Colin Slark
Team Member

here are a lot of science fiction movies,
many of them bad. Fewer of them are
good movies. Some of them have been
consigned to the bottom of sale bins
where they will languish for eternity,
being discounted into oblivion. During
an expedition into a deep, dark pile of
five-dollar schlock, in-between a copy of
Sharknado 2 and a low budget rip-off of last
summer’s Hollywood blockbuster, you could
find a gem of a movie that could take you to
planets or realities previously unknown to
humanity. Here are 5 lesser-known science
fiction movies to help stave off boredom.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the
8th Dimension (1982): Buckaroo Banzai is
arock star, a rocket scientist and a brain
surgeon who has developed a machine
that can enable a vehicle to travel through
solid matter. Unfortunately, this device
opens portals to the 8th dimension and
the evil Red Lectroids are trying to steal

Culture 7

>) lesser-known scifi movies

the device in order to get back home. It
sounds silly (and frankly it is), but it has
loads of charm and a great cast that includes
people like Peter Weller, John Lithgow,

Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd.

Dark City (1998): An amnesiac man wakes

up in a dingy hotel room to the sound of

a ringing phone. He answers and hears a
voice that tells him to get out fast. Looking
over, he finds the corpse of a brutally
murdered woman lying on the floor. As he
is darting out of the hotel, he is pursued by
a group of mysterious strangers, and while
attempting to flee from them, he discovers
that he has telekinetic powers. This man
runs through a city that is ever-changing
in strange ways and experiences night in
perpetuity. The big stars of Dark City are its
art direction and setting, which really sell
the city as a big, dark, confusing place.

Dredd (2012): In the future, humanity has
survived a nuclear war. Vast stretches of the
Earth have been turned into wastelands, and
most of the remaining human population

Review: The Interview

Nahid Taheri
Team Member

fter all the attention surrounding

The Interview, I was very interested in
watching it. However, it quickly became clear
that it was not worth the attention.

The Interview not only fails to accomplish

its mission--to tell jokes--but also lasts too
long and veers off in too many directions.
The story of how an entertainment reporter
(James Franco) and his producer (Seth
Rogen) get an opportunity to interview Kim
Jong Un does not translate into a quality

comedy. The CIA convinces the guys that
they need to take out Kim Jong Un.

It could have been an entertaining political
satire, but the entire film instead consists of
stupid, cheap humour. A lot of speculations
were made when Sony got hacked, and

it was reported that North Korea was
behind it. Honestly speaking, if it had not
been for all the controversy, it would have
seen less success. The movie is in no way
perfect and, apart from a funny little girl
singing about how much she wanted the
USA to die horribly, it has little merit.

has been concentrated into impossibly large
Mega Cities. Order is kept in these cities

by the Judges, individuals who have been
granted the power to act as a police force
with the authority to pronounce and carry
out sentences in the field. One of these
Judges, named Dredd, is carrying out a field
examination for a cadet Judge when they
are locked inside an apartment tower with

a small army of bloodthirsty drug dealers.
Visceral and quite violent, Dredd is one of the
most faithful comic book adaptations ever
made, especially when compared with the
truly terrible Sylvester Stallone film from
the nineties inspired by the same series.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972): This adaptation

of the classic science fiction novel about a
man unstuck in time was so well done that
the book’s author Kurt Vonnegut reportedly
said it was flawless. Billy Pilgrim is a man
that experiences the events of his life in a
supposedly random order from his time in
an alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore to
surviving the firebombing of Dresden during
the Second World War. Slaughterhouse-Five

is a great story about how death does not
invalidate the life that came before it.

Moon (2009): Sam Bell is the lone caretaker

of a moon base that harvests a certain
material that is sent back to Earth for use

in energy production. One day near the

end of Bell’s three-year term on the Moon,
something goes horribly wrong when he
leaves his base to investigate a broken

rover. He wakes up in the base’s medical

bay and is told by the base’s AI that he has
been in an accident that has affected his
short-term memory. Bell returns to work,
but has a suspicion that something has

gone horribly wrong. Beautifully directed
by first-time director Duncan Jones and
capped off by a great performance from Sam
Rockwell, Moon is one of the most interesting
science fiction movies in recent memory.

If you are looking for a short-term
portal to a different time, dimension,
spheroid, or reality, you could do far
worse than watch one of these movies.