By K.E. Roberts
You’ve seen the images before: interiors of massive cylindrical and spherical space habitats, where posh-looking off-world colonists attend catered cocktail parties and sip coffee on their (seemingly) tilted verandas; where space-suited construction workers navigate through zero-g miles above an immaculate suburbia, complete with backyard swimming pools…
After Martin Scorsese burst onto the scene with the one-two social realist punch of 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, he produced an ode to the milieu from which he sprang, a briefer-than-feature-length trip to his parents’ walk-up apartment in Little Italy for Sunday macaroni and gravy…
By K.E. Roberts
There is probably something more entertaining than William Shatner devouring scenery as an alcoholic, defrocked, nihilistic priest confronting evil druidic sorcery on a double-decker 747 alongside a cast of fellow C-listers, but I can’t think of it right now…
Like many folks my age, I first encountered crusading news photographer Carl Kolchak (played by the imminently charismatic and recognizable Darren McGavin) thanks to The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s repeated praise of the character as one of the biggest influences on his creation of Mulder and Scully…
The Halloween of my Northern English youth was more an informal folk festival than anything institutional, as a quick leaf through the TV schedules of the day will demonstrate: no pumpkins were deployed and you didn’t dress up; you just stayed indoors, turned the Herbert van Thal anthologies to the wall, and hoped to god no witches attacked…
By K.E. Roberts
Of all the mutually reinforcing influences that compelled the mainstream popularization and commercialization of the horror genre in the 1970s, the role of made-for-TV films gets short shrift. Quite simply, they reached millions more viewers (impressionable kids included) than theatrical releases…
O’Neill’s account of his two decades in a wilderness of conspiracies related to the Manson Family ultimately suggests some of the blame falls at the feet of a Cold War American intelligence/law enforcement/academic complex deeply compromised by its commitment to beating the Soviets at all costs…
By Andrew Nette
When things look bad—and globally, they look pretty bad at the moment—I take a strange consolation from the fact that this is not the first time in recent history that the end of the world has been seriously discussed. In 1982, when I was living in suburban Melbourne, a couple of years off finishing school, it was pretty much all I thought about…
In the spirit of High Weirdness, this review will try to weave an impressionistic, magical spell exploring the commonalities Davis unveils between the respective life’s work and esoteric, drug-aided explorations of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick…
A little over thirty years ago, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid limited series landed in comic shops. Gaiman, in the late 1980s probably known best for his history of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series (Don’t Panic), and his novelistic collaboration with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett…
