The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Silent movie version of Dante’s classic poem. Dante is suborned into a miser’s redemption story but it is the wild mediaeval visions of Hell and the tortures of the damned we have come to watch the film for
Dante Aligheri’s famous poem is dragged down to a tatty morality play with Spencer Tracy as a carnival barker running an Inferno exhibit. The film is worth watching for its stunning hallucinatory vision of Hell
Modernised version of the classic journey though Hell conducted with cardboard puppets – a uniquely appealing experiment peppered with a number of biting contemporary jibes
This leprechaun fantasy is one of the best and most underrated live-action films Disney ever made. The effects are at a peak of the era and the film plays with a sublime charm that proves absolutely winning
One of the early efforts among the surge of Marvel Comics adaptations on the big screen in the early 2000s. A disappointing adaptation that feels more like a series of posed comic-book panels than it ever does a movie
One of the better films to emerge from Full Moon, the story of a female demon who escapes to Earth and becomes a vigilante defender of the innocent. Rather well done with Angela Featherstone being particularly otherworldly
Incomprehensible surrealism from director Raul Ruiz about a doctor sent to investigate a village where miracles occur with commonplace regularity
A really strange comedy with Judd Nelson as a socially inept man who tries to make it as a stand-up comedy act after growing a third arm out of his back. Audiences scratched their heads and the film bombed
The film that Jim Henson chose to make as successor to The Muppets. An astonishing technical leap beyond Muppetry to create an entire fantasy world in living, breathing detail all only inhabited by puppets
This is a British-made fantasy film in the vein of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones but conducted on a B-budget where it does seem to be making an effort
Christopher Nolan brought the cinematic Batman franchise back to life with Batman Begins and here expands it into something amazing. The show is capped off by Heath Leder’s towering Academy Award winning performance as The Joker
The Dark Knight is a hard act to follow and Christopher Nolan almost does but not quite. The story keeps Batman off-screen for half the film. Tom Hardy’s Bane dominates the show, while Catwoman is surprisingly subdued
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman gives us an utterly mangled version of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series that has little resemblance to the books, yet makes little sense if you haven’t read them
A film that comes with an interesting sounding premise where a woman ventures through a doorway into a labyrinth world of interconnected rooms and ends up in a fight against the ruling theocracy
The first film from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, a parody of a various romance movies. The duo went on to make some of the excruciating and unfunny comedies of the next decade
A rather charming comedy in which two nerds find an angel fallen knocked down by an orbiting satellite. Much silliness but Emmenualle Beart has an otherworldly loveliness as the angel
An Australian variant on the bodyswap comedy in which couple Guy Pearce and Claudia Karvan end up in each other’s bodies resulting in some likeable if predictable comic mishaps
A man builds a cardboard maze in his living room only for he and others to become lost in it. This has a wonderfully inventive scrappy handmade eccentricity. Imagine Cube remade as one of Michel Gondry’s sweded films
David Lynch is the king of weird cinema from works like Eraserhead to Twin Peaks. In this documentary, a 70-year-old Lynch sits in his art studio and in a very laidback manner reflects on his process and tells us his life story
From the people who made the Mythica films, this is a modest and well made fantasy film about a young farmboy thrust into the role of dragonslayer that does good things on a limited budget
Excellent film from Carl Dreyer, the director of Vampyr director set during the time of witch persecutions about a woman who believes she has the powers of a witch. Everything is told with a beautifully subtle ambiguity
Kenneth Branagh breathes life into the creaky reincarnation thriller with a plot that crackles with tension, while he directs with a virtuoso showmanship that shouts style from every frame
An off-the-wall film with a unique premise about an apartment where every time somebody is killed another copy of them emerges out of a hole in the wall
Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive was a Yakuza film with a gonzo ending. In this sequel, Miike brings back the same two actors and makes it ALL gonzo
Droll British comedy where Jane Horrocks gets the advice from the ghosts of famous murders about disposing of her controlling mother
Incredibly unfunny comedy in which a teenager sells his soul to the Devil. As The Devil, Kevin Pollak lets all stop loose in a mind-bogglingly over-the-top performance
Adaptation of a Lord Dunsany story, this has an appealingly eccentricity – a film told as a series of after dinner conversations about a man recalling his past life as a dog – that works with winning charms
Robert Zemeckis film about an immortality treatment that digs a knife into Hollywood beauty treatments with a blackly funny knife. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn have huge fun playing to the gallery and upstaging one another
A film about the modern discovery of a unicorn, this seems designed to shatter any cutsie notions about unicorns and instead becomes a work about greed and where the unicorns become vicious and monstrous. An A24 film produced by Ari Aster
Classic fantasy film in which Death takes human form to visit a party and experience the human condition. Frederic March gives us Death as a comically eccentric outsider and the film has some great moments of imagination
Extremely confusing film in which Mike Vogel keeps waking up in different lives where he is pursued by creatures. Sort of like Dark City reconceived as a horror film.
