The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Brazil’s Ze do Caixao or Coffin Joe is one of the most evil characters ever created on film, spearheaded by director/star Jose Mojica Marins’s contempt for the weak and catalogue of brutalities and blasphemies
The second film from The Pact director Nicholas McCarthy. What is happening is kept deliberately vague and elliptical – as you are trying to piece everything together, McCarthy manages to pull some incredibly eerie jolts
Thriller from the screenwriter of Buried that seeks to imitate that film’s containment drama in having three characters trapped inside an ATM booth by a killer outside
Despite the possibilities set up by the title, this features no vampires nor atomic monsters but is an Italian film influenced by Eyes Without a Face about a mad surgeon trying to restore a woman’s disfigured face
Spanish Found Footage film about the investigation of a haunted woods during which almost nothing happens, before a left-field twist ending that makes little sense
You feel that a film about lesbian Japanese schoolgirls vs zombies should have been more interesting. The zombies barely mount to a dozen and the director seems more preoccupied by his softcore predilections
A heist film that ends up in a mansion filled with grown-men who have diaper fetishes. And then things get really bizarre. Some films are so wild and insane they attain cult status. And then there are the wannabes
A forgotten curiosity from the 1980s VHS era where shipwreck survivors wash up on an island where they are attacked by malevolent dolls. A film deservous of a no star rating if there ever was one
There is a certain genus of films based around coming up with deliberately ridiculous titles. The filmmakers sell you instantly on the film from the title alone but have lavished little care or budget on the actual film
One has seen just a few too many wacky titled zombie comedies and this Austrian film seems another wannabe until the climactic scenes where it redeems itself with a completely demented bloodbath
Seemingly another ridiculously titled zombie movie but in actuality this is no more than a regular zombie film played straight that has been slapped with a gonzo title as a selling point
One of the more amusing titles in the gonzo zombie title mashup fad. On the other hand, this takes itself surprisingly seriously and, while well made, never fully goes for broke
In a similar vein to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, this a work of Gothic madness as Carrie Snodgress tends cranky sadistic father Ray Milland in a big old house
The rarity of a really good Found Footage film. Designed to look like lost footage from 1970s psychic experiments, this concerns a scientific team who discover they are dealing with a woman who is demonically possessed
The film that made the world pay attention to Takashi Miike. Starting out as a seeming love story, this culminates in some of the most brutal and hard-to-watch torture scenes ever committed to film
Big serious film about reincarnation that places the arguments for into a courtroom setting. Director Robert Wise and a young Anthony Hopkins fail to do much with a talk-heavy script
Despite a title that resembles more a 1990s killer cyborg film, this is actually a zombie film. Made soon into the mid-2000s zombie revival, this is driven more by fannish enthusiasm and copious gore than anything else
Italian thriller that attained some censorship controversy when it came out. Minsy Farmer is an assistant coroner haunted and obsessed by the corpses she tends
Horror film conceived around having creepy things happening around a hospital, less so in terms of any rationale. What the film does have in its favour is that it is exxxtremely gory
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
In the same vein as Sharknado, another absurdly entertaining gonzo shark attack film concerning sharks that swim through the snow to attack skiers at a mountainside resort
The first full length Edgar Allan Poe film from D.W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame. Rather than Roger Corman’s brooding Gothicism, Griffith waters Poe’s melancholia down to a banal Christian morality play
Action film from Cannon Films with Michael Dudikoff forced to undergo a Most Dangerous Game scenario and be hunted through the bayous by white supremacists
This is the British equivalent of a Backwoods Brutality film in which Tony Curran is a towtruck driver who traps and kills motorists to salvage their belongings
Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about the spirit of an Ancient Egyptian queen possessing a modern day woman. Lavishly produced with a series of novelty deaths modeled on The Omen. Also the first mummy film to actually shoot in Egypt
A classic British ghost story that produces an exceedingly haunted atmosphere at times, although falls apart in a highly contrived M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
