The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
From the great and overlooked Curtis Harrington, a Grand Old Dames film with Shelley Winters going mad in the Baby Jane vein. This also becomes a modernised retelling of Hansel and Gretel
Low-budget psycho film that bursts with a freshness and originality, not to mention an incredibly perverse kick, featuring an excellent performance from Russell Geoffrey Banks as a mother-dominated killer
Despite being pitched as a zombie film, this is more of a ghost story featuring undead children who were killed in a mine disaster. Director J.S. Cardone does well with the horror elements
Very unique psycho film that takes place in split screen with the killer seen on one side of the screen and the victims and pursuing detective on the other
Classic horror film that imagines a secret world of pagan rites existing into the modern day. As much a classic for its colourful creation of a folk culture as it is for an unforgettable ending
The 1973 version of The Wicker Man is a cult classic; this is one of the worst remakes of all time that gets nothing about the original right, blunts its themes about religion and tosses in crude shocks and killings
Sold as a sequel to The Wicker Man, although works as more of an update and expansion of its themes. Received a muted reception but is a not entirely uninteresting film, if nowhere near the league of the original
Russian dark fantasy and horror has emerged as one of the most exciting genres in recent years. This incredibly spooky little film is a Russian equivalent of The Blair Witch Project
Tough brutal British film where a group of youth offenders are hunted while on a wilderness survival course on an island
Bel Powley gives a great performance as a wild child introduced to civilisation for the first time before it is discovered she is a wildling creature
Fine little tale of an introverted man who befriends a horde of rats and uses these to gain comeuppance. A hit that presaged a host of Animals Attack films throughout the 1970s.
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the duo behind Final Destination, remake the 1971 film about a man and his rats. However, this is set in a stylised 1940s world with a caricatured performance from Crispin Glover that causes the film to lack any credibility
A horror anthology that ostensibly tells a series of children’s tales but heads for an admirable grotesquerie
Not at all the film you’d expect for a film directed by stand-up comedian Bobcat Goldthwait – a Found Footage film about Bigfoot. Based on Goldthwait’s record as an actor, you expect this to get batshit crazy, but it instead heads into Blair Witch territory with rather effective results
A horror film premised around Nicolas Cage beating the crap out of a series of possessed animatronic robots, a fairly blatant copy of the Five Nights at Freddy’s videogame
Winchester House with its eccentric designs and strange history is reputedly one of America’s most haunted locales. From Australia’s Spierig Brothers who made the likes of Daybreakers and Predestination, this attempts to tell its story but emerges as far less than it could have been
A beautifully subtle and ambiguous film about a pioneer woman alone in a cabin on the American Frontier where she is haunted by demons of the prairies that may all be in her mind
The novelty of a ghost story that all takes place within the confines of a car stalled on the roadside – all with modestly effective results
Yes, someone made a horror version of the much loved children’s character. Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Leatherface has been replaced by Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey offered a horror version of the much loved children’s character. This is more of the same with a bigger budget
A uniquely different take on the vampire film, directed with extraordinary stylism by Hong Kong director Po Chih Leong
The first of the sequels to Wishmaster and better than the ones that would follow, although still not a patch on the imaginative makeup effects in the original
The Wishmaster series was a franchise based around a series of novelty effects wherein a malevolent djinn turned wishes against the wisher. This third entry is the utter nadir of the series
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
Rather enjoyable effort about an evil djinn that grants cursed wishes. Directed by makeup effects artist Robert Kurtzman, this has been designed to highlight various effects. Three sequels followed.
A fascinatingly different and original work. A scrupulous effort is made – from the dialogue and clothing – to place us inside a 17th Century setting dominated by insanely legalistic religious superstitions and fears, at contrast to which there lie a series of phantasmagoric visions of witches
Imagine a version of The Craft with a few dashes of The Breakfast Club – all shot as a Found Footage film. This is far more entertaining than one expects it to be
Cult film with Millie Perkins as a disturbed waitress with a troubled background, this takes place in a fascinating swim of dream and symbolism
Way back before Blumhouse’s Ouija and the subsequent cheap ouija-titled films, there was the 80s horror Witchboard, which proved popular enough that it produced two sequels starting with this
A passable 80s horror in which Tawny Kitaen summons an evil spirit via an ouija board. That was a sufficient hit on video shelves that two sequels followed and then a remake.
