These are the voyages of New Shepard… This past week, something amazing happened; something that I have complex feelings about, and that I feel obligated to mention here. William Shatner, Star Trek’s “Captain Kirk” himself, at 90 years old, took a suborbital hop roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Earth and back in an…
More Musings for Halloween: “Blacula” (1972) and “Scream Blacula Scream” (1973)…
Blaxploitation Horror. In the 1970s, some independent movie studios (the kind that cranked out B-movies for drive-ins) finally got the potentially lucrative message that representation matters. A new wave of low-budget action movies (“Shaft,” “Coffy,” “Superfly,” “Hell Up in Harlem”) were made which cast their stories with people of color in most of the major…
Musings for Halloween: “The Changeling” (1980)…
*****SPOOKY SPOILERS AHEAD!***** Many years ago, I remember seeing a trailer for a then-new horror movie coming out which featured George C. Scott (“Patton” “A Christmas Carol”) living in an apparently haunted house. The one thing that made me nearly wet my seat was the sight of an antique wheelchair, shrouded in cobwebs and sans…
“Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales” is a horror anthology spoof from a galaxy far, far away…
*****STAR DESTROYER-SIZED SPOILERS!!***** Like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather III,” just when I thought I was done with new Star Wars content for awhile, DisneyPlus “pulls me back in!” However, Disney’s latest offering falls somewhat in line with a subject near and dear to my heart–Halloween. Star Wars isn’t exactly the sort of franchise you’d…
“Fantastic!” Russell T. Davies returns to “Doctor Who”…
Davies and the Debut of New Who. Very recently, I wrote about my anticipation of Doctor Who’s much maligned (and short-lived) resurrection in 1996 with the “Doctor Who: TV Movie,” starring the talented Paul McGann as the Doctor. While that attempt to bring the Doctor back to the airwaves ultimately wasn’t successful, it did manage…
A brief sampling of Disney’s “Star Wars: Visions” (2021)…
*****STAR DESTROYER-SIZED SPOILERS AHEAD!***** With the recent avalanche of Star Wars product on DisneyPlus since “The Mandalorian” opened the floodgates to the Disney streaming service in November of 2019, there has been an almost nonstop menagerie of new Star Wars content, with a lot more on the way (“The Book of Boba Fett,” “Kenobi” etc)….
“Doctor Who: The TV Movie” (1996): Bridging the classic and modern eras…
*****TARDIS-SIZED SPOILERS!!***** Left My Hearts in San Francisco… In May of 1996, after a 7 year drought of Doctor Who (which was last broadcast in the US on PBS), I was set to enjoy an all-new Doctor Who adventure. This would be a single TV-movie, acting as a pilot episode, which would air in the…
From “Saturday Night Live” to outer space: Norm Macdonald (1960-2021)…
Short and Sweet. Keeping this column short, as I’m still recovering from recent hand surgery, and typing with a keyboard is still a bit difficult at the moment, but I wanted–no, needed to put this one out there. Norm Macdonald. While I generally write about sci-fi/fantasy/horror entertainment in this column, I just wanted to pay…
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” features a cast for the future’s past…
Forgive me if this column is a bit briefer than usual, but I’m recovering from hand surgery and my typing speed is down to a crawl, so apologies in advance if I let the graphics and videos do most of the heavy lifting on this one! *****SOME SPECULATIVE SPOILERS***** “We’ve just finished 18 months redesigning…
Retro-Musings: “Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot” (1967) was a goofy staple of childhood…
Mecha Memories. When I was a kid, VCRs weren’t really a thing yet (let alone DVDs, BluRays, DVRs or streaming), so you watched whatever was on TV at the time. Usually a favorite movie of yours would air once a year, if you were lucky, and you would make sure your butt was home and…
Biting the bullets: “From Dusk Till Dawn,” 25 years later…
*****BLOOD-SUCKING SPOILERS!***** Dawn of “From Dusk…” I still vividly remember trying to get my friends to come with me to see the new vampire/crime-drama flick from director Robert Rodriguez (“Desperado” “Spy Kids”) and writer/actor Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction,” “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” ) back in February of 1996. I was a bachelor in…
“The Suicide Squad” (2021) is a big, brutal, mean-spirited time killer…
******KEIJU-SIZED SPOILERS!!****** Good News and Bad News. The Good News. If you are, as I am, still skittish about returning to movie theaters during the current COVID-19 pandemic? You can still catch 2021’s reboot of “The Suicide Squad,” directed by James Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) on HBOMax, without an extra access code, now through…
Musings of a Middle-Aged Geek 