The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
SF effort from the UK’s Amicus Films with an ambitious plot about communication from the stars that manages to prefigure films like Contact and 2001. On the other hand, the film fails is in its pitiful and utterly inadequate special effects
One of the films from Charles Band’s Empire productions about a family facing an alien manifested out of their tv set
John Carpenter makes an alien invasion film that works as a biting satire of Reaganomics in which aliens are manipulating reality to increase their profit shares in Earth
John Carpenter at the peak of his career, remaking The Thing from Another World as a wild and phantasmagoric film steeped in paranoia that proved to be the absolute epitome of the era’s fad for air-bladder transformation effects
Though pitched as a prequel, this is essentially a remake of John Carpenter’s classic. Alas, this only finds the same phantasmagoric outlandishness as Carpenter did in a couple of scenes that may be moderately impressive for those who have never seen the original
The very first alien invader film of the 1950s. Maybe or maybe not directed by Howard Hawks, this has a dramatic urgency and tight tension that makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the films that came after
Beautifully colourful 1950s SF film about scientists who are abducted to take part in a war between two alien species
Rather odd but amiable Chinese film about friendship between a real-life artist and his model & with flying swordsmen and alien visitors all thrown in for no discernibly apparent reason
The Three Stooges join a number of other comics of this era in taking on the space race. Well they only briefly venture into orbit and mostly this can be described more as a slapstick haunted house comedy with alien invaders
Rene Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet, collaborates with cult fantasy artist Moebius and the result is a planetary adventure filled with trippily exotic backgrounds and creatures
I had heard about this for years – it had a reputation as ‘the mummy from outer space film’. Seen, it proves disappointingly routine – all the tomb raiding is over after the first scene and the rest is little more than a slasher movie with the mummy akin to a hockey-masked maniac wandering a campus killing co-eds
Very nicely made space opera from animator Don Bluth, operating from a Joss Whedon script, that unfortunately proved a big box-office flop
Chris Pratt is recruited to fight an alien invasion in a war across time in a big-budget film that flounders in its own ridiculousness
Film that feels construed to blend 60s rock films post The Beatles and an intergalactic trippiness post 2001: A Space Odyssey where alien try to abduct a rock band. From the producer of the James Bond films and the man who created The Monkees
Canadian-made parody of a cheesy 1950s SF film that emerges more wittily amusingly than most Deliberately Bad SF Films
The third of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. While the human scenes opt for a ghastly miscalculated sense of humour, the effects houses are at the peak of their game, even if Bay allows them to drag the mass destruction out to a numbing excess
Since Michael Bay retired from the series, The Transformers films have been looking for new directions. This ventures into animation to tell a Transformers origin story
The first of Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels has even better effects and more copious mass destruction to the point it washes over you without any effect
Disney animated film that proved a flop, this lazily remakes Treasure Island set in space. The result is bad science-fiction with sailing ships in space, Ben Gumm as a malfunctioning robot and so on
Modestly effective British entry into the 1950s alien invasion genre with people fighting invaders on a Swiss mountainside
A clone of Donald Trump battles The Illuminati and the Egyptian god Anubis on Mars before travelling to Hell to sort out The Devil. The sheer dementia of the premise alone has one sitting down to watch
The second of the film spinoffs from tv’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. More inane silliness played with shrieking OTT excess
A classic of 1950s Reds Under the Bed anti-Communist hysteria in which aliens give selected humans capsules capable of obliterating all life, which quickly pits East against West in a race to obtain them. Clearly influenced by The Day the Earth Stood Still, this is better than most
One of the film from legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, featuring one of his finest creations The Ymir, an alien monster from Venus that rampages throughout Rome
A crossover between all the menaces in The Asylum’s films, which are brought to life as part of an alien invasion plan
An Italian space opera where a professor and associates are abducted after finding an alien craft. The film’s main distinction was being redubbed in English under the title Star Pilot to be released as a copy of Star Wars
Supposedly an Airplane-styled movie parody that takes on 2001: A Space Odyssey (although this soon gets forgotten), this is one of the most painfully unfunny films ever made
A series of parody sketches based around the popularity of Weird Al Yankovic who plays the owner of a struggling cable tv station
