Should I stay or should I go?: existential quests & grounded escapes at Sci-Fi-London 2019 first published by Sight & Sound Three picks from Sci-Fi-London 2019, 15-22 May: The Final Land; After We Leave; Fonotune: An Electric Fairytale Among the 17 features (including five world premières and two documentaries) that are screening at this year’s…
As films like Deathwatch, The Devil’s Rock, the Outpost franchise, Frankenstein’s Army, Overlord and many others amply demonstrate, films pitched as ‘trapped in a bunker with infernal abominations’ form a (literal) subgenre, exposing the monstrousness of the military mentality. Falling neatly into this category, Matt Mitchell’s original The Rizen (2017) showed cold warriors struggling to…
In Lucid, the feature debut of blind writer/director Adam Morse, an introverted, never-smiling young man (Laurie Calvert) – whose unusual name, Zel, appears to be a play on ‘incel‘ – lives alone in his apartment, inertly and indecisively, playing games and, frankly, not smelling good. Change, however, is on its way. His mother Georgia (Sadie…
In Zoo-Head, the latest feature from writer/director Navin Dev (Red Kingdom Rising, 2014), Charlie (Daniel Ahmadi) is stuck in a loop. It is not just that he has destroyed his memory and made one day blur into another with the illicit pharmaceuticals (known as ‘zootropics’) that he regularly consumes to escape the pain of his…
David Giancola was just 19 when he wrote and directed his first feature, the cult sci-fi Time Chasers, in 1994. This would be the first of many films that he would make for his production company Edgewood Studios, all meeting low budgets with high ambitions. His latest, Axcellerator, is typical. As pizza delivery boy Dane (Ryan…
In a future Los Angeles, a pervasive complex of interconnected, semi-intelligent nanobots, both in the air and under our skin, keeps everyone permanently online (or ‘on-Tangle’) and under surveillance, modifying our perception of ourselves and the world around us and preventing any acts of violence. A small group of people – mostly geek designers –…
Marc Carreté’s feature debut Asmodexia (2014) utterly inverted the established conventions of possession horror, so viewers ‘in the know’ will approach his follow-up After The Lethargy fully primed to expect the unexpected. This time around Carreté is tackling the tropes of alien conspiracy, as journalist Sara Hamilton (Andrea Guasch) is drawn to deep forestland –…
At the beginning of Black Flowers (aka Atomic Apocalypse), Kate (Krista DeMille, excellent), her husband Sam (Ron Roggé) and their teen daughter Suzi (Andrea Sweeney Blanco) – keen swimmers all – are enjoying their vacation on a beach when they see the atomic mushroom clouds in the distance. Cut to a year and a half…