The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Tobe Hooper’s remake of the 1950s alien invaders classic for Cannon Films has much better effects and more technical proficient than the original but misses any of its paranoid, alienated mood
Minor British alien invasion effort that creates some atmosphere as a village is trapped in a forcefield by a mystery man pursued by two alien women where both parties claim to be alien cops and the other their prisoners
A film about the alien invasion of a movie theatre that is screening an all-night marathon of old films. This has been constructed around clips of old 1950s sf films
Wacky South Korean comedy that seems like Species played with the sensibilities of My Stepmother is an Alien – the whole film plays out as a nonsensically charming seduction
The finest film to come out of 1950s SF cinema, concerning an invasion of pods that replicate people but for their emotions. The sense of paranoia and psychological tension is unsurpassed
An excellent remake of the Cold War classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original has now been smartly retooled for the 1970s and slots right into the Me Generation era with paranoia perfectly intact
A Japanese SF film with Sonny Chiba as superhero fighting off alien invaders. This has a tatty cheapness that takes it well and truly places into bad movie territory.
One of the spate of teen monster movies of the 1950s, this is a B movie that at least has the benefit of not taking itself too seriously and the creation of some memorable alien creatures
Comedy about two idiot soldiers captured by alien women. The painfully unfunny routines, laughable vegetable monsters and attitudes to women make this one of the great unrecognised bad movies of all time
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
The very first alien body snatchers film. With Jack Arnold’s eerily haunted landscapes and a memorably literate Ray Bradbury script, this is one of the classic SF films of the 1950s era
It Came from Outer Space was one of the classics of the 1950s SF film. Here it was resurrected as a cable-made sequel. Without Jack Arnold or Ray Bradbury on board, the results are dreary
One of the early directorial films from Roger Corman, a surprisingly vigorous and well written variant on the alien body snatcher film featuring one of the memorable alien creations of the era
Although others can be cited, this is the film that inspired Alien. It seems to have been conceived in terms of putting The Thing from Another World aboard a spaceship. A B movie no denying but well constructed
An indie film about hitmen guarding an alien creature, this topples over with ridiculous effects and its affected attempts to be cool
A theatrical film version spun off from The Jetsons, the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series about a space age family. Not too much has changed since the 1960s
Amiable animated film about a juvenile inventor that only serves to show how more polished Pixar’s films are by comparison
The action film has largely died off in the 2010s. This is very much a throwback with a set-up reminiscent of Predator about an action team fighting an alien in the jungle
While the film bombed, it emerges as a fairly good and faithful, lavishly produced adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ swashbuckling planetary adventure
Bollywood SF film that is like a version of Shyamalan’s aliens film Signs with a few dashes of The Mouse That Roared, all played as a comic farce with much singing and dancing
The fifth of the Josh Kirby juvenile adventures where the young time-travelling hero sets out on a quest to the Magic Cavern to find the Shroom People
A very cheaply made film (actually a remake of The Time Travelers) about a research laboratory propelled through time. Most of the historical scenes are represented by stock footage
A low-budget SF film that prefigures Solaris and displays some imagination as astronauts land on a planet to find familiar things recreated from their memories
Likeable comedy variant on E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial in which senior citizen Ben Kingsley befriends an alien visitor after its UFO crashes in his backyard. Few films are made with such an acute awareness of aging
The Wachowskis set out to make a space opera adventure in the Star Wars vein. As always, the elevate every genre they take on and the film is packed with astonishing action sequences and wild, mind-expanding ideas
An animated film adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the classic DC Comics titles of all time. With superhero films now obsessed with multiverses, this seems the perfect time to bring it to the screen
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
An alternate world take on DC Comics characters, who are much more morally ambiguous – Superman is General Zod’s son and Batman’s role is taken by Man-Bat and is an actual vampire
Painfully bad attempt to incarnate the comic-book team as live-action tv pilot where the characters are played for comedy in an attempt to mimic the then success of Friends
A strong, intelligent DC Universe animated film set in an alternate timeline where the histories of various familiar DC characters have turned out radically different
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
Though sold as a Justice League film, this DC Universe Original Animated Movie serves to introduce the Teen Titans to the animated universe
