The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Pilot for a forgotten short-lived tv series starring Andy Griffith as a junk dealer who decides to mount his own expedition to The Moon. Snappily written and pulls its premise off with a reasonable degree of plausibility
Sylvester Stallone is surprisingly well cast an aging superhero forced to come out of retirement
As the spectacle of mass destruction goes, you could hardly get more epic in scale than this. On the other hand, as someone whose hometown was obliterated by an earthquake in 2011, I find it offensive that such devastation is arranged for our enjoyment while the suffering and even the idea that anybody has been killed has been edited out
The Asylum’s cheap mockbuster version of the big-budget Dwaye Johnson-starring disaster movie spectacle San Andreas. Passable as general fare from The Asylum, about the level of the average filler tv movie and with effects to a not-too-bad standard
Children’s movie where a Martian dictator abducts Santa, this has gained a cult bad movie status
In something like his 30th film and amid the tatty production values of a Edward D. Wood Jr film, El Santo fight mobsters who have employed alien monsters that look like giant ambulatory bean bags
In this rather shabby effort, Santo (in the sixteenth of his 52 films) takes on invaders from Mars whose entire plan seems to hang on the need to have to defeat Santo in the wrestling ring
One of the first films about biowarfare, a tightly effective techno-thriller from John Sturges
Ambitious if not entirely successful film with Harvey Keitel building a robot that proceeds to go amok on a moonbase inhabited by Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett
Bizarrely incomprehensible film from Avi Nesher set in a Cyberpunk future in which Olivier Gruner is turned into a Neanderthal superhuman by aliens living in cyberspace
There has very rarely been a good killer bee movie. This is one exception, a directorial effort from no less than the creator of Mission: Impossible that gains its effectiveness by using real rather than optical bees
A comedy about a guy who obtains a time travel device and uses it to go back and try to prevent his girlfriend breaking up with him
A bizarre South Korean comedy about a businessman who is imprisoned by a possibly crazed man who insists that he is an alien. Things sit in an absurdly funny ambiguity. Later remade by Yorgos Lanthimos as Bugonia
Comedy that comes comes with a winning concept – clueless hipsters try to get away from their social media devices for a weekend only to find the Earth has been invaded by aliens
Third of the sequels to Scanners, this stars Daniel Quinn as a police officer who discovers scanner abilities
The fourth and last of a series of low-budget sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, also the worst of the bunch featuring a series of absurd head-exploding effects
Richard Linklater conducts an animated adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel with extremely faithful results. Keanu Reeves is a police officer assigned to investigate what he realises is himself
Enormously entertaining David Cronenberg film about psychic powers. Cronenberg is fascinated with the conceptua possibilities and creates some sensational set-pieces
The first of a series of poorly made sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Cronenberg’s ideas have been stripped down to no more than a series of head-exploding effects
Second of the sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, this features Liliana Komorowska who becomes crazed after taking a scan suppressant drug
The directorial debut of William Malone later to make House on Haunted HillAlien (one of the first of many such), albeit brought down to Earth. As a novice director, Malone is relatively crude and far removed from the masterful style of Ridley Scott
A low expectation effort, a space opera about the crew of a salvage vessel, that ends up being quite a bit better than the B-budget film it is
The very first film from John Landis, a rather amusing spoof of revived caveman films, As with many of Landis’s films, has a substantial level of playful in-joking and genre in-referencing. Mostly, it plays out with an appealingly nonsensical absurdity
A film naming itself after an entire genre either has massive ambition or huge pretensions. Beyond the grandiose title, this is not much more than a better budgeted version of an 80s planetary adventure
A modest effort that has studied well at the Ridley Scott school of people being stalked in the dark. The film produces a genuinely unearthly and alien creation. The main problem is that the film is severely underwritten and fails to do much after coming up with such an original creature
The Maze Runner was one of the better Young Adult films, creating an intriguing conceptual mystery; this sequel ignores all of that, even throws the book out and is essentially a jumble of random sf tropes that amount to no more than running, shooting and things exploding
This looked promising but is no more than an unoriginal rehash of the cliches of the Mad Max film – at heart a Western with only token effort made to rewrite the elements in SF terms – and no greater ambition beyond being cable filler
Cult Anglo-horror film with a series of vampire killings that lead to Vincent Price trying to replace bureaucrats with androids
Modest and underrated Philip K. Dick adaptation that builds reasonable atmosphere during its journey across a planet and doubt as to who among the party might be one of a breed of evolving androids
Disappointing sequel to the modest original that does little but revisit and re-run the first film’s scenario with little to add to it
The title suggests more a sea adventure but this is a surprisingly good monster movie about the crew of a fishing vessel attacked by a sea creature and infected by parasites.
