Driving Miss Daisy—

The debate is ended if you just look at 'Poltergeist'—it reeks of Spielberg. The easy, naturalistic direction of the children (which was a Spielberg trademark at the time), the situation of the story in a family in the suburbs (all but down the block from the action of 'E.T.'), the flawless setpieces (My favorite is…

"the first "alien monster"…

I'm not saying 'Tremors' and 'Fright Night' aren't good—but I would argue that they are both more heavily Comedic (Camp even) than Horrific which is why I put 'Shawn of the Dead' on the fence—'Slither' works for me though and now 'Gremilins' too, but not 'Return of the Living Dead' which I don't find scary or even…

Me too, treefingers—but actions have consequences, and the "correcting" is not always experienced as a positive thing in the moment (see also: The Black Plague—to which we owe our fabulous European Renaissance). At any rate, all this is not likely to occur in my lifetime (or all at once anyway), but now I sure do hope…

I'll bet dollars to donuts that 9 out of 10 unwieldy Sci Fi titles are quotes from poets—many of them from "visionary" poets like Blake or Yeats, or Shakespeare. It's my sense that due to some kind of inferiority complex, Sci Fi and Fantasy writers of a certain generation liked to align themselves with what they…

"40 baht a pop"

"more like Morricone"

'Motel Hell' is a parody of (literally) grindhouse Horror movies and what has come to be called Hicksploitation. If you don't try to take it for the real thing it's very entertaining.

Most Sci-Fi plotlines in the right hands could yield either a great movie or a piece of shit—and has.

Lee Marvin in anything—but especially opposite Toshiro Mifune in 'Hell in the Pacific'.

I think 'American Werewolf in London' is one of a very few Horror Comedies to be completely successful at both. I'm thinking 'Ginger Snaps', 'Evil Dead II', 'Shawn of the Dead' (although, it's not really that scary) maybe 'The Vampire's Kiss' (It's been a while though— I wonder if that last one isn't really more of…

Thing One & Thing Two
'The Thing' was also derided unfairly at the time as a 'Alien' in the Antarctic because it had a similarly day, cluastrophobic setting, a crew of older, distinctly blue collar characters, and a creature that combined the Alien trope with graphic Body Horror effects—which at that time was a…

Another Mad Magazine feature: Sci Fi Thriller Remakes We'd Like to See Now that Technology Has Caught up With Them Enough to Make Them Almost Plausible :

Yeah, but it could never quite beat Czechosolvakia, could it:

Sum Guy—The thing is, I don't care about the politics of it. If I did I wouldn't be so resigned to its inevitability. The fact is that the Left is still working under the delusion that something we do now can change a process that has already begun (and that's not up for debate except on Fox news) while the Right is…

Outside there's a rape machine. I'd go outside if it'd look the other way—you wouldn't believe the things thay do…

I tried gin the way it's served in 1984, with cloves floating in it. Not so good—and I'm a gin fan. I wrote it up more completely elsewhere, but the biggest aspect of the Proles lives is that their country is at war with some other nation—always has been and always will be. You might not be surprised to learn that a…

I know it's not exactly the same, but I read that and saw this at roughly the same time in junior high:

Woody Allen may have gotten that from an even older source—as maybe Sellers did too. Allen got a lot of his early off the wall slapstick material (and much of his verbal wit) from the Marx Brothers.