Down, but not out… As with WonderCon 2025, this year’s WonderCon was scaled-down even further, with no ‘big ticket’ panels or new movies or TV shows to promote. I expected at least one behind-the-scenes panel for this spring’s newest blockbuster, “Project Hail Mary,” but sadly, there was nothing. Not even a Rocky plushie. Even on…
Tag: ALIENS
“ALIEN: Romulus” is a well-crafted miscellany of the ALIEN franchise’s greatest hits……
******SPACE STATION-SIZED SPOILERS!****** After my deep disappointment with the last two installments of the ALIEN franchise (“Prometheus,” “Covenant”) another ALIEN movie has burst from the chests and brains of director/cowriter Fede Álvarez. Like “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “ALIEN: Romulus” (2024) feels conspicuously designed for a younger audience (as is most everything these…
San Diego Comic Con 2024: Marvel and Star Trek and drones! Oh my…
San Diego Comic Con 2024: Welcome Back! This year’s San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is in the rearview mirror now, and once again, it was (as usual) another grand, exhausting celebration of pop culture. As a now 20-year veteran of SDCC, I do not camp out all night in lines hoping to get seats to…
Zack Snyder returns to zombieland with “Army of the Dead” (2021)…
*****VAULT OF SPOILERS AHEAD!!***** Las Vegas and zombies. Sounds like a comedy-horror marriage made in an all-night chapel with an Elvis impersonator doing the ceremony. What could’ve been a witty zom-com like “Shaun of the Dead” or “Zombieland” goes for lower hanging action-movie fruit. The result feels more like a grounded “Con Air,” but with…
“ALIENS” (1986) took a lone monster and turned it into an army…
Haunted House In Space. Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror masterpiece “ALIEN” took a simple, 1950s ‘monster on a spaceship’ B-movie story and wrapped it in glossy, A-movie production design and quality. Its status among fans has since become legendary, on a par with horror films such as “The Exorcist” and “Psycho” as well as sci-fi…
The Twilight Zone meets The X-Files in “The Vast of Night” (2020)…
*****FLYING SAUCER SHAPED SPOILERS AHEAD!!**** Despite the COVID-19 semi-quarantine, I haven’t really sampled many of the newer movies currently available for streaming, but there was one curious title that caught my eye; director/cowriter Andrew Patterson’s “The Vast of Night” (2020), a film recently purchased for streaming on Amazon Prime Video. From what I’d heard, the…
Still crazy after all these years; why I continue to collect physical media…
… and the answer to the title question is: I have no idea. But I can explain the symptoms of the madness, if not the reason. It began with audio. As a kid, seemingly millions of years ago, I remember buying my first album; John Williams’ stirring soundtrack to “Star Wars.” It was a beauty,…
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…