Movies From Beyond: A Bucket Of Blood & Starship Troopers

Welcome along to this week's trip to the darkside that we call Movies From Beyond, and what better place to start than with the news every horror geek from the 80s has been dreaming about for years? The eagerly-awaited Lost Boys 2 is currently in production, and the even better news is that the Coreys are back! How fangtastic is that? (fangs like as in vampires, geddit?).

Right, back to business - this week we have a watched a couple of forgotten gems and we now present them for your approval; A Bucket Of Blood and Starship Troopers.

We love a good 50s black and white horror as you probably know by now, and one of the lesser-known classics is Roger Corman's A Bucket Of Blood from 1959. Picture the scene - a swinging bohemian coffee house with beardy poets, beatniks and artists. There is, of course, also the socially awkward loner, a good old-fashioned horror movie standby who just wants to fit in and and be noticed. After inadvertently killing his landlady's cat while trying to make a clay sculpture, the best thing to do is to make the corpse into his newest creation. Obviously the bohemians really dig it, forcing the newly-crowned king of the art world Walter Paisley to make more and more of his pieces.  

There is something really Hitchcock about this movie and it was actually filmed in only five days with a whopping $50,000 budget. If you are big into old-school horror then this is well worth checking out, however the 1995 remake starring Anthony Michael Hall from Weird Science is well worth avoiding.  

After he made the seminal Robocop Paul Verhoeven directed the fantastically OTT Starship Troopers, which pitted us puny humans against an invading force of super bugs. There are some really good comic book moments with bugs blowing up all over the shop and the brilliantly-named hotshot platoon leader Johnny Rico running headlong into the swarms of attacking parasites. There are some really moments of satire which is fairly standard in Verhoeven's films like Total Recall and Robocop.  

Considering this movie is more than a decade old the CGI is really good and looks strangely undated,  there is of course the infamous co-ed shower scene and there is just a little too much of a romantic love triangle subplot but all in this ranks high on the must-watch chart.

[story by Simon Woodley]