The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Another film masquerading with some relevance to The Amityville Horror, although this extends no further than the title. This is an almost interesting effort where a film crew interview a possible vampire
Not long after the success of Paranormal Activity, The Asylum tried the bandwagon with the novelty of repackaging The Amityville Horror as a Found Footage film
Based on a book that claimed it was true story (but was later proven to be a hoax), this haunted house tale was a considerable success and spawned a series of sequels and imitators that continue to this day
Remake of the 1979 film that still persists with the claim that the Amityville hoax was true. This embellishes the rather dull original with the baggage of trick effects of the modern horror film
The term Karen has come to mean an entitled woman who complains a great deal. This is a horror comedy about one such Karen who becomes possessed after drinking wine that comes from the Amityville house
One out of some thirty odd films using the Amityville name. This concerns a girl who inherits a haunted theatre in the town of Amityville
No less than the twentieth film spun out around The Amityville Horror. This Blumhouse revival emerges as marginally better than most films with Amityville in the name
Michael Polish is one of the underrated American directors. Here an amnesiac Wes Bentley wakes up a prisoner of a wonderfully chilling Kate Bosworth who insists that she is his wife
A 1940s good/bad twin psycho-thriller with Albert Dekker as a psychopathic twin escaped from an asylum come back to claim the inheritance taken by his brother
Modest, low-budgeted British film about people trying to survive in the aftermath of a catastrophe. A zombie film that has borrowed a few leaves from A Quiet Place
A film about the internecine in-fighting among werewolf clans and a werewolf P.I. in a near-future European Union. With Lindsay Lohan as the EU President’s wife!
A film from genre regular Brian Yuzna that takes place in Indonesia with people at siege on a fishing platform as it comes under attack by a sea monster. One of the films made in the 3D process following the huge success of Avatar
Fine thriller about the hunt for a frogman serial killer prowling the canals of Amsterdam. The police procedural plot is not so important as the entertaining dispatches and some of the finest action sequence of the 1980s
Amsterdamned with a detective pursuing a frogman serial killer prowling the canals of Amsterdam was a hugely underrated action film. 37 years later the director and lead actor reteam for a sequel
An interesting slow burn film about an ex-soldier who accepts a job as a handyman with a woman and her ailing mother that soon heads off in some very strange directions
A film crew in the Amazon headed by Jennifer Lopez encounter a giant snake. Mounted as a CGI monster movie in the aftermath of Jurassic Park, this has scripting that frequently descends into the ludicrous
Anaconda was a CGI monster movie that has subsequently gained a bad movie reputation. The idea of a comedy remake about conducting a remake of the film just seems a little too cutely meta
A sequel to the Jennifer Lopez-starring Anaconda that manages to be even more ridiculous and cliche ridden than its predecessor to the point you frequently laugh it off the screen
Extremely satisfying German medical thriller about a secret society that conducts illicit experiments. The film comes with a torturous suspense and goes way out on a limb in the gore department
A far less effective sequel to the hit German medical thriller that neglects both the tortuous suspense and grisly horror that made the first film into a stand out
A cheap and tattily made film from regular genre director David DeCoteau concerning a revived Aztec mummy. This had nothing at all to add to the genre.
Amicus Films venture into the haunted house genre with a newlywed Stephanie Beacham haunted by a disembodied hand but atmosphere is weakened by the constant reaching for crude shock effect
Overlooked psycho-thriller from Robert Fuest, director of the Dr Phibes films, about a girl whose friend goes missing while on a cycling tour through France. Fuest does an great job in making the French countryside into something sinister
Another pointless 1970s remake, in this case of the little-known British psycho-thriller about two tourists stalked in the French countryside (now transplanted to Argentina) with ho-hum results
Made in the aftermath of the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, a star-studded Agatha Christie adaptation about a guests at a remote hotel being bumped off by someone among their number
Lush, beautifully produced version of the Agatha Christie murder mystery from the BBC to celebrate Christie’s 125th anniversary. The story is a chamber mystery with guests in an isolated house being bumped off – sort of Big Brother with dead bodies
Agatha Christie created the slasher film (sort of). This murder mystery (usually known by several less politically correct names) with a series of murders on an isolated island holds the kernel of what became the slasher template. This was the first film adaptation.
Companion piece to Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, a duo of horror films sold with Andy Warhol’s name for some reason. Dracula is revamped with a good deal of sex and gore but not uninterestingly so.
An outrageous gore-drenched version of the Frankenstein story that frequently ventures into bad taste. Despite his name in the title, Andy Warhol had nothing to do with the film
Trashy film about a regular high school student who leads a double life as a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard who becomes targeted by a serial killer. Several sequels followed.
