Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)
Bryan Singer was once the hope of fanboy cinema but this attempt to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into an epic fantasy feels exactly like formula studio product that could have been made by any hired director
The Warrior’s Way (2010)
Korean-made Wu Xia/Western crossover that imports Hollywood names and is shot in New Zealand, resulting in a bizarre oddity cross-cultural fusion. The plot elements are paper thin but the film comes to life during the stylised action scenes
The ABCs of Death (2012)
Unique anthology that offers 26 episodes from different directors, each ending with a death. The episodes vary wildly in quality but a sufficient number ignore all good taste and/or travel waaaay across taboo lines
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
A real what-were-they-thinking turkey where someone had the idea of turning the Beatles’ album into a disco-era film starring The Bee Gees … In trying to contrive a plot around the songs and their surreally psychedelic lyrics, the film frequently makes no sense
Death Race 3: Inferno (2012)
By tthis third film, the Death Race series is straining trying to find something original to do with a ry limited premise. The Death Race now takes place in the South African desert but the action scenes prove monotonous
Dark Skies (2013)
Former effects supervisor Scott Stewart surprises here in producing a carefully restrained alien abduction film that focuses on the incursion of the inexplicable into the everyday
American Mary (2012)
Canada’s twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska’s second film is set in the dark underground of body modification,. Like an episode of tv’s Nip/Tuck with a Suicide Girls ethos. Not perfect but an impressive maturation
Zombies of Mora Tau (1957)
A zombie film back from the days before zombies wanted to eat brains and could only be despatched with a bullet in the head where they were instead figures out of voodoo – in this case undead sailors guarding a treasure. A mildly interesting if never entirely standout B movie of the era
Vampires: The Turning (2005)
Supposedly a second sequel to John Carpenter’s Vampires but of little connection otherwise, this is a film of uneven effect about warring vampire clans in Thailand
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)
Little-seen Czech film that sits on the blurred edge of a dream in its hazily surreal view of the world through the eyes of a young girl where the figures around her seem to become vampires that constantly loom with darkly allegorical sexual threat
Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)
Film from Z-budget filmmaker Al Adamson. Most of this is reissued from a Filipino caveman film, along with a handful of filler scenes slung together from odds of Adamson’s other half-finished films
Alien Hunter (2003)
Film about a mysterious alien artifact unearthed in the Antarctic that falls apart due to a script that is constantly jumping all over the place and spending more time homaging other science-fiction films
The Coffin (2008)
Thai entry in the Asian horror fad. A film that has a premise but little beyond that. It feels like it is being too nice to push its audience in any way with all the supernatural manifestations eventually blurring into a sameness
Cinderella Moon (2010)
This claims to adapt a Chinese fairytale that was the basis for Cinderella. Nicely made but what you get is a cultural portrait with occasional Magical Realist elements more than anything like the traditional fairytale
Grave Encounters (2011)
Another Found Footage horror film with a reality tv ghostbusting team investigating a haunted asylum. The Found Footage genre quickly became exhausted and this only treads where others have gone before
Beautiful Creatures (2013)
Attempt to create another Twilight franchise that quickly becomes the anti-Twilight, shucking the pro-chastity message for a decidedly inflammatory stance against small-minded Christian prejudice
Warm Bodies (2013)
The idea of a Twilight copy where the lead male is a zombie seems an utterly lame idea before one sat down to watch this. That said, the film manages to make its peculiarly incongruous mix of teen romantic film, zombie film and comedy work for it
The Invincible Iron Man (2007)
One of the handful of animated Marvel Comics films. This confusingly presents a different origin story to the live-action Iorn Man film, while the major villain of The Mandarin is completely mishandled
Black Moon (1975)
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
[Rec]3: Genesis (2012)
![[Rec]3 Genesis (2012) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-3-genesis-2012-poster-717x1024.jpg)
Third entry in the Spanish Found Footage series. The Found Footage look is abandoned soon in but this decides to have fun and turns out the gore-drenched goods
Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1972)
An perfect example of 1970s exploitation cinema – a regional film made with no budget, a no-name cast and with all emphasis on the luridly sensationalistic. A crappy, badly made film on all counts
Age of the Hobbits (2012)
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
The Day (2011)
A post-holocaust film that takes its tone from the bleak survivalism of The Road. Much focus on the grim harshness of trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world but there nothing particularly original in the film’s treatment
Jack the Ripper (1959)
Dramatisation of the Jack the Ripper murders that resembles a cheap British quota quickie but musters some okay gaslit atmosphere. Alas, the film has done little research on the details of Ripper casefile
Mars et Avril (2012)
An impressively designed Quebecois sf film where it is it is sad to see so much artistry lavished on something completely nonsensical and utterly woolly-headed in terms of its ideas
Brutal (2007)
Tedious psycho film that only seems slung together to feature a series of nasty dispatches. Features some incredibly bad writing and maybe one of the most ridiculous pieces of serial killer motivation ever devised
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (2010)
Second of the Bruce Timm animated films based on DC’s Justice League, this has been construed as a Mirror Universe take that pits the Justice League up against villainous versions of themselves
Alraune (1928)
A classic German Expressionist film where Metropolis‘s Brigitte Helm gives a sizzlingly seductive performance as a woman born via artificial insemination who grows up as an emotionless man-eater
Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949)
The first Tarzan film after Johnny Weissmuller’s departure and replacement by a blank Lex Barker, although in all other ways is still the same tired formula. One of the few Tarzan films of the era to employ fantastic plot devices (a Fountain of Youth) but seems to have little idea what to do with it
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Amid the early 2010s fad for adult fairytale reinterpretations, this has an anachronistic absurdity that invites you not to take it seriously. A series of action movie poses, CGI and splatter effects are transplanted into the fairytale.
Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
Painfully dull film edited together from two unrelated Mexican films ending an incomprehensible plot featuring a revived Aztec Mummy and another mummy that transforms into a werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr
Gurozuka (2005)
Japanese horror film that only treads tepidly where the Ring and Ju-on/The Grudgefilms have gone before. Shot in a plain, ordinary manner that bleeds the J-horror film of atmosphere
Viy (1967)
The only horror film ever made in Communist Russia. Adaptation of a classic story about a monk sequestered with the body of a woman for three nights, the film creates an undeniable atmosphere and mounts to a wildly fantastical climax where he must face all the minions of Hell
The 7 Adventures of Sinbad (2010)
Cheap mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to exploit the success of the flop Prince of Persia. While ostensibly a Sinbad film, this confusingly abandons the Arabian Nights milieu and is set contemporary where Sinbad is not sailor but a corporate CEO stranded on a desert island
Twixt (2011)
Francis Ford Coppola makes what may be a ghost story or a vampire film but things are so confused you are never sure what. Less like the mature work of one of the great American filmmakers than an ingenue effort from director straight out of film school with a head full of muddled pretensions
Alter Egos (2012)
Indie superhero comedy that reads a good deal funnier on paper than it ever produces laughs on screen. The production lacks the budget to produce more than a handful of cheap superheroic digital effects
Zu Warriors (2001)
Tsui Hark’s follow-up to Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain the film that popularised Wu Xia cinema. The point where Tsui discovered CGI and latches onto it to do more than just show flying swordsmen but create an exquisitely dreamy world of pure fantastique imagination
Atrocious (2010)
Spanish Found Footage film about the investigation of a haunted woods during which almost nothing happens, before a left-field twist ending that makes little sense
The Pirate Movie (1982)
Widely rididculed attempt to market Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as a teen pop film by way of The Blue Lagoon. A mind-spinning film that seems to have no limit on how silly it is prepared to be, including numerous anachronistic contemporary pop culture in-jokes and fourth-wall breaking gags
Afterwards (2008)
Beautifully filmed work featuring John Malkovich as an enigmatic Messenger of Death. A coolly sophisticated and mysterious film that plays out like an arthouse version of Final Destination by way of the Jeff Bridges Fearless
Sick Girl (2007)
Portrait of a disturbed teenage girl on a killing and torture spree. Makes fictitious claims to be based on a true story but mostly seems designed to outrage an audience. At which, despite an undeniable amateurishness, you cannot deny it succeeds
Exit 33 (2011)
Dull and routine film with Kane Hodder as a psycho backwoods gas station owner. The film miscasts the hulking Hodder in trying to make him look like an ordinary guy
The Presence (2010)
Ghost story that does an excellent job in creating an incredibly haunted and unusual atmosphere. On the other hand, the film falls apart during the second half where it heads in another direction altogether and leaves one entirely unclear what is going on
Quantum Apocalypse (2010)
Another cheap Syfy Channel end of the world film. So cheap that the catastrophe mostly ends up being talked about rather than depicted, while the rest of the show runs by disaster movie cliches
The Bay (2012)
Barry Levinson becomes one of the few name directors to venture into the Found Footage genre and soberingly portrays the outbreak of an ecological catastrophe from multiple viewpoints
Mama (2013)
A Guillermo Del Toro produced ghost story that fails to go anywhere. The promise of the film’s trailer falls apart in the hands of a novice director who blows all of his scares
The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976)
Animated film based on the popular comic-books co-directed by the comic-book’s creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo,. This is disappointingly weak animation that substitutes slapstick cartoon gags for the comic’s more sophisticated humour
Cockneys vs Zombies (2012)
Beyond the title, this is a straightforward take on the modern zombie comedy. It is undeniably trying to be another Shaun of the Dead, at which it proves consistently amusing and likeable
Dredd (2012)
A second film version of the Judge Dredd comic-book. More faithful than the Sylvester Stallone version, this comes with a satisfyingly visceral kick, yet a low-budget means that we see little of Dredd’s satiric future
Texas Chainsaw (2013)
A Texas Chainsaw sequel in 3D with chainsaws and gore coming out at the screen seems the complete antithesis of the raw savagery of the original. The result is like a formulaic modern slasher, while the film is wrecked by a ridiculous reversal of sympathies in the last half
AVN (2010)
Japanese film that true to its title offers pits ninja against alien creatures. The film plants tongue considerably in cheek as it offers up a series of wildly fantastique action scenes and creature effects
2-Headed Shark Attack (2012)
This is a killer shark film that is not taking itself too seriously. In their pursuit for the most absurd monster movie title, The Asylum have managed to get the balance of cheap effects and tongue-in-cheek treatment down near perfectly. The first in a series from The Asylum where each sequel added more heads.
Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008)
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
Eyes of a Stranger (1981)
Entry from the heyday of the slasher film. Better plotted than most of its ilk, largely because it steals the plot from Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Featuring a teenage Jennifer Jason Leigh in her first film role
House at the End of the Street (2012)
Psycho-thriller that plays out like a creaky old deranged relative in the cellar film retooled as a teen romance until an absurd mid-film conceptual twist irredeemably kills the film off
Camera Shy (2012)
A Canadian film where a corrupt politician makes the slow realisation that he is a character inside a film. The comedy heads for obvious places at times but the film is carried by the originality and amusement of its premise
Chupacabra (2003)
An incredibly bad monster movie supposedly based around the Latin American urban legend of the Chupacabra. So cheaply made it can’t even afford CGI
The Night Strangler (1973)
Less famous sequel to the cult tv movie The Night Stalker but a far superior work. This repeats much of the first film but with Darren McGavin’s Kolchak hunting an immortal killer. Much better script and featuring a superbly eerie climactic venture down into the Seattle Underground
Tail Sting (2002)
A completely ridiculous film about mutant scorpions on a plane – after something this laughable, it’s hard to see why Snakes on a Plane needed to plant tongue in cheek
Meteor (1979)
An effort from the heyday of the 1970s disaster movie that was a big flop when it came out. Widely ridiculed for its bad special effects, it is a film I am partially prepared to defend, it setting aside the usual soap opera dramatics of these films to make an interesting parable about Cold War tensions. It also prefigures Armageddon with its plot of trying to divert a meteor on a collision course with Earth
Ghosts With Shit Jobs (2012)
Fascinating film interviewing people about the jobs they are forced to take in an economically collapsed future. Despite a minuscule budget, this has the grip of strong, intelligent SF
Genesis II (1973)
An unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot that is a fascinating almost-ran. Roddenberry rehashes Star Trek by way of Buck Rogers in a post-holocaust setting. This could have made for a worthwhile series
Outcast (2010)
Absolutely fascinating Irish-Scottish film about people hunting each other with arcane sorceries on a rundown Edinburgh council estate … Compulsively fascinating in its often enigmatic approach, while depicting magic on screen in a way unlike anything we have seen before
Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)
The 26th Japanese Godzilla film, the fourth pitting him against Mechagodzilla. After a slow first hour, the film delivers all the exhilarating mass destruction sequences we expect of it as the monsters go head to head
Bait (2012)
A strong contender for the most ridiculous killer shark ever made – something that should have occurred to the producers about the point of the film’s premise of a shark hunting people in a supermarket
Excision (2012)
Darkly subversive film about an alienated teenage girl, this digs its teeth into family values and depicts the uncomfortableness of puberty. On the other hand, this is only rarely the horror film others have reviewed it as
Silent Night (2012)
This is a very loose and somewhat desultory remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night that seems to imagine it is being far more hardcore and controversy defying than it is
The Sin Eater (2003)
Catholic horror film with Heath Ledger miscast as a priest that was a flopped. This is a fascinating piece of theological horror that plays out with an unusually strong and original script
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part I (2012)
The first of a two-part animated adaptation of the classic graphic novel ever written. The film lacks the same impact because, firstly, it is an incomplete story, and secondly, Frank Miller’s ideas have now become so much part of the modern Batman
Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (2012)
The trailer tries to build this up as a venture into a fantasy world. In reality, all that the film is is a documenting of several of Cirque du Soleil’s acts connected by a thin-to-non-existent story
Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) (1972)
SF film set in a future that is so overpopulated that childbirth is treated as an executable crime. Although sometimes naive in its speculations, this creates a dystopian scenario that imaginatively turns many familiar aspects of the present on their head
The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (2001)
TV mini-series that adapts six less well known short stories by H.G. Wells into an anthology with Wells as the central character. A couple of good stories, some that never hit the mark
Dr Jekyll and His Women (1981)
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
Starship Troopers: Invasion (2012)
The importation of anime director Shinji Aramaki to helm the latest Starship Troopers film provides dazzling animation and hardware, along with some hard, furious military action that easily outstrips all the other films. On the other hand, the film never goes beyond being about soldiers shooting up bugs
Santo vs the Vampire Women (1962)
This is the most famous of the Santo films, one that evinces an often crudely effective poetry out of its assemblage of B movie elements as he goes up against a vampire priestess and her minions
Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders (1991)
This sequel to Flesh Gordon, the R-rated parody of the Flash Gordon serials, feels like a joke that is belaboured in the retelling. The film does have a crass level of nonsensical absurdity that proves amusing
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
Peter Jackson returns to J.R.R. Tolkien and epic-sized adventure in the first of his Hobbit films. The visual sweep is there but the film feels over-extruded and over-burdened by its own self-importance.
