The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell return in a sequel to their earlier low-budget cult hit. With a far better budget this time, Raimi goes completely over-the-top with a delirious silliness that will bring tears to the eyes
The fifth film in the Evil Dead series. This comes with the selling point of being a female-led sequel and offers a much more serious and gore-drenched take than previous entries
Blumhouse film where a Westernised Indian girl rejects her traditional mother’s fears about her new boyfriend being a bad man reincarnated only for them to come true
The Ghost Story is a genre has felt overused and its clichés churned to a point of exhaustion. All of that said, this Swedish film delivers the goods and conjures an extremely spooky mood
The third in a trilogy of spookily eerie Japanese vampire films. This echoes the basics of Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire in being set at a girls’ boarding school, which is spun in interesting ways
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and quite memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
Another Found Footage entry about a group of people being stalked. This generates some passable tension and one or two surprises
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? popularised the idea of the toon where cartoon characters mingle with humans. This was exploitation director Fred Olen Ray’s take where a stripper is possessed by a demonic toon
The story of the drug-addicted heir Andrew Getty determined to be a filmmaker is almost as fascinating as the one film he made before his death. The film is an extraordinary work, filled with jaw-dropping surrealistic imagery
Excellent film based on the true life Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo who preyed upon children. Malcolm McDowell giving a standout performance in the title role
1980s horror with Clint Howard as a bullied military cadet who uses a computer to help decipher an occult tome whereupon he gains powers that allow him to enact vengeance on his tomentors
A strong portrait of disturbed psychology – imagine a mash-up between The Neon Demon and its delve into the dark side of the modeling world and Single White Female about a woman and her disturbed roommate
Darkly subversive film about an alienated teenage girl, this digs its teeth into family values and depicts the uncomfortableness of puberty. On the other hand, this is only rarely the horror film others have reviewed it as
A film where four girls on a weekend getaway undergo a home invasion. It soon becomes apparent that this is a film homaging I Spit on Your Grave
A Found Footage film from the early days before Paranormal Activity went big. This unnervingly charts the psychological disintegration of an ordinary English family under economic pressure
A completely wild South Korean film set among the rituals of Confucian shamanism during the attempts to relocate a coffin and exorcise a troublesome spirit
Eduardo Sanchez, the co-director of The Blair Witch Project, makes a Found Footage Bigfoot film. He makes a solid entry but not one substantially different to the last 238 Found Footage films
Friends on Springbreak break down after taking a detour where they encounter creepy towtruck driver Tom Sizemore and drunkenly summon the spirit of a murdered woman
Dull and routine film with Kane Hodder as a psycho backwoods gas station owner. The film miscasts the hulking Hodder in trying to make him look like an ordinary guy
Modestly effective zombie film set during the US Civil War. This eschews the usual gore-drenched zombie attacks in favour of a nicely achieved story about one man’s internal journey through the apocalypse
Joshua John Miller, the son of The Exorcist’s star Jason Miller, makes a film where an actor cast as the priest in a remake of The Exorcist becomes possessed. A witty and clever blend of meta reference and autobiography
A possession film set on an airplane. This sets out to parody exorcism movie cliches but makes a beeline for outrageous bad taste humour. It does include a great cast of genre regulars
The worst exorcism film ever made. A ridiculous Christian evangelical film about a God-loving American family under attack by malevolent spirits emerged from a book on witchcraft! Supposedly based on a true story
Low-budget possession and exorcism supposedly based on a true story that cycles through most of the tropes of the genre. An earlier version of the same “true-life” possession depicted in The Ritual
This became a big sensation with its claims to be on the true account of an exorcism even if director Scott Derrickson alters what actually happened to the point of complete fiction. The rest just rehashes cliches from The Exorcist
A possession and exorcism film from Mexico, this draws on the same tired and overly worn clichés that have been around since The Exorcist but offers some interesting twists
The Asylum’s mockbuster response to the hit of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and actually a far more interesting film. This discovers itself with a go-for-broke trashiness that the horde of Emily Rose imitators balked at
A landmark classic of the horror genre, a film whose take on demonic possession and exorcism laid down a series of tropes that are still present over five decades later. A gruelling and intensive horror story into the bargain
Regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made, featuring many of the actors from the original but John Boorman as director. An incomprehensible mishmash of ideas but not without some laudable elements
In much the same way as they did with Halloween, Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green offer up a sequel to The Exorcist on the original’s fiftieth anniversary. The results are a bizarre scratch of the head
The possession and exorcism genre has been recycling the same cliches ever since The Exorcist. Even this film’s bogus claim to be filmed in the house where the true-life event that inspired The Exorcist took place fails to make this stand out
One will go out on a limb and argue that William Peter Blatty’s sequel is actually a far superior work to the original The Exorcist, one that substitutes a literate theological detective story for barf bag theatrics and contains at least one real out there jump
Prequel to The Exorcist concerning the young Father Merrin. Production company Morgan Creek dumped Paul Schrader’s original version of the film and brought in the perpetually terrible Renny Harlin to make something scarier but Harlin’s pop-effects remain tepid
Rather ridiculous action film where Jeff Speakman breaks into a prison to take revenge against a serial killer because he received too liberal a treatment from the justice system
A medical horror film concerning a disfigured surgeon killing his way through a hospital as he seeks revenge. This is notable for its degree of gore-drenched sadism
An earlier effort from Shion Sono that concerns itself with hair extensions that take over and kill their host. More straightforward than many of Sono’s other works but the outlandish of the effects make the film
Vigilante film with a cult reputation that was banned in places because of its ultra-violence. The film is a mix of Taxi Driver and Death Wish, mostly centred around a series of gory despatches
An anthology of Edgar Allan Poe tales narrated by Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and others. Each episode is in a different style, where the succinctness allows the stories to be told as written
Documentary-maker Joe Berlinger makes an exactingly detailed recreation of the Ted Bundy case, while Zac Efron abandons teen pin-up roles and steps into the title role with unnerving likeness
Horror film from the rising name of Anthony DiBlasi set around an extreme haunt, a Halloween horror show that pushes everything beyond people’s limits
Thailand’s Pang Brothers proved themselves some of the best horror directors in the world with this eerie film in which a woman starts to see the dead after receiving corneal implants. Several sequels and an English-language remake followed
The Pang Brothers are in this author’s opinion some of the finest genre directors in the world. This sequel to their breakout hit The Eye is an even better film that achieves some genuinely haunted moments
The third and weakest of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye films, this has occasional moments of spookiness but mostly feels made up of leftover ideas that didn’t make it to the other films
A strange thriller in the Basic Instinct-mold with surveillance expert Ewan McGregor obsessed with tracking serial killer Ashley Judd, while haunted by the imaginary companion of his daughter
Psycho-thriller where derelict Michael Sarrazin is taken home by Gayle Hunnicutt and gets wound up in a series of games between her and batty aunt Eleanor Parker
An English-language remake of the ghost story from the Pang Brothers follows the other film faithfully but in terms of atmosphere is a pallid copy of the original
A giallo film from Umberto Lenzi, best known for creating the Italian cannibal film but Lenzi’s direction is crude and lacking style in comparison to the others working in this genre
Entry from the heyday of the slasher film. Better plotted than most of its ilk, largely because it steals the plot from Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Featuring a teenage Jennifer Jason Leigh in her first film role
Faye Dunaway is a fashion photographer who gains a psychic link into the mind of a killer. From a John Carpenter script but the thriller plotting is never up to the chic suggestiveness the film is given
An extraordinary film, the story of a disturbed woman who keeps people prisoners in her barn. The stark effectiveness of the film all comes in the brooding black-and-white photography
Classic French thriller about a mad surgeon who abducts women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. The film has a rare visual poetry combined with moments of horror that are still effective decades later
Painfully dull film edited together from two unrelated Mexican films ending an incomprehensible plot featuring a revived Aztec Mummy and another mummy that transforms into a werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr
Cult exploitation director Jesus Franco pays homage to the mad surgeon films of his heyday. Essentially one of Franco’s Dr Orloff films by way of the sadistic despatches of the giallo film
Modestly creepy film about a group of subjects locked in a hospital as part of a drug trial that proceeds to go wrong as some of the group have an adverse reaction and turn crazed
A Dark Horse Entertainment film that traipses through a tired serial killer plot that comes out resembling a weak episode of CSI before a frankly unbelievable twist ending
A clever little psycho film concerning a killer who is obsessed with classic movies. This was doing the movie-inspired psychos thing way before Scream and with quite a degree of ingenuity
An underrated mini-series – sort of the anti-Supernatural. This creates a highly original afterlife mythology and some great characters arcs, while overspilling with wry nerdish in-humour
Low-budget ingenue effort with pretensions to being more, this produces some occasionally nifty effects that quickly weary and only seem to hold up a thoroughly hackneyed B horror movie plot
Early silent adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story that treats the story liberally, drops Poe’s mood of desolation and despair for one more of melancholy, but holds an undeniable style
Maybe the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever, a version made for tv that fails utterly to project any of Poe’s gloom and despair, while a badly overacting Martin Landau is disastrously miscast as Roderick Usher
Mike Flanagan mini-series that expands on the story to incorporate a host of other Poe stories. More like another of Mike Flanagan’s cross-generational ghost stories by way of tv’s Succession with a lot of Poe-esque margin notes
Not an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story but a film about a man in a troubled state of mind that comes filled with numerous Poe references
A smart and intelligent supernatural thriller with Denzel Washington cast as a detective who sends a serial killer to the execution chamber only to find he now faces a demon that can inhabit any person that it touches
Though many people celebrated this as black comedy about Michael Douglas taking up arms on a shooting rampage against the petty frustrations of modern life, it is a film that is really a single redneck rant against the poor and minorities
A modern day vampire film that comes with the amusing idea of James Ransone as a vampire who lurks around AA meetings to find his prey
A dense, visually afire film from the great Tony Scott starring Robert De Niro as a sports fan who snaps from the pressures of ordinary life and then stalks baseball star Wesley Snipes
A film made not long after the John Lennon shooting with Lauren Bacall as a Hollywood star stalked by fan Michael Biehn who snaps and turns psycho after a perceived rejection
Copy of Willard with Les Tremayne as a man obsessed with snakes who starts using them to take revenge on those who have wronged him. This gets fascinatingly torrid.
