Destroy All Monsters (1968) – Ishiro Honda & Jun Fukuda

I’ll be honest, this is the first Godzilla movie I’ve watched that I didn’t pay attention to any of the actors or their arcs, I was just having too much fun with the monster mashing, the model work, and the way the mythology of the monster-verse has expanded to include so many creatures, aliens, and…

Flight of the Navigator (1986) – Randal Kleiser

Disney delivers a staple of 80s childhood with a revisit to Flight of the Navigator. Watching it now, I find myself more interested in the mysteries going on at the edges of the story than the main thrust of the narrative following young David Freeman (Joey Cramer), his abduction and subsequent return eight years later,…

Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) – Ishiro Honda

Godzilla is back! But he almost takes a backseat to the rest of the story, which sees an expansion of the Godzilla universe by bringing in aliens, flying saucers, and seeing the return of Rodan and King Ghidorah. When a new planet, Planet X, is discovered in orbit around Jupiter, a joint Japanese/American mission is…

Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) – Don Coscarelli

The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), Micheal (A. Micheal Baldwin), Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Jody (Bill Thornbury) are back again as Don Coscarelli delivers us a fourth Phantasm outing in a universe that I like visiting and revisiting. Eschewing a lot of the humour that showed up in the previous film, the fourth film is probably…

The X-Files (1993) – Space, and Fallen Angel

Series creator Chris Carter gives us what is arguably not only the worst episode of the first season, but the entire series in the first entry this week. The episode, Space, first aired on 12 November, 1993, and sees Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigating a sabotaged space shuttle mission. Surprise, surprise, Mulder…

Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline (2009 – 2016)

Space… There was a lot of it between the end of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005 and the next Human Adventure. For the first time since 1987, there were no Star Trek series or films in production. It was strange for a number of fans, though a large percentage of them realised that it was…

Absolution Gap (2003) – Alastair Reynolds

I return to Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space universe this week, with this, the third novel in the ongoing storyline involving the Inhibitors and the struggle of humanity, in all its forms, to escape extinction. We are introduced to a slew of new characters in this titanic space opera, while reacquainting ourselves with old friends. The…

Moonraker (1979) – Lewis Gilbert

Oh Moonraker. Sigh. When I was first getting into Bond films, at the age of twelve, I thought Moonraker was great – I didn’t see it during its original release in ’79, but I remember seeing images, and some of the toys and cards – because space, and lasers, gadgets and James Bond! Coming to…

Chasm City (2001) – Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds next science fiction novel, Chasm City, takes place in the same universe as Revelation Space but is not a sequel, instead we are given a future noir tale of revenge, and the human ability to commit good and horrible acts, redemption, and discovery. We visit a couple of planets that were mentioned in…

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966) – Shigeo Tanaka

The kaiju battles continue as I delve deeper into the chapter on dragons and dinosaurs in DK Canada’s fabulous Monsters in the Movies. With some fun modelwork, and man in a monster suit action this one is fairly predictable, and the human story gets too much in the way of the monster action, but it’s…