The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
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
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
Action film made at the height of the popularity of tv’s The X Files with Jack Scalia fighting off the Men in Black
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
Another failed attempt to film the works of Kurt Vonnegut where Vonnegut’s ironic pessimism ends up as witless slapstick chaos on screen
Not entirely uninteresting but also not entirely satisfactory adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel about a man who becomes unstuck in time, flipping back and forward between the events of his own life
Called the Russian 2001. Andrei Tarkovsky makes one of the great SF films, a haunting ghost story set on a space station as an alien planet below drives the crew mad with recreated doppelgangers of their loved ones
The second of the Stars Wars spinoff films tells a Han Solo origin story. After a change of directors, it emerges in the hands of Ron Howard who has spent four decades being the world’s most ploddingly sedate director
Mini-series that was a popular hit in its day, which largely steals its premise of a human and alien cop hunting a body-hopping alien from The Hidden. What makes the show work past its rather ordinary story, is the two leads and their wittily sparring Lethal Weapon-type relationship
Sequel to the hit videogame adaptation, this offers up fairly much the same mix of elements as before – a cutely anthrompomorphic creature and Jim Carrey going to rafter-rattling excess
Third of the Sonic the Hedgehog films and surprisingly far more entertaining than you expect from such a lightweight formulaic film
After a disastrous fan reception of its initial trailer, the film of the videogame arrives on screen. The surprise is that for such a zero expectation film and one that defies the engagement of any of your braincells it is as much fun as it is.
Film that seems to be trying to cram in as many exploitation elements as possible from UFOs to spree killers, zombies, Women in Prison and rock’n’roll
One of the less remembered films from Jack Arnold who directed a number of 1950s SF classics in which the children of rocket engineers are used by an alien force to sabotage a space launch. Not one of Arnold’s greats but still a modestly effective work.
An animated film about NASA experimental chimpanzees. Not quite up there with Pixar but an amiable and unpretentious and amiable outing
Comedy about a cop from the future who joins the present-day force where he is partnered with a cop thawed out from the 1960s. This is a premise that should have been funny but emerges as something like Sledge Hammer cast with the characters from Dumb and Dumber
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
Based on a Pepsi commercial, this brings NBA star Michael Jordan and a host of Looney Tunes characters together in a basketball game. A cute idea not very well developed.
The brooding space pirate Captain Harlock is one of the famous anti-heroes in manga and anime. Harlock gets a big screen revamp here from Shinji (Appleseed) Aramaki, one of the most amazing of modern anime directors, who delivers a series of epic space battles with a breathtaking beauty
Low-budget producer Roger Corman jumped aboard the Star Wars sf bandwagon with Battle Beyond the Stars then took all the effects scenes and wrote another entire film around them with Space Raiders
Mel Brooks parodies the Star Wars films. As with most Brooks films, the humour is broad and scattershot but occasionally amusing
Well produced but otherwise unfunny comedy about a group of bumbling Martian invaders who turn up on Halloween, following a rebroadcast of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show
Planetary adventure in the Star Wars vein with a few shakes of the junkyard future look of Mad Max 2. This was made to exploit the short-lived early 80s 3D revival fad
Adam Sandler plays a lone astronaut who befriends an alien. This falls somewhere between E.T. and Interstellar
An obscure parody about a team of inept and dysfunctional superheroes that was one of the earliest works from a then unknown James Gunn (who not only writes but stars as one of the superheroes)
Sequel to Species that this time offers up the male of the species. The film feels put together as an exercise in makeup effects but their physiological absurdity causes the film to topple into silliness
Slick and rather silly copy of Alien that conceptually cross-hatches it to emerge as essentially Basic Instinct with tentacles
The third of the Species films, which follows Sil’s daughter. Some okay makeup effects but the plotting gets fairly silly
Fourth entry in the Species series where at least the series seems to have gravitated to the arena of the trashily absurd B movie it belongs
Rather of an oddity – a French adult film about women from the future that in the aftermath of Star Wars was re-edited to become a film about alien women visitors come to kill off the human species via sex. Often directed with an artiness that proves far more than you expect
The Spice Girls conduct their own version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, a largely plotless film with them clowning around. Including appearances from aliens.
Last and by general opinion the least of the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films. With three super-villains present, the plot feels as though it is bursting at the seams juggling the various origin stories and ongoing dramas, although Raimi still delivers some solid superheroic action scenes
A mishmash of Alien copy and supernatural serial killer film set in a drowned future London with a script that makes no real sense. The film’s buddy cop relationship starring Rutger Hauer does have its amusements.
