Throwback Thursday – ScienceFiction.com

Throwback Thursday: ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ (1974)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 13 May 2021 20:30:10 +0000

Have you ever stumbled across, as an adult, a TV series or movie you used to watch as a kid? Sometimes it fills you with a sense of nostalgia to re-connect with the scenes you remember seeing while you were growing up, but sometimes the experience can also be a rude awakening: can you believe that this sort of thing actually used to entertain you? What were you thinking? There’s always a chance your experience will end negatively instead of positively when re-discovering something from your past that you used to know and love. Recently, I was able to catch up, via the magic of online streaming, with a TV show I watched on the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel during my impressionable years as a young teenager, ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ (streaming for free on the NBC app; available for purchase on the Amazon, Apple+, and Google Play apps). To be clear: when I watched the show in my youth, I was watching it in syndication; the show enjoyed its original short-lived run from 1974-1975, building off the success of two made-for-TV movies about the titular character, Carl Kolchak, a reporter with a penchant for investigating stories of the strange […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 17:30:56 +0000

At first glance, ‘Planet of the Vampires’ could easily be mistaken for just another kitschy ‘60s sci-fi B-movie. But those “in the know” revere this movie as one of the very first crossover horror/sci-fi films, a front-runner for great movies like ‘Alien’ and ‘Event Horizon’ and that’s why it’s this week’s Thowback Thursday, ScienceFiction.com’s ongoing column to great science fiction of the past. Filmed at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, the movie features an international cast and was shot by director Mario Bava on a shoestring budget – but Bava did such a great job of making the film look like a big production that you definitely wouldn’t think otherwise while watching it. In the film, two large interplanetary exploration ships, the Argos and the Galliott, respond to a distress signal originating from the unexplored planet Aura. Upon their attempts to land, both crews become possessed by an unknown force and violently try to kill each other; only through the willpower and efforts of Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan) commander of the Argos, is the Argos’ crew prevented from seriously injuring each other. Upon traversing the treacherous molten terrain of the planet to reach the now-unresponsive Galliott, Argos’ crew discovers that their comrades […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘The Black Cauldron’ (1985)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 16:46:45 +0000

Every so often, a company makes a bold, daring, unorthodox, out-of-the-normal-comfort-zone type of move, and it usually either pays off big for them or sends things crashing down in flames. In the 1960s, Disney was flying high, enjoying a run of success with their animated films that stretched, at that time, three decades long; hits like ‘The Jungle Book,’ ‘101 Dalmatians,’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ had the company feeling they could do no wrong. Then the 1970s came around, and the House of Mouse started to falter with their cartooned family-friendly films: ‘The Aristocats,’ ‘Robin Hood,’ and ‘The Rescuers’ were all successive films that were enjoyable enough, but mostly didn’t land anywhere near the financial and critical successes that their predecessors had. Execs started to panic a bit, and the decision to try something new and different was officially made: Disney’s first-ever not-totally-family-friendly animated film, their first cartoon movie to ever earn a PG rating (and might have even been PG-13 if not for last-minute edits), ‘The Black Cauldron,’ got the green-light. Loosely based on the first two books in the ‘Chronicles of Prydain’ series by author Lloyd Alexander, ‘The Black Cauldron’ tells the tale of Taran, a young pig-keeper from […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra’ (2001)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:13:46 +0000

It’s no secret that I, like many sci-fi and horror fans, have a special place in my heart for the old, ultra-cheesy, often uber-chintzy “B-Movies” of the 1950s and 1960s. With so many fans of this genre out there, odds are good that at least a few are movie directors, right? And possibly among those few directors, it’s even possible that a couple of them actually make movies that don’t suck, yeah? And of those select individuals, is it feasible that one of them may actually have excellent writing and acting skills as well so that he could fully utilize these skills in tandem with his love of B-Movies to create a brilliant and loving homage to the genre? While The Rolling Stones often remind us that “you can’t always get what you want,” fortunately sometimes you can: writer-director-actor Larry Blamire struck gold with his 2001 release of ‘The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,’ an amazingly-detailed and lovingly-satiric take on the old B-Movie. I proudly own a copy and have seen the movie many times over; I’m excited to now bring the film to ScienceFiction.com for our Throwback Thursday action! ‘Lost Skeleton’ blends so many “fantastical” elements soften utilized in the […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Reanimator’ (1985)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 19:42:26 +0000

Straight out of the 1980s came ‘Re-Animator,’ an amazing film that somehow took zombies, gore, comedy, and an unknown cast, threw it all together, and created a one-of-a-kind experience for zombie and horror lovers everywhere. H.P. Lovecraft wrote the serialized story ‘Herbert West: Re-Animator’ back in the early 1920s, proving to be stunningly ahead of his time in his descriptions and depictions of re-animating the dead. Even though the 1985 movie we’re talking about here shares the same name and a few characters and locations, make no mistake: this movie is its own entity, brought to life by the writing team and the performances of its cast, most notably the over-the-top personification of the titular Dr. West played to perfection by Jeffrey Combs. ‘Re-Animator’ is, quite simply, a unique movie-watching experience, not likely to be reproduced any time soon, if ever. ‘Re-Animator’ is old-school fun. From the opening scene with it’s one random zombie through the “it’s over…or is it?” ending, the movie keeps the viewer engaged and wanting more. Sure, the look of the film has gotten a little dated, but that’s part of what makes it grand. ‘Re-Animator’ is a great example of a “splatter film” made in […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Cherry 2000’ (1987)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:04:25 +0000

