Les Maîtres du Temps (Time Masters) first published by Film4 Summary: René Laloux and Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud animate this episodic SF rescue story for children. Review: “To get to Perdide, we’ll have to land on Devil’s Ball, and then go to Gamma 10. We’ll have to wait for the passage of the Blue Comet. By keeping within…
An African-American man staggers though a dark alleyway, clutching – and punching at – his own head. He collapses, gets up, reels about like someone intoxicated, or perhaps a zombie, his hands and the back of his jacket bloody. Bent over and in obvious distress, unsteady and unstable, he lies down in the road, and…
The Changed has its world première at FrightFest 2021 “Nobody seems to care about anything lately, good or bad,” comments Mac (Jason Alan Smith) to his neighbour and best friend Bill (Tony Todd) as they enjoy a morning coffee outside Mac’s house at the beginning of Michael Mongillo‘s The Changed. “I think people are finally…
Screamers first published by Little White Lies, as entry 104 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column In 2058, the mining corporation known as the New Economic Bloc (or N.E.B.) discovered a new energy source known as Berynium on the planet Sirius 6B – but when miners learnt that its extraction also released radiation and other pollutants,…
At the centre of Parallel Minds is a classic locked-room mystery. Some time not far into the future, Elise Perrott (Michelle Thrush) and her research assistant Margo Elson (Tommie-Amber Pirie) are racing to complete a pioneering technology called Red Eye – special contact lenses which enable people both to download their memories into a Universal…
At the beginning of To Your Last Death, Miriam DeKalb (voiced by Dani Lennon) bursts out of a building clutching an axe and covered in blood, as two mysterious figures look on (one instructing the other to “lock the bets”). Exclaiming “He killed them! He killed my family! He killed them all!”, Miriam is arrested…
A prospect is a possible future to which one is looking forward. There is not much likelihood of that for teenaged Cee (Sophie Thatcher, excellent) and her father Damon (Jay Duplass), ‘floaters’ hopping from one planet to another on a wing and a prayer. They are running on empty: trying to pay off an impossible…
They Remain first published by SciFiNow “The world is large and unknowable,” Keith (William Jackson Harper) tells Jessica (Rebecca Henderson). “No one ever really knows anything.” While obsessive Jessica conducts biological and genetic field research in a tented laboratory, hoping to find a “a previously uncharacterised element, genetic, environmental or otherwise – one that might change the…
Soft Matter first published by SciFiNow From the opening image of tea being brewed on a bunsen burner, Jim Hickcox’s feature debut openly advertises its DIY status. With its hand-puppet flashbacks to ancient undersea battles, and its basic creature design that, in one notable case, amounts to little more than garbage bags and gaffer tape, Soft Matter offers low-to-no-budget sci-fi…
Kin first published by Sight & Sound, Jan/Feb 2019 Review: Jonathan and Josh Baker’s Kin, adapted and considerably expanded (by writer Daniel Casey) from their short film Bag Man (2014), opens with an exterior shot of a bleakly derelict factory under a grey sky. Alongside this ruined vision of contemporary apocalypse – in present-day Detroit – there lies a ‘One Way’ road…
Mega Time Squad first published by SciFiNow “This is Johnny,” says local self-appointed gangster Shelton (Jonny Brugh), introducing his sister Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn) to one of his underling ‘boys’. “He’s bloody dynamic.” Orphaned John (Anton Tennet) really is dynamic. He may just be a small-time criminal in a small town – Thames, New Zealand, to be…