Strong intelligent SF film where a cosmonaut returns from a space mission with an alien parasite attached. On one level, not too different to a host of Alien copies but the difference is all in the approach
An incredibly cheap ripoff of Predator (and even more so that film’s real source The Most Dangerous Game) relocated to an urban area. Incredibly tatty and dull on all counts
Space opera (or more correctly planetary adventure) conducted on a low-budget where you can see the filmmakers are making a clear effort to go way above and beyond the resources to hand
Second of the Star Trek films, usually regarded as the fan favourite because of its often moving character focus on themes of life, death and aging. Ricardo Montalban makes a grandly theatrical villain and the film gets some great suspense out of space war sequences
Leonard Nimoy steps into the director’s chair of the third Star Trek film and his doing marks the shift of the films from intergalactic adventuring into the regulars engaged in a safe, easy set of adventures playing to fan audiences
William Shatner tries to emulate the success had by Leonard Nimoy in directing a Star Trek film but falls on his face, badly overstressing the comedy elements and delivering the worst of the Classic Trek films
The last of the classic Star Trek films. Nicholas Meyer, who made the last good Trek film The Wrath of Khan, returns to give the characters a moving send off, while the plot that reenacts the fall of the Berlin Wall with the Klingons gives the films a political immediacy that was missing since the tv series
J.J. Abrams revives the Star Trek franchise by recasting it with younger faces and rewriting continuity. But in the appeal to a hipper, sexier vibe, it feels a long way from Gene Roddenberry’s creation – nowhere in evidence is the original’s concern with galactic politics and social issues of the day
Gene Roddenbery created a tv series that was about boldly going, confronting different ways of life. The choice to hire the director of The Fast and the Furious films to helm the film made for the show’s 50th anniversary says how wrong-headed the reboot series has become – all about cool young leads and hurtling effects sequences
The second of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films where series regular Jonathan Frakes takes the director’s chair and delivers an exciting adventure, showing an excellent hand with the special effects. Far more satisfying than the previous film
The first of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films is an odd affair that seems like a routine episode of the series that accidentally gained a big-screen budget. This crosses over with Classic Trek where William Shatner mugs his way through a grand old airing of Captain Kirk
Third of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films has Jonathan Frakes back in the director’s seat where he again plays to his strengths with great visual effects scenes but the story feels like a filler episode
I had mixed feelings about J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek This time around the actors seem more at home in the characters and the plot works a good deal better (for the most part), while Abrams creates a hurtling effects spectacle that is the most action-oriented of the Trek films
The last of the films spun off from Star Trek: The Next Generation and a dismal flop that killed the film series off. Tom Hardy as a bad guy Romulan is a cardboard threat while the uninspired plot rehashes The Wrath of Khan
A Star Trek film spun off around Michelle Yeoh and the secret service that appears in the modern revival series
Long-awaited revival of the tv series on the big screen. While this has a mixed fan reception, it is well worth re-evaluation. It is the only one of the Trek films that reaches for epic, mind-expanding places to find something of a 2001: A Space Odyssey
The single most influential science-fiction film of all time, one that created a massive industry of sequels and spinoffs, not to mention copycats, and changed the way that people thought of science-fiction
George Lucas’s return to the Star Wars series after a sixteen year absence and a build-up rivaled only by the Second Coming. Instead most audiences went away disappointed. Lucas has used the interim to push the technology to its heights but the story and characters are lacking
The second of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels is no particular improvement. The romance is stiff and awkward, badly written while the effects sequences seem to be running out of new things to do and so just up the scale of what has happened before with so much going on it reaches a point of visual overload
The last of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy and the last opportunity for him to get it right, which he generally does. The effects are expert but are not allowed to dominate as much as they did previously and the focus has come back onto the story and Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader
George Lucas’s first sequel to Star Wars and a work that holds up every bit as well as its predecessor, in many places betters it. The story darkens the mythos and introduces new characters, while the special effects sequences are the peak of the series
A disappointing end to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. The script lazily wraps up loose ends while sidelining the new characters introduced the last time, and the climax rehashes the climaxes of the two other films
It’s not another Empire Strikes Back but it makes up for the prequels. A good part fanservice to the original – if overly reliant on rehashing elements from Star Wars – this also does many things right
I’m not one of the haters on this. It’s the first Star Wars sequel since the 1980s to invigorate the series with fresh action sequences and place more focus on the characters instead of the action
The concluding chapter of the third trilogy of Star Wars films. After the critically divided The Last Jedi, J.J. Abrams opts for a return to the safety of familiarity and nostalgia
The tv special that George Lucas would have all copies destroyed, a work of legendary badness – a Star Wars Thanksgiving special featuring most of the original cast and a series of variety performances that are mind-boggling in their ineptitude, not to mention complete and utter fumbling of everything that Star Wars was
Theatrical spinoff from the Star Wars prequels, released to introduce the popular animated series. This shows it is time for George Lucas to move beyond recycling something that was successful three decades ago
An extraordinary example of the fan film where Finnish filmmakers created a parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5, with effects that rival those of A-list studio fare made on their home computers
