Poor Aeryn and Pilot suffer some terrible abuse in one of the best episodes of Farscape’s first season. One of the more effective showcases for the Jim Henson company’s puppetry, it’s also an effective bit of body horror while adding another painful layer to the characters’ various troubles finding a place in any kind…

Sometimes, family and social coercion can pressure a woman to marry. Less often, she’s kidnapped and forced to assume the identity of a dead woman as in 1945's My Name is Julia Ross. It’s a fascinating and weird little gothic melodrama.

I looked at the news around the time I awoke at 4am yesterday and then not again until late in the afternoon. During that time, one of the things I was doing was reading Dracula again, and, has it often does when I re-read that book, the incredible amount of death impressed me. There’s so much of it that’s typically…

Happy Birthday to my fellow Aries, Maisie Williams, and congratulations on having been in a pretty decent premiere to Game of Thrones, season eight last night. That’s the most expensive show on television, aren’t you lucky? But despite the show still moving generally away from the character drama it used to be to…

The Eighth Doctor’s first independent audio series concluded in 2007 with the two part story Human Resources. What starts as a fairly amusing homage to The Office turns halfway through into a pretty effective encounter with one of the Doctor’s classic foes.

I liked the new Star Wars teaser. Looks like they’re definitely walking very briskly away from the “Kill the past” meme. The name Skywalker is even in the title. But is it Rey? Maybe the idea will be that a “Skywalker” isn’t a hereditary name but something conferred on off-spring of the midichlorians? Probably not,…

I liked last night’s new Orville but I admire its intentions more than its execution. Written by Joe Menosky, “Sanctuary” combines and reconfigures many contemporary issues to allow the viewer to contemplate the fundamental ideas and concepts with hopefully as little prejudice as possible. More than ever, I feel…

How do you kill Don Quixote? Many people may suspect Terry Gilliam’s 2019 film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is about the death of the human imagination at the hands of a cynical film industry. But this mad, funny, and brilliant film is more complex than that. The wit and intelligence, the unbridled creativity at…

Farscape contemplates acts of vengeance and violence when a sadistic wizard brings Crais and Crichton together. Zhaan struggles with her own repressed sadism which she finds she must tap into in order help Crichton as well as save the population of an entire planet.

I’d been in the mood for some good fantasy fiction lately and rarely have one of my wishes been granted more efficiently and effectively than when I read the new Sirenia Digest last night. “Which Describes a Looking-Glass and the Broken Fragments”, the new story by Caitlin R. Kiernan contained in the Digest, takes its…

The conflict between the English and the Vikings is the product of a wicked Scotsman in 1961's Erik the Conqueror (Gil Invasori). Sort of a remake of the 1958 American film The Vikings, this one’s directed by Mario Bava with lots of colourful lighting and some really beautiful outdoor shots. The story becomes oddly…

The Eighth Doctor takes notice of his companion’s butt in the 2007 audio play No More Lies. “Always looking at my bum,” says Lucie when the Doctor tells her to mind her backside before wandering into a confrontation with a wicked time traveller named Zimmerman. It’s a time loop story but without the usual repeated…

After being a joke for most of Farscape’s first six episodes, Rygel’s bodily fluids suddenly take on unexpectedly serious thematic power in an episode that deals with the lasting effects of long term abuse. At the same time, the relationship between Aeryn and Crichton starts to look more like romance because he has a…

Vincent Price tries his hand at witchfinding again in 1970's Cry of the Banshee, a movie that has nothing to do with banshees. It’s closer to the movie audiences might have been expecting 1968's Witchfinder General to have been, with Price as a corrupt magistrate up against a forest coven of pagan witches. There’s an…

An angel falls from Heaven and is reborn in Hell in 2019's Alita: Battle Angel. What a nice surprise to find Milton references in this movie which I was already eager to see because I like Robert Rodriguez and anime. There are some superficial problems I had with the screenplay but for the most part I was delighted to…

Keep the working class sedated and maybe they won’t figure out the giant turnips they’ve been pulling out of the ground are being used for nefarious purposes. It’s a simple socio-economic allegory but this episode of Farscape works primarily because of character interactions and, as usual, the visuals.

It was Christopher Walken’s birthday on Sunday so I was in the mood to watch one of his movies. 1983's The Dead Zone was right there on my shelf so I watched that. It’s with my other David Cronenberg DVDs and Blu-Rays—The Dead Zone is one I don’t watch very often I suppose because when I’m in the mood for Cronenberg I…

We all know how the world works, or we think we do. Misunderstandings based on natural errors as well as some based on lifelong ideas about how the world works tragically dominate the events portrayed in 2004's In My Father’s Den. The first and only film from New Zealand director Brad McGann, who died of cancer in…

Doctor Who stories about beings that feed on specific emotions seem to be numerous enough that the 2007 Eighth Doctor audio play, Phobos, parses the suitable emotional fodder to being quite a lot of fear, but not too much fear, and always mingled with a certain amount of euphoria. The writer, Eddie Robson, was only 29…

The powerful owner of a shipping company is murdered and only the legendary Mr. Wong can solve the mystery in 1940's Doomed to Die. Part of a series of B movies in which Boris Karloff played the famous Chinese detective, it’s a cheap production and a peculiar—and amusing—mixture of hard nosed dialogue and almost…