With some time to myself this weekend I’ve started working on my SF film watching.

Friday night I watched the classic Them!. I had not seen it since I was a kid, and I don’t think I’d ever seen it all the way through. It was great! A lot of those 50s SF films are kind of hard to watch, but it is clear why Them! is a classic of the atomic horror genre. Great pacing, creepy, and a dire warning about the horrors unleashed by the atom bomb.

Saturday night I tried watching This Island Earth, a film that’s been on my list for a long time. I’ve read about it and it always sounds interesting, and the Metaluna Mutant is a classic image from SF. The film is horrible. I got maybe 20 or 25 minutes in and just had to stop. The color of the film was grating on my eyes. Really bad. The delivery of the dialog is so fast it would make the TV show Dragnet seem like it’s in slow motion. Just really bad. So I’ll not be revisiting that one again.

Today is Sunday. I’ll find another movie to watch and do some reading. Need to knock out another book or two this month.