The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Adventure Films are similar to Action Films but usually take place in an exotic realm (jungles, desert, lost worlds, foreign lands, fantasy and space settings). They feature quest plots where the hero(es) are in search of a treasure, attempting to rescue someone, to simply survive or find a way home. Action Films emphasise muscular heroism whereas adventure films focuses more on the realm the heroes are exploring and the often colourful characters and creatures they encounter.
Most of the films that fall into the themes of Serials, Lost Worlds, Epic Fantasy Films, Arabian Nights Fantasy, Space Opera and Planetary Adventure Films can be considered as Adventure Films. The adventure film also includes many films that take place in historical settings such as Swashbucklers.
One of a spate of films featuring flyer heroes that were popular in the era. Adapted from a comic-book created by an actual World War I flying ace, this is a thirteen chapter serial but proves rather crudely made today
Yet another adaptation of a series of Young Adult fantasy books that failed to fly. The idea of an Indiana Jones-type adventure set in Victorian England holds promise but the film only sporadically manages to let the adventure fly
Steven Spielberg makes a solid effort to bring Hergé’s much loved comic-book character to life in this motion-capture animated effort. This plays free and easy with the original stories but generally gets the spirit of the comics right
Action film with Dave Bautista as a treasure hunter retrieving items in a post-apocalyptic world. Directed by a former stuntman, this plays much to the action element with little else of substance
This is a sequel to Cannon Films’ excruciating camp version of King Solomon’s Mines. Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone are back. This is a marginal improvement but far from a good film
Mel Gibson seems to love directing historical spectacles with an emphasis on bloody brutality. Here he creates a bloodthirsty adventure set among the Mayan peoples
Animated film that takes place in a Steampunk alternate history. This brims over with an extraordinary degree of visual invention from the amazingly detailed vistas of the world to a script tossing in quirky twists and wacky inventions
A Hollywood version of the Arabian Nights that throws out the story’s unique narrative structure and substitutes the colourful spectacle of the swashbuckling adventure. With Shemp Howard as Sinbad!
A low-budget film about a venture into the Hollow Earth in search of a missing person and encounters with creatures there. So low budget the underground caves seem shot in a darkened room
Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel is turned into a comedy vehicle for Jackie Chan. One of Chan’s biggest flops, an overblown turkey packed with celebrity cameos and replacing Verne’s adventure with incredibly unfunny slapstick
The first and best film version of a classic story about an expedition finding the city ruled by an immortal queen in the desert. This was shot in the real locations and comes with a stunning sense of expansiveness
George Pal was one of the top genre producers of the 1950s. Here he aims to emulate the Cinemascope Biblical spectaculars of the day albeit with an SF spin but this ends up one of his lesser works
From prolific B-budget director Fred Olen Ray, this is a softcore parody of the Indiana Jones films
Disastrous Brooke Shields starring film adaptation of the famous comic-strip about a girl reporter. Nobody involved is taking the show seriously and everything is blown into camp farce.
The film that Bill Maher would prefer to forget. Beyond the deliberately absurd title, this is an amusing spoof of the jungle adventure and contains a far cleverer degree of wit than you expect
Burt Lancaster-starring pirate swashbuckler that announces it is not taking itself seriously and goes entertainingly over-the-top, eventually adding a series of wildly anachronistic inventions
Syfy Channel film that mashes the disaster movie together with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The result is peculiarly unsatisfying either as disaster movie or the tomb raiding adventure we expect
TV mini-series that turns the discovery of Tutankamun’s tomb into an Indiana Jones adventure. But everything is played with a constant barrage of one-liners and action sequences so silly you can’t take any of the show seriously
Film about an expedition through the jungles of the Yucatan to investigate a Mayan pyramid that is revealed to contain alien artefacts. This ventures well inside wacky fringe science theories
This is an enjoyable low-budget homage to the Indiana Jones film that comes with a number of knowing references to the genre and the addition of a clever time travel plot
Harrowing wilderness survival film from John Boorman about four men on a trip downriver that fall afoul of hillbillies. A classic that was highly influential on the formation of the Backwoods Brutality genre.