A remake of the popular 1980s sword and sorcery film that was originally produced by Roger Corman. This version is directed by makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski who fills it with an amazing range of creature effects
Adapted from an Ira Levin play, this is an hilarious parody of the whodunnit with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve engaged in a series of games trying to outsmart the other amid a series of brilliant whiplash reversals
An experimental film where a camera wanders through an abandoned hotel over which fragments of film footage have been overlaid suggesting a hotel inhabited by ghosts of former residents
A Woody Allen film in which he plays a writer on his way to receive an award. The film drifts in and out of a series of vignettes and stories he has written, including a number of fantastic interludes, with highly amusing effect
A weird and twisted film about a failed artist who develops a relationship with a hole in a wall. Imagine something that falls between Barton Fink and the Radiator Girl sequences from Eraserhead
Modest and quite well made film entirely shot, produced and acted by the Adams Family who have gone on to make a series of other striking horror films. This concerns a man haunted by a ghost after he kills a girl
Another of the strange surreal deadpan films from Quentin Dupieux about a man who buys a deerskin jacket that then speaks and urges him to eliminate everybody else who is wearing a jacket
Albert Brooks directed/starring comedy in which he plays a man in the afterlife on trial, required to defend the dull and ordinary life he led, at the same time as he begins a romance with Meryl Streep
One of several films that came out around the same time, including Super and Kick-Ass, about ordinary people who believe they superheroes. Woody Harrelson gives a winning performance as the comically inept title character
This attempted to do something different to the usual formula US kiddie animation film and creates its own fantasy world. Unfortunately, while the ambition is admirable, the film flopped badly
Comedy in which John Candy wakes up inside the world of the tv soap opera he writes. This feels like it misses most of the possibilities inherent in its idea
Anime from Yoshiaki Kawajiri, director of Wicked City and Ninja Scroll, concerning a suburb of Tokyo that is transformed into a borderland zone inhabited by demonic forces
Forgotten Japanese film about a man searching for a friend finding a village where a bell must be struck to prevents creatures escaping from a pond. Beautiful, bizarre and quite unlike any fantasy film you have seen before
This has an appealing premise – the children of all the Disney villains have grown up and go to school together. This is promptly killed by the awfulness of the film itself, which is essentially High School Musical set in the Disney universe
Sequel to the painfully bad Disney Channel film that copied the success of High School Musical and featured the teenage children of classic Disney animated villains. This is just as empty-headed and unwatchable
An early Fritz Lang film clearly influenced by D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in which Death offers a woman visions of her and her lover reincarnated throughout different eras of history
Would be quirky, surrealistic indie film with lovers on the run in Las Vegas. Quentin Tarantino appears as the spirit of chance from an interdimensional swimming pool
Tsui Hark returns to form in this lush Chinese-backed historical drama where his wildly fantastical martial arts combine with the story of the true-life detective De Renjie/Detective Dee
The third of Tsui Hark’s films based on the historical figure of De Renjie/Detective Dee. While the other films were rooted in a relative realism, Tsui lets all restraints loose here and goes way over the top
Dreary Disney live-action comedy that casts Bill Cosby as The Devil who tasks a hapless Elliott Gould with trying to find redemption by getting three innocents to sell their souls
An indescribable, completely insane Southern road movie about soul collectors. Somewhere between The Dukes of Hazzard as redone by Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino and the Southern blues film Crossroads
Classic 1970s porn film about a spinster condemned to Hell who is sent back to the world to experience the lusts of the flesh. Made back at a time when the people involved seemed to care about making a good film as well
Despite a premise that sounds more like the punchline of a lawyer joke – The Devil (Al Pacino) is a high-price lawyer in New York – this is lushly produced, played seriously and with surprising theological depths
Darren Lynn Bousman, the director best known for the Saw sequels, makes a musical about a circus set in Hell through which three damned souls pass, enacting updated versions of various of Aesop’s Fables
Beautifully pure-hearted French Wartime allegory set during the Middle Ages about The Devil who has sent out envoys to tempt mortals into damnation via affairs of the heart
Ingmar Bergman comedy in which The Devil sends Don Juan to tempt a vicar’s wife. A minor Bergman entry where he seems unsuited to directing comedy and allows his usual weighty philosophical preoccupations to intrude
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
The bizarre story of a man who believes his young daughter is the reincarnation of a NASA astronaut. The film makes great claim that it is based on a true story but fails to make a compelling argument for its case
A remake of the great and underrated film and Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief who constantly outwits the authorities, this comes with style and wit to spare and strikes the note perfectly
The third of the new series of films based on the cult Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief. This entry goes back to offer us a Diabolik origin story
The 2021 Diabolik was a witty and stylish revival of the cult Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief. This was the first of the sequels, albeit with a different actor playing the title role
Crime film that takes place amid cardboard sets and toy robots. A puzzlingly surreal effort that seems more suited to an MTV clip for an indie band than a full-length film
Feature film version of the popular comic-book detective that led to three sequels. Here the stylised look of the comic-book comes out resembling a regular crime drama but the film is not uninteresting
The Warren Beatty directed and starring adaptation of the popular newspaper comic-strip detective proved a flop. Beatty creates a highly stylised world and peoples it with an all-star cast but fails to invest the world with any depth
The third of the films based on the famous comic-book detective Dick Tracy, this is far more successful at obtaining the larger-than-life feel of the comic-book than earlier entries
The first film from Mamoru Hosoda based on a tv series that was a blatant attempt to copy the Pokemon phenomenon and concerning cute creatures that live on the internet
Michel Ocelot is one of the great underrated animators of the world. Here he makes an exquisite tribute to the Belle Epoque featuring appearances from names of the era and decked out in Steampunk inventions
The first full computer animated film from Disney. It feels like someone decided to give the Jurassic Park dinosaurs their own film, mixed up with the plot of The Land Before Time
An Academy Award winning film from the great iconoclast Luis Buñuel, a series of surreal vignettes as a group of friends set out to dinner but always end up being prevented in strange ways
Enchanted in which Amy Adams played an animated fairytale princess entering the real world was a reasonable hit. This is the long-planned sequel that reunites the principals but feels like a joke that belabours in the retelling
Jonathan Rhys Meyers wakes up in a hospital as strange hallucinatory and nightmarish things start to happen. The fact that this is a deathdream film becomes very obvious
A South Korean film that came out around the same time as Frequency and has an almost identical premise about two people who start talking by radio while separated in time by twenty years.