This comes with a great hook – a couple buy up the contents of a defaulted storage locker only to find film reels taken by The Zodiac Killer, leading them on a pursuit of his identity
The first film from prolific horror and exploitation director Jesus Franco to which he would later make four sequels. This is a blatant copy of the French Eyes Without a Face served up with little directorial flair
Costa-Gavras, a director known for highly political films, makes a dark comedy about an unemployed man who sets out to eliminate his rival job applicants
A film that takes place with no dialogue set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have forsaken speech as Samara Weaving is pursued by a cult
A film supposedly based on true-life serial killer Dennis Rader that completely fictionalises much of his story, while Rader is badly miscast with big, bulky Kane Hodder
A new Russian-made version of the Baba Yaga folktale where the old witch is rewritten as a seductive nanny stealing children and their parents’ memories of them
A film about childhood boogeymen that takes place as a work of psychological horrors, where everything could be happening in the imagination of a stressed mother’s collapsing mental state. An extraordinarily assured directorial debut
The story of a grown man with the mind of a child is launched into with a spectacularly over-the-top tackiness that has to be seen to be believed. Middle-aging Ruth Roman let all stops out in a Baby Jane-type performance
A wildly deranged and gore-drenched ride. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby with an Alien chesburster where a woman is impregnated by a parasite that maintains a monologue as it urges her to kill and drink blood to feed it.
Pål Sletaune is a Norwegian director who deserves more attention for his reality-bending surrealism. Here mother Noomi Rapace moves into new apartment where ghostly screams come through the baby monitor and she soon finds that she cannot be sure what is real
McG has now become the new inheritor of the title of worst director currently at work in Hollywood, as amply evidenced in this ridiculous film starring Samara Weaving as a Satanist babysitter
A possession film that takes the Found Footage approach. This takes the traditional approach of Catholic priests intoning exorcism rituals etc and fails to do anything interesting
Marcus Nispel is a director most associated with remakes of other films. In original material here, he is still rehashing moves from other films – an abandoned asylum and every shock effect in the possession/exorcism playbook
Beautifully made Australian ghost story that creates a strong sense of eerie disquiet as psychologist Adrien Brody realises that all of his patients are dead and is prompted to go on a journey to uncover forgotten things from his past
For the most part a standard variant on the staple of people being stalked through the backwoods. Things are buoyed up by an effective twist but that fails to excuse the fact that almost nothing happens
The long-awaited return of Frank Henenlotter, the cult director of Basket Case fame, with a film about people with mutant genitalia – a work that proves extraordinary in its mind-bogglingly perverse imagery
Film based on true-life New Zealand mass murderer Stanley Graham, a disenfranchised farmer who became a local hero after shooting several police and inspiring a massive manhunt
A deliberately ridiculous Charles Band production where students throwing their laptops into a lake causes an alligator to float through the air and become giant-sized
Story of the sole survivor of a cult mass suicide waking from a coma to be haunted by the cult leader begging her to join them. This becomes a derivative of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films before a contrived ending
Kim Ki-Duk film about the strangely tender relationship that grows between a mute thug and a woman he forces into prostitution
Fine Curtis Hanson psycho-thriller in which dull yuppie James Spader befriends charismatic psychopath Rob Lowe and is drawn into a series of taunting psychological games
Sequel to the sarcastically amusing Bad Kids Go to Hell, which is set at the same school a few years later as someone starts eliminating people in detention
This promises the amusing idea of a sarcastic 00s take on The Breakfast Club but emerges as no more than a glorified episode of Scooby-Doo, in a plot about punishing the children of privilege
This is one of the most twisted films I have ever come across in recent years in which a couple have their home invaded by a clown who makes them into his sexual playthings
A comedy about a demon that appears out of a man’s ass!!! This has the dementia to be a potential midnight cult hit but misses the mark by a wide mile and stumbles around obvious targets in predictable ways