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
Italian horror film featuring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair that has little going for it bar some imaginatively gruesome deaths
Hammer film, not as well known as some of their other works, from a Nigel Kneale script that creates some effect in its story of schoolteacher Joan Fontaine moving to a sleepy English village and finding the locals engaged in witchcraft
Low budget vampire action about a vampire woman who is recruited into a secret government organisation
French psycho-thriller where Sergi Lopez gives an unnervingly charming performance as a psychopathic schoolfriend who inserts himself into Laurent Lucas’s life
Fascinating early psycho film about the police hunt for Adam Williams who kills girls with garden shears
Unexpectedly rather funny comedy that combines Mafia on a witness protection program and zombies
One of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s splatter films about a stage magician who cuts up women on stage and real life. The film makes mind boggling plays between reality and illusion
A remake of the cult Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter film about a stage magician who creates illusions of eviscerating people on stage
Reasonable box-office hit that offers a stripped-back werewolf film with minimalist effects as milquetoast Jack Nicholson suddenly discovers the beast within
Not to be confused with the Jack Nicholson film, this is a fine low-budget film about centurions during the Roman occupation of Britain encountering werewolves on an expedition north of Hadrian’s Wall
Making dubious claim to be based on real-life, this courted considerable controversy with its violence. Essentially an Australian Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Greg McLean readily pushes things to extremes
Greg McLean and John Jarratt return to the Australian Backwood Brutality saga of Wolf Creek for a second outing that is just as effective as the first. McLean often pushes the material into black humour and creates at least one sequence that makes for genuinely uncomfortable watching
This may be or may not be a werewolf film. What we have is a work that is long on mood and much ambiguity as a man hides in the English countryside from a crime he has conducted
Although it wasn’t the first werewolf film, this is the one the created all the mythology of the werewolf film – full moons, silver bullets etc – while the wolfman went on to join the pantheon of Universal Famous Monsters.
After reviving The Invisible Man, James Wan associate Leigh Whannell takes on a reworking of The Wolf Man
A British werewolf film that takes place during the shooting of an old-fashioned Hammer-styled film
A film directed by actor Jim Cummings about a small Utah town that is facing a series of werewolf attacks. This works surprisingly well due to a series of witty and well-rounded characterisations
Deliberately made to look like a lost 1980s/early 90s film, this has a winning concept and sets in with an appealingly sarcastic amusement. On the other hand, the film is never quite as amusing as it gives the impression it is going to be and starts to lose it in the third act
Adaptation of a Whitley Strieber book about intelligent wolves hunting in New York City from Michael Wadleigh, the director of Woodstock … The film tends to bury Strieber’s straightforward horror story under social concerns as though wanting to distance itself from the horror label
The 1941 Lon Chaney Jr The Wolf Man is given the remake treatment in a way that builds out on the creaky original with lavish sets and state of the art transformation effects
Evidently intended to be a werewolf equivalent of the Star Wars saga in in its epically contorted familial struggles, this sits just between the stylish and another classic monster repackaged for the teen crowd and cast with handsome good-looking faces
Another film about the Manson Family murders, this focuses on the Tate-Folger crime scene. It adheres to the fact general but twists them so it now operates more as a home invasion film
British werewolf film that wittily uses being a werewolf as a metaphor for being gay
Way before The Wolf of Wall Street, we had this David DeCoteau film about werewolf stockbrokers
Lucky McKee’s highly controversial film about a family man who makes a feral woman prisoner is out-there, takes-no-prisoners horror. Forget the kneejerk reactions, this is brutal, highly original and with a whiplash sense of dark humour
The revived Hammer Films had success with the ghost story The Woman in Black. This is the original version of the story made as a UK tv movie with a script from Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale
The revived Hammer Films visit the classic British ghost story tradition. This is impeccably mounted but the film is no more than a series of superficial boo moments of zero impact
A sequel to the 2012 ghost story from the revived Hammer Films, this adds precisely nothing to the original, has nothing to say and nothing in its directorial arsenal that is not a tiresomely over-cliched jump – you just ask, why was this film even made?
Slickly produced psycho-thriller that comes mired in controversy, featuring Amy Adams as an agoraphobe who maybe witnesses a murder.
