The Island

Question: I am doing some research on films with a cloning theme but have, so far, only managed to come up with two: Four Sided Triangle (1952) a story built around a duplicator; and the very well-known The Fly (1958 and 1986) and its sequel(s). Can you suggest any others?

Answer:
Hate to be negative right off the bat, but neither the 1958 version of The Fly nor the 1986 David Cronenberg remake is actually about cloning: They're about transporting physical objects by breaking them down into their cellular particles and then reassembling them in another location — like the transporter in Star Trek. But Four Sided Triangle is a read more

Question: With all the best- and worst-of-2005 lists I've seen, I've been wondering about the worst movies of all time. But though I've seen dozens of lists, with the exception of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, the movies on the lists all seem to have been made between 1980 and the present. Are there any bad-movie lists that go back to the early days of film, or is it just that movies started getting really bad in the 1980s?

Answer: I'll answer the second part of your question first: It's not that movies have gotten worse but that smarty-pants treasuring of "worst movies of all time" lists is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that I blame on Harry and Michael Medved and their condescending Golden Turkey Awards. I'm not saying that there aren't terrible movies out there, only that squandering energy that could be better used in any of a hundred ways on hunting down and cata read more

Question: The premise of The Island reminds me of a very bad and cheesy '70s movie that was used in an episode of MST3K. Am I right, and is it a remake of this horrible film?

Answer: The Island (2005) is not a remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), but it "borrows" shamelessly from this low-budget sci-fi film's premise: that a colony of healthy, pampered people living in a tightly supervised community because the rest of the world has supposedly undergone some calamity are actually clones bred to serve as spare parts for rich people. And yes, Clonus was lambasted on TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000. While I wouldn't go so far as to say Clonus is a good movie, I would argue that it deserves credit for dealing with issues that are even timelier now than they were 25 years ago, even if it owes its o read more