Sometimes reading throws up odd sychronicities – and my experience of reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both sf (alt-history) and the crime thriller in one book) came shortly after I’d finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both […]
This is a book that, for me, ended up being more than the sum of its parts. There was quite a lot here that I found disappointing, at first, but as McDonald interleaves the three different plot threads across three different worlds/times I found myself being drawn by the story and worrying less about the […]
I finished reading Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It’s a wonderful book – a straightforward action-adventure story in the very old style but lifted way into the stratosphere by Chabon’s mastery of language.
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?
The Night Caller From Outer Space (1965) AKA Blood Beast From Outer Space proves that not just American girls are threatened by the lustful advances of alien beasts. Martin McGrath leaves humming the theme tune, over and over and over…
If you are going to build an enormously destructive weapon, then please follow the rules laid out in The Mouse That Roared. Make it warble alarmingly when it moves, place an alarm clock inside it to scare people and make it small enough to throw around a papier-mâché dungeon.
Adventure! Mysterious lands! Dinosaurs! Huge, impressive beards! The Lost World might be nearly 80 years old, but this movie has it all. It even has Arthur Conan Doyle. And he’s typing!