The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The survival in shark infested waters film has emerged as its own genre niche in the last few years. This is an all-girl variant with a bridal party stranded and trying to make it to shore
One of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s film, this features a totally demented plot involving a man who develops psychic powers and his encounters with witches and LSD trips
Passable but slight tv movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a teacher facing undead pupils
Sequel to the Stephen King adapted film about hoodlums resurrected from the dead, this descends into an incredible silliness. Featuring a teenage Hillary Swank
The third film adapted from the Stephen King short story, which dispenses with connection to the other films and now concerns occult forces in an Arctic base
This seems a variant on the plot about a cult pursuing a child for their purposes but expectations soon get twisted on their head in interesting ways
To Die For was a forgettable effort, most notably as one of the first films to feature the darkly romantic vampire. This sequel recasts the part with the impossibly handsome Michael Praed and is a far more successful assemblage of the elements
The third of Universal’s Dracula films in which Dracula travels to Louisiana in search of a wife. A flabby Lon Chaney Jr makes a poor replacement for Bela Lugosi, while the script seems improbably stitched together – despite the title, the film features Dracula, not his son
Bizarre musical monster bash with singer Harry Nilsson as Dracula’s son and Ringo Starr as Merlin. A film that seems to have no real clue what it is doing beyond friends having a good time. Nilsson makes surely the screen’s least threatening Dracula, while this is the worst film from the usually great Freddie Francis
The third of Universal’s Frankenstein films, the last to feature Boris Karloff as the monster and the last good entry before the sequels became formulaic. Shot with the clear influence of German Expressionism, this is filled with memorable characters and some great performances
A film where a violinist is drawn in to the mystery of a piece of classical music with occult properties, this is a classy and well-made production above the mill of the average horror film
A David DeCoteau film that comes with one of the great exploitation titles of all time but is otherwise a cheap Scream Queen vehicle about a demonically possessed bowling trophy
A Roger Corman produced slasher film, which spawned two sequels. The plot draws heavily on Halloween and comes with all the usual scenes of co-eds being stalked by a maniac escaped from an asylum
Loose remake of the 1980s slasher film The House on Sorority Row, competently made but in the end this never sufficiently surmounts the routine
Taiwanese horror film about an elderly man who finds another soul is inhabiting his son’s body. A very different sort of possession story. While the horror element peters out in its third act, the film creates a very mysterious atmosphere and a series of tight thriller tensions and complications
A police procedural where detectives face bizarre murders involving a child sacrifice cult and a folk boogeyman. From the directors whose Inside started the French Extremism movement
This is essentially The Sixth Sense rehashed as a teen horror film and conducted without any finesse – here you can see the twist ending coming miles in advance
There have been great films about unseen threats before (Cat People, The Haunting) but in this case the idea of an invisible monster is just the excuse for a cheap film to avoid any special effects. It has been a long time since I have seen a film so mind-numbingly boring and dull
Another in the spate of multi-director anthologies that have become popular in recent years – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S et al. This is set around the common locale of a desert highway where all five tales hover in an eerie twilight zone where the everyday world has stepped over into the uncanny
A beautifully evocative Walter Hill film where National Guard soldiers on training manoeuvres are hunted through the Louisiana swamps after accidentally shooting at Cajun locals
I was sold from the point of reading the premise where an all-girl punk band is abducted, surgically given weapons attachments and forced to fight in an arena
A 1980s film that was sold around a single air bladder makeup effects scene where a man swells up and explodes from a snakebite. That and the entirely risible premise of Oliver Reed as a billionaire who has a psychic link with a giant snake
Independently made 1970s monster movie. The film came along about ten months too early to be be part of the great spate of B movies that copied Alien and so draws on the earlier model of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Nothing exceptional
A darkly funny Danish film about a couple who accept an invite to visit another couple who seem to have no boundaries, before everything gets nasty
The Danish original was a darkly brilliant film about guests in a home of people who step over boundaries. This is the English-language remake from Blumhouse that lacks the same dark bite
Film about a man who develops an obsession with a mysterious black box that gives him the best sex of his life
Highly original piece that works as a supernatural version of Black Hawk Down with a unit of soldiers cut off in rebel territory and surrounded by spirit beings. Grippingly effective both in terms of the tension and a script that treats the phenomenon with scrupulous rationalism
A work of brooding Italian Gothic, a loose sequel to The Terror of Dr Hichcock. Featuring oodles of atmosphere and the genre’s indisputable queen Barbara Steele as a wife haunted by a dead husband
Another unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot, this would have made for a potentially worthwhile series involving Robert Culp and Gig Young as occult investigators
An obscure item among the fad for Edgar Allan Poe films during the 1960s, this threadbare production features Poe himself investigating sinister happenings at an asylum
Bizarrely overwrought film in which a successful city lawyer is made prisoner by a backwoods voodoo priestess
Modest 1980s video release that builds with some unnerving effect as Timothy Daly grants shelter to Kelly Preston only to earn the wrath of a pursuing Satanic cult