Eric Red directed film with Michael Paré as a werewolf fighting a territorial dispute with his sister’s dog. Slight effort that suffers from crappy morphing werewolf transformation effects
From the Golden Age of TV Movies, a film where Scott Jacoby hides in the cubbyhole of the wall of his home after he accidentally kills someone and then develops a fixation on the family that move in
Roland Emmerich’s former writer Dean Devlin makes a film where a burglar discovers that David Tennant is a serial killer holding a girl prisoner and sets out to rescue her. Tennant does an entertaining turn as a bad guy
The original evil child film featuring an unforgettable performance from Patty McCormack (who received an Academy Award nomination along with most of the cast). Dated somewhat today but still holds a real charge
The 1956 The Bad Seed is the original evil child film. All other psycho children films draw themselves from here. This is a remake directed by actor Rob Lowe who also plays the father. McKenna Grace gives a superbly chill performance as the child
Peter Jackson first appeared with this no-budget splatter comedy. A miracle of DIY filmmaking, the film plays out like a live-action Roadunner cartoon where the creativity of Jackson’s home-made gore effects is positively ingenious
Terrence Malick’s first film, very loosely based on the murder spree of Charles Starkweather, albeit one where Malick reinvents Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Fugate as innocents adrift in the great American landscape
The perpetually terrible Mick Garris is allowed loose on another Stephen King book where he promptly reduces a subtle, ambiguous ghost story to a series of lunging pop-up scares without any concept of atmosphere or nuance
The second film from The Duplass Brothers, Mark and Jay. Though labelled a slasher parody, it is more of an improvisational comedy that uses the set-up of a backwoods slasher film without much interest in horror
Horror film about a mysterious creature in the cellar with a bag over its head that can bring a dead loved one back to life for two minutes, but where use of this comes with a price
Colm McCarthy, who previously directed the standout The Girl With All the Gifts, returns with a film about a man being haunted by a boogeyman out of his childhood that snatches children in a bag
Splendidly nasty French film that feels like Thelma and Louise by way of Natural Born Killers where two women pick up guns and go on a shooting spree against men who are abusive jerks. Directed by two women and cast with porn actresses, this holds little back
A strong contender for the most ridiculous killer shark ever made – something that should have occurred to the producers about the point of the film’s premise of a shark hunting people in a supermarket
The people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey offer up a savage take on another childhood favourite with a horror version of Bambi where Bambi becomes a mutated deer with a murderous hatred of humans
In the what the feck department, this is a gore-drenched horror remake of a Hanna-Barbera children’s show, one that now depicts the original anthropomorphic animals as murderous killer robots
Early effort from one of the Pang Brothers Oxide, who only directs one of the episodes in this trio of Thai ghost stories. The other director’s grasp of horror effect is often crude and amateurish
Christopher Smith seemed one of the most promising genre directors of the 2000s with films like Triangle and Black Death. Here he returns with a venture into the English ghost story
Psycho film in which an investment banker relieves the pressures of the corporate world by going out hunting people with a crossbow. A film rich in ideas is given a disappointing B movie treatment
A fascinatingly enigmatic and beautifully made film where Sienna Guillory becomes concerned when her daughter is mysteriously affected by something that causes her to stop eating
The directorial debut of Zach Cregger that received great word-of-mouth. A film that shifts points-of-views to tell the story of people discovering a horrible secret in the basement of an AirBNB
A visually extraordinary True Crime film based on the story of a Spanish woman who may or may not have abducted and killed a string of children in the 1910s
Another of the films from cult exploitation director Jess Franco. This is a vampire film made with a mix of arty erotica with Lina Romay as Countess Irina Karlstein who drains men and women’s lifeforce during sex
Another in the interminable softcore Blair Witch parodies with a group of minimally talented and clothed bimbos wandering around the woods and failing to take proceedings seriously
Following the success of The Blair Witch Project, this was an excruciatingly lame softcore parody with a group of girls tramping in the woods finding almost any excuse to undress and conduct sex-related takes on Blair Witch
