The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Off-the wall Eddie Murphy comedy in which he plays an alien spaceship disguised as a human come to Earth. All the fun comes from watching Murphy’s wacky antics, which buoy up the film’s weaker moments
A satiric comedy about a family of insects who set up house in suburbia posing as humans. This takes to its premise with a darkly farcical tone that is quite hilarious
One of the more enjoyable efforts from the mid-2000s dead zone of Disney animation, this quickly gets demented and emerges like The Jetsons colliding with The Royal Tenenbaums
The sequel to the Jason Statham starring killer shark film, bigger and more over the top than before. The surprise is seeing cult director Ben Wheatley turning to making a big, dumb film
Big budget about a giant prehistoric killer shark film. This is like a Sharknado film with its sense of its own risibility perfectly under cap, played seriously and mounted as a series of spectacular shark attack sequences
If you could take it seriously, this would be a a bad movie but its awareness of its own absurdity is its saving grace. The sight of giant piranha skipping down rivers has an appealing delirium
The Asylum had hits with Mega Python vs Giant Shark and Mega Piranha featuring former teen pop stars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. This pits Tiffany and Debbie together in an epic bitch-fight vs giant animals
The first sequel to The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. This is less sparing with the cheap effects, while it plants tongue-in-cheek and tries to make a virtue out of the sheer ridiculousness of the action
The Asylum’s first venture into the gonzo shark movie that would spin off a series of sequels and culminate in the Sharknado phenomenon. Despite one of the great attention grabbing titles of all time, this is an unmemorable affair
The fourth of The Asylum’s Mega Shark films and the best of the series where they get the balance of tongue-in-cheek absurdity just right and the low-budget effects prove surprisingly good
Third in The Asylum’s series of Mega Shark films where they borrow the Godzilla series’ idea of Mecha-Godzilla and pit the Mega Shark against a robot copy of itself
From the director of Smokey and the Bandit, an SF film about an international action team who go into action in hi-tech vehicles. This was a big bomb in its day and widely ridiculed.
The Asylum’s low-budget mockbuster copy of The Meg, which is an irony in that The Meg was really an Asylum killer shark film with an A-budget. Two sequels followed.
The Asylum make a sequel to their earlier giant prehistoric shark film Megalodon with a US Navy ship facing Chinese spy ships and megalodon sharks risen from the depths
The third of The Asylum’s trilogy of films about giant prehistoric sharks, this has another US Navy ship and the crew of an underwater research station facing more prehistoric sharks
Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinarily ambitious SF film about an architect’s vision of building a utopia. Hated by most audiences, this still contains some great if flawed film-making.
A DreamWorks animated film about a super-villain that might have worked better had its thunder not been stolen by the far superior Despicable Me a few months earlier
There have been some very sophisticated time paradox films in recent years. At complete contrast, this is a comedy that has a great deal of fun with the premise of a guy and assorted temporal copies of himself running about
Little-known SF film with Billy Zane in a dystopian future involving Virtual Reality tech and implanted memories. Like Total Recall rewritten as an episode of Miami Vice
Lars von Trier’s exploration of his depression continues in this nihilistic end of the world film. It is bleak and relentless but somehow I preferred von Trier back in agent provocateur mode
A documentary that offers the best discussion of the life of Georges Melies to date. Much of the film is focused on the recent rediscovery of a complete trove of negatives of Melies’s film
Adaptation of a Doris Lessing novel set in a collapsing future England. The world is nicely portrayed but the cryptically surreal time travel element ends up baffling
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a darling of the arthouse and makes bafflingly cryptic films with a very haunted mood. This features Tilda Swinton in search of a series of mysterious sounds
An anthology made up of three short films all adapted from the works of Katsihiro Otomo of Akira fame, of which Otomo also directs one of the segments
An absorbing documentary about the making of Alien, which charts the film’s origins, the key personnel and the making of the classic chestburster scene
A Danish black comedy in perfect pitch deadpan. Imagine a version of The Island of Dr Moreau as directed by Giorgos Lanthimos of Dogtooth and The Lobster fame
Sequel that turns a witty original into overblown slapstick that never consists of anything more than absurd gags with aliens and technology popping up from behind everyday objects
One fails to greet another sequel with any enthusiasm. This mostly consists of tired, familiar gags, where the most generous compliment you can pay is that it is better than Men in Black II
A huge box-office hit, this is a witty comedy that turns the UFO conspiracy of The X Files on its head with the heroes part of an organisation that covers up the existence of aliens
The original Men in Black was a witty parody of alien coverup conspiracies; the sequels became slapstick films about pop-up aliens and gadgets hidden behind everyday things. This offers little that is new
Film based on the supposed Psychic Warfare Division of the US Army. Based on a non-fiction book, this is played by director Grant Heslov as a broad farce and sits on an uncertain line as to whether the powers are real
A satiric Argentinean animated film about a Martian left stranded abandoned on Earth after the crash of his flying saucer, this then begins to poke fun at internet culture
Film with Ryan Merriman as a teen who rebuilds an old Mercury rocket as a school science project and then has to save a NASA mission
Timur Bekmambetov makes a film in the Screenlife process where the screen becomes a computer screen. Set in a near future L.A. where the judicial system has been replaced by an A.I
A Japanese attempt to jump aboard the space opera bandwagon in the aftermath of Star Wars fad, a vigorous and colourful retelling of The Seven Samurai set in space
Early Charles Band film made in the mid-80s 3D revival fad. A cheap planetary adventure that feels like a collage of other SF films around at the time, most notably Star Wars and Mad Max 2
1970s disaster movie that prefigures Armageddon with its plot of trying to divert a meteor on a collision course with Earth. It sets aside the usual soap opera dramatics to make an interesting parable about Cold War tensions
A TV mini-series where a meteor is about to collide with the Earth. Assorted well-known faces fight through the chaos and Disaster Movie formulaic perils to prevent this
Robert Townsend directs and stars as the screen’s first Black superhero in this comedy take on the superhero film
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Moonfall. This plays the same ridiculous premise with an ingenious absurdity and is proves more entertaining than its big budget model
Animated film set in a dystopian near-future Europe of constant surveillance where a call centre worker discovers that people are being monitored via implants in their heads
Fritz Lang’s work was way ahead of its time and is one of the few silent films screened today. The film’s politics are naive but Lang’s visions of the city of the future and first screen robot are vivid.
