On a distant planet, the evil Lord Doom (Michael Guerin, voiced by Jerry Lentz), a sort of cut-price cross between Marvel’s Doctor Doom and Masters of the Universe‘s Skeletor, lives in virtual isolation with only the diminutive Chamberlain (Jon Simanton) for company. Tiring of the cold and the desolation of his home world, Doom sets … Continue reading
Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World has long had a poor reputation thanks to its truly idiotic monster, a mind-controlling alien from Venus that lurks in a cave, possessing innocent bystanders but not actually doing very much as Paul Blaisdell’s creature suit (dubbed Beulah by its creator) is virtually immobile. The original plan had been … Continue reading
This wild Korean monster movie from Bong Joon-ho (Salinui chueok/Memories of Murder (2003), Namgeuk-ilgi/Antarctic Journal (2005), Snowpiercer (2013)), known in English language territories as The Host, deftly mixes humour and giant monster mayhem as it pits the residents of Seoul against a mutant tadpole that emerges from the Han River after feeding on discarded formaldehyde … Continue reading
Back in 1954, Harry Essex had written Universal’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the everyday tale of an aquatic creature that gets the hots for a human woman and goes on the rampage trying to drag her off his underwater lair. Nearly two decades later he decided to recycle the basic plot for the … Continue reading
Perhaps the most fun of the black and white Ray Harryhausen films, 20 Million Miles to Earth is chock full of iconic images, from the partly submerged spaceship off the coast of Sicily to the alien Ymir’s climactic rampage through Rome. It has some pacing issues and a tendency to suddenly dump vital information on … Continue reading
Roger Corman’s customary penny pinching ways leaves Attack of the Crab Monsters – one of no fewer than nine feature films he directed that were released in 1957, easily his most prolific year – stranded without its eponymous nasties for the bulk of its brief 62 minute running time. After a fleeting glimpse of one of … Continue reading
Director/producer had form when it came to adapting the works of Stephen King but anyone expecting the same uplifting, feel good experience as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) from his adaptation of King’s 1980 novella of the same name (first published in the anthology Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and … Continue reading