The Bare Wench Project was an inane softcore parody of The Blair Witch Project. This is the first of four sequels in which another troupe of girls go wandering in the woods while finding almost any opportunity to take their clothes off
A surprisingly reasonable effort that relocates the Backwoods Brutality film to England with people menaced by mutant creatures emerged from the rural canals
Mario Bava essentially created Italian Gothic cinema and returns to it again here in the story of a sadistic nobleman who is resurrected and begins killing people anew
Saw series Darren Lynn Bousman downplays sadism in favour of a psychologically ambiguous film about a series of attacks possibly conducted by the Jersey Devil
Hollywood noir from the Coen Brothers, this takes us inside the crumbling mental state of a screenwriter in the 1930s. Like a David Lynch remake of Day of the Locust, this comes rich in the Coens’ black uncomfortable humour
This slick eroticised thriller was a huge success and made the career of Sharon Stone. The absurd plot bears no resemblance to human motivation but Paul Verhoeven makes an undeniably provocative and entertaining package
Sequel to Basic Instinct made fourteen years later. Sharon Stone vamps her way across the screen but the heated sexuality of the original has been watered down to a lukewarm whimper
Frank Henenlotter takes the commercial route and makes a sequel to his no-budget cult film. A bigger budget allows the film to become a comic variant on Freaks featuring a series of way-out makeup effects
The third of Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case films but by this point the perverse wit of the original has become replaced by a cartoonish absurdity
Remarkable little no-budget film from Frank Henenlotter about the relationship between a man and the deformed, psychopathic torso of his severed Siamese twin
Balls-to-the-wall horror from Turkey. It is not clear what is going on for much of the film about police investigating a house filled with Devil worshippers but you cannot deny that it pulls out all stops
The first of the screen’s Old Dark House thrillers set around large mansions with the cast stalked by a masked killer. None of this prepares you for the utterly sensational visuals of this film, which leap off the screen with vivid effect
The second remake of the still superior silent Old Dark House classic. The original had incredibly vivid visuals but despite the addition of sound and Vincent Price, this version feels creaky and dated
Rather ridiculous film where Stewart Moss is bitten by a bat and afterwards turning into a bat creature. Not a terribly interesting film – it takes three-quarters of the show for him to work out what the title tells us
Sound remake of the silent Old Dark House classic The Bat. This retains the original’s extraordinary visuals, including use of a mobile camera, something that was groundbreaking technology for the time in ways that still astonish today
Despite the title, this is no relation to tv’s Bates Motel or the Psycho franchise but a slasher film set around a famous Pennsylvania Halloween haunted house attraction. The film otherwise displays a general but unremarkable competence
Not the tv series, this is an unsold earlier tv pilot that attempted to spin a series off from Psycho, An ill-conceived disaster, the film’s clumsy
direction could not be further away from Alfred Hitchcock if it tried
Lushly made retelling of the Countess Bathory story, one that tries to make an interesting if historically questionable case that she was kind to servants and a misunderstood victim
There has yet to be a decent killer bat movie. This redresses the balance somewhat by offering up CGI bat effects but otherwise falls prey to a cliche-ridden script
Just when the zombie genre seemed to be creatively exhausted, this is one of the freshest takes in some time. This does nothing radical with the basics, just offers a series of wry, sharply written vignettes as two bored slackers greet the apocalypse
A halfway reasonable film from The Asylum with the military trying to appropriate werewolves for weapons purposes. A good premise despite so-so-effects work
When Rodney Ascher’s incredibly uncanny documentary The Nightmare came out, I predicted sleep paralysis would become a new theme for horror. This starts as a sleep paralysis film but veers off to become something else
Fine film in which a young couple’s idyllic getaway to the title location becomes a nightmare as the ocean produces a fog that starts to create mutations
A survival horror film where Idris Elba is on a trip to Africa only to be hunted by a rogue lion. Decently produced, this never works as well as you expect it would have
Variant on the Mad Relative Locked in the Attic/Cellar film made as part of the British horror cycle. Unfortunately, this plods where it should have developed tension