The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Another of Dario Argento’s giallo thrillers filled with all his trademark artily extravagant deaths. At the centre of the film is a teenage Jennifer Connelly who can psychically communicate with insects
In the same vein as The Conjuring films, a film about a true-life Spanish team of paranormal investigators
The great John Huston, the director of The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and other classics, directs a psychotherapy psycho-thriller. Alas the thriller essentials slip entirely through his hands
Horror anthology featuring four ghost stories from Thai directors. While all the segments vary in approach and style, this is a spooky and above average effort with the real standout being the final segment with an air hostess aboard a plane with a dead body in the midst of a storm
Another horror anthology with each episode from a different directors, united around the wraparound theme of stories being told by patients in a strange psychiatric facility
South Korean jump aboard the Ringu phenomenon about a series of haunted phone calls that works well through a clever ending
Sharp and original script from Larry Cohen in which Colin Farrell is trapped inside a phone booth by a sniper. Good story that even the awful Joel Schumacher in the director’s seat doesn’t screw up too badly
Bert I. Gordon, best known for his giant bug films of the 1950s, makes a torrid psycho-thriller about a young girl being cheated of her inheritance as people around her are being killed possibly by the ghost of her mother (Zsa Zsa Gabor)
Adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about an unaging libertine starring Hurd Hatfield. This is regarded as a classic but reads as fairly melodramatic and tame today
From producer Dan Curtis, creator of tv’s Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about a libertine who remains eternally youthful while his debaucheries are transferred to a portrait. This has to count as the best version of the story to date.
A venture into the slasher film from hack Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon that features utterly surreal bad dialogue and copious amounts of blood
An interestingly strange film with Mia Wasikowska as a disturbed hooker and Christopher Abbott as a man who plans to kill her
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
A film based on true-life Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton who fed his victim’s bodies to his pigs
Raw and undeniable brutal film in which a plus-size teenage girl forms a relationship with a serial killer after he abducts her tormentors
A True Crime film very loosely based on the story of a woman who killed two men and fed their remains to her pigs. Here it is turned into essentially a slasher movie
Another of the horror versions of children’s stories, this has a in-name-only connection to Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet and is otherwise a variant on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre about a growth-hormone enhanced killer
A well made tribute to the 1980s slasher film with characterisations and performances that make much rounded characters than usual
Creepy and surprisingly well-made Canadian horror film in which a mentally disturbed David Hewlett has a strange relationship with an anatomical dummy that directs him to kill.
From the people who made Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, another horror version of a children’s story. Here Pinocchio eviscerates human organs in order make himself into a real boy
A Korean retelling of the fairytale The Pied Piper of Hamelin that in mid-film suddenly morphs from a standard telling into an incredibly grim horror film. The results are really quite striking, not to mention pulled off with considerable assurance
One of the last films made by Julian Sands before his death, this concerns a cursed musical score that ties back to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Sands plays an autocratic orchestra conductor
The second film from Joe Dante. Mounted as a quickie copy of Jaws by producer Roger Corman, Dante succeeds in peppering it with a lot of sly jokes and genre in-references
The 1978 Piranha is remade as a cable tv movie but has excised all the humour and witty genre in-referencing of the original
Another in the fad for 70s/80s remakes where Alexandre Aja for once captures the spirit of Joe Dante’s 1978 original by planting tongue in cheek and wading in with mind-bogglingly gory enthusiasm
The film that James Cameron would prefer we forget about. A nominal sequel to Joe Dante’s enjoyable tongue-in-cheek Piranha, this misses that film’s sense of humour and lets the show sink amid absurd effects
Sequel to the Piranha remake. Much the same as before but up one cup size. Well not really, the sequel is more like a joke that was funny the first time that becomes belaboured in the retelling
Part of the gonzo shark film’s ongoing quest for the most ridiculous title mash-up, this involves a horde of genetically engineered shark-piranha hybrids loose in New York City
Amid the spate of deliberately ridiculous monster movies of the 2010s, we have also seen a fad for absurd hybrid creatures. In actuality, the piranhaconda is just a giant snake – and served by some incredibly bad effects in this negligible effort from B-budget hack Jim Wynorski
The second of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films with Vincent Price. This feels too much as though Corman was trying to make another House of Usher, nevertheless it creates its own thunderously overwrought atmosphere, even if it has little to do with the Poe story
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story gets full marks for being set during the Spanish Inquisition. On the other hand, Gordon’s unserious splatter heavy approach and a campy performance from Lance Henriksen deflates the material
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
A rare Indian venture into the horror film, this is a haunted house film of modest effect that suddenly becomes a whole lot more watchable when it pulls a major M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist on us
Bollywood remake of a ghost story that comes with one of the cleverer M. Night Shyamalan conceptual reversal twists
Interestingly different film about zombified children set after a time when childbirth has died out. This generates a reasonable level of tension but arrives at a very confusing end
A standout Australian-made zombie film that breathes some life into an overworked genre, focusing on the tensions among the survivors as they try to fend off the dead while at siege on a farm
Classic Hammer film, vividly made and rich in subtext, concerning aristocrats turning the peasantry into zombies to work in the mines
Robert Rodriguez’s half of the Grindhouse double-bill where Rodriguez makes an hilariously tongue-in-cheek zombie film with great absurd comic energy and packed with witty cameos from various stars
A painfully amateurish zombie films – the entire show has been shot in someone’s house. There are only two gore effects throughout and the titular platoon the soldiers is limited to only three in number
Bailee Madison takes a drug that fakes death and wakes up at the morgue – only to discover that coroner Jerry O’Connell is running an organ harvesting operation
Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut is a psycho-thriller that prefigures Fatal Attraction with Eastwood playing a radio DJ who is stalked by a deranged Jessica Walter
Slasher film where a girl is hired as a housekeeper in a remote location only to find she is being stalked by a masked killer and forced to survive with her bare hands. Two sequels followed.
