Cinefantastique Online

The Mighty Movie Podcast brings you interviews with the makers of horror, fantasy & science fiction films, conducted by Dan Persons.

In the future — and by “future,” we mean 2001 — the Chinese prison system will be stupid. Also violent, sadistic, and quite, quite unsanitary — what with there not being a wall, fixture or floor that isn’t thoroughly coated with the viscera of its unfortunate inhabitants — but mostly really, [...]

MAC AND ME is another one of those transcendental experiences — a film so awful, a film so wrongheaded in all its aspects, a film so cynically devised and ham-fistedly executed that it practically redefines the idea of the bad film. An obvious rip-off of the Steven [...]

Oh, the Sixties, was there a way in which you weren’t one of our most fraked-up decades? War, assassinations, riots in the streets, MY MOTHER THE CAR on TV — never was there a time when it more seemed that society was shredding at the seams. Fortunately, director Larry Buchanan, the mastermind behind such cinematic [...]

Some people’s pasts come back to haunt them; some come back to kill them. In Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s martial arts film, DRAGON, Donnie Yen plays a loving husband living with his wife and child in a small, Chinese village at the beginning of the twentieth century. But when he seemingly inadvertently [...]

In such series as FARSCAPE and STARGATE SG-1, Ben Browder traveled to distant universes filled with strange and fascinating creatures. But in all their adventures, neither FARSCAPE’s John Crichton nor SG-1′s Cameron Mitchell ever had to contend with an environment as daunting as high school, or a life form as enigmatic [...]

Italy has brought us so many wonderful things: Fellini; lasagna; Silvio Berlusconi (that last is debatable). But among the many marvels borne of those shores, truly the most wondrous has to be the knock-off film, a genre that took groundbreaking, innovative American titles and replicated them with [...]

Eve bit the apple, Pandora opened the box, and for a certain generation of young Russians, the first taste of a certain, ambrosial nectar that we in the West call Pepsi did close to the same thing: unleash a desire that, once freed, could not be contained. In the caustic, Russian [...]

Give REGULAR SHOW creator J.G. Quintel credit for coming up with a title that works in ironic counterpoint to itself. On the one hand, the Cartoon Network series is an examination of young people entering the workforce in modern America, with all the friction, tension, and social and moral quandaries that might ensue. On the [...]

Television has managed to deliver up no shortage of animated shows ostensibly aimed at kids that also manage to build a justifiably enthusiastic adult fan base. Even with that, ADVENTURE TIME stands out. The tale of a human boy, Finn, and a shape-shifting dog, Jake (who’s also Finn’s brother — long story), making their way [...]

Somewhere towards the end of the 1970′s, the entertainment industry got it into its head that the public not only wanted to spend their nights out rollerskating to driving, disco music, but that they wanted to watch people rollerskating to driving disco music — so much so that there’d be no [...]

This is an episode of Temple of Bad that includes several firsts. It’s our first discussion of a black-and-white film. It’s our first discussion of a film that has such a ridiculously short running time. It’s our first film starring John Carradine, and our first film starring the oh-so-dreamy John Agar. Sadly, it’s also our [...]

FLYING SWORDS OF DRAGON GATE is the first Tsui Hark film to be shot in Imax 3D, starring Jet Li. Okay, stop salivating and sit back down, we’ve got work to do.
Granted, your enthusiasm is understandable. Hark — master of such deliriously epic action films as PEKING OPERA BLUES and ONCE UPON A TIME IN [...]

Could there be a movie so inanely scripted, so ineptly produced, so all-around awful that it confounds even the staunch acolytes of the Temple of Bad? Uh, yes. Yes there is, and it’s the topic of our latest episode.
AN AMERICAN CAROL was intended to serve as a counterbalance to the perceived liberal tilt of mainstream [...]