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George Pal’s ill-fated ‘future docu’ followup to Destination Moon still stirs the imagination, rendering in vivid Technicolor the visionary images that amazed us in Chesley Bonestell’s paintings about space travel. We still love the movie even if we want to shove the script and whoever approved it out an airlock without a space helmet. It’s fun to pick it apart, but when Van Cleave’s trilling ‘spacey’ music plays we know we’re back in 1950s Sci-fi Nirvana, anticipating a techno-future of space marvels. [Imprint] gives the movie a classy Blu-ray showcase.

Conquest of Space

All-Region Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #112

1955 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 81 min. / Street Date April 6, 2022 / Available from /

Starring: Walter Brooke, Eric Fleming, Mickey Shaughnessy, Phil Foster, William Redfield, William Hopper, Benson Fong, Ross Martin, Vito Scotti, Joan Shawlee, Michael Fox, Rosemary Clooney.

Cinematography: Lionel Lindon

Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Joseph MacMillan Johnson

Film Editor: Everett Douglas

Original...

George Pal’s second science fiction classic has conceptual imagination and visual wonder to spare, along with a million awkward and dated details. When rogue planets threaten to obliterate the Earth, a super-Ark spaceship is built to spirit forty ‘chosen ones’ to safety. The Ark passengers have the right stuff, but you may be enraged by the rigged process to select who gets to go. Gee-whiz spectacle is the order of the day — how many End Of The World movies actually show terra firma expunged from the Solar System? Barbara Rush and John Hoyt are the acting standouts, but top honors go to Pal’s visual effect artists and designers.

When Worlds Collide

Blu-ray

Viavision / [Imprint] 6 (Australia)

1951 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Street Date August 26, 2020 / available through [Imprint] : $34.95

Starring: Barbara Rush, Richard Derr, Larry Keating, John Hoyt, Judith Ames, James Congden, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Kirk Alyn, Casey Rogers, John Ridgely,...

George Pal’s second science fiction classic has conceptual imagination and visual wonder to spare, along with a million awkward and dated details. When rogue planets threaten to obliterate the Earth, a super-Ark spaceship is built to spirit forty ‘chosen ones’ to safety. The Ark passengers have the right stuff, but you may be enraged by the rigged process to select who gets to go. Gee-whiz spectacle is the order of the day — how many End Of The World movies actually show terra firma expunged from the Solar System? Barbara Rush and John Hoyt are the acting standouts, but top honors go to Pal’s visual effect artists and designers.

When Worlds Collide

Blu-ray

Viavision / Imprint (Australia)

1951 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Street Date August 26, 2020 / available through [Imprint] : $34.95

Starring: Barbara Rush, Richard Derr, Larry Keating, John Hoyt, Judith Ames, James Congden, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Kirk Alyn, Casey Rogers,...

Ryan Britt May 4, 2019

Dark Empire was one of the early Star Wars expanded universe efforts, and it may have an influence on The Rise of Skywalker.

With a single cackle, the childhood memories of countless Star Wars fans have been reignited. Though he isn't actually seen in the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine’s laugh at the end means the darkest of dark side dudes is totally back. And if bringing back the famous Sith Lord feels like the oldest trick in the book, you’re not wrong. But, in this case, the book in question was a 1991-1992 comic book miniseries called Dark Empire, published by Dark Horse Comics back when new Star Wars stories were far rarer than they are today.

For those who might not remember, Dark Empire focused on the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine after his “death” in Return of the Jedi.

A few years ago the editors of Shadowlocked asked me to compile a list of what was initially to be, the ten greatest movie matte paintings of all time. A mere ten selections was too slim by a long shot, so my list stretched considerably to twenty, then thirty and finally a nice round fifty entries. Even with that number I found it wasn’t easy to narrow down a suitably wide ranging showcase of motion picture matte art that best represented the artform. So with that in mind, and due to the surprising popularity of that 2012 Shadowlocked list (which is well worth a visit, here Ed), I’ve assembled a further fifty wonderful examples of this vast, vital and more extensively utilised than you’d imagine – though now sadly ‘dead and buried’ – movie magic.

It would of course be so easy to simply concentrate on the well known, iconic,...

In his book ‘The Great Movies: Volume 2’, Roger Ebert wrote that “King Kong is the father of Jurassic Park, the Alien movies, and countless other stories where the heroes are terrified by skillful special effects”. In volume 1, he wrote that “Star Wars was a technological watershed that influenced many of the movies that came after.” In this article, Cinelinx looks at an 82 year old monster movie and a 38 year old space opera, in order to determine which is the seminal film in the evolution of movies in regard to setting the path for the modern era.

Let’s start with King Kong. It’s been 10 years since the last film version of King Kong, which was directed by Peter Jackson. (Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit) There was a remake by Dino De Laurentis in 1976, and even a few Japanese Dai Kaiju Eiga versions of the giant ape in the 1960s,...

A long time ago, this is what the future was going to look like:

This is a mission to the moon as envisaged by Collier’s magazine and artist Chesley Bonestell in the 1960s. The future was all about white men taking to space and conquering the high frontier. And only white men. (Check for yourself in this larger version. Every person in this image is a white man.) I wonder if anyone involved in the production of this piece of art, and in the long series of magazine articles about the future that Collier’s published at the time, saw anything off-kilter about this. I doubt it.

The most depressing thing about science fiction — always — is how conservative it is. This is, allegedly, the genre that is all about imagining grand new futures for humanity… and yet early literary Sf — let’s call it pre late 1960s — seemed incapable...

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

By Brian Fies

208 pages, $14.95, Abrams ComicArts

The future never turns out like people predict. Nostradamus was wrong. Authors, philosophers, painters, and clergy have all been wrong about what the world of tomorrow will turn out to be. Depending upon when you were born and where you were raised, the future is either shockingly surprising or deeply disappointing. Brian Fies’ Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? falls into the latter category.

The 2009 book is now out in softcover and a personal essay on what the world has become since the 1939 World’s Fair, which also parallels the development of geek culture since, after all, that was the first place Superman made a personal appearance as his popularity was just beginning to soar. The sky was the limit, it seemed, and the World’s Fair promised peace and prosperity at a time that war...

The art of the glass shot or matte painting is one which originated very much in the early ‘teens’ of the silent era. Pioneer film maker, director, cameraman and visual effects inventor Norman Dawn is generally acknowledged as the father of the painted matte composite, with other visionary film makers such as Ferdinand Pinney Earle, Walter Hall and Walter Percy Day being heralded as making vast contributions to the trick process in the early 1920’s.

Boiled down, the matte process is one whereby a limited film set may be extended to whatever, or wherever the director’s imagination dictates with the employment of a matte artist. In it’s most pure form, the artist would set up a large plate of clear glass in front of the motion picture camera upon which he would carefully paint in new scenery an ornate period ceiling, snow capped mountains, a Gothic castle or even an alien world.

H.G. Wells' 1898 classic alien invasion novel, The War of the Worlds, has been adapted several times for the big screen, most recently by Steven Spielberg five years ago (my first "Scenes We Love" entry for Cinematical), two low-budget entries, one set in Victorian times and the other in the present released to coincide with Spielberg's adaptation, and most memorably, fifty-seven years ago by producer George Pal (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, The Time Machine, Conquest of Space, When Worlds Collide, Destination Moon) for Paramount Pictures. Pal's adaptation, directed by Byron Haskin (The Power, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, From the Earth to the Moon, Conquest of Space) from a screenplay by Barré Lyndon, created the template for every alien invasion film that followed. The War of the Worlds won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking visual effects. It was nominated, but surprisingly didn't win, the Academy Award for the equally innovative sound design.