The second in a trilogy of slasher films about people being staked by a maniac at a backwoods cabin while everything is secretly being filmed by tv cameras
Third of a trilogy of slasher films where people isolated at a cabin are stalked by a hulking maniac in a barbed wire mask. This mixes the formula of the previous films up in some interesting ways
Steven Spielberg’s daughter Destry makes her directorial debut with a confused mix of an imprisonment thriller and a zombie film, albeit a zombie film that only produces a single zombie
Slow and subtle Sean Penn directed thriller where Jack Nicholson plays a retired detective haunted by a child murder case
Very odd early Peter Weir film about a strange plumber who moves in and takes over cautious Judy Morris’s apartment
Mickey Keating film in which two siblings go to help a brother who appears in mental distress and claims to have imprisoned a monster in his basement
This is one of a plethora of hard-to-differentiate apart ghost stories that have littered the dvd shelves in recent years, frequently copying Insidious in appropriating a sinister-seeming adjective as title. There is not a single directorial or musical cue, sound effect or line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a cliche
Todd Haynes’ first film, three stories, two of which are fantastic … Being Haynes’ first film, this is less polished than his later work but circles through familiar themes of social outsiders, gay identity and recreations of previous cinematic styles, including one segment that is a mocked-up 1940s mad scientist film
Horror film about a cursed Polaroid camera that kills everybody that appears in one of its photos
The third of the Poltergeist sequels, which moves the locale to an apartment building and is better than its predecessor thanks to a series of eerie mirror effects
Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that pulls its effects off flawlessly
It has become an overused phrase in this site’s critical arsenal to say “yet another 70s/80s remake that is inferior to the original”. The 1982 Poltergeist was one of the great ghost stories of the era; this hits all the beats and with bigger effects but fails to find any of the haunted mood of the original
This was the first sequel to Poltergeist but it only demonstrates that without Tobe Hopper in the director’s seat it is an unimaginative by-the-numbers effort
A film that sat on the shelf and was then retitled to capitalise on the release of the Poltergeist remake despite featuring no poltergeists … A routine run through the well and truly worn modern ghost story cliches with no originality and little atmosphere
Bruce McDonald makes a standout fim with Stephen McHattie as a radio dj dealing with a zombie infection that inhabits the English language that breaks out in the town around him
Grippingly intense thriller with a couple trapped in an empty swimming pool along with a hungry crocodile
Possibly the most entertaining no-budget movie ever made. Essentially shot around the director’s own home for a bunch of traded favours, this is a slasher film where the cast have been encouraged to plant tongue-in-cheek and go over the top with frequently sidesplitting results
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone conduct a revisionist take on the Frankenstein film. This ended up a critical favourite at most of the 2023 awards with Emma winning the show in an hilarious performance
Micro-budgeted early Adam Wingard film that delves into the disturbed mental spaces of a depressed man
Surprisingly good modern slasher film set in a movie theatre during a festival of old horror films. The films come with surprisingly affectionate and well done recreations of old gimmick films
A film based on the true-life figure of the Vatican’s official exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth this could have been great but descends into tedious hokum
One of several Popeye horror films that were made after the popular comic-strip character came into public domain in 2025. This is essentially Popeye by way of Friday the 13th
Film about a sinister small town where the population must always be kept at the title figure. An interestingly strange scenario suffers from far too laidback direction
From cult director Joe D’Amato, this throws together hardcore erotica and gory zombie film in a conceptually bizarre mix that leaves you scratching your head
Low-budget occult film about guests at a motel trapped in a mysterious twilight zone. A work sits between the cheap and occasionally effective
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
Early film from Danish director Anders Rønnow-Klarlund. This starts out as a plague outbreak drama and then does a bizarre mid-film twist to become a possession film
Steven E. de Souza directs a film that supposedly tells the true story that inspired The Exorcist but in practice is just another excuse to trot out the possession and exorcism cliches
B-budget dircetor Fred Olen Ray has taken the plot of Gremlins and thrown it together with one of his sofctore erotic films in which a mind-controlling goblin creature forces people to have sex
