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GHOST PLANET
Free on Youtube
Might be on Prime

A kickstarter-funded college drama department with a very nice AI/CGI rig produced a full-length scifi movie with space ships and explosions and double-dealing and alien technology.

Background. A couple of centuries in the future someone discovered an ancient alien race (Tessarans) went away somewhere a thousand years ago and left behind a bunch of working faster than light spaceships of various sizes. These were grabbed by governments and corporations and crewed by desperate amateurs looking for a quick path to riches. One such team accidentally discovered a planet with lots and lots and lots of valuable tech but had to run home when something happened. (I don't want to spoil it.) A rich trillionaire finds them and offers them a more powerful ship if they will go back and claim the technology. The risk of death is quite high. The trillionaire sends along his girlfriend to keep an eye on things, but she hasn't told the crew everything.

Corny dialogue with idiot men and oversexed women. What fun!

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Sunday, September 20, 2026 - 07:45 pm: Edit

The recent Star Trek shows have been filmed in Ontario for a number of years now.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, September 21, 2026 - 11:39 am: Edit

Paramount is settling with California et al (there were twelve states involved in the suit), per the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Forbes. Part of the deal involves creating independent editorial boards for both CNN and CBS. Another part requires that Paramount sell neither the Paramount nor Warner Brothers lots. So it would appear that Skydance/Paramount/WB will be remaining in California.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, October 12, 2026 - 02:12 am: Edit

20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH
Free on YouTube
A 1957 movie that somehow I had never seen. Worth a watch for those who watch old Scifi movies even if they did see them decades ago. (Venus is actually 24 million miles away and using the best orbit we can concoct the trip would be over 100 million miles.)
Fishermen near the coast of Sicily see a large metal aircraft crash in the ocean, floating for a time (as long as the plot needs) nose down with the huge tail fins up. As this is 1957 and no one has ever seen a spaceship the fishermen assume it to be a military aircraft. Most of the fishermen paddle away but one intrepid boat rows over and sees+ a huge hole in the side. Two fishermen enter (maybe they were Italian Navy in WW2 so they knew how hatches worked) and rescue two crewmen (both badly hurt) and see others who are dead. They bring out the two wounded men.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon the general in charge of the secret spaceship to Venus (which at the time nobody knew was hot acid) reads tracking reports which saw the missing spaceship XJ21 headed in the general direction of the Med. He checks other reports and sees an Italian police report that an aircraft crashed in the sea, so the general and the top scientist hop a PBY Catalina and fly east. (To save on actor salaries, the usual people who would accompany a two-star are omitted.) the timeline is something you don't really want to think about.
The local Italian police chief sends for the local doctor to attend to the two pilots, but learns he has left for an emergency some distance away. He sends someone looking for a "old doctor who was traveling through with his daughter" and it turns out that the old man is a PHD Zoologist and his daughter is in the third year of medical school. She treats the unconscious pilots; one dies and the other wakes up but never specifically say he is an American.
Meanwhile, a young Italian boy finds a plastic tube about six inches across and two feet long washed up on the beach. He opens it, pulls out an egg the size of a football, which he sells to the Dr Zoologist for enough to buy a cowboy hat and two toy guns. Nobody realizes it was from Venus as the spaceship is secret.
Meanwhile diplomatic cables have been flying and the general arrives in Sicily to meet an Italian foreign ministry official who says "we're happy to cooperate with the US". The general says "don't tell anyone but that was a spaceship to Venus and we need to find the sample tube that has an egg in it." Amazingly, the secret doesn't leak but is officially revealed much later.
The egg hatches and turns into a foot-long lizard-man thing with a whipping tail and the arms and legs of a man. He has nasty teeth and claws. Over time, the Venusian grows to 3 feet tall, then six, and much later to 20 feet tall. The Xenomorph supposedly gains mass through breathing our air, which just doesn't scientifically hold up. The astronaut says what the xenomorph eats which makes no sense given the predatory teeth.
Trying to capture the xenocritter gets people hurt in the fight, and the Italian police declare they will hunt and kill it to protect the civilians. The Americans say they want to capture it alive for study and bring in USMC helicopters and US Army paratroopers.
From there I don't want to ruin it any more than I have; I just posted what I did to illustrate what writers of 1957 got away with.
The astronaut star is the actor who later played private detective Paul Drake on Perry Mason. The Italian medical student is played by the actress who played the scientist's secretary/bride on Earth Vs The Flying Saucers. Ray Harryhausen did the monster. The tanks in the final scene are Chaffee light tanks and look great as they are real WW2 leftovers given to the Italian Army.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, November 01, 2026 - 04:56 pm: Edit

THE BLACKOUT: INVASION EARTH
Prime Video
An event happens that destroys all electronics the world over except for a "circle of life" around Moscow. Patrols outside the circle find lots of dead people, but further out the people are staggering around mindlessly. Elite soldiers (airborne and that type) form deep patrols into the dead areas and one of those patrols eventually discovers near Kirov that this is a prelude to an alien invasion.
Stunning visuals, fully in American English except for some road signs and headlines in Russian which aren't central to the story. While critics love or hate the storytelling, I thought it made as much sense as any science fiction movie. Especially when you meet an alien who tells Russian military intelligence what's really going on and how long it has been going on. And why a circular region around Moscow was spared. It actually makes (sortta) sense and is kinda funny.
As good as scifi romps get, totally watchable, the two women who find themselves in believable frontline situation actually make sense and act like women rather than supermen.