Stunning anime remake of Metropolis based on an Osasmu Tezuka manga. The visuals and design are overwhelming – like a Cyberpunk film set in a stylised Art Deco world
Parasite director Bong Joon Ho makes an SF film with Robert Pattinson as a clone(s) on a planetary colonisation expedition who becomes embroiled in trying to save an alien species
Reminiscent of The Quiet Earth, this concerns a bus of people who end up in a deserted Hong Kong, The film seems unsure whether it is comedy or drama, while it creates an intriguing mystery about what is happening only to leave it unanswered in a frustratingly abrupt ending
George Clooney starred in Gravity and now directs/stars in his own scientifically grounded space film about the last man trying to communicate with a surviving space mission following a catastrophe event on Earth
This feels like a 70s/80s sf film like Starman or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failing as SF is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
The third screen adaptation of John Wyndham’s book, previously filmed as Village of the Damned, this gives the story an update in some interesting ways
A copycat of King Kong made on a budget of about $1.98 and featuring some pitiful giant ape effects
The original Mighty Joe Young was a wonderfully underrated giant ape film. This is a remake conducted in the post-Jurassic Park era that adds CGI but holds none of the magic of the original
Cheap and ridiculous attempt to cash-in on the 1976 remake of King Kong made by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers. A classic bad movie on most counts
The long-planned film adaptation of a time travel novel by John Varley, one of the finest SF writers in the world, that alas ends up bluntening and dumbing the story down in the clod hands of Michael Anderson
An ambitious film yet a;; contained within a single house, set on the eve of a space mission where the commander realises that the A.I. has started going wildly off-book
Disney live-action comedy where Dean Jones accidentally creates a duck that lays golden eggs
Wim Wenders film from a story idea by U2’s Bono set around the down-and-outs at a fleapit hotel slightly into the future. The film circles around a cast of eccentrics without ever really coming together
Sax Rohmer created the super-villain Fu Manchu, less well-known was his character of the female super-villain Sumuru who leads an all-woman army in a world domination plot. This was one of two Sumuru films
This was the second film from Guillermo Del Toro, a modest and quite good copy of Alien with Mira Sorvino hunting intelligent, evolved insects in the New York subway tunnels
This was the first of two video-released sequels to Guillermo Del Toro’s intelligent insect film Mimic, although this is now more of a regular and unexceptional monster movie
Fascinating British film about an experiment in brainwashing where scientist Dirk Bogarde is made to change his personality in an isolation tank
This comes with a great premise – a man is woken from a coma for the first time and is forced to deal with the world with the mind of a newborn infant. A clear attempt to copy Charly, this would be a great vehicle for a modern character actor but suffers from stodgy unimaginative handling
Produced by Wes Craven and his son, this started as a third Hills Have Eyes film but ends up a generic Alien copy with a mutant monster hunting people in a desert laboratory
The worst film from the legendary Ken Russell, a ridiculously bad biopic of the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Geller was a fraud but the film treats all his claims as though they are to hysterical effect
Homage to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, albeit produced on an even cheaper budget than any of the sequels. Where the film almost redeems itself is when it goes to town with the various head-exploding effects
Without Inception there would be no Mindscape, which involves people entering memories rather than dreams plus other similarities but this has has no interest in the SF potential beyond a thriller plot
One of three films produced by Fangoria magazine, this takes place in a post-holocaust wasteland of crazies and is certainly gore-drenched but unfortunately only churns cliches
The incomprehensibly manic antics of the Minions have a cuteness appeal that has overspilled the Despicable Me films. Here they get a film all to themselves with amiably lightweight results
The cutely nonsensical Minions have become a pop culture phenomenon. Here we get more of them in the second film outing, although this acts more as a Gru origin story
Fascinating film that conjures something of Primer in which a scientist creates a machine that splits his personality into ten parts
Steven Spielberg takes on Philip K. Dick in a much grittier film than usual In the strong, intelligent script, Tom Cruise is an officer on a police force that predicts crime before it happens
An amiable, lightweight Disney Channel film about a trio of kids who build a time machine and use it to go back and save the school’s nerds from embarrassment
Offbeat comedy where Anthony Edwards picks up a phone call that warns a nuclear strike is about to hit in 50 minutes during which he tries to find his love as L.A. descends into chaos
A remake of the classic bad movie Cat-Women of the Moon in which explorers to the Moon encounter an all-women society. Things do not improve in the bad movie stakes here
Episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica tv series that were recut and screened theatrically for international audiences
