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It’s a bit surprising to consider that nearly as many years have elapsed since John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi thriller The Thing as between it and its own predecessor, 1951’s The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks. Both are widely considered to be classics in the sci-fi horror genres, so a third version has [...]

Imagine the young people in Logan’s Run dropping dead when they hit thirty instead of being executed and you have the basic idea for In Time, writer/director Andrew Niccol’s sleek sci-fi effort starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried that manages to overcome lackluster acting and poor plot development thanks to its [...]

If you want to get technical about it, director Shawn Levy’s Real Steel is not an official adaptation of the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game, but it may as well be, because I can’t imagine any other film employing the admittedly silly idea of boxing robots being as wholly enjoyable as [...]

Just so we’re clear, Guillermo del Toro didn’t direct this big screen version of a 1973 TV movie. He co-wrote and, as with 2007’s The Orphanage, produced it. I mention this so you don’t think him responsible for what turns out to be an unscary little horror flick.

The original Planet of the Apes franchise, spanning five films from the original 1968 Charlton Heston movie to 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, was equal parts science fiction and social satire. It turned out that people wearing chimp costumes were remarkably versatile in service of the latter goal, making [...]

The mixing of the Western and sci-fi genres is nothing new. It goes back at least as far as when Singing Cowboy Gene Autry descended into the super-advanced underground civilization of Murania in the kooky but fun 1935 serial The Phantom Empire. Over the years, it’s been done with varied success, ranging from [...]

If, like me, you’ve been both fascinated and unnerved by the recent articles describing neutrinos that may be travelling faster than the speed of light, you may also have developed a new, less skeptical view of things previously filed under “science fiction,” or at least are no [...]

In 1958, an 11-year old kid in Scottsdale, Arizona borrowed his dad’s 8-mm movie camera to fulfill the requirements of the Boy Scouts’ photography merit badge. His first film was a western in which the big special effect was a staged crash of his Lionel model train set. He caught [...]

Playing writer Robert E. Howard’s fictional warrior convincingly requires one to possess big muscles, skill with a sword and, apparently, a thick Austrian accent. Because while Jason Momoa, who assumes the title role in this new version of Conan the Barbarian, meets the first two requirements, the film suffers immeasurably for [...]