Another formulaic Syfy Channel B-budget disaster film. The film’s sole distinction is a more outlandish premise than usual – where the storm appears initially to be caused by a UFO that has been shot down
Low-budget and fairly indifferently made sequel to David Twohy’s quite good alien invasion film
Amateur production that seems like a version of the X-Men crossbred with The Amazing Race. Not very good on most counts
An astonishingly bleak John Frankenheimer film in which a disillusioned middle-aged man is contacted by a secret organisation that rejuvenates him to become Rock Hudson
A kid makes the discovery that his father is a superhero and he and his friends amuse themselves with the cool gadgetry in his secret headquarters, before being required to defend it against a villain
The very first film appearance of the Loch Ness Monster. A hardly auspicious debut, this came before there was such a thing as the monster movie and is played mostly as a comedy. We do eventually get an appearance of the Loch Ness Monster right at the very end
Toho Films of the 1960s are best known for the Godzilla films and assorted monster bashes. This is one of their non-monster films, part of a spate of mutant supervillain films concerning a villain who has invented a teleportation machine and is using it to exact revenge
South Korean monster movie set that only rehashes the cliches set down by Alien/Aliens. On the plus side, the CGI monster looks great and there are some particularly imaginative set-pieces with it but the film is at best only a rehash of Deepstar Six on an oil rig
Variant on the alternate world hopping theme where a bounty hunter finds the person he is pursuing is an alternate world criminal. The film’s budget is way too low to do any justice to either the theme or the setting after the collapse of civilisation
Full Moon Entertainment produce a cheapo B-budget copy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Cheap Syfy Channel CGI disaster spectacle about runaway plant roots – from the Garden of Eden, no less – growing to endanger the entire planet. Utterly formulaic and seeming to consist of no more than canned pieces of cliche action
The End of the World seems the least likely backdrop for a romantic comedy. Newcomer Lorene Scafaria seems less interested in depicting social collapse than in making an insipid romcom road movie with two leads who fail to strike up any connection
Tarsem Singh is one of the most extraordinary visual stylists at work today. The disappointment here is that he has abandoned this to make a regular chase and shootout film that any other director could have. What we get is an uncredited rehash of the Rock Hudson film Seconds stripped down to an action film
Action film with Michael Madsen and a mystery alien woman fighting a government coverup of UFOs to retrieve his abducted daughter
Film in which a man is inducted into a secretive organisation that reveals he has superpowers
Comedy vehicle for Marlon Wayans in which he becomes a test subject for a sense-heightening drug. Marlon’s natural comic energy far exceeds the slightness of the premise
Quite good Korean film about a clone with vast psychic powers, this mounts to a climax that captures something of Akira
The tv series Firefly gained a cult following before being cancelled before its time. This was a theatrical film intended to wrap the story up.
Blackly funny film that predates the advent of reality tv about a tv show where people are licensed to hunt each other
A story about the harsh conditions suffered by a family of colonists on Mars
Stark black-and-white thriller from John Frankenheimer about a military coup in the US. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling delivers a superb script
A popular Polish comedy in its day about two men who awake from cryogenic suspension in a women-ruled future where men are obsolete. Some of the comedy reads as very dated watching the film today
A Chinese attempt to create an alien invasion film epic mass destruction in the vein of Independence Day and Michael Bay
Shoddy low-budget Canadian-made attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, this promotes itself as a bogus sequel to the H.G. Wells classic
Guillermo Del Toro makes monster movies with sympathy for the monster. This is his take onThe Creature from the Black Lagoon where the romance between creature and heroine is brought out to centre stage
Another gonzo killer shark film from The Asylum, makers of Sharknado films, this features the entertaining absurdity of evolved humanoid Soviet sharks living on the Moon
Z-budget director Mark Polonia makes a cheap and ridiculous variant on the gonzo killer shark film about a Nazi mad scientist creating a Franken-shark that comes with Hitler’s brain placed into it
Amid the fad for deliberately absurd killer shark films viz Sharknado, this surely takes the prize for ridiculousness of conception and delivery – a hybrid creature with the head of a shark and the tentacles of an octopus. I defy you not to burst into laughter at some of the scenes (*)
Entry in the gonzo killer shark film (viz Sharknado et al), sequel to the earlier Sharktopus Though produced by veteran B movie producer Roger Corman, these Sharktopus films are some of the shittiest in the gonzo killer shark fad, featuring way below sub par effects and missing the sense of humour
Third of the Sharktopus films from Roger Corman, an entry in the series that is making no longer making any effort to take itself seriously
A mind-bogglingly bad film that has absolutely nothing to do with H. Rider Haggard and is a post-holocaust film with Sandahl Bergman as an Amazonian warrior. The film is made with a bizarreness that may cause mental damage
1950s mad scientist film where a scientist develops a regeneration serum only to turn Mari Blanchard into a man-eating femme fatale
The late Bud Spencer and his compatriot Terence Hill appeared in seventeen badly dubbed, slapstick comedies in the 1970s/80s … Spencer went it alone for this excruciating slapstick take on Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which that film’s kid Cary Guffey is an alien found by Spencer’s sheriff
A mockbuster take on Sherlock Holmes from The Asylum released the same time as the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr film. Ben Syder makes for a neurotically subdued Holmes but the film takes a leap off into demented Steampunk territory to emerge as one of The Asylum’s better offerings