Kevin Spacey is a mysterious patient in a psychiatric institution who makes possibly true claims to be an alien. An uncredited ripoff of the far superior Man Facing Southeast
The director of Hobo with a Shotgun returns with a film about a group of kids caught up in the midst as aliens invade a party put on while their parents are away
A David DeCoteau film about a giant alien eyeball that causes people to become erotically aroused. The chessiness of the premise is hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
Killer clown film directed by the Chiodo Brothers best known for their makeup effects who come up with an appealing arsenal of sinister clown figures. On the other hand, the film is a one-note joke
A cheesily bad alien invader film from the 1950s that seems to be trying to throw every element in SF of the era into the mix from mind controlling aliens to atomic monsters
Alex Proyas seemed a promising genre director during the 1990s. Here Nicolas Cage finds a time capsule that predicts a series of disasters, before the film tangents off into a strange Biblical End of the World scenario
This is the Bollywood version of E.T.. That is if one can imagine an E.T. with singing, dancing and romantic scenes. A simplistic but popular hit that spawned several sequels
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
A bizarrely funny deadpan satire about aliens that have invaded the Earth and turned humanity into an economic underclass. With possibly the weirdest looking aliens to ever appear in an SF film
One of the first films to come out exploiting the success of Star Wars – a badly made teen underdog fantasy in which bullied Kim Milford takes revenge after finding an alien raygun
One of the sillier films made in the aftermath of Star Wars. It is recycling third hand cliches and reduces these to simplistic fantasies of military heroism for the videogame generation
One of the most brilliant SF works conducted for television – the adaptation of an Ursula Le Guin book about a a man whose dreams change the world every time he wakes up
Lazer Team was an easy predictable comedy about four screw-ups that accidentally obtain parts of an alien power suit. This sequel is all the same gags on rinse and repeat.
A film from the comedy collective Rooster Teeth about four screw-ups who pick up power suit items from an alien spaceship only to find they are to defend Earth in a tournament
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman books are space opera classics. Here they are given the anime treatment, which abandons much adherence to the source material and ends up more as a copy of Star Wars
Conceptually odd mix of an erotic film and a standard copy of Alien. This come with the peculiarity of steamy encounters sitting alongside chestburster scenes
This is essentially Alien as a scientifically grounded space film like Gravity where an original alien menace attacking aboard the International Space Station
Tobe Hooper’s space vampires film wildly divides audiences and was a flop for Cannon Films. You have to applaud its ambitious conceptual grasp even if it bites off more wild ideas than it is ever capable of coherently presenting
Likeable Disney animated film about a young misfit Hawaiian girl who befriends an unruly alien creature. This has a good deal of oddball energy and humour that makes it rather appealing
The Disney live-action remake machine continues with this version of the hit 2002 animated film about a cuddly malevolent alien creature. As with most of the Disney remake, the original looks flat in live-action
Director Stanley Donen conducts a star-studded musical adaptation of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s children story about an innocent alien prince come to Earth but with ponderous results
On its own terms, a frequently lovely film. The director made a big thing of how much he loved the Saint-Exupery original but makes a completely different story with only occasional Little Prince interludes
This is intended as a deliberately bad parody of a 1950s SF film. It is a fairly silly effort that almost ends up being too well made for its own good to mimic the originals that weren’t even trying
Joe Dante makes a toon film winding in dozens of cameos from Warner Brothers cartoon characters. The results prove enormously playful and creative. Infinitely more creative and fun that the Space Jam films
Surprisingly halfway reasonable big screen remake of the 1960s tv series, this welcomely dumps the campy silliness of the show for a grittier, much more realistic take on the characters
Unusually effective tv movie about two warring alien species fighting for the fate of the Earth. An early effort from producer Aaron Spelling with an eye-opening cast of before they were famous names
A children’s movie that is a shameless and derivative copy of E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial, featuring one of the dopiest looking aliens ever designed for a film
An extraordinary Argentinean film about a patient in his asylum who insists that he is an alien and has genteel affect on the inmates. Later uncreditedly ripped-off as K-PAX.
One of the earliest 1950s alien visitor films, although here the alien is peaceful and humanity the aggressor. A moodily effective entry from cult director Edgar G. Ulmer.
Zack Snyder’s reboot of Superman leaves you irritated in the first half of the film at its throwing chunks of comic-book canon out the window and the second half bored with the mass destruction orgy that drags on
The amusing idea of a mimicry of a Bear Grylls-type wilderness survival reality show – but with the addition of a monster.
