Ashley McConnell’s fourth Quantum Leap novel, Prelude, reworks some of the events seen at the beginning of the pilot, ties directly in with her second novel, Too Close For Comfort, and takes us back to when Doctor Sam Beckett and a newly retired Admiral Al Calavicci reconnected following the shutdown of Project Starbright to focus…
Tag: backstory
Screamers (1995) – Christian Duguay
Screamers is a bit of a mess. It has a solid pedigree but somewhere between its origin and its filming, I imagine a number of things went wrong, culminating in the disappointing movie it became. The film stars Peter Weller and is originally based on a story by Philip K. Dick and Dan O’Bannon had…
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) – Rachel Talalay
Despite the poster’s tagline about saving the best for last, the sixth film in the Nightmare on Elm Street series is nothing short of a franchise killer. So horrendously bad there doesn’t seem to be any redeeming qualities to the film although there’s an actual interesting seed of an idea regarding Freddy’s offspring. Filled with…
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) – Chuck Russell
The third entry in the Elm Street franchise is a lot of people’s favorites after the first film, and it’s easy to see why, with story credits from Wes Craven and Frank Darabont this instalment features Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) on the cusp, he’s still scary, but he’s also starting to introduce some quips to…
Scream 4 (2011) – Wes Craven
Kevin Williamson is back with a script that gives the Scream (and Stab) franchise the course correction it needed following the Scream 3 misstep, and right off the bat, the film has the sense of fun, and play that was messing in the third film. In fact the casting seems steps above the third film…
Star Trek: Picard – Rogue Elements (2021) – John Jackson Miller
The year is 2391, four years after the Romulan star was destroyed, and Simon & Schuster’s next entry in the Star Trek: Picard, is an enjoyable entry that mixes a lot of humor with a very noir detective story that ties back to one of the biggest events of the 23rd century. The longest of…
Star Trek: Picard – Last Best Hope (2020) – Una McCormack
It has been a while since I slipped into a Star Trek novel. I’m still back on The Original Series, and the last one I read was 1995’s The Ashes of Eden, the first novel that introduced the Shatner-Verse version of Trek novels. But I was eager to see how the newer novels tied in…
GoldenEye (1995) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s penultimate 007 novel is a short, uninspired adaptation of the 1995 film, GoldenEye which saw Pierce Brosnan finally step into the shoes of James Bond. I’m not sure if Gardner was simply tired of writing Bond books at this point, or if he was less than impressed with the film’s script and was…
Star Trek: Shadows on the Shadow (1993) – Michael Jan Friedman
Set shortly after the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Shadows on the Sun explores some of the backstory of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, a character that has become one of my favourites over the years. It’s interesting, as a child, and teen, Kirk was always the character for me. But as I…
Octopussy and The Living Daylights (1966) – Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming’s final James Bond book, the second published posthumously and the fourteenth 007 book overall is a collection of previously published quartet of short stories. And it’s a great collection to go out on, though of course Bond would continue to live on under other authors, and of course, as an ongoing film franchise….
The Mind Reels 