A Japanese variation on The Silence of the Lambs that is one of the better copies. Made with a cool, composed fascination and some original twists
A small masterpiece of 1960s Italian Gothic cinema. Exquisitely moody black-and-white photography with Barbara Steele as the ideal of a Gothic dominatrix twisting men around her finger and setting a town against itself
Dazzling mash-up of 1940s film noir and the horror genre. One of the most beautifully filmed of all horror films, Alan Parker creates a bygone world with a visual sensuality that constantly edges over into the fantastic
Not very well made Danish vampire film that almost redeems itself by trying to conduct everything as a John Woo-styled action film
Strange Spanish-made film about a mother-dominated psycho, which is also a film being watched in a theatre by an audience that is being stalked by another psycho
Film about a group of friends lost in the woods who take refuge in a cabin while being hunted by a creature. This is generic, produces some jumps but is dogged by unconvincing creature effects
Adaptation of a novel by Splatterpunk authors Skipp and Spector, this sits halfway between being a monster movie and an erotic thriller. Disowned by its director who hides behind a pseudonym
This claims to be the first zombie musical. Surprisingly enough, it isn’t. A cute idea but you have the sense the only musical the filmmakers had seen beforehand was High School Musical
A standout French-made stalker film that leaves Fatal Attraction in its dust. Isabelle Carré giving a frightening performance as a woman who becomes obsessed with a doctor
Someone had the bright idea to make a film centred around the creepy doll that appears in the wraparound scenes of The Conjuring. But without James Wan as director, everything disappears into formulaic scares
James Wan is one of the finest directors currently at work in the horror genre. The produced by James Wan credit is a less enthusiastic prospect and had consisted of total dogs spinning off more popular works.
Audiences and critics alike hated the first Annabelle – I went into this prequel with little enthusiasm but ended up pleasantly surprised. All it takes is a change of director to David F. Sandberg who provides a series of genuinely eerie jumps
An Asylum film that has the idea of staging a retelling of the true-life Anneliese Michel story that formed the basis of The Exorcism of Emily Rose as a Found Footage film
A film where a man encounters an instant messenger contact that knows his darkest secrets and suggests he can have godlike powers. This soon heads into some fairly disturbed headspace
Comedy about a man with ghosts in his home who invites in a so-called ‘ghost assassin’ before it becomes increasingly apparent he is completely nuts. Less a horror comedy than an eccentric bromance gone wrong
WolfCop found an appeal with its amusing title premise. Here the principal talents involved have reunited for a sequel, although the feeling is more that they have done so solely because the first film was a success
This highly charged work about race issues received a very mixed critical reception but I liked it for its clever M. Night Shyamalan-esque twistiness that messes with storytelling convention
From the notorious 1970s/80s period of Italian cinema, this was listed as one of the notorious Video Nasties. This features a lone cannibal killer amok on a Greek island amid plentiful gore
German serial killer thriller that owes more than a small debt of inspiration to The Silence of the Lambs. That said, it also does its own interesting and original thing
An Italian-made ripoff of The Exorcist. Probably the most lavishly produced of all Exorcist ripoffs, this soon slips into lurid shock theatrics. Star Carla Gravina should get full marks for going beyond the call of duty
Lars von Trier made this deeply unfathomable film after a bout of severe depression. Claimedly a work of misogyny, it features Willem Dafoe trying to deal with a deranged Charlotte Gainsbourg
Horror film where Ashlyn Yennie wakes up in a hospital filled with sinister happenings including people being maimed and then regenerated
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
A zombie apocalypse that occurs via social networking sites??? To the film’s credit, it makes such a wacky idea plausible but the low-budget leads to a zombie apocalypse that mostly occurs off-stage
A wendigo film, this comes with impressive prospect and backed by no less names than Guillermo Del Toro and David S. Goyer
Unexpectedly excellent film where an elderly Satanist couple abduct a pregnant woman in order to incarnate their grandson in her unborn child. This deflates the cliches in a series of alternately funny and wild twists
Did we need a prequel to the events of Rosemary’s Baby? The original one of the defining classics of the horror genre. Under producer Michael Bay Apartment 7A is just more IP churn
Another J-horror on the bandwagon created by the Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge films. Some promisingly initial scares traipse off into a dull mystery about investigating the past
Tobe Hooper makes a film where Chad Lowe becomes the supervisor an apartment building filled with strange tenants. However, Hooper misses the intended black comedy tone by a mile
Psychological thriller where an uptight Colin Firth gets a handsomely charming roommate in Hart Bochner who proceeds to seduce everybody in the building with sinister intent
One of the most lunatic mad scientist plots of all time in which Boris Karloff kills an ape then puts on its skin to go out and kill people for their spinal fluids to create a cure for polio
Poverty row cheapie with Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist transformed into an ape-man after an experiment gone wrong who goes out hunting victims for their spinal fluids with his pet gorilla
Another of the last films that Bruce Willis made before his mental deterioration forced him to retire. A variation on The Most Dangerous Game where Bruce plays a bad-ass facing hunters with his bare hands
Charlize Theron is on a wilderness adventure in the Australian Outback when she is hunted by Taron Egerton. A variant on The Most Dangerous Game with Egerton seemingly cast as Mick out of Wolf Creek
A really, really bad variant on the killer shark film. Painfully bad in every single regard. Dustin Ferguson is quickly establishing himself as the modern Edward D. Wood, Jr
Big-budgeted Spanish-made zombie film based on a best-selling book. Very much a post-Covid depiction of the zombie apocalypse, this rehashes the familiar basics capably well
Gareth Evans, the director of The Raid films, makes a film about the search for a missing sister among a cult. The film borrows from The Wicker Man, before a climactic dive into full-on gore and sadism
This feels like an amateur film made on a big budget that consists of utterly tepid scares where the director fails to do anything not borrowed from a dozen other ghost stories
This seems a generic ghost story. The second half has the protagonist’s dead girlfriend trying to stop him seeing another woman and becomes a descent into obsession that works rather well
This starts out as a haunted house film then veers off to become a possession story. A tepid effort filled with by-the-numbers jumps that bites off a far more ambitious twist ending than it is capable of adequately delivering
In a similar vein to James Wan’s Malignant, a film with a heroine who has a malignant twin force its way out of a wound in her side and proceed to take over her life
A drifter who likes killing tattooed girls and a girl who enjoys eating the flesh of victims meet and love blossoms. Where you expect this to go in the direction of something like Natural Born Killers, it fizzles out
A very obscure title, this is a fascinatingly enigmatic and arty film in which Edward Woodward has a dream of having a car crash that then starts coming true as he sets out
TV mini-series about British serial killing husband and wife duo Fred and Rosemary West. While not uninteresting, this merely depicts the aftermath of Fred’s arrest and the relationship with a volunteer helper
This is one slasher film that chooses a title date where the date in question requires it taking a more comedic approach. Despite which this is a standard effort in all ways
One of the worst among the 00s fad for remakes of 80s horror films. The original is abandoned all bar the name and becomes an I Know What You Did Last Summer-type slasher peopled by unlikeable teens
Early Bryan Singer film from a Stephen King novella about the friendship between a boy and an aging Nazi. While well acclaimed, the film never seems to get its relationship right or communicate the true nature of Nazism’s evils
The Asylum produces a sequel to Zoombies. While the original featured zombified zoo animals, this time we get an aquarium where the staff find themselves fighting off of zombified marine life
A French Canadian (Quebec)-made slasher film set around an aqua park. This builds to a memorably gore-drenched finale
Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, a popular revival of the 1970s bugs amok genre about a town overrun by deadly spiders, although this avoids the horror label and plays itself with much humour
Horror film about a couple camping in the woods who are menaced by something lurking outside their tent. A solid film that develops some passable suspense and eventually enters Folk Horror territory
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell make their third Evil Dead film. The series hit a peak with the delirious balance of horror and comedy in the second film but here the comedy over-balances and becomes too broad
This comes with an insane mash-ups of ideas – modern day Frankenstein monster is thrown back in time to the Civil War (in a process that also creates multiple copies) and ends up fighting on the Northern side
Zack Snyder makes a zombie heist film that if nothing else overspills with interesting ideas and a comic energy that goes along way to forgiving Snyder for trashing George Romero in Dawn of the Dead
Prequel to Army of the Dead set around the character of the German safecracker as he is dragged into conducting an impossible heist
Comedy-thriller in the Old Dark House tradition with greedy relatives being bumped off in the fight for the will. A film that begins with a corpse getting married can’t be all bad.
Blackly funny Frank Capra comedy adapted from a very popular Broadway play of the era in which Cary Grant discovers that his two old dear aunts have been killing off their boarders
Actor Wings Hauser directs and stars in a film in which he plays a detective pursuing a killer who is luring teenage runaways into making snuff films
Psycho-thriller in which Daphne Zuniga is a woman accused of the murder of her psychiatrist and may or may not have been faking her mental illness
The Brothers Dowdle made the standout The Poughkeepsie Tapes but this is a sub-Da Vinci Code archaeological mystery that is little more than a Halloween haunted house attraction in the Paris catacombs
A very underrated and almost completely ignored film from the great Anglo-horror cycle in which Victorian scientists are on a quest to capture the spirit of death
Film in which Sean Penn plays the real-life figure of a man frustrated by the pressures of everyday life who snaps and attempts to fly a plane into the White House
The second film from John Carpenter, a powerful and effective work about a handful of police and prisoners trapped in a police station at siege from an all-out assault by gang members outside
Fair-to-reasonable remake of John Carpenter’s low-budget 1976 film about a handful of staff in a police station under siege from gangs outside. Much of the original has undergone change
Uwe Boll makes a big issue film about the subprime mortgage crisis. The film is packed by Boll with messages but comes down to being a variant on Death Wish with its blue-collar hero on a shooting rampage against bankers
From Walter Hill, one of the legendary action directors, comes what is either the most edgy or tasteless concepts for a revenge film – Michelle Rodriguez is a hitman who seeks revenge after having gender reassignment surgery forced on him
A formulaic copy of Fatal Attraction. The difference here is that the sexes have been reversed and the key parts cast with African-American actors
One of the best of the horror anthologies from UK’s Amicus Films. This adapts four stories from Robert Bloch, which are all tales told by the inmates of the titular asylum and settle in with chill effectiveness
From the director of Snakes on a Plane, a film about a co-ed university dormitory that used to be an asylum where students find that former horrors still lurk
A crew of reality tv paranormal investigators are hired to investigate a haunted abandoned asylum. This sort of film has been done numerous time before.