Silver-masked Mexican wrestling hero Santo (called Samson in the U.S. version of the film) does battle with a mad scientist who has discovered a way to make wax monsters (including a not-very-convincing Frankenstein creature) come to life.
Santo (in U.S. versions of the film his name was converted to the more familiar Samson), the masked hero and athlete, once again battles the forces of darkness.
A Martian spaceship comes to Earth and kidnaps Santa Claus and two children.
Funnier than Spaceballs, but this is no joke.
When deranged scientist Sigmund Glock escapes from prison, he's determined to take revenge on Peter Harrigan, the cop who put him behind bars.
‘Ephemerol,’ a sedative administered to pregnant women in the 1940s, has sired a generation of Scanners, mutant telepaths pushed toward madness by their own lethal brain waves.
Non-Cronenberg sequel to the 1981 cult classic finds police out to build an effective crime-fighting unit out of the Scanners, but one power-mad official is using the enslaved mutants in his own underground psychic militia.
Third Scanners entry was done by the same team as the second, yet is camped-up schlock that matches neither predecessor in tone.
Vincent Price is a sinister doctor who tries to create a super race of people devoid of emotions.
A mad scientist on a desert island gleefully turns a group of escaped convicts into grotesque monstrosities.
A young sea captain and a crusty scientist unite to search out a giant sea monster awakened by atomic tests.
Sci-fi action flick about the capture of a secret biological warfare research station.
A boy and his new adventurer friend are on a quest to find the strange “Golden Statue” that causes people to grow old before their time.
A rare Japanese sci-fi flick about a soldier who uses a teleportation device to avenge himself on fellow soldiers who tried to kill him.
Another documentary about the activities being conducted in at Area 51 (also known as Dreamland) and the super-secret military operations, world-wide data control systems, mind-control experiments and weaponry, and super aeronautics and avionic programs under way there. This one does have one hell of a twist. Norio Hayakawa, a former director for the Civilian Intelligence Network &#x…
Originality doesn't exactly blossom in Full Moon Production's variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The mysterious Dr. Lao (Tony Randall) brings his magical circus into the small western town of Abalone and changes the lives of the residents forever. The circus’ attractions include a nearly senile Merlin the Magician, the blind seer Apollonius, an abominable snowman, the god Pan, Medusa, a giant serpent, and a tiny fish which turns out to be the Loch Ness Monster. The line b…
Ray Harryhausen works his stop-motion animation magic in what may be the first color film of its type. Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) decides that his thumb-size girlfriend, Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), would be easier to love if normal size. So off he goes to search for the egg of a Roc, which will reverse the spell cast by the evil magician Sokurah (Torin Thatcher…
In the year 2037, a scientist finds two of the world's greatest lovers and unites them so he can transform their reciprocating motion into electricity.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Why “The Shadow” of course, as is shown in this highly stylized big screen version of the ‘30s pulp fiction series and radio show that once starred Orson Welles. Billionaire playboy Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a master of illusion and defender of justice thanks to his alter ego and his secret network of operat…
There are fans who say that the Hollywood career of George Pal (1908-1980) parallels that of Walt Disney. But while Uncle Walt went on to become a household name as an entertainment innovator, Pal, who took as many risks with even more way-out material, suffered reversals for every step forward. George Pal's history alternates between fantasy masterpieces and tantalizing sci-f…
As a result of NASA experiments in dream travel, an interdimensional monster invades our world in search of victims, changing shape to match their thoughts.
Willis O'Brien's team of f/x wizards assembled for the original King Kong worked on many RKO features afterwards. One is She, and their handiwork is the film's chief glory. They whip up H. Rider Haggard's lost city of Kor, transferred from Africa to the Arctic and warmed into life by underground volcanoes. Kor is a combination of Egyptian, Greek, Mayan, and Art D…
A beautiful female warrior rules over the men in a post-holocaust world “23 years after the Cancellation.” A lengthy quest takes She and her friends – Tom, Dick, and Hari – into battle with increasingly bizarre foes, like chainsaw-wielding guys wrapped in bandages and the self-cloning minions of a Darth-Vader type whose mask sports Mickey Mouse ears.
This is a really weird one.
Advanced robot designed for the military is hit by lightning and begins to think for itself.
Sequel to the adorable-robot-outwits-bad-guys tale is aimed strictly at small fry but counts as an improvement, with better pacing and wittier whimsy.
