The story of a council block inhabited by an odd mixture of London poor, that happens to become the center of an alien invasion. From the producers of Shane of The Dead, Attack The Block is a pretty straight forward take on a monster movie. Unlike CGI fests such as Super 8 and Cloverfield, Attack The Block gives us a story on a human level-and leaves the over the top special effects in the box. Our heroes don’t start off very heroic, they are busy mugging a woman when something falls from the sky and flattens a car. They find…
Category: sci fi
Another Earth
Another low budget sort-of-science-fiction film with a lot of art house appeal. Another Earth is about a woman who is in a car crash and crippled with guilt over her irresponsible actions. She spends years in jail and then stalkes the man she plowed into. She spends a lot of time moping around and looking sad and remorseful. In the background of this sad sack story of a drunk driver is the secondary story of a second earth appearing in the sky one day. The other earth is an exact duplicate of our own earth. It keeps getting closer and…
Empty the Movie
Empty is a sort of post apocalyptic story, if you can call going one week without gas a post apocalyptic event. Yes, this movie tells the tale of a world without gasoline-thus all gas tanks are Empty and anarchy reins. Empty is an ultra low budget independent film with a cast of about ten people-with two of them grabbing the bulk of the screen time. Much like Monsters our heroes are a rich girl and a poor working class schmuck. The rich girl is mostly reasonable and sane, her working class, tough guy boyfriend is mostly a total asshole. We…
Torchwood Miracle Day
In Torchwood Miracle Day death takes a holiday-and it looks more like a permanent leave. The interesting Torchwood bit is that Captain Jack, our hero, has been immortal-until Miracle Day that is. So is it all a plot to kill off Captain Jack for good? The first season of Torchwood had a high sexual content, as many British sci-fi shows do these days. The second season they dropped it down a couple of notches. The third season had little to no sex that I recall. This latest Torchwood, from the BBC and Starz held the sex back until episode three…
Falling Skies
I’ll watch just about any science fiction that doesn’t feature giant robots that turn into cars. Falling Skies from TNT and Steven Spielberg is the story of Earth after the fall of humankind to an alien invasion. The aliens are called Skidders and most closely resemble one of the twisted toys from the original Toy Story. They have an upper body with a head and two arms, but then have a lower body composed of several legs. We learn that the key to killing them is to disable as many legs as possible. Falling Skies is basically a post apocalyptic…
Hit List:Antia Blake and Edward Ride Again
Laurell K Hamilton goes old school with Anita Blake in the 20th book in the series. Hit List is more monster hunting and vampire slaying and a lot less wicked sexual powers and Ardeur induced orgies. This is a good thing. The story opens up with Anita and Edward investigating a series of murders where weretigers are the victims. It seems that the Harlequin are following the orders of Marmee Noir and that they are still after Anita. The story takes place far from Jean Claude and Richard and the rest of the cast of thousands that make up Anita’s…
Super 8 ~Uh, Not That Super
J.J. Abrams has made a love song to Steven Spielberg. From the Super 8 One Sheet that bears a striking resemblance to the One Sheet for Close Encounters of The Third Kind to his story which bears a striking resemblance to both E.T. and The Goonies. Our story is set in 1979-for no clear reason other than J.J. wanted to listen to some old tunes from the era when Disco was duking it out with New Wave. There are a couple of gags about Sony Walkmans that play cassette tapes and overnight film processing, but there was no reason it…
Man In The Dark by Paul Auster
The audio book of Man in The Dark was read by author Paul Auster and he does a brilliant job of bringing this odd story to life. His voice has a soft cadence and a deliberate touch which perfectly matches the slow paced story of a seventy-two year old man who can’t quit get to sleep. As our tale opens, we find our hero alone in the dark, staring at the ceiling he can’t see, surrounded by an emptiness that he can’t quite feel. To keep himself occupied, he tells himself a story. A man wakes up in a perfectly…
Total Oblivion-More or Less
One of the hallmarks of post apocalypse stories is that things go from bad to worse on a very regular basis. But most of them start off in the fairly familiar, fairly common world and something goes terribly wrong-zombies, atomic war, pandemic plague, EMP, or just some mysterious something that puts an end to life as we know it. But rarely have I seen a mysterious something else quite as odd as the one used in Total Oblivion-More or Less. The Earth finds itself over run by hordes of barbarian Scythians and people from something like the Roman Empire. But…
The Borgias and The Game of Thrones
It’s unfortunate that these two medieval costume dramas are airing during the same time-they are near clones of each other. They are both about intrigue, betrayal, infidelity, and the sordid underbelly of the world of Kings. I like them both, but they are very similar in their story lines-at least, so far. George R R Martin is a famous Sci Fi writer, though to be honest I am not familiar with much of anything he has written. But I like fantasy and science fiction, so I was a bit excited to see that Game of Thrones was going to be…