Monday, March 18, 2024

Tag: sci-fi

Scared to Death
Ostensibly a forgettable creature feature, Scared to Death is noteworthy as an egregious case of W.M.H.S. (White Male Hero Syndrome). That’s when an otherwise bland, unlikable, undeserving character is elevated to hero status just because he’s a White man -- sort of like how Rudy Giuliani became "America's Mayor"...
Nope
*OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING* With the release of Jordan Peele’s eagerly anticipated third film, Nope, it’s fair to say that his filmmaking style has been established. A Peelian movie is horror-skewed genre fare that seeks to entertain but also convey underlying social commentary -- directly or indirectly racial in nature and...
Storage 24
A year or so after Attack the Block was released, another British sci-fi horror film with a black protagonist fighting an alien invasion came out -- with less spectacular results. Noel Clarke stars in Storage 24 as Londoner Charlie, who’s down in the dumps after his girlfriend Shelley (Antonia...
Black Box
Buried within an avalanche of horror offerings featuring black folks during the Halloween 2020 season (including Antebellum, Bad Hair, His House, Spell, Vampires vs. the Bronx, Don’t Look Back, Synchronic and Kindred, plus family offerings The Witches and A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting and the ubiquitous TV series...
Friend of the World movie poster
Friend of the World is an odd, interesting little movie that defies easy categorization from the perspective of both genre -- combining horror, sci-fi, heady drama and even brief comedy -- and length -- clocking in at a short-film-with-feature-aspirations 50 minutes. Even its format is hard to pin down;...
Into the Dark: Crawlers
Aside from being a reliable source of quality holiday horror entertainment over the past year and a half, Hulu’s feature film anthology series Into the Dark has low-key become an inclusive showcase for women of color, who have starred in at least one-third of the episodes so far, including...
Critters 4
For a while, it seemed that the go-to move for an established film franchise that had reached a shark-jumping level of creative desperation was to shoot it into outer space -- the cinematic equivalent of a family sitcom adding a baby into the mix. James Bond, Hellraiser, Airplane, Leprechaun,...
Coleville
Square-jawed white guy Jake (Andrew Brooks Gagne) is having a bad day. First, he wakes up late for his job interview. Then, his car won't start, so he hops a train...and immediately falls asleep, missing his stop. Did I mention he’s also forgotten his phone? It seems punctuality and...
Attack the Block
Although it received widespread critical acclaim, I feel like Attack the Block hasn't really gotten the props it deserves. I don't mean just as a cult fave -- it's debatable whether it's even achieved that status -- but frankly, as one of the best horror movies of the 21st...
The Cloverfield Paradox
The Cloverfield Paradox had been on the radar for some time (known initially as God Particle) when, on Super Bowl Sunday 2018, amidst the ads for carbonated beverages and fashionably edible laundry detergent, the world was shocked by a commercial announcing that the movie was now available on Netflix....