The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Angels are heavenly entities. They are seen as the messengers of The Almighty. The traditional image of the angel is of a human-like being of ethereal beauty and almost always with a pair of wings and sometimes a halo. Satan was a former angel who rebelled against Heaven, for which he and a host of other angels were cast down into Hell.
Angels frequently turn up in Light Fantasy Films and comedies, where they are essentially heavenly bureaucrats come down to Earth to help individuals sort their lives out or rectify heavenly errors. Other treatments concern guardian angels.
There are a number of comedies about angels or featuring angels acting in less-than-heavenly ways. There has also been a certain body of serious angel fantasies and a number of treatments of angels that fall within the horror genre.
A screwball comedy with Jack Benny as a trumpeter send down from Heaven to Earth to blow the Last Trumpet who ends up getting distracted by a series of comic mishaps
One of the original Hollywood afterlife films of the 1940s light fantasy boom, twice remade, most notedly as Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. Amiable and likeable while avoiding any deeper issues
Truly amazing William Randolph Hearst financed film about a weak US President who is influenced by angels and ruthlessly cracks down on law and order
F.W. Murnau’s version of the classic tale of an aging scholar selling his soul to the Devil for youth and love is one of the most fabulous pieces of pure cinema to come out of the German Expressionist era
An extraordinary find, the first ever feature film, a depiction of Dante’s Inferno and a descent down to visit the damned in Hell conducted with an incredible ambition for the time the film was made
A insanely madcap work of meta-fiction. Imagine stupider versions of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction mixed with Stranger Than Fiction as they discover they are fictional characters