J.B. Spins

Casual viewers might think of fantasy heroes as virtuous Tolkienesque dragonslayers, but for real fans, the irresponsible antiheroes are eve...

Casting 6’ 1” Brigitte Nielsen as the “She-Devil” made a lot of sense, but the notorious 1985 fantasy bomb committed many grievous cinematic...

This portal fantasy world keeps bankers’ hours: nine to five, Japanese time. To get there, seven troubled middle-schoolers literally travel ...

If ever there was an animal in need of a hero, it would be the pangolin . Thanks to the black market in Mainland China (where their meat is ...

For fantasy fans, princesses and dragons always go well together, as Anne McCaffrey proved in dozens of books. Frogs are also pretty archety...

The fantasy genre is about as archetypal as fiction gets. Take for instance the “sacred bloom,” a flower that imparts terrible, dreadful kno...

We do not really think of Disney in the context of Tolkienesque fantasy, but the Mouse House produced The Sword in the Stone, The Black ...

Before Game of Thrones, snobby critics used to just lump fantasy in with kids’ books and movies, like it was all cut from the same Lloyd...

In this Medieval hodge-podge, names from antiquity are freely recycled with little regard for their origins. Our hero’s father Theron is ...

In a fantasy world roughly based on Medieval Europe, the monarch and his men-at-arms expect to hold a monopoly on murder. Therefore, when...

Remember when video games cost a quarter and required players to stand on their own two feet? Evidently, there is at least one coin-opera...

As the age of legends comes to a close, veterans of the Monster Hunt Bureau are facing some pretty severe structural unemployment. They h...

Welcome to a time long ago in a galaxy far, far away. However, instead of the Force, the warriors of Karazawa follow the Bushido way. Rat...

Does this sound familiar?  A little dude with big feet saves the world.  A magic ring is involved.  Welcome back to Middle Earth.  Aft...

They were not called dark ages for nothing.  Battlefield carnage and an inflexible class system are the realities of the day.  Yet, the ...

If you’re going to borrow from Harry Potter, you might as well do it with pretty girls. This seems to be the logic behind Ip Man helmer Wil...

In her novel Ahab’s Wife , Sena Jeter Naslund tells the story of the sailor’s wife only briefly mentioned in Melville’s Moby - Dick . An int...

So deeply ingrained are the images of a devastated Poland during WWII and the Soviet era, many Americans forget the millennia old country wa...

Forget the Syfy (Sci-Fi) Channel’s Earthsea miniseries. Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea novels and stories, would certainly ...

Maybe it is not quite as daunting to remake as Star Wars , but if you identify with the generation formerly known as “X,” you would probably...