Giant Freakin Robot

Science fiction plays host to some of the toughest characters in all of fiction, so we’ve set out to put together a team of the toughest of that tough bunch.  Think of it like the Avengers, except with more bullets and a heavier focus on fighting aliens.

If you’ve got a job dismantling angry robots or shooting at things in outer space, or you need someone to travel back in time and kill your creepy Uncle before he’s born, we’ve got the ultimate team to do it.

These are the most unstoppable, gritty, hard-as-nails characters in all of science fiction. On their own each is fully capable of saving the universe. Together we suspect they’d literally be able to do anything.

Sarah Connor

When you first met Sarah Connor, she was a meek, mild-mannered waitress just sort of floating aimlessly through her life. Encounters with a vicious, single-minded cyborg from the future, sent back to hunt you down so your son is never born, have a way of changing that. Over the course of the first two movies in the Terminator movies, Sarah transforms into a serious action star, teaching herself all manner of combat and survival skills, actively seeking out any and all knowledge that might help her in her one-woman war against Cyberdyne Systems and a future ruled by human-hunting machines. Basically, she’s a perfect addition to your team of mercs, and will always be working to improve her already ample skill set and add to the team.

Ah, January is finally over, which means all of the movies headed to theaters will be at least 8% more likely to be engaging, with the possible exception of Jupiter Ascending, which had a predictably horrible debut at Sundance. Critics, right? Thankfully, NetflixNetflix is filling February with a bunch of new-to-streaming features, and they’re adding five solid 2014 sci-fi releases. As well as the first season of Richie Rich, which isn’t sci-fi, but I feel like I’m living in a weird alternate reality where people like Richie Rich again. Anyway, set your My Lists.

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (February 7)
One of my favorite sci-fi/horrors of last year, Tommy Wirkola’s splatstick-filled sequel Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is a non-stop slip-n-slide through some of the most insanely imaginative gore out there. An advancement on its predecessor in every way, this flick pits the surviving Martin (Vegar Hoel) against that Nazi zombie bastard Herzog (Ørjan Gamst), who is stopping at nothing to raise all the dead German soldiers he can to take over the world. But Martin has two secret weapons: a zombie arm that also has dead-raising powers, and a trio of American zombie killers (including Martin Starr) who are fully invested in putting these bodies back into the ground no matter what it takes. And what it takes is a lot of blood-soaked special effects.

It’s that time of the year when every inch of the Internet is packed with end-of-the-year lists, from the usual “best and worst” to more eclectic assemblages of data. In this age of widespread broadband, one annual metric that’s always interesting to check is what the most pirated films of the year were. You might think the list is inevitably going to parallel the films with the highest profile or box office — after all, more interest and more word of mouth should theoretically make it more likely that a potential pirate would have a given film in his or her cross-hairs. But that’s not always the case, and this year’s list of most pirated films does contain several surprises…and a whole lot of science fiction.

We’ve got the full list of the top 20 most pirated films below. A huge surprise right out the gate? Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, one of the biggest success stories of the year, is nowhere on the list. So kudos to Marvel for making a blockbuster that even the pirates apparently want to pay for. Here’s the list, with the numbers listing millions of times they were downloaded:

There are a lot of great, memorable death scenes in movies. Some pack an emotional punch, others play key narrative roles, and still more are just plain awesome. This new video collects 26 of the most unforgettable, important, and straight up crazy film deaths, each chosen by a different director. Sci-fi is well represented on this list, with some of your favorite moments showing up, as well as a few surprising omissions.

This video is one of the coolest bits of promotion we’ve ever seen, coming from Drafthouse Films and Magnet Releasing to pump up the release of their horror anthology ABCs of Death 2. The concept is that 26 directors made 26 short films, each assigned a different letter of the alphabet. As you probably guessed, each filmmaker also got to choose their favorite cinematic death scene for inclusion in this video. That would be a tough one, there are so many to pick from, and what if someone beat you to the punch and named your favorite? You’re obviously going to be publicly judged on the basis of your selection.

Paul Verhoven’s 1987 neo-noir classic RoboCop is one of our all-time favorite movies. Even the mediocre rehash from earlier this year can do nothing to tarnish that memory. (Some people enjoyed that movie, which I just don’t get. While it’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, not even the worst remake of a Verhoeven movies—that honor goes to Total Recall—it’s just bland and doesn’t bring anything new to the party.) That’s why a book like RoboCop: The Definitive History is right up our alley, and here are a few quick glimpses at what lies inside the cover.

The book by Calum Waddell hit bookstores yesterday, but before you rush out and buy it (and by that I most likely mean open another browser window and order it from Amazon), take a moment to check out these photos that come from Badass Digest. They show a variety of behind the scenes images from across the history of the franchise, from Verhoeven on set all the way up to concept art from the new installment.

One of the best parts of Comic-Con is all the crazy exclusives that populate the dealer’s room floor, from action figures to posters to shirts and pretty much everything in between. Well, for any Blu-ray aficionados currently hunkering down in San Diego, you might want to swing by the 20th Century Fox booth, as they’ve announced a collection of exclusive Comic-Con Blu-ray editions of four movie classics any GFR reader should own: Alien, the original RoboCop, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, and the 1958 version of The Fly. The matching artwork should look pretty damn striking all in a row, so you might want to shelve these cover out.

Of course, these are all movies that have been released many, many times over the years, and if you’re a true Alien die-hard, chances are you already own the stellar Alien Anthology. But in addition to the snazzy cover art, each of these three Blu-ray sets is from a limited run of 500, and each comes with a matching numbered lithograph. Here’s what you’ll get on the Alien disc as far as bonus features: