Some impressions of the eclectic variety of movies I’ve watched in the past couple of months, from the obscure to the classic, from mainstream blockbusters to quirky independents.
Viewing notes, March-April 2015: part two
Tag: Science Fiction
Viewing notes, March-April 2015: part one
Recent viewing includes the big-budget Furious 7 and the smaller but better It Follows, as well as a collection of older genre movies on disk.
Val Guest on Blu-ray
Surprisingly, the underrated British director Val Guest has recently been represented by a flurry of Blu-ray releases, two of which highlight some of his finest work while the third makes available one of his lesser known minor films of the ’50s.
Oh, the horror! part two
Styles of movie horror have evolved, a process well-illustrated by comparing several new releases – John Erick Dowdle’s As Above, So Below and Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, for instance – with the seven features in the second Vincent Price Collection from Shout! Factory.
Year End 2014
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Val Guest and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
Val Guest instills story and characters with gripping realism in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, one of the greatest of all British science fiction movies, now released in an excellent Blu-ray edition by the BFI.
Terence Fisher and science fiction
Renowned British horror director Terence Fisher rarely tried his hand at science fiction; Odeon Entertainment has recently released new Blu-ray editions of his two best SF films, Island of Terror and Night of the Big Heat.
Late summer viewing 2014, part three
The range of my recent viewing covers classic Italian and Eastern European films by Elio Petri and Karel Zeman as well as a pair of 1970s sci-fi/fantasy productions from the BBC, newly released on disk by the BFI.
When “bad” can be good …
There are bad movies and then there are “bad” movies; our relationship with the latter is more complicated than it first appears.
Robots “R” Us
Since we’ve been able to invent stories, we’ve had fantasies about creating artificial versions of ourselves, but in “playing god” we often end up faced with unruly creatures or machines which rebel against us or even worse become our masters.
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