The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This is a copy of Alien with a monster hunting people through darkened corridors and is generic in all regards, although you have to admit that Stan Winston creates an original monster and the film generates reasonable suspense
Most of the comics of the 1960s made a film dealing with the Space Race and here it is the turn of Don Knotts. Lots of bumbling slapstick ensues in this hardly inspiring entry
Film about a device that can record and play back memory. This comes with a reasonable cast but the great disappointment is the idea is never used for anything more than a mundane murder mystery
Lisa Joy, co-creator of tv’s Westworld, directs a work of future noir in an ingenious plot involving a memory recording device and Hugh Jackman obsessed with a missing woman
A film that comes with a lame premise about aliens distributing a video of a 1950s SF film that turns people into mind-controlled killers all as prelude to an invasion
Dazzling French animated Cyberpunk film shot in the performance capture animated process and then rendered in striking two-tone black-and-white
Comedy released under the National Lampoon banner in which a nerdy student accidentally creates a clone of his object of desire. This feels like a mash-up between Weird Science and a frat rat comedy
Halfway reasonable Jean-Claude Van Damme film in which he plays the clone of a serial killer who is brought to life in attempt to track down the original
Whatever you want to say about his acting ability, Keanu Reeves represents a cool and has smarts in the projects he takes on. So when he takes a producing role as here, you feel it is a project you should pay attention to. Instead, the cloning film that he makes is absolutely laughable and should contend for an award for the SF film with the least plausible science in it
A film about a teleportation experiment that has the unforeseen effect of turning men into woman and then into human-alligator hybrids. We are in extremely bad movie stakes here
Alex Cox sequelizes his off-the-wall cult hit Repo Man but only turns it into an amateurish, meandering effort that is only trying to be wacky and cultish
Alex Coz’s surreal cult film with Emilio Estevez as an L.A. punk working as a repo driver who gets wound into the hunt for a car with radioactive aliens in the trunk
SF film set in a future where agents are sent to repossess artificial organs when the owner’s fall behind on payments. Sort of Sicko by way of Logan’s Run but lacking the necessary sense of black humour to work
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman conducts a futuristic Gothic rock opera. A film of constant posturings where Bousman demonstrates remarkably little affinity for either music or sf … a musical that feels made by people who are tone deaf
Incredibly shabbily made Danish copy of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms about a dinosaur revived in Copenhagen
Based on the survival horror videogame, this was the first in a surprisingly popular series of films. It also presaged a major return of the zombie film during the 2000s/10s, even if this only treads where George Romero went better before
Four films in and clear evidence that the Resident Evil series needs to be retired. This consists of tediously borrowed action moves now presented in 3D and a plot of random dead ends that make little sense
The first of the Resident Evil sequels and a better film than its predecessor, getting in a series of spectacular, if at times ridiculously silly, action sequences
The second of the Resident Evil anime films. This is set before the release of the T-Virus and focuses on origin stories for some of the characters
The first in a series of anime films that were produced by Capcom, the creators of the Resident Evil videogames, and intended to run parallel to the live-action films. I was never a big fan of the live-action films. The question is – does Resident Evil work better in the anime format?
Third of the Resident Evil films. This expands the scale of action to show the entire world destroyed by the virus but for all that and a decent budget, director Russell Mulcahy fails to push the elements to a suitable head of steam
Another unnecessary entry in a creativity-handicapped series, the continuing popularity of which is baffles. This shuffles through the familiar moves, brings back several familiar characters but only leaves me asking why I have invested some nine hours of time following this series
The Resident Evil films are designed for people who were introduced to drama via the Xbox, action sequences that can be assembled in random order and where it doesn’t matter what happens. I watched this, the sixth and final entry, with next-to-no enthusiasm but then quite unexpectedly it starts to work
A reboot of the Resident Evil film series under a new director with Johannes Roberts who abandons the previous action poses for a far darker and more visceral survival horror approach
A Chinese attempt to make a Michael Bay mass destruction spectacular depicting an Earth that has been overrun by massive plant growth
This has the distinction of being the first film to depict cloning. An edgy conspiracy thriller where Senator Bradford Dillman wakes in a secret medical facility that clones important people
Modest and halfway reasonable variant on Groundhog Day with a group of people caught in the same loop of time where everything manages to go wrong each time
Influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this is a strange film about UFOs and cattle mutilations. Explanations are not always clear but the film boasts a great cast
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
Witty and overlooked parody of the superhero with Alan Arkin as a retired superhero trying to get back into the game. Made before superhero films became big and has a number of charms that were ahead of its time
The second of the films made about the Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu, the first made in sound. This is where the film series started to find itself, turning in some superlative thrills and a wonderful battle of wits between hero and villain. Pulp thrills at their best
Unsold tv pilot that features Sherlock Holmes cryogenically unfrozen in the present-day. While the characters have some quirky appeal, the exercise seems construed more as a copy of a tv show of the era like Moonlighting
Wes Craven’s adaptation of DC’s Swamp Thing was not a very good film. This sequel has been handed over to prolific B-budget hack Jim Wynorski who shows he is unable to take any of it seriously
The first of the sequels to the original The Fly where the scientist’s son begins his own experiments
The first of the sequels to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Featuring the first screen appearance of George Clooney.