Luc Besson adapts a French comic-book – sort of a female version of Tintin – with uneven but generally amiable regard. The result is somewhere between an Indiana Jones adventure and the quirkness of an Amelie
An odd mix of 1950s alien invasion film and low-budget jungle adventure as explorers in the wilds of Mexico encounter a glowing amorphous blob in the jungle
Guy Ritchie makes an adventure film that pays homage to Indiana Jones and a host of other works concerning the quest for the Fountain of Youth. A superficial film killed by its constantly distracting flip banter
Undeniably entertaining Filipino action film that tries to throw in everything including time travel, post-holocaust action, adventure quests, magical artifacts, lost worlds, Nazis and dwarves
This advertises itself as the first live-action Steampunk film. What we get is like a Victorian version of The Librarians with two adventurers hunting mythical artifacts while armed with steam weapons
Maybe the definitive Tarzan film, one that drops the pulp adventure and recasts the story as British arthouse theatre. Superbly mounted and cast. Christopher Lambert has never better in the title role
A tomb raiding adventure about the venture into a tomb filled with deadly spiders in search of an immortality serum. A Chinese-Australian-co-production.
From the director of Emmanuelle, this is an adaptation of an adult comic-book that replays the lost city adventure with the addition of a mind-boggling softcore fetishism
The premise of a group of adventurers seeking artifacts from fairytales has mild possibilities but is given zero conviction by anybody involved. A sub-Indiana Jones adventure that was made as a tv pilot
A Peruvian children’s animated film about a device that allows people to enter an author’s imagination. This mostly has children having adventures in a facsimile of Jules Verne
Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea created a fad for Jules Verne adaptations throughout the 1950s/60s. Disney returned to Verne in this colourfully absurd adventure with children on a globe-spanning hunt for their missing father
At age 80, Harrison Ford returns for what looks like being the last ever Indiana Jones film. It’s not perfect but when you compare to all the other contemporary franchises, this still has the good old adventure spirit
The fourth of the Indiana Jones films, returning after a 19 year gap to general disappointment. Largely a film about Indy getting old, this tries but the action scenes pale against what the series was in its heyday
Third of the Indiana Jones films. This comes with all the breakneck action sequences and Sean Connery doing a fine comic turn as Indiana’s irascible father but also plays to a much greater slapstick emphasis
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s first sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark is like a single 118 minute rollercoaster ride without let-up in terms of action, although is far less polished in the scripting department
Novelist Peter Benchley’s name was huge as a result of Jaws. One of the less successful Benchley adaptations about the discovery of a lost society of pirate descendants who prey on shipping in the Bermuda Triangle
An underrated and quite magnificent lost world adventure from Disney with an airship crew in search of a lost Viking world in the Arctic. Contains some absolutely stunning effects work for the era.
Sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth, a supposed adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island and a consistently silly, nonsensical film that operates at the level of a children’s cartoon
This family friendly adaptation of the classic Jules Verne novel was made to highlight the 3D process and throws most of the book out to essentially become Jules Verne the theme park ride
The success of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea created a spate of Jules Verne’s adaptation. Here Verne’s tale of explorers in an underground realm has been turned into an absurdly colourful adventure
Ostensibly as a teen version of the Jules Verne novel made by Cannon Films. However, this started under one director and finished under another with totally incomprehensible results
Hallmark TV mini-series version of the Jules Verne novel that keeps faith to the book for the most part before heading off on some colourfully exotic adventures
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the reboot of the 90s Jumanji, was a box-office success. That mandated a sequel. The central problem is where exactly does a film about characters sucked inside a videogame go with its premise?