The English-language remake of the Dutch film The Lift about a killer elevator. Starring a then unknown Naomi Watts in a role that would probably embarrass her now
The 29th of the Japanese Godzilla films. Coming after the longest gap in the series to date, this functions as a complete reboot of the original. Godzilla is reconceived as a fearsome creation amid epic mass destruction and what are hands down the best effects of any film in the series
A reboot of the classic Japanese tv series about a superhero who goes into action on a motorcycle using a suit to transform into a grasshopper being
Reboot of the old Japanese superhero series, conducted with the epic scale, mass destruction and dazzling effects of the more recent Godzilla films
One of the other films from Jim Sharman, director of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a gonzo comedy where alien visitors bring a statue of the Duke of Edinburgh to life
David Cronenberg’s first commercial release, a vivid work about parasites that turn the residents of an apartment building into sexual fetishists. Cronenberg has set out to shock while beneath that he creates fascinating metaphors about sex
Cute robot film that essentially plays out as E.T. with diodes. It gets some laughs and has a some virtuoso effects but as SF this is a film that can only be enjoyed as mindless entertainment
Sequel to the cute robot film pushes the cutsie elements to a nauseatingly anthropomorphished extreme, having it spout smartass colloquialisms and erasing even basic credibility
At age 81, David Cronenberg is still on great form with this perversely fascinating work about the development of a technology that places cameras inside graves to observe corpses as they decay
A film ostensibly about alien abductees that has rather pleasurably been construed as a series of wild head-spinning twists that are constantly pulling everything we think we know is going on from under the audience, even if it eventually provides more questions than it ever does answers
An alien body snatchers film conducted with a series of smart whiplash twists and turns – even surprisingly a sense of humour
M. Night Shyamalan delves into the crop circle phenomenon and makes an alien invasion film. At this point his films were predicated on big conceptual surprises and this comes out as a damp squib when we find out what is going on
This was dismissed as a copy of a A Quiet Place and had an almost identical plot about survivors sheltering from creatures that attack the smallest sound. In actuality, this was based on a book that predates A Quiet Place
The first and probably the least worst in a series of James Bond copycat films starring Dean Martin as agent Matt Helm. Martin plays the part as a tipsy lounge lizard and the film comes stuffed with excruciating double entendres
Action film made at the height of the popularity of tv’s The X Files with Jack Scalia fighting off the Men in Black
Maybe the best Christmas movie ever. Maybe also the bleakest as a group of friends gather to celebrate Christmas dinner before the end of the world
A Canadian film starring Elias Koteas as an aging man banished to solitary servitude on a prison planet where his loneliness is broken by the arrival of a fellow prisoner
Classic SF film from effects man Douglas Trumbull, one that spins 2001: A Space Odyssey with a conservationist bent. Slightly loopy in terms of its science, the design and effects have a grandeur
South Korean tv mini-series about the investigation of a moonbase with illicit experiments and something possibly alien unleashed
A directorial debut from Woody Allen co-writer Marshall Brickman, an offbeat comedy where scientists hypnotise Alan Arkin into believing he is an alien
Another in the spate of recent A.I. films of the 2010s/20s. Here one can buy android replacements for one’s late spouse but someone is hacking and causing them to go rogue
John Cusack as a super-villain unleashing an army of giant robots against humanity – what’s not to like? Well maybe the entire film, which fails to leave no Machines Amok cliche unturned. Cusack gives a performance through gritted teeth no doubt at the atrocious dialogue he has to utter
Based on Ray Kurzweil’s non-fiction book about the coming evolution of machine intelligence, this is an odd mix of documentary and SF, including a storyline to illustrate Kurzweil’s main theses … The vision is an extraordinarily utopian one but one has just a few plausibility problems with it
Big-budget modern Japanese remake of a 1970s disaster movie in which Japan starts to catastrophically sink into the ocean. Despite revisiting the original with CGI spectacle, this is a film in which hardly anything interesting happens
Gonzo comedy set in alternate world where a samurai-sword wielding Buddy Holly wanders through a post-apocalyptic present
Christian work about the Biblical End Times set in a dystopia where everyone is forced to accept the Mark of the Beast. Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, no less!
Arnold Schwarzenegger revisits something of Total Recall in this modest and clever action film in which he discovers that a clone has stolen his life
This seemed to have a lot of promise in its set-up of Adam Driver crashlanded in Earth’s prehistoric past fighting off dinosaurs
A reasonably effective and spooky Found Footage film set around the unexplained phenomena at the real-life Skinwalker Ranch
Preposterous Australian-made Indiana Jones ripoff involving alien artifacts and Easter Island that would be a bad movie classic if it were not so absurdly entertaining
Superlative film that recreates an imagined world of 1930s retro sf filled with flyer heroes, giant robots and stunning Art Deco designs.
From Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, an anime that seems a mix of Biggles and Never Let Me Go, all taking place in an alternate world. The film is exquisite in its detail
This feels like a copy of the Harry Potter films set at a school for trainee superheroes. Alas after the set-up of its premise, the film appears at a loss of what to do and falls back on insipid cliches
This has been conceived as the ultimate modern exploitation film featuring Nazi zombie piloting flying sharks. Think Iron Sky by way of Sharknado. The results are highly entertaining
An alien invasion film that exists largely as a series of dazzling effects set-pieces, although proves frustrating when it comes to plot or explanatory rationale