Genre Icons We Love - Summer Glau

If you look very closely at the tortured ballerina in the ANGEL episode Waiting In The Wings then you will see that it is none other than Summer Glau. This isn't really a surprise since trained as a ballerina and therefore looks completely at home in the part.

From this small background role, however, started a career that has made her such a genre icon that she was able to appear as herself in a cameo role on the best geek comedy show ever THE BIG BANG THEORY.

Glau manages to combine a vulnerability and apparent fragility with inner strength and this is the combination that made her perfect to play the kick ass robot sent back in time to save John Connor (again) in TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES. There is a definite kick to be had watching this slight girl beating the living daylights out of some big hefty blokes.

It was, though, just a variation on the part she had already played in Joss Whedon's sadly truncated FIREFLY in which she was a young and fragile girl who could turn into a kick ass killing machine when the plot required. In an ensemble as strong as this show boasted, being able to hold her own proved her acting ability.

Since then, she's gone on to play one of the empowered 4400, a supergeek scientist type in DOLLHOUSE and the mentally fragile superhero sidekick in THE CAPE (just coming to an end on SyFy).

No matter what she appears  in, Summer is watchable and eye catching and a perfect science fiction icon.

Aliens Invade the Horror Channel

 We like the Horror Channel and not just because it's one of the few movie channels that we can get on our Sky box thingy. The channel regularly screens TV shows that we missed the first time around (or just ignored) and which have only a tenuous link at best with the word 'horror'.

Anyway, March sees aliens invade the channel as a series of straight to TV, DVD, video or bargain bucket productions for your delight and delectation. Watch out, watch the skies and watch what you're doing with that lighted blowtorch.

The invasion begins on Friday 5 March with ALIEN FURY: COUNTDOWN TO INVASION (2000), directed by Rob Hedden (writer, director of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan). This sci-fi drama pits aliens against a covert US defence agency and a surveillance satellite retrofitted with a nuclear warhead. Starring Dale Midkiff (Pet Sematary), Dondre Whitfield (Ghost Whisperer) and Stephen Tobolowsky (Deadwood, Glee).

  Next up is INTRUDERS. Directed in 1992 by the original Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, this alien abduction mini-series features our very own Stephen Berkoff, alongside Richard Crenna (Colonel Trautman in the Rambo movies) and award-winning actress Mare Winningham. Centering on two cases, where both women have experienced similar nightmares involving aliens, a psychiatrist decides to investigate. This will be split into two parts, with Part 1 on Sat 12 March and Part 2 on Sunday 13 March

THE INVADERS (1995), which will broadcast on Saturday 19^th March and Sunday 20^th March, was originally a television series created by Larry Cohen in 1967. This welcome reprise stars Scott Bakula (of Quantum Leap and Star Trek: Enterprise fame) as Nolan Wood, who discovers an alien conspiracy and tries to stop an invasion of the earth by aliens disguised as humans. Roy Thinnes reprises his role of David Vincent, now an old man handing the burden over to Wood.

In ROSWELL: THE ALIENS ATTACK (1999) a cheesy slice of sci-fi on Sat 26 March, two aliens intend on blowing us all to smithereens. John, a male alien and Eve a female alien escape from Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 with intentions to blow up the earth. Eve finds she enjoys sex and likes to seduce soldiers. However, John falls in love with an Earthling and decides to stop Eve from setting off a nuclear weapon the two had developed.

Finally, on Sunday 27 March, the channel brings you ALIEN TERMINATOR (1995). Five miles below the Earth's surface, a group of scientists is working in self-imposed isolation, perfecting a series of DNA experiments that could literally change the world. But when one of those experiments goes awry, it unleashes a nearly immortal organism - one capable of instant regeneration, and with an insatiable appetite for living flesh. Soon, nothing can contain the creature and the scientists grimly prepare for their final battle. Directed by Dave (Reeker) Payne.