After a wonderful weekend celebrating pop culture at a horror convention this past weekend, I woke up this morning to the terrible news that actor Sam Neill, whose work I’ve long admired over at least five decades, has passed away at age 78–an age that seems terribly young to me these days as I tentatively…
CreepIE Aftermath 2026 brings a Halloween chill to a warm summer…
Trick or Heat In 2022 a new horror convention called CreepIEcon came to the Inland Empire of SoCal (hence the capitalized “I.E”), and it was small but attracted a decent enough crowd to warrant a second show, called CreepIE Aftermath, in September of 2023. Now both shows have evolved to attract a larger talent pool,…
An X-ray look into “Superman Returns,” 20 years later …
******SUPER-SPOILERS!****** Growing up in the 1970s reading random Marvel comics books (“SpiderMan,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Hulk”), I wasn’t much of a DC kid. Despite being old enough to have seen TV’s “Adventures of Superman” (1952-1958) in reruns (as did friends of mine), I never really got into it, and the only reasons younger-me ever…
Movie night in a historic 97 year-old SoCal theater…
“26 Miles Away…” In 1999, my wife and I honeymooned on Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, and we still have near-annual getaways there to celebrate anniversaries since. The island was sold to the Wrigley family (the chewing gum magnates) back in 1919, and was quickly turned into a famed movie location as well…
Personal Log: Telling it to the Mountain…
This column will not be a review or deep dive of a movie or TV series, but I wanted to give a heads-up to longtime readers that there’s going to be a minor change going forward with regards to reviewing content from Paramount+. This includes nearly all of the Star Trek TV shows and movies,…
All aboard “Stop! That! Train!” (2026) for a silly, sassy spoof…
******STOP THOSE SPOILERS!****** “Stop! That! Train!” is a railway-based, drag queen led-redux of the Abrams/Zucker Bros comedy, “Airplane!” (1980); one of my personal favorite comedy movies of all time. The movie was created by writing partners Christina Friel and Connor Wright (“The Bitch Who Stole Christmas”) and directed by Adam Shankman, a veteran music video…
Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” (2026) revisits more than it reveals…
******UNIDENTIFIED FLYING SPOILERS!****** I’ve been a fan of director Steven Spielberg since my family and I waited hours parked outside a drive-in theater waiting for the filled parking lot to clear so we could squeeze in and see “JAWS” back in 1975. Two years later, seeing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (CE3K) at the…
Retro-Musings: “Conquest of Space” (1955) is sabotaged (literally) by its unlikable characters…
******MARS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** I grew up admiring the gorgeous, inspirational space art by Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), who remains one of my favorite artists. I love his imaginative paintings of future space exploration, with astronauts setting foot on the moon, Mars, and even the Saturnian moon of Titan. Growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, those…
Marcia Lucas (1945-2026); an editing virtuoso of 1970s cinema…
A long time ago, in an editing bay not too far away… Born in Modesto, California in 1945 to an Air Force officer father, Marcia Griffin moved all over California, until her parents divorced and she went to North Hollywood, where she and her mother stayed with her grandmother. It was in Hollywood where Marcia…
Apple TV’s “Star City”; unpacking the Soviet sidequel to “For All Mankind”…
******ROCKET-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Debuting in November of 2019, “For All Mankind” was created by veteran TV writer/executive producer Ronald D. Moore, best known for the critically-acclaimed reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” (2003-2009), along with coproducers/writers Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert. The series was hung on a deceptively simple premise; what if the Soviets had beaten the Americans…
For All Mankind’s season 5 finale, “This Land is Our Land,” regains some much-needed optimism…
******TITAN-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” nearly lost me with its surprisingly reactionary 4th season, which saw the demotion and humiliation of its stronger women characters, such as Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), who is brutally imprisoned, while astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) was shot, and exiled from Mars after a revolt at the end…
A few thoughts on UFOs/UAP and extraterrestrial life…
******SAUCER-SHAPED SPOILERS!****** Growing up in the 1970s, UFOs (as they were called then) were wildly popular. I watched alien visitation/invasion movies, such as “The War of the Worlds” (1953), “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” (1956), and “Invaders from Mars” (1953)–that last one really scared the hell out of me watching it alone on late-night TV…