Gorgo (1961)
Superior revived dinosaur amok movie. While the effects are the cut-price man in the monster suit ones, these are expertly achieved and the film comes with a surprisingly poignant twist that makes it stand out
Rise of the Guardians (2012)
The concept – sort of akin to
From Hell It Came (1957)
A bad movie classic. Plenty of hysterically funny dialogue and one of the most ridiculous looking movie monsters of all time – a possessed tree (where the film also manages to wind in the 1950s obsession with atomic monsters)
Bugmaster (2006)
Akira director/creator Katsuhiro Otomo returns with this live-action manga adaptation about a wandering exorcist. Very different to any of Otomo’s anime, this is much quieter and rooted in Japanese folklore but has some undeniably way out scenes
The Incredible Mr Limpet (1964)
An appealingly silly blend of live-action and animation where Don Knotts plays a downtrodden clerk obsessed with fish who falls into the ocean and becomes a porpoise
Acid Head: The Buzzard Nuts County Slaughter (2011)
Tony Watt strikes again with another of wilfully bad, agonisingly unwatchable films. All the bad acting, plotlessly rambling scenes and random exploitation movie homages that one expects of a Tony Watt film
Schlock (1973)
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
Five (1951)
SF cinema’s first ever portrayal of nuclear war. The film is sometimes incredibly naive and mostly wants to make a parable of racial tolerance. It is often heavy-handed but also holds moments of undeniable lyricism
Midnight’s Children (2012)
Adaptation of a Salman Rushdie novel that acts as a superhero film of sorts about a secret war between people with unique powers set against the backdrop of 20th Century Indian history
Superman (1948)
A 15 chapter serial that marks the very first live-action screen appearance of Superman. The superheroics and effects are painfully primitive today (where Superman flying is represented by animation) but the serial gets many aspects of the comic-book down right
The Mask (1961)
Film that has a minor cult reputation for its cheaply trippy 3D hallucination scenes. Outside of that, The Mask (not to be confused with the Jim Carrey film) is a dull variant on the Dr Jekyll story in which a ritual mask causes the wearer’s dark side to emerge
Zaat (1971)
A bad movie classic about a scientist turning himself into a fish monster and trying to get fish to walk and take over the Earth. Filled with prize bad movie writing, laughable effects and a ridiculously cheesy monster suit
Undocumented (2010)
A Found Footage film that gets political – in this case, featuring a group of American vigilantes torturing Mexican illegal immigrants. Not quite full on Torture Porn but holds a darkly barbed bite
Hitchcock (2012)
A non-fiction film about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. The script does a great job nailing the psychological undertows and the parts are brought to life with several tour-de-force performances
Sector 7 (2011)
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
The Pit & the Pendulum (2009)
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
Frankenweenie (2012)
Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated expansion of his 1982 short film has a winning concept – a parody of the Universal Frankenstein films with a teenage boy resurrecting his dog
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006)
This is one of Takashi Miike’s most incomprehensible films – what appears to be a murder mystery and gay love story set in a prison, along with random SF elements
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
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 Tall Man (2012)
Pascal Laugier returns with this fascinating effort about a small town subject to child abductions by a possible boogieman. A film that is as blatantly manipulative as it is ingenious in its way-out twists and turns where everything we assume is going on at the outset is eventually turned completely on its head
Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011)
Though Marvel Comics have had massive success with their big screen adaptations in the 00s, they have been far less successful with their attempts to spin off animated films. An okay but unexceptional animated prequel released at the same time as the first Thor live-action film
The Invisible Ray (1936)
Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi pairing from the heyday of mad science cinema. The science is portrayed with a fascinating and fearful Gothic awe, which leads to some captivatingly directed scenes
Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
Dull and unimaginative Silent Hill sequel that only revisits what went before. The first film had an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere but the sequel reduces everything to no more than pop-up Clive Barker