Based on the urban legend surrounding a dybbuk box that turned up on an EBay auction, although the film throws this out to conduct an utterly generic possession story. Despite the novelty of drawing on Judaic mythology, the film still trades in the same tired cliches as the Christian exorcism film
This predates The Exorcist in its possession themes where Perry King becomes possessed by the spirit of a Puerto Rican killer
British horror film that develops a sense of uncanniness that resembles an Eraserhead at times with a man haunted by a puppet and giant spiders. The mood is unsettling, least of all that we are never sure what is real or taking place in the character’s head
Another Uwe Boll videogame adaptation, a satire where Zack Ward sets out on a shooting spree. Boll sets out to offend as many people as possible but somehow forgets to make any of it funny
Albert Pyun jumps aboard the post The Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller fad with a routine that has Charlie Sheen as a writer in Glasgow being taunted by the killer he wrote a book about
Another Found Footage film, a mix of interviews and video footage supposedly recorded by a serial killer. Despite some initial amateurishness, the film soon gets a disturbing grip on you in depicting the astonishing cruelty and fiendishness of the killer
Troma film that has maybe the silliest movie title ever. This sets out to be so persistently moronic and wilfully offensive that it eventually attains a delirious absurdity
An incredibly spooky film set at a hospital during a power cut as a nurse on night duty finds ghostly things stirring in the building
The third of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films, the only one without Vincent Price. Here Ray Milland develops a fearful obsession of being buried alive
The first film from the acclaimed Alan Rudolph, a hippie era nightmare where smoking marijuana causes people to have disturbing visions of sinister figures
Japanese horror film about a professor who receives newspaper headlines that predict deaths before they occur
Ghost story that does an excellent job in creating an incredibly haunted and unusual atmosphere. On the other hand, the film falls apart during the second half where it heads in another direction altogether and leaves one entirely unclear what is going on
Steven Soderbergh is one of the foremost independent directors in the US. He has dipped into numerous different genres and here takes on the ghost story in a film shot from the ghost’s point-of-view
A shabby Canadian police procedural with David Birney as a detective hunting a killer who is targeting prostitutes
Directed by and starring actress Alice Lowe, this comes in a blackly funny vein. Lowe plays a pregnant woman driven by the voice of her baby as she starts dispatching everything from sleazy men to those who annoy her
Obscure Australian film about people being hunted by a mythical creature known as The Yowie
Franck Khalfoun, a former Alexandre Aja associate, who has made the quite reasonable likes of P2 and the remake of Maniac, directs a desert island survival story where the jungle lurks with horrors
Not to be confused with the recent Predator sequel. this is a German survival horror where a group of trampers abruptly find themselves hunted in the woods
Daniel Stamm, the director who made the standout
This has the flavour of From Dusk Till Dawn, a getaway thriller that does a mid-film morph into full horror territory as a gang of fleeing petty criminals stray into the lair of mad surgeon
Based on the book that led a publishing phenomenon in which literary classics are mashed up with monsters, this has the difficult balancing act – that of making Jane Austen’s Regency romance sit alongside zombies – nevertheless manages to play both with an impeccably straight-face
This spends much effort creating an imaginative future where priests battle vampires who are banished to reservations only to do nothing with it other than reach for the tropes of the Western
The possession and exorcism film has become a heavily exhausted one, having cycled through the same limited bag of tricks for the last 40 years. This South Korean take still mines the same territory but adds some nifty new tricks to build to a riveting climax
Strong and effective Bigfoot horror film from makeup effects artist Patrick Magee. The film is never better than when Magee is in his element, creating a uniquely designed Bigfoot that is capable of blending into its surroundings unnoticed
Johannes Roberts is a director that has been producing some solid work since the 2000s. Here he makes a film about a rabid killer chimpanzee that ratchets up some great tension
One of several killer crocodile films that came out in 2007. This has some big-budget CGI effects but is cliched and was overshadowed by far better entries from the same year with Rogue and Black Water
One of the less successful, nevertheless underrated John Carpenter films where he pays tribute to Nigel Kneale in a conceptually mind-boggling mix of deviltry and quantum physics
Animated film from Denmark about a man who goes on an ultra-violent crusade against the porn industry over the loss of innocence of his young niece