Obscure film that has developed a certain cult following concerning a murderous family. This plays out like a non-comedy version of the Addams Family and has an undeniable ghoulish atmosphere
South Korean horror film that feels like The Sixth Sense crossed with the enigmatic games of Don’t Look Now. The film takes place in a cryptically baffling mandala of dreams, hallucinations and possible deathdream that eventually proves rather absorbing
From incredibly prolific B-budget British producer/director Scott Jeffrey, a film about a radio broadcaster who ventures to the home of a scientist to find it overrun by genetically engineered spiders
Italian giallo with a professor in Budapest investigating a cult of spider worshippers
From prolific producer Scott Chambers, a film that describes itself perfectly in the title. This follows the formula established by Snakes on a Plane with spiders amok on board a plane
A documentary about William Castle, the horror director of the 1950s/60s who specialised in sensationalistic promotional gimmicks for his films
The black sheep among the Japanese Ringu films. A sequel released the same time as the first film, this lacks the other’s uncanny atmosphere and was ignored
The Saw series is revived sort of, featuring the activities of a Jigsaw copycat, otherwise this offers up all the familiar essentials in all but name
A remake of the classic film noir psycho-thriller. Now the story is conducted in colour and with a name star cast but misses all the atmosphere the original had by a wide mile
Banal ghost story mostly noted for starring a teenage Elisabeth Moss
A surprisingly good film that generates a great deal of tension in the story of a group of people trapped inside a gas station by a deadly plant infection that takes over bodies
M. Night Shyamalan’s name took a nosedive throughout most of the 2000s (although I am prepared to defend him) but he received some of his best notices in years with his collaborations for Blumhouse, This split personality thriller, anchored by a tour-de-force performance(s) from James McAvoy, continues the upward trend
The start of Tobe Hooper’s decline wherein he borrows the basics of Firestarter in a really bad film with a madly overacting Brad Dourif as a pyrokinetic
The East Side Kids, a popular comedy group during the 1940s/50s, conduct a variant on the Old Dark House film featuring a sinisterly lurking Bela Lugosi … The East Side Kids’ films were made on impoverished budgets – this one of their better but still aimlessly circles around creaky and dated gags
Fascinatingly original monster movie – a wild mix of H.P. Lovecraft, The Man from Earth and Before Sunrise. A beautifully realised work that leaves you with the sense of not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next
Another of the notorious Nazisploitation films, featuring a seductive woman Nazi mad scientist who creates inventive tortures and a subhuman beast who ravages prisoners
Throwback to the mad scientist film with modern makeup effects in which scientist Strother Martin injects Dirk Benedict with a serum that turns him into a snake man
A blatant copy of The Blair Witch Project with a group of people armed with video cameras investigating a haunted house
A bizarre Japanese film about hordes of schoolgirl zombies
A slasher musical??? The mind does a double takes trying to process the incongruity of the genre mash-ups. That said, this works exceedingly well – neither compromising on the slasher aspects, yet equally delivering some clever and witty musical numbers
A giallo thriller about a series of murders that take place during the rehearsal for a play. Michele Soavi directs a series of vivid suspense set-pieces
Soldiers are trapped climbing an endless set of stairs in a timeloop that forces them to revisit a battlefield atrocity
Strong and highly original film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by vampires. This has more the feel of a zombie film or an existential Western but does some highly original things with its ideas
Stake Land, set in a beautifully wintry post-holocaust world where vampires had taken over, one of the best films from Glass Eye Pix. This is a sequel that reunites most of the same elements from the original but fails to ignite them as memorably as the first film did
Pierre David produced psycho-thriller where Maryam d’Abo is befriended by Jay Underwood who proves to be a stalker in a creepily effective performance
British tv psycho film that works through a multi-layered plot of dexterous twists and a handsomely engaging lead actor
Film from one of the producers of Scary Movie that heads for the same lowbrow comedy routines while spoofing 80s horror films
The Stand is regarded as Stephen King’s best novel, an epic that depicts the final showdown between good and evil in the aftermath of civilisation. The mini-series adaptation was alas placed into the ham fists of one of King’s worst adapters. Mick Garris
The Stand is in my opinion Stephen King’s greatest book. The question is whether this new mini-series version will improve on the laughably failed 1994 version
From the 1970s Animals Attack genre, a blatant copy of Willard where a downtrodden man befriends rattlesnakes and uses them to take revenge
Bob Fosse’s riveting biopic of murdered Playmate Dorothy Stratten with Eric Roberts giving his best performance ever
Bizarre horror about an actress trying to get her big break in Hollywood that takes all manner of strange turns as she becomes infected and starts physically decaying. More explanation about what is going on would have helped no end but the film still arrives in memorably perverse territory
Another entry in the popular Folk Horror revival of the 2020s, this is a superb slow burn film that operates essentially as a British Pet Sematary
Marc Forster film that starts in with a beautifully filmed sense of disquiet mood and eerie reality disjuncts but loses it when it opts for another M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
This comes with the completely nonsensical premise of Countess Bathory having been reincarnated inside a videogame. Needless to say it is one that the film does nothing to make credible or even indicate it has read anything about the historical Countess Bathory
A team of house movers find they are working for infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who has an attic full of deformed mutations
This offers one of the more original twists on the Saw set-up – Val Kilmer plays a professor who imprisons a group of people in a steam room slowly turning the temperature up as a protest against global warming.
