Category: Reviews

Avoid The Void

This movie starts out great, slips to mediocre, then plunges headlong into completely stupid.  In a way, it is a nice little Lovecraftian homage complete with a black pharoah looking to open a doorway to hell, opposed by a young and out-of-his-league cop. Unfortunately it doesn’t live up to...

Solid Recommend: Blow the Man Down

Good news, everyone! Not everything sucks, and I’ve found a rare gem in this modern cinematic wasteland.  Imagine if Fargo was set in a small New England fishing town, and it wasn’t completely retarded.  Don’t let the “Amazon Original” tag fool you – this one is worth a watch....

Utopian Ugliness

Don’t bother with this. On paper it checks all the boxes:  Dark conspiracies.  Comic book fans as plucky underdog heroes.  Technocrat blundering endangering the global food supply.  An artificial virus that threatens world stability. It should have been a slam dunk, but it falls prey to all of the...

Bill And Ted’s Excellent Family Adventure

Sat the family down this past long weekend to show them this masterpiece of family cinema. The effects are a bit dated, but it holds up just fine. To my great surprise the seven year old laughed riotously through most of it.  She was a bit bored at the...

Dave Made A Maze

Got a weird one for you. A film in which Dave builds a cardboard maze in his living room while his girlfriend is gone for the weekend, and then gets stuck inside and needs to be rescued.  The story opens with her disbelief at the mess he made, and...

Total Recall Rewatch: Random Thoughts

Still holds up, for the most part. You have to set aside a whole lot of junk science to appreciate it, but as a late-80s actioner, it works.  Yeah, the feeling of the thing is very much what the 1980s thought the future would look like, complete with over-large...

Always an Alternative

No entertainment product is indispensable. There is always an alternative, even if it’s just reading bible stories around the living room.  The powerborkers – spelling intentional – forgot that the artificial little tribes they built around jerseys and colors mean a lot less to the public than the organic...

Thumb’s Up: The Vast of Night

This was pretty good. It’s a slow-burn mystery set in small-town New Mexico way back in the lost golden age of the 1950s. The plot revolves around a technically literate high-school girl – one who feels organically smart rather than performatively so because screw you manbabies – and a...

Fanning the Flames of Good Reading

There’s a couple of fresh new outrages going on in the drama llama club that is mainstream sci-fi.  Somebody tried to publish a magazine that didn’t prostrate itself before the cult of Nu and got cancelled.  Again.  And something about Lovecraft.  Again. BOR-ing! Rather than talk about that, why...

The Earth a Machine to Speak

Ya gotta understand that when I talk about “engineering porn”, I’m not talking about slinky women dressed immodestly and draped over trains. Sometimes people use that second word as a suffix that means, “gorgeous ideas about a typically innocuous thing elevated to a higher level by means of extraordinary...