It’s strange, trying to play the “numbers game.” Here we are, on the final day of the year 2020, talking about a movie that was released in 1987, that featured a plot that was set in 2017, but referenced the number 2000 in it’s title… it’s enough to make even a mathematician’s head swim! The pursuit for the perfect woman has scattered many men to the ends of the Earth trying to find her. The 1980s were no different, of course – and the sci-fi adventures of the era had a great time trying to envision what the future might be like – even trying to predict the faraway time of 2017… In 1988’s ‘Cherry 2000,’ Sam Treadwell found his “perfect girl” and made her his wife. She tells him everything that he wants to hear, is supportive no matter what he does, is ready for sex in a hot minute, and absolutely adores everything about him. Every man’s dream girl, right? One minor catch about all her perfection: she is literally programmed that way. Unfortunately, when his decades-old sexy love-robot blows a fuse that is darn near impossible to replace in the modern circles of 2017, Sam must hire […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘The Black Cauldron’ (1985)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 19:25:11 +0000

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Alien 3’ (1992)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 17:11:40 +0000

When ‘Alien’ was released in 1979, it changed the landscape for both science fiction and horror. ‘Alien’ combined the two genres so well, people wept and fainted from fear in the theater; that’s always a sign of success. A sequel was bound to happen, and when James Cameron’s ‘Aliens’ came out in 1986, it upped the ante for action films and made the fictional Colonial Marines seem as real as the US Army. Both of those movies introduced unforgettable characters, particularly the seemingly undefeatable heroine, Ellen Ripley, played to damn near cinematic perfection by Sigourney Weaver. What happened to the series after that is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. ‘Alien3 ‘ was almost universally reviled by both fans and critics while the fourth film, ‘Alien: Resurrection,’ well… nobody talks about that. Fans sweep ‘Resurrection’ under the rug because of its overwhelming French-ness and the unfortunate casting of Winona Rider as a robot. As modern audiences know, the franchise has been revived recently by stabs at world-building like ‘Prometheus‘ and ‘Alien: Covenant.’ For many fans, that all leaves ‘Alien3 ‘ as arguably the last “true” Alien film – the end of the “classic trilogy,” if you will – yet it is the one […]

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Book Review: ‘Star Wars: Death Troopers’ (2007)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 16:37:19 +0000

It’s a Thursday, and it’s October, the “Halloween Season” …so what’s a combo Star Wars fan/die-hard zombie aficionado like myself supposed to do? Talk about one of the only pieces of media on the planet that crosses the two over, of course! Initially released over a decade ago, when it was firmly in sorta-canon upon its release but now relegated to “Legends” status – and long before ‘Rogue One’ used characters of the same name in its opening sequence – “Star Wars: Death Troopers” is the mixing of a Star Wars story and a zombie horror story. While it sounds amazingly amazing in theory, and indeed is a pretty fun read, as a proud-yet-critical fan of both universes I feel I must be a little, well, critical here. The experience of reading this book feels a little like meeting a supermodel might: your preconceived notions make you insanely excited for the big event, it seems so amazing and perfect from a distance, but after you spend some time with it, you find out that it’s definitely not perfect and you actually end up a little bummed out. The book was written by Joe Schreiber, who has written a few horror […]

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Throwback Thursday: Empty Street at the End of the World: Fulci’s ‘City of the Living Dead (1980)’

Anthony Isaac Bradley — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 15:20:20 +0000

City of the Living Dead isn’t your parent’s grandma’s cousin’s sister’s walking dead. These dead folk have a leader: a priest (Fabrizio Jovine), who hangs himself in the opening scene. Since then, his corpse appears around the city–with rope still taut around his neck–to reanimate the dead for horrific bursts of violence as the city is overcome with mist, and its inhabitants flee for shelter. Lucio Fulci’s film covers one of the famed director’s beloved topics: the end of the world. Winds of a thousand maggots blow through shutters, the little fellas nesting in the actor’s left over 70s hairstyles. Fathers lose their minds, going to extreme lengths to protect their children. The hanged priest stares at a woman so hard that her eyes bleed, and all her insides–and I do mean all–pour from her mouth like a fountain. Yes, like most Fulci films, this one is very graphic. Neither men, women, or children are safe. While some think A Quiet Place or Bird Box when it comes to perceived-pandemics, my mind goes to Day of the Dead, or this film. Fulci underscores emptiness with a city gone dark (is it ever daylight in this film?), extreme close-ups, and zero compassion. In one […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Below’ (2002)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 23:43:02 +0000

