Janne is a journalist and magazine editor from Finland, who in his spare time runs the science fiction blog Scifist.
This 1944 faux-sequel to Monogram’s The Ape Man marked the end of Bela Lugosi’s stint at the Poverty Row studio. Here he is joined by a good cast and a seasoned director who nonetheless fail to bring life to this illogical “thawed-out-cave-man” yarn. It is better than its predecessor, though. 3/10
It was a trip to the moon in 1902 that gave birth to the narrative film, and propelled cinema forward. The theatrical fairy-tale A Trip to the Moon turned French director Georges Méliès into the uncrowned king of international cinema. The silent era provided some of the timeless classics of space films, whose influence is not only seen on screen even today, but that even had an impact on space travel itself. Hereby we present the 10 greatest space films of the silent era.
The fifth and final instalment in Universal’s Invisible Man Franchise was released in 1944 and treads familiar ground as an escapee turns invisible in order to exact revenge on his wrong-doers. John Carradine is delicious as the nutty scientist, scream queen Evelyn Ankers is underused and Jon Hall returns as the invisible menace for a second time. A messy script is saved by quality filmmaking. 5/10
The Roaring Twenties are back, albeit with perhaps less optimism about the future than a hundred years ago. At Scifist we’re taking some time to look back at the last year of the ‘teens, and we’re listing the 10 most popular reviews on the site in 2019.
Arguably Argentina’s first horror movie proper, A Light in the Window from 1942 feels like an amalgamation of every old dark house film made in Hollywood in the twenties. Horror icon Narciso Ibáñez Menta stars as the acromegalic mad doctor kidnapping trespassers in order to perfect a cure for his condition. Cheap and derivative, but not terrible. 4/10
A magnificent train wreck. That’s perhaps the most fitting description of Argentina’s first horror, SF and monster film, The Beast Man from 1934. This no-budget monstrosity throws every conceivable Hollywood genre cliché in the mix, following the exploits of a beast man created by a mad scienist, who’s kidnapping women in a small town. 2/10
Acquanetta the Ape Woman returns in a 1944 sequel to Universal’s Captive Wild Woman. The first 20 minutes go by in flashbacks from the original picture, before the wild woman is resurrected and goes ape, off-screen, in a mental asylum. An ill-conceived and clumsy effort, this is a monster movie without a monster, trying feebly to emulate Val Lewton’s Cat People. 3/10