A revival of Jumanji. The original’s boardgame is now a videogame that sucks the players inside. The adventure elements are routine but the film’s has comedic fun with its bodyswapped characters
Lush and beautifully produced live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories. In comparison to the studio backlot Tarzan films of the era, this is in colour, builds entire jungle sets and even goes on location in India
The first of the Disney live-action remakes of their animated films. Stephen Sommers abandons the talking animals and gives us a film that it more Tarzan than Rudyard Kipling set in a lush fantasy version of India
A fairly blatant copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories – even more so of the then recent 1994 live-action Disney remake – all having been conducted on a B-budget
The long-delayed film based on the Disney theme park ride is an assemblage of cliches from various adventure films but ends up being far more enjoyable than it has any right to be
Former Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller plays himself in a routine studio backlot jungle adventure that uncreditedly steals the plot from H. Rider Haggard’s She
This was The Asylum’s mockbuster copy of Disney’s Jungle Cruise and is a similar kind of adventure film. However, this proves far more entertaining than what you expect
Cannon Films’ remake of the H. Rider Haggard adventure novel was made to exploit the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark but that does not excuse what an awful film it is where everything is played up for excruciating camp humour
A Hallmark TV mini-series version of the classic H. Rider haggard adventure novel that suffers from a non-acting Patrick Swayze badly miscast as Allan Quatermain
This has nothing to do with King Kong and is an adventure film that features a female Tarzan and a mad scientist creating an army of mind-controlled gorillas
A reboot where King Kong is now part of a shared universe. This is less a tragic love story about Kong falling for a girl and being brought down by civilisation than Kong as a heroic defender fighting off other monsters
A reasonable attempt to revive Tarzan. Tthis could almost be a sequel to Greystoke with more of an emphasis on adventure. Alexander Skarsgård broods his way through the title role.
The first of several tv movies and later tv series about a team that collect mythic artifacts. An unapologetic copy of the Indiana Jones films and surprisingly more fun than you expect
The second of The Librarian tv movies featuring Noah Wyle as an Indiana Jones-modelled adventurer in search of mythical artifacts – here a map to King Solomon’s Mines
A conceptually peculiar mix of Indiana Jones and Waterworld about tomb raiding adventures in a drowned future and the quest for Moses’s staff to turn back the rising waters
An oddity from Hammer Films – a colourfully interesting lost world film set in the Sargasso Sea filled with trapped ships from all eras and cheesy monster. More dramatically interesting in the build-up than when we arrive
A TV mini-series adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle lost world story, this has been produced by the BBC as a glorious period adventure with CGI dinosaurs
A copycat of King Kong made on a budget of about $1.98 and featuring some pitiful giant ape effects
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
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
Nominal remake of the Boris Karloff The Mummy, which has now been inflated into a big budget Indiana Jones adventure. Stephen Sommers lets the film overspill with CGI spectacle but the exercise is deflated by a jokey, unserious attitude
Sequel to the 1999 The Mummy. Here Stephen Sommers amplifies everything in that film by a factor of ten where the constant bombardment by the spectacular reaches an point of absurd overkill
The third of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films that feels like it has no point other than to steal $10 from your hand and give you a bucket of content free mental popcorn in return
A serial adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic survival story about escapees aboard a hot-air balloon who wash up on a desert island. To the regular story, this sees fit to add hostile natives, pirates and invading aliens from Mercury
Amid the fad for Jules Verne adaptations of the 1950s/60s, we had this version of Verne’s desert island story, which has been pumped up with the addition of giant-size Ray Harryhausen animals and insects
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of Jules Verne’s desert island drama featuring no less than Patrick Stewart as Captain Nemo. This sinks badly amid incredibly shoddy giant animal digital effects
About the ninth film version of Jules Verne’s desert island survival story. This doesn’t add the giant animals/insects other versions do, although we still get a number of wild sf elements the original book never had. Problem though is that the film never adds enough to make proceedings very interesting
A serial Tarzan adventure that stood outside the regular Johnny Weissmuller films. A producer formed a business partnership with Edgar Rice Burroughs and went to Guatemala to shoot
Pearl White was the original serial heroine in The Perils of Pauline. During the 1960s Batman craze, the serial was revived as this campy comedy
Serial adaptation of the famous comic-strip superhero. One of the better serial comic-book adaptations, featuring some great cliffhangers and maintaining great faith to the comic-strip original
Big screen adaptation of the popular comic-strip superhero. This aims for the tone of an old fashioned serial adventure and is nicely mounted but crucially never comes to life.