Japanese SF film that makes a rather enjoyable magpie collage out of a Terminator time travel action plot married to John Woo and Matrix action stylistics
The first sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon where The Creature is brought back to civilisation. Director Jack Arnold again creates sympathy and pathos for the monster
Excruciating and painfully unfunny attempt to make a deliberately bad SF film with alien vixens attempting to take over a high school
Alex Cox, director of the cult Repo Man , was once a name of some promise but he has instead spent more than two decades making increasingly obscure and amateurish films. His adaptation of a Jacobean revenge drama into a near-future setting improves this none despite a great cast line-up
Modestly effective film with an amnesiac soldier trying to make his way across Africa in the aftermath of an alien invasion. Featuring some fine and well staged effects
This comes with a wonderfully satiric idea of a plague that kills the world’s wealthiest people
The third Riddick film abandons the dark space opera of the less popular Chronicles of Riddick and tries to return to the planetary survival story of Pitch Black. Despite the effort showing at times, the film gets to be a good deal of fun when it gets to the scenes of Riddick outwitting the mercenaries
An film from the early days of the Space Age about the attempts to capture meteorites to use as building for rockets. The basic premise is scientifically preposterous but the film is not uninteresting
A cheap submarine adventure/underwater monster encounter from Spanish director Juan Pique Simon that was intended as a copy of James Cameron’s The Abyss
One of the fear-fraught films made in the aftermath of 9/11, a tense thriller concerning the detonation of a dirty bomb in L.A. and the panic that descends as one man tries to barricade his home
Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program comes out halfway between admiration of the sheer ballsiness of the astronauts and buying into the flag-waving nationalism the Space Race represented.
McG, one of the more empty-headed of modern mainstream directors, makes a big effects-heavy, Young Adult alien invasion film, a genre that has never enjoyed any success. To no surprise, this did not either
A plague has killed off all adults. In the ruins, two girlfriends venture into the domain ruled by the tyrannical football jocks to rescue one’s brother
Low-budget British film about environmental protestors pursued by a genetically engineered giant ape
Reboot of the classic franchise, a loose remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Thanks to some remarkable CGI effects, the apes entirely outshine the humans
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are resurrected in a new animated film that feels like a watered-down fix designed for Ritalin-deprived youth
Interestingly mysterious film about the investigation into a zone affected by an alien meteorite
The first adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s series of novels where every person who ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet is given an abysmal treatment as a tv movie that ditches and rewrites major aspects of the books
The second tv mini-series of Philip Jose Farmer’s classic SF novels trashes the books just as badly as the first attempt. The premise and characters are indifferently rewritten, while the show is churned out by a director with a tatty indifference to what he is making
The extraordinary poetry of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a man trying to retain his humanity amid the harsh struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic world is necessarily weakened in being translated to screen but the film still does a fine job of capturing the essence of the book
After a decade, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby returned for their sixth and final Road movie. Both they and the knockabout comedy are on great form with the show taking on the influence of the 60s spy movie fad and even sending them to The Moon
A mockbuster from The Asylum released to ride on the coattails of Mad Max: Fury Road. Slightly more watchable than most of their offerings, although still cheaply made, this is the oddity of a Mad Max film with the addition of vampires
Part of the fad for gonzo Japanese splatter films we had in the late 00s, featuring absurdly over-the-top splatter effects and demented action sequences.; Concerning cyborg-enhanced geisha who wade into battle going through a deliriously silly range of bio-mechanical transformations
A popular hit that spins the cyborg cop theme through a Cyberpunk future, while director Paul Verhoeven piles on excesses of violence and black humour. A darkly funny satire of Reaganite America, this is an entertainingly slick comic-book of a movie
I have to admit despite all the bad feeling for this, I liked it. While what went on in terms of the man inside the machine was cut and dried in the original, this has been shifted to give us a “the soul of Robocop” story . Moreover, the original’s biting satire of 1980s corporations and politics has been smartly updated to tackle some big 2010s issues
With a script co-written by Frank Miller, this sequel is a leaner work that abandons the campier excesses of its predecessor while expanding on its ideas with considerable ingenuity
The third Robocop film killed the series off with a disastrous decision to go for a PG rating and pair Robocop with a cute kid
A Hong Kong take on RoboCop with Sally Yeh as crimefighting android. Though produced by and also starring Tsui Hark, a very silly slapstick element comes to dominate what are otherwise imaginative action sequences
Another in the fad for deliberately ridiculous shark movies following in the wake of Sharknado. With immensely entertaining regard, this offers up sharks invading Starbucks, swimming through malls, eating Bill Gates and even going on Twitter
Surprisingly warm and genteel story about the relationship between an aging cat burglar and a robot. For once, no cliches about robots becoming intelligent or discovering feelings but simply a credible piece extrapolated from contemporary robotics
