Lima

In terms of pure craftsmanship, it's pretty good (it has an impressive setting in a post-apocalyptic world), but my question is about the literary source: who writes these verbal diarrhea and, more importantly, who reads them? “Twilight”, “Divergence”, “Labyrinth”, “Hunger Games”, just one literary crap after another, all obviously intended for teenage readers whose mental world I don't understand and don't want to.

Edward L. Cahn wasn't a bad filmmaker, he made some very decent films, and some utter crap, and this one stands somewhere in between. The deadly monster, coming out of the sea, is good, the costume is convincing, and the plot around it is quite genre-bearable (in the context of the time, that is), though of course ridiculously stupid. Cahn carries it off quite well, Dr. Lombardi has an impressive villainous charisma, and since he’s on screen a lot, the 70 minutes are quite easy to sit through. It's a pity that the main good guy is such a schmuck and the actor, Lance Fuller, is so bad, which stands out in contrast with the character of Lombardi. And the unfailing certainty (in the negative sense of the word) Tom Conway is once again a pain in the ass, when the monster catches him at the end, you almost feel satisfaction :o)

The intention to make the best sci-fi horror film possible is evident but futile. There's the occasional Hitchcock rip-off, with the camera taking interesting angles and shots, and at times it's unintentionally funny. Without exception, the actors are all terrible, the actresses who play the victims of the mad scientist and his employer have terrible accents, you won't believe them at all, and the werewolf is rather laughable. Production-wise, it's no big deal, because 95% of the time we don't leave the location of one house where the human duplication lab is and where everything important happens. Mascelli often fails to lead the actors and they play like in a small town amateur theatre, which is probably my biggest complaint. One of the victims is supposed to play a woman with a cat brain, so she adopts cat-like behavior and gesticulation, but instead of a cat woman, she comes across as high. The story isn't completely stupid, it's a classic horror plot, but the film has no charisma, it's a failed and unentertaining B-movie – with terrible music as an unsolicited bonus.

Poster tagline: MONSTERS WALK THE EARTH IN RAVISHING RAMPAGE OF CLAWING FURY!!! I've seen both versions, including the newer one, edited differently and with added scenes for American audiences, and I definitely recommend the older one, it has a more straightforward take on the subject, the newer version doesn't benefit from the added scenes, they dilute it and the introduction with John Carradine is completely unnecessary. Otherwise, good. I appreciate the fact that it was filmed on proper locations in northern Sweden, the actors are likeable and play well (especially the main female character won me over with her spontaneity), the music is of unusually high quality for a B-movie, the aliens and the monster look fine, the monster attack on the Laplander village, despite the rudimentary effects, is not lacking in impact, and the two scenes where the film looks like an instructional video about skiing in the Arctic Circle didn't spoil the experience. Only the ending is rather rushed and botched, as if the filmmakers suddenly ran out of budget. And an important notice: watch it only in a high-quality screen, as half the film takes place in the dark, at night, and in poorer picture conditions the characters and surroundings blur together. I attribute the unflattering reviews of some colleagues here to the longer American version, which is really not good.

I understand that it's hard to come up with something new when it comes to adapting a PC game, especially when you've got Blizzard's watchful eye on your back, and the thousands of fans who've spent hundreds of hours in WoW. Even so, the filmmakers could still have delivered more than just a recycled dumb fantasy cliché that you’ll immediately discard because you've seen it in plenty of other movies, computer games, or read it in the weaker fantasy titles that bookstores are full of. I was going to write exactly what Cervenak wrote, but he beat me to it, so I'll just repeat it - any 10 minutes of The Hobbit is more fun than 2 hours of Warcraft. I’m not going to mince words, it was boring.

