The Fabulist Reviews

This movie starts with pee-drinking. Scene 1: hero drinks his own pee! Granted it is filtered through a makeshift pee filtering device, but still! Gross, right? Kevin Costner is terrible as a hero in any ...

Have you heard of this guy John Carpenter? He is really good at movies. This tale is silly and ultimately unsatisfying (there's just not enough hook impalings!) but it also works well because of fun ...

I've reviewed this before but I'm reviewing it again because it's so great. "52 Pick-Up" is a pillar of sleaze, a paragon of crime, and chock full of banana hammock style. Based on an Elmore ...

Mae West is still pretty funny 87 years later. Almost all of her jokes are of the “hey, let’s have sex!” variety (“it’s not the men in your life, it’s the life in your men!” ...

A stylish apartment building is overrun by a parasitic sex leech.This is David “What Can I Put My Penis In?” Cronenberg’s first movie and I love it: A creepy doctor creates a sexually transmitted parasite ...

They had me at the Mod Frogs. Attired in tailored suits, with skinny ties, pointy shoes, pencil moustaches, and all as green as Kermit — these stylish, savvy, human-sized “mute” mafiosi are just the tip ...

Jonathan "Silence of the Lambs" Demme directed this ultra-low-budget road romp starring Cloris "I won an Academy Award and four years later I'm in this weird movie?" Leachman, Donny "Ralph Malph" Most, and Ann "My ...

"Alien" meets "Hellraiser" starring Sam "Possession" Neill? Yes please! Larry "You Probably Know Him As Laurence" Fishburne plays Captain Kirk and everybody has to strip to their underpants for cryogenia. Sam Neill plays Paul Reiser, ...

This movie takes place in January of the year 2021, and it’s disturbing how much this movie got right: an economy controlled by mega-corporations, giant homeless encampments, and a global pandemic — this sci-fi movie ...

After the white-hot airboat driving and suburbia-destroying intensity of "Invasion U.S.A." I just had to see what else could possibly come from the addled mind of director Joseph Zito. Unfortunately, the answer is "not much." ...

Children’s literature, which this reporter maintains must include visual as well as text media, has always had a weird streak.  It’s tempting to cite “Adventure Time” as a recent trendsetter — the bizarro Cartoon Network ...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe juggernaut has arrived on Disney+, and in our living rooms, with "WandaVision." The nine-episode TV serial finds two thus far underused MCU superheroes happily trapped with no memory inside what seems ...

I've had a really hard time reading in the last month. I was tearing through books all spring and then I absolutely hit a wall. I don't think I read anything for 3 or 4 ...

This moment — Spock’s mind-meld with the Horta in “Devil in the Dark” -- is the instant when the socialist Federation of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" with all its hope becomes possible.Throughout the original ...

[Ellen Klages has won her share of literary awards, but the biggest prize of all goes to the reader, who gets to explore the familiar, but distinct, worlds she creates. A San Francisco Bay Area ...

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, ...

I love books, I love stories, and I love being read to. Growing up my parents read to us almost every night, and it's always felt like such a loving, nurturing thing when a partner ...

“Picard,” a new “Star Trek” series featuring an older Captain Jean-Luc Picard dragging himself out of retirement for one last hurrah, premieres on January 23. In interviews about the forthcoming series, the producers (Alex Kurtzman, ...

“The Mandalorian,” the first live action Star Wars TV series, is the Star Wars fan’s wet dream. It is a gritty take on Star Wars, so obsessed with the scum and villainy side of the ...

(Above: Edvard Munch, "Vampyr") David Tennant reads vampire stories: Hallowe'en has come for you a little early with this special treat — great vampire fiction by Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Edith Wharton and other great ...

(Above, the new WandaVision TV series appears to be pegged to a 2015 Marvel comic.) There's a dope new trailer-ish thing for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, mashing up previous episodes and ...

The Daylight GateBy Jeanette WintersonGrove Press (2012) Buy this book via IndieBound Unfailingly dire, unflinchingly bloody, full of love and license, and brimming over with real devotion and all-too-human devilry, Jeanette Winterson’s “The Daylight Gate“ ...

Support indie booksellers and buy this book via IndieBound • Amazon users can buy this book as a trade paperback (Gollancz SF Masterworks edition) or a Kindle ebook. The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three NovellasBy ...

[All links to books are via IndieBound.] Octavia E. Butler's birthday is today, June 22, and her death in 2006 at age 58 — attributed variously to a stroke and also a head injury — ...