The first of several animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this does a solid job in adapting Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, a retelling of The Avengers origin story
Appealingly quirky homemade zombie film that launched the career of Australia’s Spierig Brothers. The two demonstrate a considerable inventivity when it comes to the visual and makeup effects, which they created all themselves
Big screen version of a classic New Zealand children’s story, directed by Jonathan King with an emphasis on gooey creature effects
Fascinating film with Scarlett Johansson as an alien visitor luring male hitchhikers. The film is beautifully made but frustratingly opaque in terms of explanations for what is happening. indeed, feels like a science-fiction film that has been stripped of any easy science-fiction handholds
A British response to the 1950s alien invader fad that swept the US. Despite a low-budget, this achieves an undeniable atmosphere of paranoia as a scientist discovers that his newlywed wife may be an alien infiltrator
Very popular mini-series during its day (that was followed by a tv series) concerning the alien invasion and occupation of Earth, this has an utter banality that fails on almost every level – as human drama, science and even basic plausibility
Seventh of the V/H/S Found Footage horror anthologies, this is one of the best with a number of the episodes venturing into SF and others that feature some genuinely outlandish moments
Follow-up to the popular V mini-series, this is an absurd melodrama that is made up of incredibly bad science-fiction writing and directed with zero plausibility
It was a box-office bomb but this is one of the most breathtaking and completely designed SF work to ever cross the screen. In terms of effects, sets and costuming, Luc Besson gives us a work that is an overwhelming treat for the eyes
Disappointingly tatty rendering of the famous comic-book strip as a low-budget Roger Corman production. Vampirella is missing her distinctive costume and Talisa Soto comes nowhere near the comic-book character’s statuesque voluptuousness
Anything with the Marvel Comics name on it is box-office gold. This spins a standalone film off from one of the main villains of the Spider-Man comic-book. This is watchable by several showstopping effects set-pieces.
The first sequel to the passable Venom. Next to Batman & Robin, this could be a strong contender for the worst big-budget superhero film ever made
The third of the Venom films, which has become one of the worst of the modern Marvel spinoffs. By this point any pretence that the films are taking themselves seriously has been long forgotten
Sequel to the modest success of V/H/S, an anthology of short Found Footage horror films featuring a different line-up of genre directors. The episodes are competent at best, none standout and mostly forgettable
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Absolutely fascinating documentary that speculates what the likely reactions would be if aliens were to arrive on Earth where we get input from various scientists and UN spokespeople. The answers are compelling and completely different from anything that you usually get in SF cinema
A satirical Gore Vidal play is bent out of shape to become a vehicle for the slapstick nonsense of Jerry Lewis, cast as an alien visitor. Lewis is a love him or hate him actor; depending on one’s tolerance for such, this has much fast-paced silliness
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
Another excruciatingly bad mock exploitation film from Tony Watt, who may well be the world’s worst filmmaker. This mixes killer women, aliens, UFOs, Mafia into an incomprehensible mix
Fourth of the original Star Trek films jumps on board the popularity of time travel themes following Back to the Future to have the regulars time travel back to the present for a series of amiable, easy comic encounters
Forgotten 1980s obscurity about aliens come to Earth in search of rock music that feels like someone attempted to conduct a version of Grease for the Star Wars crowd. Filled with utterly excruciating slapstick humour and bland songs from bands that nobody has heard from again
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet
An early film from legendary B movie producer/director Roger Corman. This is an alien invasion film but has been twisted out of shape to exploit the fascination with satellites after the launch of Sputnik several months before the film came out
First and best adaptation of the book, this takes liberties with the H.G. Wells original but smartly updates the book’s underlying anxieties to the Cold War era (in so doing becoming the grandaddy of the 1950s alien invader film) and providing what was top notch effects spectacle for the era
Where the legend of The Asylum and their low-budget mockbusters began, this was a cheap modernised version of the H.G. Wells novel that was released a day before the Spielberg film. Despite cheap effects, this adheres closer to Wells than Spielberg did and is better written than most Asylum product
Released just before the Spielberg film, this was an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel set in the Victorian period that attempts to tell the story as it was written. The film has ambition way beyond the resources at hand but you cannot help but applaud what it tries to do