The first animated film in 3D, a blatant copy of Star Wars that proves occasionally engaging
The first of Roland Emmerich’s special effects epics. Emmerich rehashes Erich von Daniken’s Ancient Astronauts theories but casts it as a planetary adventure on an epic canvas with surprisingly entertaining results
John Carpenter abandons horror to make one of the better E.T.-inspired cute and cuddly alien visitor films. The film’s grasp of science is sometimes shaky but the film gains an enormous amount from Jeff Bridges’ performance as the alien trying to adjust to being in a human body
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Passable video-released Starship Troopers sequel the heads more in the direction of a body snatchers film. Directed by Phil Tippett
Travesty of Robert Heinlein’s classic SF novel from Paul Verhoeven. Heinlein’s philosophical argument for militarism is junked in favour of blackly comic mindless violence
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
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, behind parody films like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, turn to The Hunger Games. There is all the usual inanity and celebrity mocking of their films, although they do seem to make a film that is only marginally less moronic than usual
Cheaply made video-released sequel to Lilo & Stitch, which is only a rehash but does surprisingly reunite all the voice talents
British effort that proves to be no more than another copy of Alien – set in a warehouse of storage lockers. The film never consists of anything beyond a crashingly ordinary regurgitation of the moves used by an endless number of Alien copies
Modestly effective Soviet SF film about an expedition to Venus where the cosmonauts encounter a wild and colourful planet of plants and prehistoric wildlife
This is essentially E.T. by way of The Desperate Hours where aliens on the run take a family hostage
Roger Christian was art director on Alien but will always be remembered as director of the notorious Battlefield Earth. Here he is stuck making a cheap, tatty and frequently incomprehensible copy of Alien about alien impregnation
Appealingly quirky film that pays homage to the alien invaders genre of the 1950s as filtered through post-E.T. sensibilities where the invaders still live in a fifties timwarp
1950s British science-fiction entry that draws influence from the Quatermass films. While the title(s) leads you to expect an alien invasion entry, it is in actuality more of a British copy of a giant insect film. A routine effort that is eventually done in by utterly impoverished giant insect effects
A British-made ripoff of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Slow, plodding and talky without the action ever seeming to move beyond the confines of a country pub
A film that has been sold on the basis of its deliberately ridiculous title concept – that of alien invaders attempting to take over the airwaves by posing as televangelists
A mind-bogglingly surreal John Landis film about a family who take everything literally. A completely demented viewing experience in watching as they bumble around trying to puzzle over who is stealing the garbage
James Gunn takes over the Suicide Squad franchise and welcomely rescues it from the dud first screen outing
J.J. Abrams makes a homages to 8mm filmmaking and the films of his youth – you could easily imagine this as a Steven Spielberg-produced film of the era. On the other hand, after the obsessive secrecy in pre-release, the results emerge as underwhelming
Excrutiatingly unwatchable live-action film in which trained animals have all been dubbed with smartass voices. In the nominal plot, a group of dogs gain superpowers, which becomes dragged out into a series of witless slapstick scenes, all overrun with agonisingly hip and unfunny one-liners
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
This is where the modern comic-book superhero began on screen. A film that is almost completely successful in banishing campy silliness and taking itself seriously, allowing Superman to fly with magnificent effects. Christopher Reeve shines as the ultimate boy scout
A condensed animated adaptation of the top-selling DC comic-book of all time The Death of Superman that comes with some massively exciting animated action set-pieces
Fine animated film that traces Superman’s early years – Superman: Year One if you like – as we see pieces of the mythos coming together
Pilot for the excellent Bruce Timm Superman animated tv series of the mid-1990s. This retells the Superman origin story, keeping great faith to the comics, while adding some fantastic action scenes
One of the best among the incredibly underrated animated DC Comics films. A beautifully character-driven venture into the Superman mythos where Brainiac gets a magnificently theatric airing, while Supergirl undergoes some astonishing revisions
A cheap Spanish-made copy of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film
TV mini-series in ten two-hour parts that deals with UFOs, covering several generations from the 1940s to the present. An interesting take on UFO encounters with the benefit of some phenomenal performances
Alien invasion film made by industry outsiders from South Africa. The plot is like a much better version of I Am Number Four but played out on a much more ambitious scale where the novice filmmakers do sensational things in the visual effects department on a minuscule budget
An anthology of Halloween-themed horror tales, all from different genre directors, including some interesting high-profile names. The results are uneven with the film providing a couple of amusing segments but nothing truly standout
Alien invasion tv movie that mostly consists of cliches borrowed from the then success of tv’s The X Files
Amiably good natured if unchallenging comedy where Dawn French engages in a relationship with an alien visitor
Film spinoff from the animated tv series Teen Titans Go! This hits in with an hilairous barrage of one-liners wickedly spoofing the superhero genre and jokes at DC Comics canon
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
The Teen Titans get their first solo film in the DC Universe Original Animated Movies. A reasonable adventure based on a classic comic title that works with a good story and characterisation, even if some of it has an adult flavour that makes you wonder who the audience is
The first film featuring DC Comics; Teen Titans, a spinoff from the Teen Titans animated series
Nobody has good things to say about the 2014 reboot of the Turtles. This sequel is stuck with its legacy – giant over-sized Turtles that lacked the cuteness of the originals; bitchy non-acting Megan Fox – but comes out winningly by doing one thing – emulating the spirit of the original cartoon series