Meteor War [Music Videos]

Two creative music videos for you to enjoy. Both have been added to The Sci-Fi Gene Music Video Choice playlist.



I'm always pleasantly surprised by just how geeky Ariana Grande is. I did not expect the video for One Last Time to be a Cloverfield-style found footage survival movie set during a meteorite strike - but I am grateful that it is. Thank you Ariana.



Nerina Pallot's classic anti-war anthem from 2009 demands a war movie for its' video - and gets one. I would argue this is the best war movie ever made, its' gritty realism really bringing home the grim horror that is a trip to the supermarket. I wouldn't necessarily win the argument, but winning isn't everything, is it? At least I participated.

It's Only A Paper Moon [Review: Apollo 18]

Has the found footage genre had its day? Apollo 18 might be a good point to stand the genre down. True, at time of writing it has a meta-review score of 28% over at Rotten Tomatoes. True, it tells an unoriginal and highly predictable story within a lazy, generic Military-Government Conspiracy (TM) frame. True, it was launched at a press conference where dumb claims were made about the providence of the footage. Yawn.

In its favour, this is one of the few found footage films where the basic premise makes sense. Most FF films require the presence of an obsessive filmmaker or videographer: look, if some fifty-storey tentacled sea-beast and it's crab-like spawn are pursuing you through New York as the skyscrapers collapse around you, and you are actually sane, would you a) drop everything and run, or b) keep hold of fifty kilos of professional film equipment? What better way to show your girlfriend how much you love her than to stand there and video her while she is being attacked by demons? 

It is logical that an Apollo moonship would carry lots of cameras, and that the astronauts would film everything. The film has purportedly been edited together from a collection of sources by a mysterious conspiracy website: so thankfully there's no attempt to tell the story in real time. Different film sources have different colours and looks, plus some are hand-held while others are fixed, remote controlled or motion-sensitive: so there's much more shot variety, and slightly less nausea-inducing shakycam (even so, you may still wish to take your preferred travel sickness pill before viewing.) It helps. Performances are good although not Oscar-worthy, sets and visuals are authentic. While Apollo 18 might not be the best advertisement for the future of the space programme (that would be Space Camp, obviously) the film really does bring back the magic and high drama of the Apollo missions: for me this was more of a draw than the horror element.

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch.) I enjoyed this film but I concede it could have been better.

Death By Lens Flare [Review: Skyline]

"God I hate L.A."

Independence Day was - amazingly - a decent date movie and a real crowd pleaser: something for jingoistic Americans, USAF hardware enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, chess players, and fans of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air - I mean, that's just about everyone, right?

Skyline is not a date movie. It's a solid B movie with an A ending, for alien invasion enthusiasts and other sci-fi-gene deficiency sufferers only. While imaginative captions such as "Day One" mark it superficially as an ID4 clone, it's actually closer to War Of The Worlds or Cloverfield in telling the story of everyman heroes caught up in the sidelines of the invasion rather than the leaders, movers and shakers.

The aliens, a menagerie of biomechanical horrors with orifices in curious places, come armed with a variant of the War of the Worlds death ray: a hypnotic blue lens flare that gives you a serious case of acne, then sucks you up into the mothership. The humans fight back, naturally, with automatic Venetian blinds, bad driving, handguns, fireaxes and a Canon EOS 5D.

Avoiding the aliens and their hypnotic weapons, the cast are confined to an apartment block, the rooftops and a few streets, and the style switches between claustrophobic interior and action-heavy exterior scenes. Two thirds though there's a sequence where an alien mothership gets taken down by a drone-launched nuclear missile: what happens next isn't particularly believable or well done, but it does mark a departure from the ID4 storyline - and from this point onwards things get steadily better: the last third of this film more than makes up for earlier weaknesses, and the last few minutes are unexpected and very moving.

I wondered whether the film was a metaphor for parenthood - Elaine (Scottie Thompson) is pregnant, and both she and her boyfriend Jarrod (Eric Balfour) are unprepared for either parenthood or alien invasion, a situation brought home by their visit to eternal playboy Terry (Donald Faisal) and reinforced by constant talk of accepting the reality of the changed situation, stepping up to the mark and taking responsibility for others than yourself. No. It isn't.

Bonus points are awarded for having the heroes actually worry about radiation exposure after the nukes go off - however points must also be deducted for the crude way in which that DSLR (gorgeous as it is) is hammered into the plot as a semi-McGuffin. Sorry, but if it ain't subliminal then it's just advertising.

Drop the camera and run - again

A creature attacks the metropolis, survivors go on the run shooting everything on camcorder as they go. Sounds familiar? Monster, made by The Asylum and distributed by Lighthouse, is as close to a rip-off of a certain other monster movie as it is possible to get (even though it was released first!) and it set me wondering about why people make derivative films. Cloverfield itself actually has very high production values - this film clearly cannot afford the same values so this is a cheap attempt to mimic an expensive attempt to look cheap.

Having started with a negative point, I have to say I really enjoyed this film, although more in the way you might enjoy an amateur or fringe theatre production. There's a lot to learn here about how to make films on a budget - clever use of sound and camera angles to convey panicking crowds without actually showing any people, etc. I might try some of this if I make any more short films. Most of the film seems to have been made by a handful of people - actually I was surprised by how many names were on the credits!

The two stars are Sarah Lieving and Erin Sullivan. Sarah is apparently a regular at Asylum, Erin has only a few credits including "Transmorphers" (I wonder what that one's about...) They're both endearing and reasonable actresses - this film gets a lot of criticism at least on imdb but this is mainly because it's derivative. It's also fair to say that unlike a film with a larger budget, the pair pretty much have to carry the whole film - clearly there was only a budget for a few minutes of film with other actors, plus the brief action climax at the end, plus a few extra dollars for special effects, so most scenes just feature the two girls, and a lot of the action can't be shown so they have to rely on their acting skills to convey it. The whole shoot must have been hard work.

Drop the camera and run - the movie

Cloverfield is in many ways the opposite of Kate and Leopold - this film really should not work. It's a one trick gimmick - a monster movie but how original - it's all on a camcorder... By rights you should be bored after about eight minutes, even with the gene deficiency, and spend the rest of the movie shouting "drop the camera and run! drop the camera!"

This film worked for me for two reasons - firstly, it's only 90 minutes long (as it's supposedly recorded on an analogue camcorder cassette) but perfectly paced, and secondly, the director JJ Abrams is actually pretty good. It takes serious professionalism to simulate amateur filmmaking this way and still produce decent atmosphere and drama, and JJ's sense of timing is good enough to occasionally deliver actual shocks and thrills, something sadly rare in the horror genre.