Your chance to witness Greek mythology updated/mangled in a post-apocalyptic setting with skateboard-thrash culture sensibilities.
Astronauts of a future overtechnologized Earth grudgingly care for the last remaining wilderness environments, sent into orbit for eventual reforestation. When authorities instead order the project scrapped and the vegetation destroyed, nature-loving Bruce Dern mutinies and pilots his dome-enclosed woodland into the safety of deep space. Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut; he created spec…
Sinbad (Patrick Wayne replacing John Phillip Law) sails to Charnak to ask Prince Kassim for the hand of his sister, Farah (Jane Seymour). Unfortunately, the prince has been baboonified by their evil stepmother Zenobia (Margaret Whiting). To break the spell, Sinbad must once again hit the road, er sea, and face a myriad of Ray Harryhausen's stop-moti…
It's a sin, it's so bad, this Italian muscle epic claiming to be based on an obscure Edgar Allen Poe retelling of Arabian Nights legends (quoth Poe's agent: Nevermore!).
A pair of amazons fight for women's rights in a post-nuclear future.
Yes, it's the attack of the killer mosquito! Not just any mosquito of course, but a new gigantic species bred on toxic waste.
Space epic deals about pieces of ancient stone left by prehistoric extraterrestrials, now lost in a time warp.
Fine adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's challenging breakthrough novel has never managed to find an audience. Perhaps Vonnegut's quizzical pessimism and director George Roy Hill's straightforward approach to it simply don't mesh for viewers. The story trips back and forth across time and space – never losing its intelligent humor – from the World War II fire-bo…
With a title like that, what you see is what you get.
“I can't believe you haven't had sex in 200 years.” “204 if you count my marriage.” Woody Allen has seen the future, and in it, tobacco, fat, and hot fudge are the healthiest things for you, and watching Howard Cosell is considered cruel and unusual punishment. Allen's most ambitious film to date is as much an homage to silent comedy as it is scienc…
Huge prehistoric monsters are awakened from long hibernation by atomic testing in Los Angeles.
Big-budget, handsomely made sf is set in a future where an ecological disaster has destroyed society as we know it. The climate has been radically changed, creating a strong wind current. Mark Hamill is an ill-tempered cop who flies a wild-looking plane. He and partner Kitty Aldridge capture poetry-spouting murderer Bob Peck, but before they can bring him to justice, he's kidnapped by dim-w…
Stupid troop of explorers bring back a snow creature from the Himalayas.
In 2050 the sun begins throwing off giant solar flares which turn the Earth extra-crispy.
Cop (Michael Pare), stationed on the moon, is sent to Earth to find a stolen chemical that is capable of restoring a destroyed environment.
Ridiculous costumes are somehow appropriate to the laughable title, but this isn't an intentional comedy.
With this the USSR tried to eclipse 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of cerebral science fiction.
Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for this much-anticipated, big-budget adaptation of his own novel.
A post-Jeannie, pre-Dallas Larry Hagman directed this exercise in zaniness.
This thoroughly enjoyable sequel to The Absent Minded Professor finds Fred MacMurray still toying with his prodigious invention Flubber, now in a convenient gaseous form. “Flubbergas” causes those who inhale it to float away (which comes in handy during the town's big football game).
After a reissue double feature of Frankenstein and Dracula in 1938 became a surprise knockout hit, Universal decided to start making horror movies once again. This is the second sequel (after The Bride of Frankenstein) to the 1931 version of the horror classic. The good doctor's skeptical son (Basil Rathbone, in a fine bombastic performance) returns to the family…
The second of Godzilla's “south seas” pictures (after Godzilla Vs. the Sea Monster), this one concerns the adventures of a group of scientists trying to control weather conditions on a tropical island. Their lives are threatened when their experiments hatch the title infant, drawing the unwelcome attention of the adult monster and some gigantic insects as well. I…
Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) returns to Skull Island, only to discover a younger albino member of Kong's species living there in this often humorous sequel to RKO's immensely popular King Kong.
The future is… no future. That's the basic message behind this relentlessly dark film that is turned into more than just a grim ecological shocker through excellent performances, including that of Edward G. Robinson in his final role. In the year 2022, New York City is jammed with 40 million people (mostly unemployed), suicide is not only legal – it's enco…
Really bad, low-budget flick with a rubber monster and a climactic crash into a “sea of monsters” which is really a fish tank full of crabs.
