The following is not a list of movies you must see before you die. If you were to accidentally electrocute yourself having not seen the full list, I really wouldn’t give a tinker’s cuss (nothing personal, you understand – although I might laugh a bit); neither would I come to your funeral and rave over your coffin as it was being lowered into the cold earth, brandishing the list and pointing to the ones you didn’t see. Anyway, since you’d actually be dead, you’d probably have bigger, not to mention otherworldly, fish to fry.
Let’s simply call this a list of great movies and shorts that I’ve enjoyed in the past, and would like to share; some I only saw once but never forgot, some I’ve seen over and over again without getting tired of them. So, in no particular order of preference:

SURELY ONE OF THE best things about reading short fiction is waiting for the twist at the end. Not every short story has to have one, and some do very well without them, but they are delicious when they’re done properly. And could there be more fitting genres for them than sci-fi and horror?

EVERY NOW AND THEN a sci-fi geek needs a little reassurance that the path he’s chosen is a righteous one. While it’s true that there’s a certain portion of them – sorry, us – that are completely immune to any ridicule being slung their way (for they know their detractors could be silenced with but a wave of the hand and the utterance of a level four banishment spell), there’s a number of geek guys – and girls, of course – who, every now and then, wonder if they’re not just a wee bit old to be learning Klingon, or creating a mini-army of daleks in their basement, or preparing for the day they’ll be picked up by the Xyrilian mothership they’ve been signalling to for the past decade.

WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE about teleportation? Apart from being the coolest sci-fi gadget ever (an issue for which I'll make my case in just a minute), the practical implications for humankind on this poor, soon-to-be-boned planet would be astronomical. Such as? No more fuel crisis, for a start; that alone means that if there’s one thing that the world’s scientists should put their heads together on, it’s the creation of the planet’s first instantaneous teleport device.

CHRISTMAS IS HERE, FOLKS, and as usual, we have a huge amount of largely unusable dross out there in the shops to get for our friends and family. One thing that proliferates more than anything else around this time is literature, and I use the word in its loosest sense. The bookshelves at CNA, WH Smith and Barnes & Noble (depending on which corner of the globe you’re in) annually groan under the weight of the offerings brought out by celebrity chefs, TV presenters, actors, musicians, models, fame whores, soap stars, designers, comedians and sometimes, writers.

AT ANY POINT IN a movie I’m watching, it’s always fun to see the director drop in a knowing homage to another movie. It not only tells me a little more about the director’s influences, but also gives me a moment of self-satisfaction if I’m the only one who recognises the reference – then I can patronisingly explain it to whomever I’m watching the movie with, and feel like a smug git for a while.

You know the old adage: as one door closes another one opens. Is the end ever really the end? Or could Armageddon, in whichever form it takes, simply be nothing more than a global cleaning of the slate? The sudden deletion of 99.9% of the world’s population (leaving about seven million people, which sounds like quite a lot, but trust me, it ain’t) is just about the biggest turning over of a new leaf you can get, and we’d be remiss not to take the opportunity with both hands and run with it.

People of Earth, I have a warning for you, we’re all going to die in a rain of fire from the sky!!! I know this because I watch a lot of sci-fi movies. And the general message that these movies send out is that if you’re not from here and you visit Earth, vast oceans of virtually impenetrable human ignorance await you. Even if your mission is one of peace, exploration or discovery, you’re still in for a shitty, shitty time.

Jim: Hi folks, this is Jim Dandy and Chris Mascake welcoming you to the End-of-the-World Supreme Devil Face-Off, here at the Arena of Doom, just a few minutes drive out of Bloemfontein. It’s the End Times, and the day has come to decide which actor best portrayed the Devil in cinema and TV in the last hundred years. These are the final few, who have all come through the initials heats to battle it out in their respective teams today. We’ve a great assortment of Lucifers and Satans, and a handful of portrayals that are somewhat open to interpretation.