Reviews of four sci-fi thrillers: The Satan Bug (1965) on Blu from Kino Lorber + Fox’s 2005 DVD of Panic in the Streets (1950) from the KQEK.com archives, Ejecta (2014) from Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada, and Singularity Principle (2013) from Big Screen / CAV.
John Sturges’ film version of Alistair MacLean’s novel (written under the pseudonym Ian Stuart) is a highly underrated and important entry in the virus or bio-thriller film, and finally makes its deserved Blu-ray release after being ignored on home video for far too long…
After handling the social dramas Gentleman’s Agreement and Pinky, director Elia Kazan returned to the docu-style of Boomerang, this time relishing the tension of a city manhunt for a handful of possibly infected plague carriers. Kazan’s use of genuine locations is superb, capturing the grime of poverty-row housing, ethnic ghettos, and the gleaming city buildings and streets which house nervous state officials looking for a quick fix for a messy problem…
Decades after an alien visitation, a return of the interstellar creatures mandates a troupe of black ops to track them down to as insolated farmhouse where they find William Cassidy, a wiry man (Julian Richings) with a history of publishing conspiracy theories, and a refusal to detail the events of what killed one of their own, and what still lurks outside…
Not dissimilar to the time-travelling sci-fi thriller Primer (2004), Singularity Principle (2013) has a handful of characters pushing theory into reality, in this case developing a working mechanism to unearth and cross over into a parallel world that wreaks havoc with more than the personal lives of cosmic scientists…
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