The right idea, at the right time, can be magic. It happened in 1979 when Ridley Scott delivered the first true science fiction horror film. It also happened again in 2013, in Dorset, when a group of amatuer actors, and professional bus drivers decided to bring the film to the stage instead of their usual…
Tag: Alien
Alien 3: The Unproduced First-Draft Screenplay by William Gibson (2021) – Pat Cadigan
Author Pat Cadigan takes William Gibson’s original script for Alien 3 and transforms it into a white knuckle thriller ride of a novel that gives us a glimpse at what could have been in the Alien film series. Fans know the convoluted story of how Alien 3 came to the screen, and that were countless…
Enemy Mine (1985) – Wolfgang Petersen
Enemy Mine, from director Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr., looks like a 50s era sci-fi film (particularly the model work and space suits) but it’s message of prejudice, hate, and race war, is as relevant today (and arguably more so) than it was when it was made. Feeling like a…
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) – 4K Review
The infamous Snyder Cut comes to physical media this week from Warner Brothers and it is an event. After the disastrous theatrical release that saw the film taken over by Joss Whedon when director Zack Snyder had to step away for personal reasons, fans around the world lobbied Warner to release Snyder’s version of the…
TIFF 2021: Encounter dir. Michael Pearce
From the beginning of the film, thanks to the way the film is told, and the willing suspension of disbelief that is inherent with cinema, we believe Malik (Riz Ahmed) and his conviction that a microscopic parasitic alien organism has come to the planet and is slowly taking over, manipulating people to their own end….
The X-Files (1999) – Field Trip, and Biogenesis
Frank Spotnitz created the story which Vince Gilligan and John Shiban wrote the teleplay for the sixth season’s penultimate episode, Field Trip, which first aired on 9 May, 1999. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) head to Brown Mountain, home of the Brown Mountain Lights, which Mulder believes may be UFO related, to investigate…
The X-Files (1999) – The Unnatural, and Three of a Kind
David Duchovny wrote and director the first episode up this week, The Unnatural, which first aired on 25 April, 1999. This serves as his directorial review, and it’s a lot of fun, and may be poking fun at the mythology arc, or it may just be a story Mulder (Duchovny) is told by Arthur Dales…
Outland (1981) – Peter Hyams
Peter Hyams writes and directs this galactic update of the classic western, High Noon, that sees Sean Connery stepping into the Gary Cooper role of a lone marshall awaiting the arrival of men who are coming to kill him. With a visual look that seems to marry it with the universe of Alien (aided by…
Battlestar Galactica 7: War of the Gods (1982) – Nicholas Yermakov, and Glen A. Larson
The next novel in the Galactica series, War of the Gods, seems to have eschewed the Galactica 1980 tie-in, and simply gone back to the Adama Journals intercut with chapters detailing the action of this adaptation of the epic two-parter that gave us a hint at a deeper mythology working in the series. After a…
The X-Files (1997) – Gethsemane, and Redux
‘Believe the lie’ Series creator Chris Carter delivers a season finale that left me as shaken as when I first saw it. Gethsemane first aired on 18 May, 1997, and brings the faiths and beliefs of Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) to the fore. Mulder heads into the Yukon Territory where what appears…
The Mind Reels 