This is a B-budget film about genetically engineered killer bats where the usual is boosted by a sense of humour and a line-up of eccentric characters
The first film from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio, later known for the Blind Dead series. A Euro vampire film starring Anita Ekberg, this proves dreary on all counts
Robin Hardy, director of The Wicker Man, makes an Irish-set thriller in which a country girl moved to the city is stalked by a serial killer who sends his victims poetry
Featuring Simon Pegg as a paranoid writer seeing sinister happenings everywhere. This should have been a darkly funny comedy but the film winds everything up to a shrilly hysteric fever pitch
A film about a couple who break down on a country road and seek help at a sinister farmhouse, before everything turns into Torture Porn territory. And then things get weird
One of the films from cult French director Jean Rollin whose works always contained an arty mix of horror and erotica. This concerns mysterious blood-drinking rituals among a group of women at a chateau
A documentary that charts the lurid and frequently distasteful phenomenon of the Nazisploitation film that emerged as a mini-genre in the 1970s
Another zombie film that comes with a deliberately ridiculous title, even if the title ends up being a misnomer. This site’s choice for the worst film of 2020
Classic and highly influential psycho-thriller with Glenn Close as a deranged woman who stalks married man Michael Douglas after he has a fling with her. The film’s stature has been overstated and beneath the surface it holds a very conservative outlook on gender politics
An occasionally amusing Airplane-styled spoof of film noir and psycho-thrillers, including parodies of then recent films like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, among others
Entry in the 1980s slasher fad with a manic killing women at a sorority house that comes with a Jekyll and Hyde rationale. Shabbily made on all counts and often repellent in its nastiness
Troma film that ventures back into their regular bad taste territory. This often feels like a film that never coheses into a particularly clear idea of what it is trying to do, possibly the result of six different directors
Brian Yuzna’s adaptation of the cult comic-book is a disappointment that has tamed down any of the censorship-pushing controversy the original had and emerges as no more than a standard dark avenging superhero film
Fine copy of Eyes of Laura Mars from Rockne S. O’Bannon in which clairvoyant Ally Sheedy gains the ability to see through the eyes of a serial killer
Rather confused film about people on a therapy retreat to confront their fears who then have to deal with a wooden dummy that has maybe come to life
Psycho-thriller with William Petersen trying to protect daughter Reese Witherspoonan from being ensnared by a charming, psychopathic boyfriend played by an unknown Mark Wahlberg
Quite a decent little Australian film in the survival in shark-infested waters stakes about a diving team forced by mobsters to conduct a dive in a river inhabited by a killer shark to retrieve a haul of gold bullion
Abel Ferrara is known for bleak works of social realism. This features a killer targeting strippers but has a superficial blandness that feels like it is made by someone who has never visited a strip joint in their life
Film spun out from a web series. Robert Englund as a mad psychiatrist who creates a machine that helps people confront their phobias that somehow opens a doorway to creatures from another dimension
A rather funny comedy about the making of a disaster-laden low-budget horror film where the filmmaking style depicted makes Ed Wood’s films seem like works of art
One of the better psycho-thrillers made by Hammer Films where a deft script is aided by good performances including Peter Cushing and a wonderfully bitchy Joan Collins
A variant on The Game where Michael Douglas had his life turned into a nightmare series of rubber reality games that were being staged for his amusement. This spins the same idea through a witty series of horror movie homages
From Frank LaLogiaa, a director who has made too few films, a low-budget film with Stefan Arngrim as a teenage Antichrist. This is a film filled with as much promise as it does absurd effect
Backwoods horror that starts well, keeping its menace ambiguous but collapses into a mishmash of pretensions and amateurish symbolism
The third of the Fear Street films, this takes the story back to a 17th Century filled with absurdly modern attitudes and offers an explanation that ties everything together
The second of the R.L. Stine adapted Fear Street films, this one takes the action back to 1978 where it then becomes a vigorous homage to the slasher film
The first of the Fear Street films, somewhat more adult than the usual R.L. Stine adaptations. This can be considered the first Woke era slasher film
Follow-up to the R.L. Stine-based Fear Street films of a couple of years back, this conducts a not bad homage to the 1980s slasher film and gets the period setting right
Internet horror film that rehashes Ring with a haunted website instead of a tv broadcast. This suffers from a muddled concept where it is not at all clear what is happening.
Roman Polanski misfired with this vampire comedy intended as a spoof of Hammer Films. Beautifully produced but comedy is not Polanski’s forte and the film seems to consists of much slapstick running around
A visually striking compilation of five animated French horror tales. Each varies widely in style but the result is far more extraordinary than many live-action counterparts
A smartly funny monster movie with various people at siege in a bar and under attack by creatures. This takes great delight in puncturing the cliches of the genre. Two sequels followed.