Steven Spielberg remakes the classic H.G. Wells alien invasion story, liberally rewriting it for the post-9/11 world. Not Spielberg’s best film but a more than solid work on most grounds
BBC mini-series that sets out to restore the H.G. Wells novel to the era it was written. This it does, as well as restores many aspects that other films change. At the same time, it also introduces some radical changes that make it the most variant of the adaptations to date
Sequel to the H.G. Wells novel that imagines a fascinating alternate history that might have occurred following the Martian invasion. The clear appeal has been creating a series of scenes showing humanity tackling invading tripods in giant Steampunk manned robots
Not an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel but a biting satire made in Poland during Soviet occupation about how the pretext of an alien invasion is used to create an authoritarian regime and the way media is used to control the masses. A film more potent today than when it was made
The idea of H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel rewritten with a Young Adult focus makes you cringe but the idea works in its own way
The first Japanese entry in the great alien invader fad of the 1950s. Nothing great but it does boast the awesomeness of starfish-shaped aliens
An uninspired comedy about a neighbourhood watch encountering alien invaders that falls somewhere between Ghostbusters and The ‘Burbs. The film’s virtues lie less in the weak premise than in the director allowing the stars to freely improvise with occasionally funny results
Modestly made alien contact film that came out not long after Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Sequel to Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork, which ups the number of horror homages but suffers a low budget
Robert Rodriguez appears to have gotten the oversized non-event that was Alita: Battle Angel out of his system by making another of his seat of the pants home movies – this is less Spy Kids than Superhero Kids – and brings back one element Alita forgot, a sense of fun
An adult film about aliens that visit Earth to repopulate their own species and abduct women during sex whereupon they stimulate them with the penises that come out of their mouths
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around
Eccentric Werner Herzog film where he tries to convince us that footage from a space shuttle mission and taken under the polar ice cap is documentary footage of a trip to explore an alien planet
One of the cheap Italian space operas of the 1960s from Antonio Margheriti. This has a certain colourful absurdity amid the mostly dull happenings and B-budget effects
Star Wars meets Top Gun – a concept it is surprising no one has thought of before – but alas this film adaptation of the popular videogame only regurgitates the cliches of either film
Low-budget Alien copy directed by makeup effects artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe with a plot that prefigures Armageddon as drillers uncover an alien nasty on an asteroid
One of the first copies of Alien, this essentially acts as a slasher movie but with an alien instead of a hockey-masked killer. It also manages to predict the essentials of Predator in many ways. A B-movie but the cast list makes for eye-opening reading today
Low-budget film about an expedition to Mars The novelty the film holds is that it attempts to rework The Wizard of Oz in SF terms
Despite the bad press surroundings this, I failed to find it as bad as other reviewers. It’s a solid if not standout entry in the series with some fine superheroic action sequences
A British-made copy of Alien that has been construed as a series of bizarre images and scenes that make no real sense – even the title is given no explanation
Xtro was cheesily ridiculous Alien copy. This is a sequel that bears nothing in common with the original beyond the title. In between the two films, we had Aliens so there is now a plot about soldiers hunting the creature with biiig guns. Nothing bad, just an uninspired rehash of the standard Alien copy
Third of the Xtro films, none of which are related to one another, this features the discovery of aliens at an abandoned military base
One of the more forgettable films from Godzilla creator Ishiro Honda about an alien entity taking the form of giant animals on a Pacific island
Zack Snyder’s original cut of Justice League is a magnificent work that restores much character depth and story. I would far rather watch this than any of the recent MCU films
Enjoyable sequel to Jumanji and actually a much superior film in the hands of Jon Favreau. This expands the idea of the Jumanji boardgame that brings things from a jungle to life to a space theme
Takashi Miike makes a sequel to his earlier superhero film filled with his typically eccentric touches
This wants to be a little of everything – part 1960s spy film, part British sex comedy, and another part an sf film involving invading alien women – and proves none too satisfying at any of them. The softcore scenes featuring semi-clad alien women are fairly much allowed to overrun the show
One of the best films from Charles Band’s Empire Productions, a splendid homage to the GI film with a group of soldiers investigating a crashed UFO behind enemy lines