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
Third of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and purportedly made without a completed script, this becomes bloated and sprawling
The second of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Johnny Depp and all the principals are back and much of the eccentric humour is present but the action has undergone budget bloat
After the two last lacklustre entries, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise starts to recover where the two new directors pull off some spectacular comedy-action sequences that go a long way towards recapturing what the series used to be
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is revived for a fifth outing. There is a new director in Rob Marshall but bar an energetic comic opening, he never does much that hits the zany heights of the previous entries
Enjoyably tongue-in-cheek pirate swashbuckler based on the Disney theme park that proved an enormous hit and spun off a series of sequels, as well as giving Johnny Depp one of his iconic roles
Adaptation of the popular videogame that ventures into Arabian Nights adventure, this was a box-office flop. It swashbuckles entertainingly but Jake Gyllenhaal feels badly miscast as a buffed adventure hero
Swashbuckling fairytale that treads a fine line between deconstruction and parody, while reveling in a script where the dialogue positively dances. Perfectly cast – a film that few do not come out enjoying its ebullient fantasy
The director of Battlefield Earth teams up with Uwe Boll to deliver a sub-Indiana Jones adventure about venturing into an Egyptian pyramid in search of Ancient Astronauts. The tomb raider cliches are so tired and creaky that the film fails to generate any excitement
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s homage to the adventure films of the 1940s was a huge hit in its day, spawning several sequels and many imitators. The film is pure action and adventure, delivered with enormous charm and wit
Lesser budgeted sequel to the 1994 remake of The Jungle Book, which actually comes closer in tone to the original Rudyard Kipling stories
Beautifully produced film version of the old radio superhero where director Russell Mulcahy does a wonderful job with the period design and adventure
The most lavish of the silent screen adaptations of H. Rider Haggard’s classic, multiply filmed adventure novel about the discovery of a lost city ruled over by an immortal queen
Big screen adaptation of the Will Eisner comic-book and 1950s tv series about a female Tarzan. A blank Tanya Roberts in the title role and a campy script pushes it well into bad movie status
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
Disney’s 61st animated film. A lost world adventure that emerges as Fantastic Voyage by way of Avatar
This Disney animated adaptation treats the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with surprising respect and faithfulness for the most part where the addition of talking animals even works for it. Fun and with a great deal of creative energy, one of the better films from the 90s Disney renaissance
An animated version of the Tarzan story shot in the motion capture process. Some of the modernisations might have Edgar Rice Burroughs turning in his grave, nevertheless the animation is excellent and the film works well as a technologically upgraded version of the Disney film
The second and very best of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, this has an incredible sense of adventure and even a surprising eroticism for the era
The ninth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. All but the first two Weissmuller films slip into the utterly banal and formulaic. The novelty this time is Tarzan encountering a city inhabited all by all women
One of several silent movie versions of Tarzan, featuring the actor who was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ personal choice for the role
Producer Sy Weintraub made some of the best of all Tarzan films in the 1960s, shooting in real locations and with thrilling adventure elements. This is one of his weaker ones that takes Tarzan to Brazil accompanied by an annoying cute kid
A German-made Tarzan film that resurrects most of the adventure film tropes to negligible effect. As Tarzan, Caspar Van Dien looks like an Ivy League college student in the jungle.
The last of the Tarzan outings featuring Lex Barker, as well as an interesting cast line-up including Raymond Burr as the villain