*****SUPERNATURAL SPOILERS AHEAD!!***** “Hocus Pocus” (1993) As longtime readers of this column might glean, I am a huge Halloween geek. Even into my golden years, it’s still my favorite holiday. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. That said, I never caught the original “Hocus Pocus” in theatrical release. As…
Rob Zombie’s “The Munsters” (2022) fails to reanimate…
*****SPOOKY SPOILERS!!***** The Munsters (1964-1966) The original TV series of “The Munsters” was a childhood staple of mine. I was a huge fan of the Universal Monsters (Wolf-man, Frankenstein’s monster, Mummy, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon) as a kid; I had the glow in the dark Aurora model kits, and Forry Ackerman’s “Famous Monsters…
Star Wars “Andor” debuts with a slow-burning trio of episodes…
*****STAR DESTROYER-SIZED SPOILERS!!***** “A Long Time Ago…” A few years after Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, we saw the first non-Skywalker standalone Star Wars film arrive in cinemas with 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” which showed us a darker, more agnostic corner of the Star Wars universe. “Rogue One” dramatized the events…
“Quantum Leap” (2022); an old program is updated with fresh new code…
******ZIGGY-SIZED SPOILERS!!****** “Quantum Leap” (1989-1993). “Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished. He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His…
“The Thing” and I: Director John Carpenter’s sci-fi/horror classic turns 40…
******SAUCER-SIZED SPOILERS!!****** “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Where to start, but at the beginning; “The Thing” first thawed as the novella “Who Goes There?”, written in 1938 by John W. Campbell. It involved a group of Antarctic researchers who discover a spaceship frozen in ice for millions of years. Attempting to remove it…
“Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”: 50 years of a zombie cult classic…
Rise and Dine. The late George Romero’s 1968 horror classic “Night of the Living Dead” reimagined zombies from their previous incarnation as mindless victims of voodoo magic into rotting, flesh-eating corpses, reanimated from death itself. Romero’s reinvention of zombies has become commonplace today (“The Walking Dead”, and countless other imitators), but it was still a…
“Jurassic World: Dominion” (2022) scavenges the carcass of a classic…
******SAUROPOD-SIZED SPOILERS AHEAD!!****** “Jurassic Park” (1993) 1993 was a great year for movies; “Schindler’s List,” “Philadelphia,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “Tombstone,” “The Fugitive,” “Hocus Pocus” (don’t judge!) and a little movie called “Jurassic Park”, based on the popular novel by the late Michael Crichton, which did for dinosaurs what Spielberg’s own “JAWS” did for sharks,…
“Star Trek: The Experience” (1998-2008) at the Las Vegas Hilton; “Surely, the best of times…”
My apologies for not having new Star Trek content for September 8th, aka “Star Trek Day,” but at the risk of “airing a rerun,” I’d like to take this opportunity to revisit the amazing, sadly long-defunct “Star Trek: The Experience” (1998-2008), which formerly inhabited the Las Vegas Hilton hotel for ten years (1998-2008). I had the…
“Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) is a better sequel than its predecessor deserves…
*****AIRCRAFT CARRIER-SIZED SPOILERS!!***** Danger Zone. 1986’s “Top Gun” isn’t exactly one of my favorite movies, to put it charitably. Back in the late 1980s, I thought it was a dumb, jingoistic US Navy recruitment film smothered in a slick coat of Hollywood production values. “Top Gun” wallowed in action movie cliches and shallow characters; ignoring…
Log entry for Star Trek Las Vegas 2022, aka “The 56-Year Mission”…
The Search for Space? The annual Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas, renamed ‘the 56-Year Mission’ due to a lost license with Paramount/CBS, has returned to Las Vegas, has returned to the strip, but in a different venue this year–Bally’s Hotel and Casino–due to the refurbishment of its traditional host, The Rio, just down the…
The case for Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” (2022)…
******BIG GREEN SPOILERS!!****** Old School Smash. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the comic books and TV series based on Marvel’s “The Incredible Hulk” (1977-1982). The TV series kicked things up a notch by taking the story of latter-day Jekyll & Hyde, Dr. David “Bruce” Banner (an amazing performance by the late…
Scanning all Star Treks (1966-present)…
*****STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS AHEAD!***** With the annual Star Trek Las Vegas convention (aka “the 56 Year Mission”) right around the corner, I thought this might be a good time to take an overview of the entire televised Star Trek franchise. I’d previously examined all of the Star Trek feature films, so I thought I might explore…