Tag: Science Fiction

Movie Review: THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT – classic piece of scifi cinema that holds up well thanks to a dark, Lovecraftian tone.

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quatermass

No great secret here: I am a fan of the work of HP Lovecraft.  That’s an easy thing to say these days I guess, if you want to get some kind of credibility in the horror genre, but I find it easy to weed out the real fans.  The Fake Ones are all about tossing the name of Cthulhu around, while qualifying his work with a disclaimer that distances themselves from him.  “I really love his stuff, but he was so racist …”.  It’s the kind of surface-level thinking that shows in “Lovecraftian” fiction peppered throughout the Amazon .99c specials.  Throw in The Elder Gods, some tentacles, Cthulhu, and hey presto, a Lovecraft pastiche.  Very few people actually get the work of Lovecraft, they only get the pop culture tropes, then hit a brick wall.  Fewer still moviemakers get it, but there have been some.  There’s an article in me someday that will list my top 5 Lovecraftian movies, but this is a review of 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment, renamed The Creeping Unknown for the US market, a much more fitting title, I feel.

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Movie Review: THE OBJECTIVE – A disappointing ending, but the bulk of this X-Files-meets-Zero-Dark-Thirty is pretty good.

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2008’s The Objective is by now an “old” movie, at least in terms of reviews, and I normally wouldn’t bother, but it’s notable because I think it’s relatively obscure, AND it was directed by Daniel Myrick, who co-directed my number one horror movie, The Blair Witch Project.  I literally had never heard of this movie at its time of release, and might have gone a long way without hearing of it if I hadn’t just finished the revised Danse Macabre, by Stephen King, in which he mentions it in his new foreword to that book.  King isn’t the greatest of critics, but my first reading of Danse Macabre in the late 80s provided a giant reading list, which I plowed through, and since he was complimentary about The Blair Witch Project, maybe The Objective wouldn’t be so bad.  Turns out, it isn’t.

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Movie Review: STAR TREK BEYOND – Chris Pine still unable to bring it as Kirk, in the blandest Trek movie since Insurrection

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To qualify everything that comes next: while I’m a Star Trek fan, there’s a lot about Trek I cannot stand.  I’m talking about the various TV incarnations and the current reboot, just to be clear.  It’s the earliest memory of TV I can recall, and according to the dedicated Star Trek wiki, Memory Alpha, I likely caught it in the final season of its first run on the BBC (September – December 1971).  I loved this show, and a big part of me still does.

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Movie Review: PREDESTINATION – unspectacular, but watchable, time travel thriller with a terrific paradox at its heart

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I don’t know of anyone who would say they’re a fan of Ethan Hawke per se, but I think there are very few people who would say the opposite.  I’m in the former camp – I’ve enjoyed a number of his movies and performances, but can’t quite make the leap to say I’m a fan.  He’s kind of like a less-charming Kevin Bacon; solid, but lacks genuine star power.  I’ve yet to see him turn in a bad performance, though, and I really like the fact he’s done so many genre movies in his long and varied career.  Maybe he just has never had the best agents, maybe he just comes across as too cold and detached in many of his movies, I don’t know.

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Movie Review: Z FOR ZACHARIAH – unconvincing post apocalyptic melodrama feels more like a low-key romantic western.

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z_for_zachariah

I’ve often wondered why post-apocalyptic drama is so popular – I count myself a fan of them, but I don’t know if I can fully articulate why.  Almost every single one of them portray a world I wouldn’t want to live in: I’m not ashamed to admit I love my internet, I love my convenient life and all the trappings that come with it.  I also wouldn’t survive long in the kind of world I tend to enjoy in fiction.  Let’s face it, it would suck.  Living day to day, evading the horrors of not having enough to eat, or clean water to drink.  Instead of my current cushy job and the comfortable life it affords me, I couldn’t abide a medieval life of weak, failing crops, anarchy … loneliness.  I admit I would cash in my chips early.

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