Canadian family saga told through the eyes of a young boy growing up amid a strange extended Newfoundland family. Featuring a number of fantastical elements.
The final film from legendary 1950s SF producer George Pal, an adaptation of the celebrated 1930s pulp hero Doc Savage. Alas, this is given the campy unserious tone of tv’s Batman, which utterly wrecks the show
This gets the nonsensical absurdity of the original Doctor Dolittle stories far more than the Eddie Murphy version. On the other hand, this was the era of Mary Poppins and this is made as a lumbering musical
Complete and utter bastardisation of Hugh Lofting’s charming Doctor Dolittle stories, which are turned into a modern comedy with Eddie Murphy and talking animals doing lots of pee and poop jokes
A sequel to the Eddie Murphy Dr Dolittle remake. This is still an insult to the original stories but under director Steve Carr at least proves a more amiable comedy than the first film did
Sequel to the Eddie Murphy Dr Dolittle films without Murphy where the title role is inherited by Kyla Pratt as his teenage daughter. The humour is pitched at an excruciating level of inanity
The second of the video-released Dr Dolittle films featuring his teenage daughter Kyla Pratt. This is marginally better and less excruciating in its humour than its predecessor Dr. Dolittle 3 was
South Korean film about a doctor with shamanistic powers, this starts out seeming to be a horror film before becoming something different altogether
Dr Mabuse is one of the great villains of cinema. Fritz Lang was one of the greatest directors of the silent era and his first Mabuse film is extraordinary where Lang indulges in visual tricks that still look sensational today
One of the better films from Charles Band – an uncredited homage to Marvel’s Dr Strange. The film captures a wonderful atmosphere of esotericism and Jeffrey Combs is perfect as the sorcerer superhero
Forgotten, unsold tv pilot based on the Marvel Comics sorceror superhero. Unlike other Marvel tv properties of this era, this has an imaginativeness in its reach for esoteric spaces that favourably compares to the comic-book original
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
One among a handful of animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this conducts a passable telling of the origin story of the Sorcerer Supreme
Doctor Strange was one of the better MCU films. Here Sam Raimi takes over in the director’s chair. This readily delves into multiverse themes but requires a major crash course in a plethora of Marvel tv series to follow
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
Kevin Smith makes a film about Catholicism. Smith’s irreverent humour caused considerable controversy when the film came out, although this is also an interesting and thoughtful work that does make a number of thoughtful theological points
This revival of the classic children’s character who can speak to animals took a critical battering but I kind of liked it. It has a completely madcap slapstick tone and more crucially returns to the stories and banishes any bad memory of Eddie Murphy
A strange and fascinating Swedish film about a lonely security guard’s obsessive love affair with a mannequin, which duly comes to life. Or does it? The film sits in a place of ambiguity whether he is imagining it or not
A model maker is hired to build a miniature of a famous actress’s house but then finds the model is capable of influencing reality. An ingenious premise that plays out with near-perfection
A bizarre and entirely incomprehensible Japanese urban fantasy. I reached the end with no idea what this film’s string of strange happenings was about at all
Tony Scott directs a biopic of true-life bounty hunter Domino Harvey that becomes a totally madcap film (including fantasy elements) thanks to a lunatically out of control script from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly
A hit Brazilian film with Sonia Braga as a widow who remarries only for her wayward late husband to reappear as a ghost after she finds she is missing his passion. Charming and whimsical
Eccentric French fairytale filled with appealingly absurdist and surreal touches and with visuals that remind of the extravagance of a Barbarella. Charming and visually engaging
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
Film about clairvoyance and predestination that owes much to Don’t Look Now. Unfortunately, this reduces everything to the prosaic level of a tv movie thriller
Blumhouse film that borrows the basics of Frequency where a detective starts receiving phone calls from his murdered niece from several days in the past and tries to prevent her murder
French actress-director Marina de Van makes a film about a woman who finds her identity being occluded by someone else’s life. de Van creates a superbly paranoid sense of dis-ease that compares favourably to Polanski’s The Tenant