The giant spaceship Southern Star falls under an attack by mutinous Kalgan, who wants to take everyone to “Pirate World.” Direct-to-video pic alternates between cheapo laser battles in what look like boiler rooms to galactic dogfights with expensive f/x – the latter being entire sequences swiped from TV's Battlestar Galactica (no wonder the Southern Star looks so familiar) retrofitted with lame-o lines like “Surrender or be blown to astro-dust!” Dig the dorky disco scenes in which space cadets boogie with hula hoops.
A young fighter pilot returns home to find his planet under siege and his family dead.
A criminal sentenced to life on the prison planet Botany Bay busts out and must be challenged by aging sheriff Richard Farnsworth.
A plucky 10-year-old blasts off into a futuristic world of intergalactic desperados, crafty alien mercenaries, starship battles, and cliff-hanging dangers.
Edited version of the Flash Gordon serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.
The force was not with Mel Brooks, whose spoof of the George Lucas franchise seems light years too late. But why ask for the moon when you have such stars as Rick Moranis as the petulant geek Dark Helmet, John Candy as Barf, who is half-dog/half-man (“I'm my own best friend”), Dom DeLuise as the voice of Pizza the Hut, and Brooks, revising his 2,000-Year-O…
Ship full of little green Martians is en route to an alien war but mistakenly lands in rural Illinois (they overhear a rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” and assume the target has changed).
If the jokes were better this could pass as a comedy.
Attempted Airplane-style sci-fi spoof that only works in fits and starts.
If the outline for a really good episode of Fox TV's The X-Files fell into the wrong hands, the result might have been this crazed chase adventure.
A vagrant named Starker changes his identity repeatedly to elude detection by the all-seeing “Company Director,” who in the course of the narrative replaces his body with cybernetic components and ends up looking like Marvel Comics’ Silver Surfer.
Rutger Hauer is a futuristic cop tracking down a vicious alien serial killer in London in the year 2008.
A Frenchman, amnesiac after a car crash, comes up against Russian scientists, space-bound dogs, and weightlessness.
A meteorite, crashing to Earth, has caused a wasteland area known as the Zone.
This spaghetti space opera followed closely on the heels of Star Wars.
After their space station explodes, survivors in an escape craft realize they're sealed in with a lethal sluglike alien, who only stops killing when he brings up the Holy Bible on the ship's computer and decides that these humans aren't so bad after all.
A genetically engineered female warrior uses the hunt for a distant alien relic as a means to free herself from her corporate creators.
Competently told space tale has a good cast and a nice O.
A beautiful woman rebel is unjustly sentenced to a brutal intergalactic prison ship.
The crew of the Enterprise reassembles to search out and fight a strange alien force that threatens Earth. This was the first film adaptation of the classic ‘60s TV series. Director Robert Wise, whose previous credits included noted sf epic The Day the Earth Stood Still, gives it his all, but the movie was a disappointment to most Trek fans. Ponderous and slow moving, the movie is ultimatel…
“I have hurt you. And I wish to go on…hurting you.” Ricardo Montalban picks up where he was left off by Captain Kirk in the 1967 TV episode, “Space Seed” (also available on video). Montalban's galaxy-chewing performance as the vengeful genetically engineered supervillain (“From Hell's heart I stab at thee,” he thun…
Captain Kirk hijacks the USS Enterprise and commands the crew (who look a little wearier with each picture in the series) to go on a mission to the Genesis Planet, a young world whose environment has been given a jump-start by a mysterious scientific device. Kirk is determined to find out whether Mr. Spock has somehow survived his death in The Wrath of Khan, the previous film. As usu…
The inescapable fave, the 1966–69 NBC TV series set aboard the giant interstellar science-military exploration vessel U.S.S. Enterprise with its multicultural multi-species crew, led by Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, the emotionless Mr. Spock, and all those expendable guys in red shirts, matched against galaxies of danger, foes, riddles, and rewards. Many participants, most notoriously William Sh…
This one makes it official (and Star Trek 6 only confirms it): the even-numbered Star Trek movies are better than the odd-numbered ones. This is a whale of a tale that you don't have to be a Trekker to enjoy. The crew of the Bounty (remember, the Enterprise was destroyed in The Search for Spock) time travels back to ‘80s San Francisco to retrieve two humpb…
“Star Date: 13–12.4.
