Capitalizing on the popularity of its television series “Battlestar Galactica,” ABC, Glen A. Larson Productions and Universal produced a theatrical release entitled: Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (MGCA, for short). There was no new footage. The film was an edited compilation of three episodes (more on those below). MGCA was a sort of a sequel...

Before the Second World War ushered in the atomic age, and all the attendant nuclear angst, science fiction films found many other things to feel angsty about. There was less of rocket and aliens -- although there were some of those too -- but more of the mad scientist trope. There were dystopic visions of the future, but amusing ones too. Electricity,...

On Monday, December 21st, modern science finally caught up with the vision of space technology from the 1950s. SpaceX finally succeeded in making their Falcon 9 rocket return to earth -- under power -- to land upright on legs.  You can see a short YouTube video here, that shows the landing as seen from a helicopter. For fans of sci-fi films from the...

The major studios were still cautious about producing big budget sci-fi. Jules Verne was a safe conservative choice. Journey to the Center of the Earth (JCE) was more adventure fiction or travel fiction than science fiction movie. Verne's novel drew from the science of geology. His literary style was prone to long expository stretches, so the "science"...

Reader “Robin” suggested that Sting of Death (SoD) might be a good addition to this sci-fi collections. Admittedly, SoD was passed over when this study was viewing through films of the 60s as most sources classified it as horror. Upon deeper examination, SoD does have a hint of sci-fi and turns out to be a fitting follow-up to the two recently reviewed...

The success or failure of B movies produced by Poverty Row studios was not all that closely tracked. One sure sign of a B movie’s success was that it was copied. Producers Releasing Corporation’s 1940 Devil Bat, starring Bela Lugosi, must have been a hit (so far as B movies ever were “hits”) because PRC put out a copy of it in 1946 entitled The Flying...