It is a cliché to argue that science fiction is never about the future but always about the time in which it is made. Yet, as with many a cliché, there is often a nugget of truth beneath the grimy accumulation of lazy associations. So it was hard to watch the range of films that […]
Includes reviews of Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010), One Hundred Mornings (2009), Zenith (2010), Gantz (2011) and Super (2010) [p5-6] I love B-movies. That’s why, while most of the rest of the country was sitting down to ogle the frocks and sigh at kisses on a balcony on royal wedding day, I was in a dark […]
Jonathan McCalmont’s always provocative SF Diplomat blog has published an interesting piece on Iron Man. His reading of early Iron Man as a straightforward, modernist, anti-communist hero is perfectly defensible, but I’ve felt there was always something more to Iron Man/Tony Stark’s character that, typical of the work of Stan Lee, has meant that there […]
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (lauded as a masterpiece pretty much everywhere, except here). I think Asher is far too harsh on The Road – at the very least it is a beautiful exercise in sparse writing that creates a genuinely uncomfortable sense of dread in many passages. His complaint about crimes […]
Watching 300 last week it struck me how, like most things, pretty much everything everyone thinks they know about Sparta is wrong. Like, for example, everyone knows the Spartans were uniquely cruel in exposing children to the elements if they were considered weak.
(Part one is here) One of the very strangest things about the representation of Sparta in 300 is the treatment of the Ephors. If you’ve seen the film then you’ll know that they are portrayed as twisted and mis-shapen mystics, a kind of ancient race living high on a mountaintop above the Spartan city who […]
This issue we descend further into the pits of hell to bring Matrix readers the bad and the ugly in science ficton film. Join us as we reach a new level of terror and explore the tortured mind of troubled auteur Roy “Chubby” Brown through his seminal 1993 masterwork U.F.O. The Movie.
The Wicksboro Incident (2003) is “inspired” by The Blair Witch Project in much the same way that a drunk pissing his name in the snow is “inspired” by Picasso. And it is proof that low budgets don’t always mean smart film-making and better imagination. Watch it and see if you can guess which of the […]
If the bomb had dropped in the early 1960s the English middle class would have been thoroughly inconvenienced — getting a decent cup of tea was going to be bloody hard if all the best china had been smashed for a start.
1988’s The Seventh Sign is a film in the tradition of Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen, but, y’know, rubbish. No one who acted in this film has been heard of since 1995. Is it cursed?