After he became a star in the independent film world with ‘Pi’ and ‘Requiem for a Dream’ – but before my mom heard of him thanks to ‘Black Swan’ and ‘The Wrestler’ – Darren Aronofsky co-wrote ‘Below.’ Displaying his fascination with people trapped in nightmarish scenarios of their own making, Aronofsky spins a story about a submarine crew trapped underwater between their enemy on the surface and the horrors of the unknown… uh, below. An American World War II submarine crew, already exhausted and low on supplies from their mission, makes a brief stop to rescue three survivors of a nearby shipwreck. Unfortunately, that moment is enough time for them to be noticed by a German ship, and with no way to defend herself, the sub is forced to submerge. Stuck underwater with a rapidly diminishing stock of important goods like “air,” the crew grows to distrust and fear their passengers and each other as they struggle to escape the dangerous waters. Making things worse is the series of strange occurrences, like a record player that seemingly turns itself on while the crew tries to stay silent to avoid being found by the Germans. As the wait gets more and […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘On The Silver Globe’ (1988)

Anthony Isaac Bradley — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 16:15:42 +0000

This film — should you be lucky enough to see On the Silver Globe — is an exhausting, mad experience. An endurance test, but director Andrzej Jaroszewicz surely intended the film to affect audiences in such a way. I’m not saying it’s a hallmark film of his – his classic movie Possession (1981) takes the title as it breaks me every time I watch it due to the emotional intensity of its lead actors. On the Silver Globe attacked my senses and mental well-being with its harrowing pace and images of mindless war. Noted torturer of audiences, Gaspar Noe, cites Jaroszewicz’s work in his recent film, Climax, for a reason — the two know how to drill into the minds of their viewers, and place something awful there. So what is On the Silver Globe? The Austin Film Society (AFS) (who held the screening I attended) describes the film as “a mystical sci-fi parable of space messiahs and tribal warfare on a faraway planet,” and the film does indeed feel like it’s from another dimension. The locations are barren, with a hue of blue and gray. Wide-open spaces or cavernous tunnels hold horrific secrets. On top of sets and locales, everything […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Resident Evil 4’ (2005)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 22:06:24 +0000

Ah, the glory days of the Nintendo Wii, arguably the first wide-scale release of the groundbreaking three-dimensional “movement control” aesthetic of using your full body to effectively play video games, not just a controller. Nowadays, it seems like most gaming systems – our cell phones included – incorporate this aspect of gameplay in some form or another, but back when the Wii was launched in 2006, it was truly a singular experience. When I got a Wii in 2006, one of the first games I bought for it was Resident Evil 4, and the game holds the distinction of being the first video game I ever played (and beat!) that heavily involved zombies, and I may have spoiled myself by setting the bar so high. It’s visually stunning, incredibly challenging, and actually has a storyline that engages the player from start to finish, a feat that not all games can accomplish, and certainly not a ton of the dreck that was coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The game was initially available for play on the GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2005 and was soon afterwards released on PC, the iPhone, and the Nintendo Wii. The Wii […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Red State’ (2010)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 01:58:10 +0000

It can be a mixed bag when a “genre” director makes a foray into a category that he/she has never tried before. For example, no one is stopping Rob Zombie from making a romantic comedy, but one has to wonder what the success of that film would look like. Heck, I even wonder what the title would look like – ‘The Devil’s Roses’? ‘House of 1,000 Delightful Misunderstandings’? There was a time, exactly a decade ago, when Kevin Smith had only ever made “Kevin Smith-style comedy” movies. It was with great intrigue at the time, then, that he took a very direct and intentional tonal shift. The man best known to his fans as “Silent Bob” effectively turned things on its ear with the release of ‘Red State,’ a horror film with serious undertones of social commentary. Smith is known to both casual movie-goers and his legions of hard-core fans as the comedic mastermind behind cult classics like ‘Clerks,’ ‘Chasing Amy,’ ‘Dogma,’ and ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.’ But ‘Red State’ sees Smith take things in a whole new direction, something that can most closely be approximated to the horror genre. By Smith’s own admission, the film isn’t exactly […]

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956)

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 21:34:24 +0000

‘Forbidden Planet’ is a science-fiction film made more than half a century ago that helped to define an era. Remembered for its fantastic characters and advanced special effects, it is now considered a cult classic. The movie was directed by Fred M. Wilcox, and written by Cyril Hume, based on a short story by Irving Block. (It’s also been widely reported that the film is loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Just sayin’!) The special effects team was made up of A. Arnold Gillespie, Joshua Meador, Warren Newcombe, and Irving G. Ries. Set in the 23rd century, the film opens aboard the starship C57-D, captained by Commander J. J. Adams (played in all seriousness by the late, great Leslie Nielsen). They are approaching the planet Altair; a colony was supposedly established on the planet some twenty years earlier. When they near, the crew is warned by Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), who is one of two surviving colony members, not to land. However, Adams and crew proceed with their plans and land the ship. Met by Robby the Robot, they are taken to Dr. Morbius’ home where they meet his beautiful daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). As the movie progresses, conflict on […]

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