A renegade Vulcan kidnaps the Enterprise and takes it on a journey to the mythic center of the universe. William Shatner's big-action directorial debut (he also co-wrote the original story) is a poor follow-up to the Nimoy-directed fourth Trek film. The series was getting pretty tired by this time anyway, but this heavy-handed and pretentiously pseudo-theological entry certain…
The original crew of the Enterprise exits in grand style in the sixth Star Trek film. Mirroring the fall of the iron curtain, a disaster in the Klingon Empire leads to negotiation of a peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation. At the request of Spock, and over Kirk's reservations, the intrepid crew of the Enterprise are sent to escort the Klingon Chancellor to the talks. When th…
The television voyage continues in this first film featuring the Next Generation cast, and seventh overall Star Trek film. Bridging the gap between the generations is legendary Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Following an explosion aboard the newly christened Enterprise B, Kirk is trapped in a space anomaly known as the Nexus. Anyone who enters the Nexus feels as if they are…
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …” That's how the movie that changed the film industry begins. Even though its special effects may have been eclipsed, it's still one of Hollywood's best, the first chapter of an epic coming-of-age trilogy. Recently remastered, the tape version looks and sounds almost as good as it did in theatres. It's a s…
Seventy-eight years in the future of the future. Who came up with an idea like that? Somewhere, a thousand voices are shouting out the answer in unison, but let's leave it as a rhetorical question for now. To revive an old television series, updated for a new audience is not such a new idea – it happened many times before. A series would disappear from the airwaves for a few years, o…
This feature cartoon was released on theatre screens in 3-D, and one truly got dizzy watching the sweeps and swoops of spacecraft with an extra dimension thrown in.
A space shuttle is called on to save the world's first hypersonic airliner trapped in an orbit above earth.
“It is a period of civil war: Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.
Imagine the Cecil B. deSpielberg production of Close Encounters with the Ten Commandments. U.S. military probe of a ring-shaped ancient Egyptian artifact (your tax dollars at work) sends he-man colonel Kurt Russell and geeky Egyptologist James Spader into a parallel universe. There they meet the builders of the pyramids who are enslaved by an evil despot (Jaye Davidson)…
An alien from an advanced civilization lands in Wisconsin.
No-frills Star Wars ripoff about human slaves trying to escape a planet run by evil robots.
Christopher Lee leads a group of bad aliens seeking to take over the Earth.
Bruce Davison is the scientist brother of a classical pianist who commits suicide after being raped.
In 1979, U.S. sf fans were introduced to a new animated series of unusual depth and complexity. Starblazers, titled Uchuu Senkan Yamato (Space Cruiser Yamato) in its native Japan, came as a surprise in several ways. First of all, and most obviously, it was anime – Japanese animation, which meant it was done in a very distinctive style, one most American viewers hadn't s…
Another monosyllabic post-apocalypse samurai western, Shane with a Mad Max makeover.
Post-apocalypse actioner finds a group of survivors trying to make a life for themselves in a town they call New Hope.
Stephen King creates a chilling vision of scientific progress gone awry in this shocking tech-no-thriller.
One of the worst Stephen King adaptations in recent memory (and there have been some bad ones). This bloated variation of Ten Little Indians finds 10 airline passengers dozing off on their L.A.-to-Boston flight and awakening to find their fellow passengers and the crew have vanished. Of course, one passenger (David Morse) is a pilot and he manages to land the plane in B…
Quite good made-for-TV adaptation of the apocalyptic Stephen King epic (King adapted the screenplay himself) should be ghoulish enough for most. Cool opening featuring Blue Oyster Cult's “Don't Fear the Reaper” as the camera reveals death and more death at a top-secret government lab where a killer virus has escaped. Around the world millions die, and conf…
Another of King's creepy tales adapted for TV. Bobbi (Marg Helgenberger) and Gard (Jimmy Smits) live in the small town of Haven, Maine (actually filmed on New Zealand's North Island). She's an aspiring writer; he's a fading poet with a drinking problem and a metal plate in his head (this is important). Walking in t…
A group of aliens escaping interplanetary persecution land on Earth and enlist the aid of an Earth family.
Linda Moulton Howe's documentary on animal (and sometimes human) mutilations around the world is crammed full of photos, film, and interviews.
