Author Archives: Felix Vasquez

“Robot Monster” and Seventy Years of the Ro-Man

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Will be screening on June 24th at 3p.m. at Manhattan’s Dolby Screening Room, 1360 Avenue of the Americas. Tickets can be purchased online.

“The boy is impertinent!”

Ro-man is not quite an ape. And he’s not quite a man. He’s kind of a sentient alien who is smart enough to destroy civilization but not smart enough to be able to breathe Earth’s atmosphere sans his diving helmet. He’s a complicated Ro-man and no one understands him but his woman. Phil Tucker’s “Robot Monster” is a post apocalyptic survival film that conveniently evades all glimpses at the actual invasion and aforementioned apocalypse. The evil Ro-Man have invaded and destroyed Earth because—well—humans are bad. And to add insult to injury they monitor the remaining survivors in hopes of capturing and or destroying them.

They can never seem to make up their minds on that mission statement.

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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)

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I’d like to believe that 2018’s “Bumblee” kind of rubbed off on the studios and it caused them to go in to another direction with their “Transformers” movie series. The “direction” being making their “Transformers” series watchable, entertaining, and coherent. Where as the previous films were all overlong, droning, loud, and obnoxious, “Rise of the Beasts” actually manages to be a very good time. And I say that as someone that’s been completely dismissing anything and everything about “Transformers” since the movies wound up being so god awful. “Bumblebee” being the exception, of course.

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Querelle (1982) [LA&M Film Fetish Forum]

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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of “Querelle” is a divisive movie and has been for a long time. It’s a movie that originally split some critics and journalists, as it’s a movie that’s been explained as a film you’d have to be almost exclusively gay to watch. That’s not a criticism or chastising, but the popular opinion I’ve read seems to indicate that it’s mostly clicked with gay audiences. “Querelle” is very much tailored to gay audiences, as it’s a movie about self discovery and main character Querelle searching for a sense of identity.

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Five Movies from “Seinfeld” I Definitely Would Have Seen

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It’s been exactly twenty five years since “Seinfeld” ended and left television as one of the most popular and influential series of all time. To this day its influence continues to be felt, and I’m still a huge fan. It’s my number three TV series of all time (Behind “The Simpsons” and “The Honeymooners”) and continues to be one of my favorite comfort food TV shows to binge. One of the best aspects of “Seinfeld” was that it consistently made up fake movies that would act as plot devices or plot catalysts for the episodes.

While they had stuff like “The English Patient” and “Home Alone 2,” they also had their own in-universe movies, ranging from comedies, dramas, and action films. They became prominent gags throughout the series, and as a fan I thought I’d list five of the fictional in-universe movies that I definitely would have seen, and likely loved.

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Flamin’ Hot (2023)

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It’s pretty disheartening when a movie like “Flamin’ Hot” is released that offers a different take on the whole rags to riches story. Then you learn that none of it is even remotely true, and all you can really do is invest in a myth, or shut it off halfway. I decided to stick with it because, hey if you can’t be given a true story, maybe there’s an entertaining one to be found. But “Flamin’ Hot” is just another in a line of “Rah Rah Capitalism!” movies to be found on the market with movies like “Tetris,” “Blackberry,” and the obnoxious “Air.” I don’t know what the goal is behind making movies about the creation of various products, but I’m just not on board.

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Heroes of the Golden Mask (2023)

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Inside “Heroes of the Golden Mask” there’s a great film desperate to bust out. It has a cool concept, some solid animation, and a neat mythology behind it. It’s just once you get down to the nit and grit of the narrative and some lingering plot holes, it never rises above being just average. It’s definitely a direct to video kind of animated movie better suited for basic cable, despite its best efforts. That’s not for lack of trying, though. Director Sean Patrick O’Reilly has a large career in producing budget animation. He and Arcana Studios have helped engineer titles such as “The Steam Engines of Oz,” and the mildly amusing “Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom.”

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SILEO (2022)

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The search for meaning, and why we exist is a question that plagues most sentient things on the planet. Although we’d probably be better off merely surviving day to day there’s the curse of the conscious being that we have to know why. That’s basically the premise for “SILEO.” Three years in the making, director and animator Demeter Lorant has build a dystopian, cold world where everything and every facet of society is run by machines. The machines have evolved to such a point that even the older models are being rejuvenated bit by bit. When GEFF 325520-BD, a fixer unit robot, decides to halt production, he goes on a quest to figure out why he’s there.

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