Poster tagline: SHOCKING SENSATION!!! SEE THE MOST AMAZING OF ALL RITUALS IN THE TEMPLE OF LOVE!!! SEE THE SUPERSONIC THRILL OF HURTLING THROUGH SPACE TOWARDS A LOST PLANET!!! SEE THE FIRE MAIDENS, DESTINED FOR ONE PURPOSE – THE CREATION OF A NEW RACE OF SUPERHUMANS!!! I've seen about 200 films from the Golden Age, and I'd put this one in the top 10. A clear tip for local fans who don't hesitate to give 1* or Boo! to mainstream films, you’d be speechless. Everything is bad here. The direction is completely off, the shots are stretched to fill time (a secretary walks down the stairs for 10 seconds, pulls her chair up to write a note, tucks her chair away for 5 seconds, and walks up the stairs again for 10 seconds, all that in a single shot). The actors routinely stare at the camera when they're supposed to be acting scared, some of them are obviously laughing, the extras honestly stare and stare for a long time, the girls – the Jupiternians – dance and dance....and dance, the routine activities are stretched out in one take and the runtime swells and swells to make it at least the 80 minutes it needs to be, and even that's too much. The sets are non-existent, except for one room with decorations and a static view of the spaceship. There are no special effects, not even any of the famous rear projection, even though they would fit here, and the shot of the spacecraft stationary on Jupiter is a scanned photo. From a technical point of view, it's rubbish. During the launch and the flight, the astronauts sit comfortably in their chairs, as if they were watching football in the living room, untethered, wearing only white medical gowns, the rocket is controlled by a steering wheel and two levers, and because there was no money, no one bothered with the decorations of Jupiter, so the surface of the planet is an ordinary Central European landscape, and quite ugly and dull at that, overgrown with bushes. They talk about the land of New Atlantis, its lake, its temple, but you don't see any of that because the budget probably was spent on catering. Thank God for the monster (a skinny guy in a black jumpsuit with a hockey mask), it's funny, so at least you can laugh in between banging your head against the wall. Ed Wood gets demonized here on FilmBooster, but folks, compared to this, he’s Fellini. I had the "privilege" of seeing the HD version, yes even these obscure titles are being remastered.

It's garishly colored, cluttered, but without any Pokémon. What is this?

Unique. It's as if the cameraman had been transported back several centuries in a time machine and filmed the feelings of a family in isolation in the middle of the dark woods. Everything is subordinated to these feelings of the time – the archaic language, the great piety that permeated every individual back then, the fear of the unknown, the fear even of the forest next to you, where evil, evil spirits and witches were believed to reside. Because faith in Christ and fear of the powers of hell was everything at that time, the whole film is permeated with pious talk, prayers and irrational behaviour, which – as it seems from the reviews here – the dull-witted population, without knowledge of the historical context and dumbed down by the mainstream, will not appreciate. The rest of us give it a thumbs up, because such period parables, where the author drew from written sources of the time, bringing to life the witch trials and the mindset of pious people, are a rarity in today's cinemas. It's just a shame about the overly suggestive ending, if the author had had the balls to drive it through the simple "psychosis" of one frightened family, I would applaud even more. And Anna Taylor-Joy? You’ll be hearing a lot about her, trust me!

Poster tagline: THE ENEMY THAT DOOMS THE NATION LIES HIDDEN UNDER THE NORTH POLE!!! IN THEATRES TOMORROW, YOU’LL BE THERE!!! I don't share the sheer enthusiasm of my favourite colleagues here. The reason for the amphibious flying saucer appearing at regular intervals at the North Pole, as well as the impaling of the Cyclops by a submarine, seemed rather far-fetched, even by the standards of the B-movies of the time. Likewise the undisguised advocacy of weaponry in the final seconds was a bit too much, but otherwise it’s alright. I don't mind the slightly clumsy submarine and flying saucer models (I know a number of clumsier effects from that time), the real footage is tastefully incorporated, the one-eyed alien sitting in a giant sphere is absolutely adorable, as are his fluent English reasons for wanting to colonize Earth, the effects of the destruction of two characters in radiation look good. And the actors? Apart from Tom Conway, who traditionally pissed me off in his overwrought pose, the others did their jobs reliably. In other words, they don’t know how to act very much, but it gets lost here.

I really don't remember ever seeing in a movie an actor devouring food, then throwing it up and the colleague sitting next to him grabbing the vomit and finishing it with gusto – all that without a cut, in one continuous shot. Even a little detail like that just goes to show that Asians are, well, different. The legendary Shaw Brothers studio came up with a film that is a bit out of their league. It's partly a traditional martial arts story, but most of it is a big mess with occult, magical scenes, with gore elements that are interestingly stylized so you can't even take them seriously. The result is, in sum, a mix of traditional Western horror and Asian mysticism. There's so much crazy imagery that it's impossible to remember – tarantulas drinking squashed brains with straws, crocodiles attacking skulls, bats disintegrating, reptiles of various forms trying to be scary, statues coming to life, bodily metamorphoses of all kinds, etc. etc. In short, a round of applause for the director's imagination. The story is perhaps not even important, though there is a clumsy effort at one, and everything culminates in a twenty-minute WTF fight between two wizards over a rare Buddhist relic, in a style that is beyond my imagination.