Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom: Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Uberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti. In World War II Italy, four fascist libertines round up nine adolescent boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of physical, mental, and sexual torture. There’s a message here, but I’m struggling to find it among all the gratuitous acts of violence and disgust. It’s on many of the “could never be made today” lists, and for good reason, there’s not much story, no character progressions, no real story structure, and the ending is just when...

Foundation: Created by Josh Friedman, David S. Goyer. With Lou Llobell, Jared Harris, Lee Pace, Leah Harvey. A complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. It’s been famously said that the “Foundation” book series could never be adopted to television, and for the most part they were right. Not that this isn’t a good series, it is in fact, one of the best science fictions stories on TV right now, but because what they’ve filmed is just different enough from the source material that I would consider it...

Black Friday: Directed by Casey Tebo. With Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Ryan Lee, Stephen Peck. A group of toy store employees must protect each other from a horde of parasite infected shoppers. Bruce Campbell is here, but this is definitely not a Bruce Campbell starring film, he’s just of many in a cast of employees forced to straight up murder black Friday shoppers when they’re infected with some form of a rage / “thing” virus. It’s a typical lower budgets but fun horror film, so if you’re into single location horror that includes Bruce Campbell, this might be right up...

Cowboy Bebop: Created by Christopher L. Yost. With John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, Elena Satine. A ragtag crew of bounty hunters chases down the galaxy’s most dangerous criminals. They’ll save the world – for the right price. I didn’t watch the original Cowboy Bebop back when it originally came out, just never came into my orbit. I had the opportunity to watch it a couple years ago, took that opportunity, and was underwhelmed with what I experienced. I’m sure if I had seen it 30 years ago it would have been a somewhat revelatory experience, as I’m a huge...

Possession: Directed by Andrzej Zulawski. With Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent. A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister. Reportedly filmed during an ugly divorce of the Director from his wife, this is a fantastic mess of a movie that lets the horror of losing your mind linger on frame slightly longer than is comfortable, presents all sorts of questions, and answers nearly none of them. Would I suggest this film to just anyone? Nope. If you’re looking for some...

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold: Directed by Gary Nelson. With Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, James Earl Jones, Henry Silva. Allan Quatermain once again teams up with Jesse Huston where the discovery of a mysterious old gold piece sends Quatermain looking for his long-lost brother, missing in the wilds of Africa after seeking a lost white race. Per IMDB, this was filmed at the same time as “King Solomon’s Mines” and uses the same soundtrack, with only 30 minutes of new music added for the sequel. What’s weird to me is how rough this one feels compared to...

See: Created by Steven Knight. With Jason Momoa, Sylvia Hoeks, Hera Hilmar, Christian Camargo. Far in a dystopian future, the human race has lost the sense of sight, and society has had to find new ways to interact, build, hunt, and to survive. All of that is challenged when a set of twins are born with sight. A second season come and gone, this show is increasingly better and better. It started with families torn apart and ended with a war of blind people waging battles in interesting ways that made the concepts seem new and fresh. Buy On Amazon!

Torchy Gets Her Man: Directed by William Beaudine. With Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane, Tom Kennedy, Willard Robertson. A notorious counterfeiter passes himself off as a Secret Service agent to Steve and gets him to unwittingly help him bilk the racetrack out of tens of thousands. Oh what a fool I was, assuming that “getting her man” meant she was finally going to be married! All’s well that ends well, as Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane are both back as Torchy and McBride, apparently the actors they tried to go with didn’t get the reception that WB was hoping for, so...

Riverworld: Directed by Stuart Gillard. With Tahmoh Penikett, Mark Deklin, Peter Wingfield, Jeananne Goossen. Welcome to Riverworld, a place of strange, watery beauty and the current abode of a fascinating cast of the recently (and not-so-recently) dead. It certainly isn’t Heaven, but it just might be Hell. This is the same story that was in the previous version of the film from six years prior, but all the fine details are different. Instead of an astronaut, our main character is a reporter, and instead of space collision, it’s a terrorist bombing that kills him, in an extremely well lit club...

In the nightmarish city they call Punktown, on a planet where countless sentient species collide, you can become a creator of clones. You can become a piece of performance art. You might even become a library of sorrows… A mish mash of stories that range from pretty ok to pretty good, though as an introduction to the world of “Punktown”, this collection of short stories did it’s job and let me know what it was going to be all about. It’s well written, but I don’t think the franchise is up my alley. If you like clones, demons, laser swords,...