Editorial Product Review: :We have met the enemy, and it is us: when a Martian spacecraft with a terrifying link to the origins of humanity is unearthed beneath a London tube station, only the esteemed Professor Bernard Quatermass (a very British--and possibly mad--precursor to Mulder and Scully) can save London's suddenly murderous population from itself. One of the most intelligently paranoid science fiction films ever produced, this pessimistic masterpiece functions as a dark flip side to the relatively optimistic alien-induced evolution theory ...
Editorial Product Review: :Made the same year as the gory gothic hit The Curse of Frankenstein, this smartly written, philosophically grounded Hammer studios adventure written by Nigel Kneale (who also wrote the excellent science fiction thriller Quatermass and its two sequels) was lost in the flesh and blood of Hammer's new vein of horror. Peter Cushing, best known for his ruthless portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein and his more tempered rationalist skew on vampire hunter Van Helsing, plays another scientist driven to prove ...
Editorial Product Review: :After Hammer Studios' tremendous success with The Curse of Frankenstein, they struck a deal to adapt Universal's catalog of classics and set their sights first on Dracula. Christopher Lee removes the monstrous makeup from the earlier film and makes his entrance as an elegant, confident, altogether seductive Dracula, a frightening figure of flashing eyes and erotic allure. Peter Cushing, with his hawklike profile and piercing eyes, turns his rationalist intensity to Van Helsing: man of science as crusading vampire ...
Editorial Product Review: :Considered by many critics to be the finest in the series, Hammer's second Quatermass feature (adapted from the television serial by Nigel Kneale) is a subversive alien invasion story. Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) stumbles onto a top-secret government base near a rural location that has been inundated by a steady stream of meteors. His investigations, which are met with distrust by suspicious townspeople and outright hostility by the base guards, uncover a conspiracy originating in the highest reaches of ...
Editorial Product Review: :Christopher Lee, long Hammer Studios' house villain, takes a rare heroic turn as scholar and occultist Duc de Richleau, the kind of role that Peter Cushing had made his métier. Lee plays Richleau with a dark elegance and intensity--he's a commanding figure with a trim goatee who discovers that the son of a war buddy has joined a satanic cult lorded over by the quietly malevolent Mocata (Charles Gray, best known as the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture ...
Editorial Product Review: :When Christopher Lee declined to reprise his role as Count Dracula in a sequel to the enormously popular The Horror of Dracula, Hammer went another direction and instead followed the investigations of vampire hunter Van Helsing (Peter Cushing). He doesn't actually appear until the second act, after French schoolteacher Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur, a big eyed, thick-lipped, curvy young beauty in the Bardot mold) inadvertently releases Baron Meinster (David Peel), a young disciple of Dracula, from his castle prison in ...
Editorial Product Review: :This 1962 version of the horror story comes from Britain's Hammer Films, and is unusually ornate for that studio. Herbert Lom gives an affecting performance as the disfigured composer who wreaks vengeance beneath an opera house. The film is low on violence and strong on the character's psychological state, and the Phantom's lair is very haunting in its own way. A subplot involving a police investigation is mere (and distracting) padding, but otherwise there is a lot of merit ...
Editorial Product Review: :This 1962 version of the horror story comes from Britain's Hammer Films, and is unusually ornate for that studio. Herbert Lom gives an affecting performance as the disfigured composer who wreaks vengeance beneath an opera house. The film is low on violence and strong on the character's psychological state, and the Phantom's lair is very haunting in its own way. A subplot involving a police investigation is mere (and distracting) padding, but otherwise there is a lot of merit ...
Editorial Product Review: :After Hammer Studios rewrote the histories of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy it was only natural to take on the howling hirsute one. Discarding the cursed gypsies, blooming wolfsbane, and chanted legends that swirl through Universal's The Wolf Man, director Terence Fisher and screenwriter John Elder (a pseudonym for producer Anthony Hinds) returned to Guy Endore's novel The Werewolf of Paris for inspiration. Switching locations to 18th-century Spain (to make use of standing sets from a canceled production about ...
Sales of semiconductors in November indicate that consumer products such as LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs, digital music players, and other devices sold well during the holidays, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said Monday.
November chip sales rose 2.3 percent year-on-year to $23.1 billion, the SIA said.
Unit demand has far outpaced last year. But falling chip prices have hurt industry revenue, the chip association said. For example, DRAM (dynamic RAM) bit shipments grew 25 percent in the three months through mid-December, but average selling prices have declined 20 percent over the same period.
The association also noted that rising energy prices and concerns about the sub-prime lending issue in the U.S. do not appear to have had a significant impact on consumer spending for the holidays, the SIA said. The group reiterated its forecast that worldwide semiconductor sales will reach a new record in 2007. But it will take a stronger than expected December selling season to reach the 3.8 percent growth goal the group had forecast earlier this year, the SIA said.
Investment banking firm Credit Suisse was not as optimistic as the SIA.
The November data was below normal seasonal trends, noted analyst John Pitzer, in a report on Monday. Even if December reaches its normal seasonal growth, 2007 industry revenue will only reach $255.7 billion, up 3.2 percent over last year. The growth percentage would fall short of the SIA's 3.8 percent target.
The slow November prompted Credit Suisse to lower its 2008 chip industry revenue forecast to 9.4 percent year-on-year growth, down from a previous target of 13 percent.
Editor Annalee Newitz reveals the inspiration for the futurism-focused site's name, shares her obsession with the scientifically taboo and tells why sci-fi is going mainstream.