Blumhouse film with Danielle Deadwyler and family having to deal with the ominous threat of a mystery woman in black veil who simply sits in their yard
Actress Anna Kendrick directs a film based on a true-life serial killer Rodney Alcala who appeared on tv’s The Dating Game
Behind the lurid title, this concerns a mad scientist sacrificing women to a plant in his basement … This came out the same year as Hammer Films burst onto the English horror scene and by comparison is a plodding affair with no greater ambition than being a 1940s Bela Lugosi cheapie
The first occasion I have had to review a horror film from Peru – a thriller about a young woman imprisoned and forced to bear a child. This is never a work that particularly reinvents the wheel, just turns out a solid and suspenseful imprisonment thriller
One of the most in-depth film documentaries ever made where Kier-La Janisse exhaustively excavates every example of Folk Horror
After making the groundbreaking anime Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo then chose to direct this oddity – a live-action comedy about a frustrated Yakuza enforcer trying to evict an apartment of foreigners that turns into a horror film in its last third
You wonder what this can do with such an overworked genre as the zombie apocalypse. It is not a film that reinvents the wheel for the genre but spins the basics out into an exciting, international locale hopping survival story
A film that comes with such a level of psychotronic dementia that it may seriously damage your sanity concerning the relationship between a man and his pet worms
The old party game about choosing between two difficult decisions is spun out into a rather lame attempt to make another Saw. Given a generic commercial handling, the film fails to get inside the psychological tension of its life and death decisions
The always interesting David Blyth returns to screens with what feels like an amateur remake of Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29 that becomes a confused and plotless mishmash of hallucinations, random BDSM scenarios and shock effects
This starts with a woman going on a date with a man she does not realise is a serial killer, before things go off at a very strange tangent
Iranian director Babak Anvari impressed with Under the Shadows. This is his follow-up where barman Armie Hammer’s life is turned upside down after he picks up a sinister cellphone
An unknown Charlie Sheen stars in a film about teens haunted an avenging ghost car. An uncredited copy of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter
B-budget Syfy Channel outing that attempts to answer the true-life Unsolved Mystery of the lost colony at Roanoke. Unfortunately, the film’s answers are no more interesting than a bunch of Viking spirits, while the film generates little atmosphere or anything beyond rudimentary historical conviction
Becky was a modest effort with Lulu Wilson as a thirteen year-old violently fighting off home invaders. This is a sequel with her up against white supremacists
I have to search my memory to think of another film that is so openly plagiaristic – this is almost a scene-for-scene remake of Steven Spielberg’s Duel about a man facing a killer truck on a highway. This misses the subtlety of the original so widely you could run a highway through it
This is surely one of the great exploitation titles of all time. Another Mexican wrestling superhero film where a duo of woman wrestlers take on the Aztec Mummy from another Mexican horror series
The biggest box-office hit six weeks in a row in 2020, albeit during Corona lockdown. This gets some extremely creepy effects in that managed to work on a jaded viewer
A sequel that has been arranged for the sole purpose of serving up a series of gory dispatch set-pieces every few minutes
Passable effort that copies that basics of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a group of stranded teens running afoul of an in-bred family
A reimagining of the long-running Wrong Turn series of Backwoods Brutality films, this does imaginative things with the set-up and emerges as the best of the series so far
Sequel to the cult Australian zombie film, this refines the first film and exists as even more of a visual comic-book – all that seems missing is dialogue that comes in comic balloons
Australian zombie film that comes with a hyperactive fierceness and energy that reminds of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. On the minus side, the zombie genre is now so creatively strip-mined that the film never offers anything original
Low-budget British film about a mysterious killer lurking in the house
BBC tv adaptation of Gothic potboiler by J. Sheridan Le Fanu with newlywed wife Naomi Watts facing an evil squire and mad women in a big gloomy house
Ti West returns with a fascinatingly charged psycho film that takes place on the shoot of a 1970s porn film
An early Cannon Films offering among the 80s slasher fad premised around a hospital setting and seeing the phenomenally well-stacked former Playmate Barbi Benton undressed. Most of the paper thin plot seems to have been made up on set and the direction is ridiculously overwrought
Amid the vast horde of low-budget zombie films of the 00s, this Norwegian effort in 3D emerges as possibly the worst. It has no discernible plot, while the gore only consists of cheap digital overlays that looks like Monty Python cutout animation
As directors, women are underrepresented – in terms of the content listed on this side, for example, probably less than 5% has been made by women. As a believer in equal opportunities for all, one can only cheer on XX where five women have gotten together to make a horror anthology
Not much to do with The Wizard of Oz – more like The Crazies by way of The Blair Witch Project, this creates a genuinely unsettling otherworldly mystery before entering into decidedly disturbed headspace
A monster movie based around The Yeti, this starts out as a B-budget adventure film with an expedition to Alaska in search of missing explorers who become trapped by a ferocious Yeti
Troma film about a group of trampers attacked by a Yeti only for one of the group to discover gay love with the Yeti
Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Tusk slides off the cliff somewhere between Johnny Depp’s incredibly silly performance, a nemesis you can’t take seriously and what largely becomes a vanity exercise in nepotism – Smith and Depp creating a vehicle to highlight their daughters
An unsettlingly effective Irish Folk Horror film about a teen whose mother disappears and then returns ‘changed’
You have to admit the title gets your attention but this is otherwise a slasher film of sorts about a group in search of Stephen King’s home
The 2020s have seen a surprise upsurge in films about people being pursued by attackers. This is another about a teen girl flees pursued by a J.K. Simmons as a business professor who suddenly goes psycho
There have been some clever and witty deconstructions and parodies of the slasher film in recent years. This starts in with an immediately captivating hook where the title phrase is turned around on the protagonist
David Koepp has an impressive resume as a screenwriter, even better as a director. Here he makes a film where Kevin Bacon rents a sinister holiday home that has shifting topography
An absolutely extraordinary work of Folk Horror about a young witch who learns the ability to inhabit the bodies of others