One of the less effective films by Dario Argento. Another giallo thriller, this has the same flourishes of style in sporadic moments but the plot is even more confusing than usual
Psycho-thriller with Andrea Roth as a woman who enviegles herself into a household with malevolent intent
Great psycho-thriller with Terry O’Quinn as a man determined to marry into the perfect family who then slaughters the family when they fail to meet expectations. This digs into 80s Family Values with scabrous regard
Disastrous remake of the classic 80s horror film, which comes shorn of its biting satire on Family Values and turned into just another teen horror film
Sequel to the hit psycho-thriller. Terry O’Quinn is back and on fine form but this just repeats the original, bumps up the number of killings with extra gore to become no more than a B psycho film
A shabby sequel where the classic original where Terry O’Quinn is replaced by another actor and everything reduced to no more than a routine slasher film
Akiva Goldsman is the single worst screenwriter in Hollywood with a line of genre atrocities to his name. In his second directorial outing, blow me down if Goldsman doesn’t make a halfway decent film, a cryptic film about a young girl facing unseen monsters amid a possible invasion
The Slender Man film proved instantly forgettable. This copycat is an incredibly spooky show that should have enjoyed that film’s success
This seems caught between offering an earnest theological debate about Catholicism and being a standard possession film. The results are not entirely uninteresting
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
Enormously underrated directorial effort from screenwriter David Koepp in which Kevin Bacon gains the ability to see the dead. A film filled with some genuinely spooky moments
Stir of Echoes was a spookily effective film. Alas in this sequel, we go from Kevin Bacon as a medium to Rob Lowe as a haunted Iraq War veteran amid a series of routine pop-up scares
The English-language debut from South Korea’s Park Chan-wook is a supremely controlled film, more like a period arthouse film than drenched in the buckets of gore we expect of Park … Essentially a reworking of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, a film that takes place all in smouldering tensions
A dull Canadian-made police procedural with detective Richard Crenna on the trail of a sniper that is killing prostitutes
A film about a stop-motion animation filmmaker who descends into a dark and obsessive state of mind
One of the best Stephen King tv mini-series with Colm Feore as a mysterious stranger who manipulates and turns an entire town against themselves
An Australian-made variant on the Backwoods Brutality cycle where a whitebread couple on a sailing trip are tortured by hicks. Nothing beyond the cliches or remarkable about this.
This film’s pitch line – Casanova meets Dracula – had me in the door in an instant, yet the film is a maddeningly dull one – slow, plotless with talky scenes that drag on for minutes at a time. The film has no interest in depicting Casanova the famous lover, while he and Dracula never even talk together
An outrageous Hong Kong prison film that comes filled with mind-bogglingly over-the-top splatter effects
A psycho film (as opposed to a psycho-thriller) from Hammer Films where innocent and unworldwise Rita Tushingham arrives in London only to be lured in by ice cold killer Shane Briant
William Castle psycho-thriller made to exploit the successes of both PsychoWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with an axe-wielding Joan Crawford letting all stops go
Modestly effective film in which teens in a small town go berserk and begin killing people as a result of experiments being conducted at the university psychology department
One of the mad scientist films of the era – or perhaps more correctly a murder mystery/comedy with an identity disorder. This features an amazing cast, including bad guy Lionel Atwill as a sinister doctor and Shemp Howard, of Three Stooges fame, as a comic-relief detective
Japanese director Shion Sono has emerged as an increasingly worthwhile name in recent years. This is an admirably twisted and perverse work that leaves you quite flabbergasted
Intended as a homage to giallo cinema, this strips everything else away until the film exists as only a series of fragmentary images and sensations designs to provoke and tease
An incredibly refreshing and original psycho film, made with a furious energy. Every bit of the way it is constantly messing with us and turning everything we think is going on on its head
Jose Mojica Marins, the cult Brazilian director/actor best known as the demoniac undertaker Ze do Caixao/Coffin Joe, presides over a hotel where the guests meet sinister fates
An The Exorcist copy made as a tv movie – where The Exorcist shocked audiences with barf bag theatrics and obscenities, this merely has Karen Black shucking her staid fashion sense and buying a sexy red dress. Rather peculiarly, this becomes a possession story as women’s self-actualisation drama
Brazil’s Jose Mojica Marins became a cult figure for his Coffin Joe films; this is an anthology sold under the Coffin Joe banner. Without the Coffin Joe presence, all we have is a series of not very well directed pieces that linger on perversity, although the final segment does stand out memorably
80s outrage rocker Dee Snider writes and stars in this horror film where he plays a freakish serial killer who is demonised by parents
One of the first women-directed horror films. Also one of the first on the subject of people venturing underground and encountering cave monsters