I quite enjoyed the Bram Stoker award winning YA novel Clown in a Cornfield, so it made sense that sooner or later I was going to take in the film adaption of the story. It makes me laugh that the book is very much defined as a teen book, but the film itself, because of…
Tag: tropes
Drug of Choice (1970) – Micheal Crichton
Micheal Crichton writing as his alter-ego John Lange delivers a fast-paced, odd, and occasionally uneven tale with Drug of Choice. I think the biggest problem with the story is that its too short. A number of the sequences could have been expanded on to unnerve the reader and immerse them into the mystery of what…
Get Smart (1966) – The Greatest Spy on Earth, Island of the Darned, and Bronzefinger
Let’s all go to the circus! Agent 86, Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) and 99 (Barbara Feldon) go undercover at the big top in The Greatest Spy on Earth. Written by Dee Caruso and Gerald Gardner, this episode was first broadcast on 19 November 1966. They are assigned to break a KAOS diamond smuggling ring that…
Magpie Murders (2016) – Anthony Horowitz
I’ve always enjoyed Anthony Horowitz’s writing. I dug his young spy novels, the Alex Rider series, and his foray into James Bond territory. But he is not a writer to be confined by genre, and when I came across Magpie Murders in one of the little libraries in a neighbor’s yard, I had to at…
Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) – Gareth Edwards
It’s lost some of its magic. There is too much green screen and visual effects, and almost no practical work when it comes to the dinosaurs, and it’s glaringly obvious. There’s no majesty when we see the dinosaurs now, because they don’t look real anymore. You can tell they are all done by VFX artists….
Star Trek: The Devil’s Isle of Space (1968)
The second issue of Gold Key’s Star Trek comics hit spinners on June 1968. It once again featured Dick Wood as writer and Nevio Zaccara as the artist. The story ends up being a familiar science fiction trope. The prison planet. The Enterprise arrives in an asteroid field, some of which are glowing. On them…
Smallville (2001) – Pilot, and Metamorphosis
The Superman mythos got the teen drama remix with Smallville. Perfectly cast and solidly scripted, the series ran for ten seasons, and while I did enjoy it, I never got past season five originally. We’re going to fix that this time out. The show launched with its Pilot on 16 October, 2001. Written by Alfred…
Huxley (2025) – Ben Mauro
I was very fortunate to chat with Ben Mauro when he appeared at Toronto’s Fan Expo. And I have just finished the first installment in his Huxley saga. Filled with world-building and fantastic art, Mauro takes some familiar science fiction tropes, and incorporates them in a new way. The trade paperback is composed of the…
Casino Royale (1967) – Val Guest, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joe McGrath, and John Huston
It’s been a long time since I watched Casino Royale, a spoof of 007 films, which had originally been developed as a serious adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel. When the Bond filmmakers, and Sean Connery didn’t want to be involved, the producers held onto the rights and went with a comedy instead. With five…
If Looks Could Kill (1991) – William Dear
Richard Grieco takes on the super-spy genre in this teen action comedy. There are nods to the established tropes of the genre, filled with lots of teen humor. Grieco is Michael Corben. An almost high school graduate. He’s receives an incomplete. The only impossible way for him to get the missing credits… join the French…
The Mind Reels 