The second of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films where he has the smarts to hire John Woo as director who brings his customary stylish flair with action to transform the film into something exhiliraing
For his third outing in the series, Tom Cruise made a smart bet on giving the reins to J.J. Abrams who made his directorial debut and turned in the most enjoyable entry in the series to that point. One of the best moves is in the casting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain of the show
The seventh of Mission: Impossible films with Tom Cruise still on great form at age 61. He and the team raise the bar for the series to a new high
The sixth of the Mission: Impossible films. Not the best of the series but Tom Cruise and associates have everything polished to an expertly honed formula by now and the film is a kinetic ride of intensive and often jaw-dropping action sequences
The best of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films to this point. The live-action directorial debut of Pixar director Brad Bird proves an inspired move and Bird gets all the gadgetry just right along with a series of sensational action sequences
The Mission: Impossible films have become superbly polished vehicles with exotic locales, death-defying stuntwork and spectacular action sequences. This enacts it all well; the main problem is that Ghost Protocol is such a tough act to follow that this cannot help but fall in its shadow
The eighth of the Mission: Impossible films. The previous entry Dead Reckoning was a high point in the series and this is left wrapping up the storyline in what would appear to be Tom Cruise’s final outing for the series
Film adapted from the popular German-language Perry Rhodan space operas that is cheap and quickly heads into bad movie stakes
Brian De Palma makes a surprisingly good hard science film about a rescue mission send to save the first manned Mars expedition and their encountering alien artifacts on the planet
A Bollywood film about an invisible superhero, this is sparing on effects but should be seen for the lunatic entertainment value it offers, including several surreal song and dance numbers and much frenetic slapstick
DreamWorks animated film based on an old Rocky and Bullwinkle segment about a time-travelling genius dog and his adopted human son. This takes a relentlessly content-free approach to history that strips it down to no more than a series of giddy 3D slapstick gags for the single digit age groups
Tarantino associate Roger Avary comes up with a modernised take on the Frankenstein story, an interestingly ambitious effort that features Wil Wheaton as a patchwork creation coming to understand his condition
Antonio Margheriti, better known for his Gothic horror and giallo films, makes an invisible man comedy
A surprise delight, an animated film that overspills with madcap creative energy concerning a misfit family on a road trip who come up against the machine revolution
Film that takes place across three future eras that questions what happens when Virtual Reality produces artificial memories more vivid than real world ones
Very cheaply made film about a deadly mold going amok at a laboratory, which is only notable for some gory meltdown effects and the filmmaker’s laughable lack of knowledge about contamination procedures
Films about stupid people are rarely funny – this concerns a whole planet of stupid people. Despite reasonable production values, there is little that raises even a mild smile in this comedic take on Flash Gordon
Comedy about aliens who have invaded Earth and keep broadcasting commercials to tell how wonderful life is. You feel like this should be great satire but instead the film flounders about without any plot tapping a 60s counter-culture vibe before finding it doesn’t have anything to say
The only film that Marilyn Monroe will be written about for on this site. A classic screwball comedy about the accidental discovery of a formula that causes all who take it to revert to adolescence. Much madcap malarkey ensues but it does get very silly
One of the wacky inventor live-action comedies Disney made in the 1960s, a sequel to The Misadventures of Merlin Jones where Tommy Kirk variously adopts a chimpanzee and tries to sleep-coach football jocks
Ridiculous action film produced at the peak of The X Files popularity about two detectives against a body-hopping alien and sinister government agency
The title monolith is a cheat, this is however a creepy Australian film about a series of ultra-mysterious objects
A very underrated 1950s sf film … Neither quite alien invader film nor monster movie, it features some of the most original creatures of the era – rocks from a meteorite that grow into massive geodes that devour everything in their path – and eerily atmospheric direction
Possibly the worst film to be made out of the 1950s giant bug cycle concerning giant wasps marauding in Africa. All the dramatic scenes are composed of scenes cannibalised from other adventure films, while the effects have a shoddiness that frequently reduces you to laughter
One of the first films produced by Roger Corman, a routine B monster movie that has mostly been made around obtaining the use of a one-man submersible
Supposedly an adaptation of Jules Verns’s Mysterious Island from low-budget Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon, one that gives the impression nobody actually read the book
One of the better mockbusters from The Asylum, timed to come out at the same time as the US Godzilla, King of the Monsters and actually far more modestly enjoyable