One of the earliest works from Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult director of Akira, although he only contributes one episode to an anthology of anime tales with the common theme of robots. The collection contains some impressive and visually striking episodes
An utterly charming film, all told without dialogue, about a dog living in 1980s New York who purchases a robot as its new best friend
Stuart Gordon, the cult director of Re-Animator, turns his hand to making a live-action Transformers film way back before anybody had ever head the name Michael Bay
One of the most entertaining bad movies ever made, an alien invader film featuring the famous Ro-Man, a gorilla suit with a diving helmet
While the title sounds like a cheesy faux B movie, this a surprisingly serious work. Taking undeniable influence from tv’s The Tripods , it is a YA work about the fight to free Earth following a machine invasion that proves far more entertaining than anything one expects of it
Micro-budgeted SF film where a nanoswarm is accidentally released, taking over an apartment building and reprogramming technology
The title is a massive cheat as there is only a single robot that turns up in a single fight scene. The film has the distinction of being the world’s first Found Footage Cyberpunk film about a mystery box that creates mass insanity when opened
British-made film about an astronaut stranded on a world of robots. Made by a team of three people, this produces effects that rival Hollywood productions but is also a solid work of planetary survival that comes with some jaw-dropping mid-film twists
Rather entertaining film from The Asylum about the machine revolution that overspills with madcap technological invention
Hong Kong-made copy of RoboCop where Amy Yip has her mind transferred into a cyborg body to track a mad scientist
A comedy variant on android/A.I. themes where two people use robot doubles for romantic subterfuge only for the two androids to elope together
From Italy, a blatant copy of Predator – only where instead of a military unit being hunted through the jungle by an alien, they are hunted by a copycat of RoboCop
Promisingly ambitious animated SF film that tries to catch some of the trippy qualities of Heavy Metal where the impressive quality of animation is let down by a juvenile story about a rock band in a post-holocaust future
Completely obscure, this is fairly terrible on almost every level – an effort about a rock singer given the gift by an alien woman of a special frequency that creates peace when he sings. This would be a guaranteed bad movie classic if anybody else had ever heard about it
Incredible Communist fear film largely made up of stock footage that urges the US to build a strong missile defence as the Soviet Union arms itself to attack
Unfunny comedy in which Harland Williams plays a bumbling idiot who is recruited to take part in a NASA Mars landing mission. Slapstick inanity results.
Low-budget film designed to copy the success of Destination Moon that ended up being the first film of the 1950s Golden Age. A surprisingly modest effort about a rocketship going off course to land on Mars
The No 1 cult film of all time, more a phenomenon than a film, a demented glitter rock homage to mad science cinema and 50s sf films run through with celebration of a gender-bender joie de vivre
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
Disney are now doing what Lucasfilm did with their novels in the 80s and spinning adventures off from even minor background characters. This is a grittier Dirty Dozen adventure but still recycles the same basic elements
A pneumatically inflated heroine fights the machines amid a standard array of space opera and post-apocalyptic future tropes
Classic work of dystopian SF set in a future where an ultra-violent sport has been created to pacify the masses
Remade, the 1975 dystopian film about future sports is stripped of any of its big message (even of its future setting) and is turned into no more than a formulaic action film
Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson star in a big-budget banking thriller where the US faces economic collapses
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
Brian Yuzna usually makes well worthwhile films but this one about an escaped prisoner hunted by a killer cyborg dog fails to come together
Katsuhiro Otomo written anime that functions as a parody of the school of Transformer robots as the artificially intelligent hospital bed of a geriatric becomes a giant ramshackle colossus rampaging through the city
Impressive Australian film that recalls the Mad Max films. Rather than action spectacle, this feels like Mad Max as rewritten by Cormac McCarthy wherein a collapsed future echoes a beautifully written exploration of the soul of a man in a violent world
A Hunger Games wannabe with elderly people forced to eliminate one another while inhabiting young avatar bodies inside a virtual simulation. It is a long time since I have encountered a film where the fundamental premise makes no sense whatsoever when you look at it logically
Stylish but not always coherent South Korean near-future thriller about a comic-book artist, a hit woman and an amnesia drug
Austrian film where three people aboard a space station survive a toxic cloud that obliterates all life on Earth below
The last gasp of the mid-80s era of nuclear anxieties that brought Threads and The Day After, a tv mini-series about the imposition of martial law in a British city as US-Soviet nuclear war looms in Europe
Michael Crichton’s books and films are always run through with a fear of technology run amok. Here Crichton makes an enjoyably straightforward directorial outing about a police squad set up to stop runaway robots,
This adapts one of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novels but the book is sidelined to become an Arnold Schwarzenegger action comic-book on the oft-used theme of a future where people compete in televised gladiatorial games