Nicolas Roeg’s film featuring David Bowie as an alienated alien visitor to Earth, a film that is equal amounts brilliance and pretentious distractions
A spinoff film from The Mandalorian tv series, this is the best film set in the Star Wars universe this side of the 2000s for the simple reason that it has invested in characters rather than slavish fanboy callbacks
Tim Burton makes a film based on the old Topps bubblegum card series about Martian invaders, which becomes an affectionately goofy tribute to 1950s alien invasion cinema
Motion-capture animated version of a popular children’s book. The title suggests a 1950s B movie and the subtext doesn’t bear close examination but the results are engagingly put together
Larry Buchanan was a low-budget director whose cheapness easily equaled Edward D. Wood, Jr. This alien invasion effort features Tommy Kirk come to Earth to procure women for repopulation purposes
Adapted from a David Gerrold book, this is essentially the Adam Sandler adopts a kid film Big Daddy by way of K-PAX and its ambiguous alien visitor
Ray Bradbury’s book about the human colonisation of Mars is an SF classic for its wistful, nostalgic poetry. This tv mini-series adaptation is killed by a lumbering director who over-explains Bradbury’s imagery in the most literal ways
A majorly unfunny film about the arrival of aliens in Hawaiian shirts that do bad stand-up comedy routines and tell everybody’s embarrassing secrets
This ended up being the lowest rated of all MCU films. One wondered whether this was just fannish hyperbole but no what we end up with is the Batman & Robin of The MCU, the single worst film that franchise has produced
Another instance of a computer game or film franchise turning to anime to conduct a spinoff. While Mass Effect has an impressive reputation on the console screen, the film here is a dull piece that only comes in around the level of a production line animated tv episode
Live-action film based on the Mattel toy line and popular animated tv series. Given a Cannon Films budget, it emerges as a cheesily absurd Flash Gordon/Conan the Barbarian knockoff
There is an appealingly satiric concept here – a parody of a nature documentary looking at human mating rituals from an alien perspective where everything is constantly being misinterpreted in terms of an animal behaviour – but what emerges is mostly a one-gag film
A sequel to Meatball Machine, the film that started the gonzo Japanese splatter genre, filled with wild mutations, over-the-top splatter, a surreal sense of humour and an obsession with schoolgirls in panties
No-one is pretending that the Bill Murray summer camp comedy Meatballs was a masterpiece but it looks a work of art in comparison to this unfunny sequel, which also throw in a stiff E.T. lookalike
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 it up over its weaker moments
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
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 hardly greets the attempt to generate another entry out of this franchise with any enthusiasm. This mostly consists of tired and familiar gags, where maybe the most generous compliment you can pay is that it is better than Men in Black II was
A huge box-office hit, this comedy turns UFO conspiracy of
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
Satiric Argentinean animated film about a Martian stranded on Earth
Japanese attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, a vigorous and colourful retelling of The Seven Samurai as a space opera
Parasite director Bong Joon Ho makes an ambitious SF film where Robert Pattinson as a clone(s) on a planetary colonisation expedition who becomes embroiled in trying to save an alien species
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
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
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
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 sixth Godzilla film, the first where the series combines elements of space opera – a typical entry of the era and colourfully entertaining about it too
Cloverfield by way of Stalker – a unique and original film about zones on Earth overrun by alien creatures. Director Gareth Edwards creates his own effects that far surpass many big budget efforts
This offers the expectation of a sequel to the sleeper hit of Monsters; what we instead get is not many monsters and a film about recruits in a Middle Eastern war zone. That said, you cannot deny that what we have is an undeniably well made film
Cutley appealing DreamWorks animated film that brings together a bunch of oddball creatures clearly intended as an affectionate homage to various 1950s sf films
Disney comedy starring Tom Tyron as an astronaut caught up in comedic antics with alien visitor Dany Saval
Comedy about stupid alien visitors largely construed as a vehicle for popular British comedy duo Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones. Some witty SF in-jokes among a haphazard script
Painfully cheap and badly made ripoff of Gremlins about a horde of malevolent alien creatures. Produced by Roger Corman
The third and one of the better of the generally insipid Muppet movies produced following Jim Henson’s death. This tells the story of Gonzo’s origins as an alien where the film borrows spoofs the then-popularity of tv’s The X Files