Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Have you ever noticed how frightening the absurd can be? The less something holds with what we regard as the operating standards of reality, the more it troubles us, especially when the situation is personally, rather than communally, affecting.
Them!
You’d be challenged to find a more gripping, immersive first 15 minutes from a horror movie than what we get with Them! (1954).
The Blob
More an homage than a direct remake, Chuck Russell’s The Blob is distinctly ’80s but with a ’50s soul.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
It’s a lovely day, and there you are motoring with your lady on the way back to your laboratory, where you keep hunks of flesh alive, when you get into a nasty wreck that slices her head clean off.
I Come in Peace
Part of the Channel 11 Saturday Afternoon Movies canon, I Come in Peace (released outside the U.S. as Dark Angel) is the third-best Al Leong Christmas movie (after Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, of course) and may have the most explosions of any Christmas movie ever.
Altered States
Adapted by Network scenarist Paddy Chayefsky from his only novel, Altered States (1980) is an unusual work of mainstream psychedelic science fiction, one that posits the unfettered mind as an engine of radical corporeal transformation.
Monolith
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home. But the young woman, credited simply as “the interviewer”—we learn her subjects’ names but never her own—refuses to be defeated.
Starman
John Carpenter has often turned to the horrors of science fiction, most brilliantly in The Thing (1982) and They Live (1988), and also in his Village of the Damned remake (1995), Ghosts of Mars (2001), and his more humorous feature debut, Dark Star (1974).
Planet of the Vampires
Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off, and its hypnotic sound turned way up.
Nr. 10
From its opening image of ocean waves stuttering slowly behind a sheet of steely rain to its final vista of human detritus turned into cosmic junk, Nr. 10 seems determined above all to enter and exit every scene in medias res.