Victim, A Clockwork Orange, The Devils, Last Tango in Paris, Alien, The Evil Dead In 1912, the British Board…
The Andromeda Strain first published by Little White Lies, as the 82nd entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column. In H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds and the many adaptations that it had inspired, the ferocious alien invaders of earth were eventually undone by microscopic bacteria. The converse is the case in Michael…
Horror Express first publsihed by Little White Lies, as the part 75 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column The novella Who Goes There?, published in 1934 by John W. Campbell Jr. under his pen name Don A. Stewart, has left a considerable mark on cinema. First there was Christian Nyby’s loose adaptation The Thing From Another…
Imitation Girl first published by SciFiNow “Alright, whoa baby! She’s gorgeous! Alright, that looks good, how much is it?” The speaker, in the opening scene of Imitation Girl, is a boy in his young teens (William Wakeland), diminished in static wideshot as he negotiates with two older men who have purchased a girlie magazine on his…