Most modern pics that want to recreate the attitude of ‘50s alien flicks try too hard and tip far into camp silliness, but this one gets the deadpan tone just right. Grotesque space beings conquered the midwest town of Centerville in the ‘50s and body-snatched the locals’ appearance and attire. Twenty-five years later, Paul LeMat's ex-wife, a Centerville native, disappe…
Three astronauts awake from 188 years in the fridge to find cloning has arrived.
Glen Corbett crashlands on a planet an awful lot like Earth – and must stay on the run.
The Day the Earth Stood Still warmed over.
A scientist who had cryogenically frozen himself to escape the Nazis is thawed out in the present, and his powers are used by a delinquent-obsessed sociopath.
Nobody looks more natural, in a garter belt and stockings, begging a dominatrix to give a little whip, than G.
The ever-lovin’ nuclear holocaust has occurred, and good guys and bad guys battle it out for scarce water.
Home video rescued from limbo this long-unseen indie production showcasing the cosmology of jazz-improv innovator and self-styled space-age prophet Sun Ra, mythologized as a shaman who descends in a starship that looks like a pair of blazing eyeballs.
When astronaut Zach Stone (Ken Olandt) returns from an assignment on Mars he finds his policeman brother has been murdered.
Rookie policeman develops super powers after being accidentally exposed to radiation.
A $42 million adventure fantasy based on the popular Nintendo video game. It's not half bad either, despite the Luigi character's having been turned into a twenty-something dude to provide the obligatory romantic interest. The brothers are in hot pursuit of Daisy, a paleontology student who's been abducted to an alternate Manhattan whose inhabitants are descended from d…
George Lucas was one of a new breed of filmmaker, part of the first generation to come from formal film training. He graduated from the prestigious University of Southern California's School of Film. After serving as director of photography on the Rolling Stones’ documentary Gimme Shelter, Lucas, with the help of friend Francis Ford Coppola, turned his 20-minute student film into his…
This attempt at a companion to the Superman series was a big-budget bomb. Helen Slater made her debut here and nearly killed off her career in the process (well, the Kryptonite didn't help). The film tells the story (such as it was) of a young woman with super powers, Superman's cousin or something. She's in pursuit of a magic doo-dad, but naturally…
The DC Comics legend comes alive in this slightly overblown but still very entertaining $55 million saga. The film follows Superman's life from his infancy on the doomed planet Krypton to his adult career as Earth's Man of Steel. Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty pair marvelously as super criminal Lex Luthor and his bumbling sidekick. Marlon Brando is suitably imposing as Superman&#…
A sequel to the 1978 blockbuster.
The Superman series started going seriously awry with this second sequel. Villainous businessman Robert Vaughn tries to conquer Superman via the expertise of a bumbling computer expert (Richard Pryor) and the judicious use of artificial Kryptonite. The Man in the Cape explores his darker side after undergoing transformation into sleaze-ball. Director Richard Lester tried to take this…
The third and quite unnecessary sequel, in which the Man of Steel endeavors to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The cast of the popular ‘50s’ television show made this rarely seen feature as a “pilot” for the series.
Incoherent shoestring-budget Superman spoof with a masked hero fighting to save the world from the evil intentions of a mad scientist.
After civilization collapses, humans begin reverting back to a primitive way of life.
Nuclear holocaust survivors battle a violent band of marauding motorcyclists on the barren ranches of the 21st century.
A lone astronaut returns to Earth to find it a sterile, post-nuclear holocaust wasteland, and battles a megalomaniac ruler.
Nonsensical cable thriller finds government computer researcher Dan (C.
Overlooked camp drama about scientist accidentally turned into tragic half-vegetable, half-man swamp creature, with government agent Adrienne Barbeau caught in the middle, occasionally while topless.
Back in the late ‘70s, in addition to demonic possession, Legionnaire's Disease, and punk rock, everyone was worried about a rumored species of “killer bees” flying up from Mexico to sting everyone to death. Several flicks were rushed into existence to allow filmgoers to vicariously live out their newfound terror of murderous insects (and hopefully make the filmm…
Good, and at times gooey, special effects, along with a decent I-wish-I was-Errol-Flynn performance from Lee Horsley make this a worthwhile fantasy swashbuckler.
Black-marketeer Andre (Chris Makepeace) is double crossed by a partner and arrested by Life Corp., which runs this futuristic civilization.
Syngenor stands for Synthesized Genetic Organism, to differentiate it from all other organisms.