The Sacred Texts. As a lifelong fan of sci-fi movies, I’ve long collected books, magazines and, more recently, videos all about the making-of sci-fi and other movies. My first magazine I remember collecting was Forry Ackerman’s “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” and I would later graduate to Starlog, Cinemafantastique, Sci-Fi Universe, and others, including several British…
Tag: ALIEN
From Mechanic to Messiah: Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021)…
Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021). With his wife at his side, longtime actor Yaphet Kotto passed away on March 15th in the Philippines at the age of 81. He was one of those character actors I’d always hoped to meet someday, but this hope is sadly gone. At an imposing 6 ft. 3 inches tall, Kotto brought…
San Diego Comic Con 2019 Megapost 2: Star Trek, Space Command, and a BIG shark…
Lessons learned; the ecstasy and agony. The first lesson of San Diego Comic Con attendance should be choose where to spend your time wisely. Try to sift through what sounds good versus what has real substance. Of course, it’s difficult to say what is actually worth your while until you’re actually there, right? It’s a…
San Diego Comic Con 2019 MegaPost: Preview Night and Cosplay…
San Diego Comic Con 2019 (the 50th anniversary) is once again upon us, and the crowds (limited to around 130,000 now) once again make this glorious, wildly over-the-top celebration of pop culture feel like a curious mix of “The Wizard Of Oz” and “Soylent Green.” Preview Night. Cosplay. Cosplay is the soul of these conventions….
For its 40th anniversary, “ALIEN” lands in New Jersey as a high school play!
Way back when I was in high school (right around the time of the first cave paintings) I was in our school’s drama club. Even though I had no real intention of ever becoming an actor (though one of my classmates did), it helped me build a little self-confidence and overcome a fear of public…
ALIEN (1979) is still a ‘perfect organism’ after 40 years…
Spring of 1979. A new, post-Star Wars, R-rated science fiction movie was in theatrical release, and it is to my great regret that, as then-12 year old kid, I didn’t see it in those days. Don’t get me wrong; I really really wanted to see it. I eagerly read every article about Ridley Scott’s scary…
Retro-Musings: 1966’s “Queen of Blood” shares plenty of hemoglobin with “ALIEN”…
In the 1960s, legendary guerrilla-filmmaking producer Roger Corman (whose protégés would include Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Jonathan Demme, Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron) imported several high-end Soviet-era science fiction movies, which he recut using American-shot scenes, actors and English-language dubbing. This was a practice similar to what was done to Ishiro Honda’s 1954 atomic-bomb allegory…
ALIEN Covenant: In space, no one can hear you rip off your old ideas…
Just saw ALIEN Covenant this afternoon, and from the title of this blog entry you can probably surmise that I was less-than-dazzled by the latest offering from Sir Ridley Scott. Being a huge fan of Scott’s brilliant 1979 original “ALIEN,” his visually immersive “Blade Runner” (1982) and his spirited epic “The Martian” (2015) I was…
Where did the once-brilliant ALIEN franchise go so wrong?
With the imminent release of “ALIEN: Covenant” (coming in May) I wanted to discuss the ALIEN franchise in general. But I became more intrigued by this question: at what point did this once brilliant franchise go so wrong? The first two films are unabashed classics. As ALIENS director James Cameron has said, ‘the first movie…
To Sir John Hurt, with love…
Famed, Oscar-nominated British actor Sir John Hurt passed away only last week (just a few days after his 77th birthday). He was one of my favorite character actors over the last few decades, and he became a favorite of mine almost without me realizing it, by stealthily disappearing into each new role. I won’t go…