// Category Archive for: Science Fiction

TV Review: Lucha Underground, S2 E11 – 15

By Sachin Hingoo

Hey, I just met you,
and this is crazy,
Robert Rodriguez
loves lucha libre!

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve visited the Temple, and with Dario Cueto back in control and his feral brother Matanza as champion, the whole show has a different feel. Gone is Mil Muertes looming over the Temple on his throne and the candles and other spooky touches Catrina put in Dario’s office. Instead we’re back to having live bands play us into the shows and a general feeling that chaotic violence can erupt at any time. I have to say that I’m glad to have Dario back in the backstage vignettes in particular, because he’s a much better actor than Catrina and has his sadistic douchebag character down pat.

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DVD Review: Children Of The Stars

By Jeffery X Martin

Documentaries about alternative religious belief systems are always a dicey watch, especially if the religion being examined doesn’t jibe with your own or sounds totally off the wall. The temptation to snicker or outright mock the people who believe this crazy stuff is always there. But religion is such a personal thing; laughing at someone about what they believe just feels disrespectful.

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Today In Pop Culture: Right On, Frankenstein!

By Tim Murr

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born to a philosopher father and a feminist author mother. She lost her mother just a month after her birth. Her father brought her up with a more intense education than most women of that time period. At 17, she began her relationship with her future husband, poet/philosopher/radical Percy Shelley. In 1818, came the fateful holiday near Geneva, Switzerland where Mary, her sister, and Percy stayed with Lord Byron. They amused themselves with German ghost stories and then challenged one another to write their own ghost stories.

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Today In Pop Culture: The Bermuda Triangle Is Not A Waxing Style

By Jeffery X Martin

The USS Cyclops was a Navy ship during the First World War. She set sail from Rio de Janeiro in February of 1918, carrying a load of manganese ore, crucial for the manufacture of munitions. The ship and her crew set sail for Baltimore on March 4.

They never reached their destination.

What happened to the USS Cyclops?

The Bermuda Triangle, that’s what.

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Today In Pop Culture: King Kong Freaks America Out

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s fascinating to find out what people are afraid of, specifically what movies frighten them. For example, one person may be scared by Jaws but not scared of Orca, the Killer Whale. You might be frightened by Paranormal Activity, but not by Poltergeist. These objects of fright change from decade to decade, as the zeitgeist shifts and people become more jaded. But who would have thought that, in the 1930s, so many people would have been afraid of a giant ape?

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TV Review: The X-Files, Episode 6, “My Struggle II”

By Jeffery X Martin

…and that’s it.

The reboot of The X-Files is over, ending with the direct sequel to the first episode. I wish there were easy answers here, a quick snazzy way to recap everything and make it nice and tidy.

But The X-Files was never about nice and tidy. It created a mythology that spread throughout time and culture, from the Mayan calendar to smallpox immunizations. The X-Files absorbed everything and spit it back out, twisted.

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VHS Visions: Alien Nation (1988)

By Tim Murr

My favorite type of science fiction is where it’s basically our real world but with a twist, just one or two things off, like Robocop or The Fly. Dystopian futures and spaceships are fine, but I rarely feel sucked into those worlds in the same way. Alien Nation was one of my favorite films as a kid. It came out in 1988 and I couldn’t wait for it to hit my local video store. Being rated R, I knew there was no chance in hell of my parents taking me to see it in the theater.

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TV Review: The X-Files Episode 5, “Babylon”

By Jeffery X Martin

This week’s episode of The X-Files: The College Years gives us hope, but in the totally wrong way, leaving the viewer just as confused about the diretion and meaning of the entire series as Mulder and Scully are about the existence of God. Where the hell did this brilliant episode come from? Compared with everything else we’ve gotten from the reboot, this episode is as unexpected as hearing your toddler recite the Iliad in the original Latin while loading her diaper up during Yom Kippur.

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TV Review: The X-Files Episode 4, “Home Again”

By Jeffery X Martin

I don’t even know what’s going on anymore. At this point, I feel like the reboot of The X-Files is rick-rolling me.

Never gonna solve this case.
Suck on this mythology.
By now, Mulder and Scully
Are boneheads.

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TV Review: The X-Files, Episode 3, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Creature”

By Jeffery X Martin

Some of the best episodes of The X-Files were the Monster of the Week shows, where the mythology is forgotten about for a moment and we get to focus on a separate case. It makes sense that we would get one of those episodes in the mini-series, and here it is.

Mulder and Scully investigate a case with multiple victims, and those who survive claim the perpetrator is a monster. It’s a typical X-Files setup, with a creature living in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, but there are a couple of differences. It’s not a werewolf. It may not really be human at all.

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