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.
Brett Ratner inherits the X-Men franchise from Bryan Singer for the third film in the series and promptly killed it off (after this point everything became prequels featuring Young X-Men). Ratner’s handling of the superheroic action lacks Singer’s exhilaration or any affinity for the characters
High-profile adaptation of the classic children’s work by Madeline L’Engle that has been entirely wrenched out of shape by its director to become a heavy-handed message about diversity. It is SF made by people who think the genre is just eye candy and absurdly over-the-top costumes
The Wishmaster series was a franchise based around a series of novelty effects wherein a malevolent djinn turned wishes against the wisher. This third entry is the utter nadir of the series
Flop and muchly hated biopic of John Belushi that turns his life into a bad farce. Included here for the presence of an angel that guides Belushi through his life
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
Wim Wenders’ exquisitely lovely film about angels that hover over West Berlin invisibly observing the human condition. One of the most beautiful of all paeans to the human condition.
Unremarkable and largely forgotten video release with former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett investigating appears of a mysterious figure that encourages people to suicide
Not to be confused with the Oliver Stone film, this is a surrealist satire on the George W. Bush presidency
Whale Rider director Niki Caro makes an uneven film about a 19th Century peasant who is inspired to make wine by an angel
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John went stellar in Grease. The same flopped when they reteamed in this comedy where they are caught in a bet between God and The Devil
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
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
One of the most excruciatingly painful films ever made – a softcore comedy in which God and The Devil make a bet to replay the Garden of Eden by reincarnating Adam and Eve throughout history. Filled with ghastly over-the-top performances and much eye-rolling innuendo
Christmas horror film with wrestler Bill Goldberg playing a demonic version of Santa Claus
A bad movie classic. A vanity project for Canadian heavy metal star/bodybuilder Jon-Mikl Thor who plays a heavy metal star who takes frequently his shirt off to pose while his band are killed by demonic forces (represented by the screen’s maybe worst ever puppet effects) as they try to record an album
A dark Coming of Age story set in a surreal depiction of the midwest populated by what might be vampires and angels
Remarkable film with Mimi Rogers as a grieving widow who is drawn into the certainty that the Biblical Rapture is about to occur
The fourth of The Prophecy films about war between angels, the first to be made without Christopher Walken with Sean Pertwee as a detective in Bucharest who is drawn in
An okay sequel to the angel wars film The Prophecy, the first of several. As in the previous film, a returning Christopher Walken steals the show and gets all the best lines
Standout film about angels warring on Earth that dispenses with any cutsie depiction of angels. Several sequels followed.
The third of the Prophecy films with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel. This time the wry humour and interplay of ideas of the other films feels more thinly drawn
Remake of The Bishop’s Wife with Denzel Washington as an angel come to aid an overworked pastor but falling for his wife Whitney Houston
The final film from the great Robert Altman set backstage at a radio variety show as an angel of death wanders through
Absolutely extraordinary British tv play that was one of the formative works in the development of Folk Horror on screen
Unfunny comedy in which Eva Longoria dies and returns as a ghost to make life miserable for fiance Paul Rudd as he becomes involved with another woman
The Polish Brothers, two of the most underrated creative teams in the US today, make a rather puzzling film about angels that feels like muted Coen Brothers. The film is cool, measured, has often striking imagery but leaves you scratching your head trying to figure out what it is about
Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the Biblical legend was mired in controversy. I can only applaud his decision to defy those who claim ownership of the story and set out to make an interesting film. Yet Noah remains an epic that never seems to quite fill the screen and a human drama that never quite comes to life
The novelty of a dance film about the end of the world in a giant flood
A variant on It’s a Wonderful Life where James Belushi gets to live the life he never did due to missing a key baseball homerun
Charming, delightful venture into Magical Realism directed by Robert Redford as the angels step in to aid the impoverished residents of a New Mexico town
Mike Flanagan returns with his best work to date. Effectively a Catholic version of Salem’s Lot, this comes with some flat out great pieces of writing
Nora Ephron romantic comedy with John Travolta cast as angel who is a slob. A rather aimless shapeless comedy that thinks it is funnier than it is
Unrelated to the Bill Murray film in anything but name, this is a moronic teen summer camp comedy in which Patrick Dempsey is aided in trying to lose his virginity by angel Sally Kellerman
Based on the popular videogame, this is fairly much Death Wish by way of Jacob’s Ladder and proves an underwhelming delivery of its promise
A bizarrely ridiculous erotic film with pretensions to being a relationship drama that features appearances from angels and smartass talking seagulls. An aging Mickey Rooney is the heavenly supervisor
A painfully dull and uneventful Roberta Findlay film where almost nothing happens. The film is almost redeemed by an effective twist ending ripped off from The Sentinel
The Adam Sandler comedy and its pitch to the most vulgar common denominator is an acquired taste. This not very funny effort casts Sandler as The Devil’s Son
Film set in a police interrogation room in the afterlife where two attorneys argue over whether a dead man should be saved or damned
Danny Boyle eccentricity with Ewan McGregor as an inept kidnapper and Cameron Diaz as his more astute abductee. A head-scratching comedy that also throws gun-toting angels into the mix
A delightful work of Magical Realism from Cuba where a saint tells us the story of the interwoven fates of various people living in Havana
An absurd film where angels conduct a war on Earth, which comes amid much in the way of gunfire and creature effects. Directed by a former visual effects supervisor.
The second of the Kirk Cameron Biblical End Times films. On one hand, these are quite competently made B movies; on the other the fundamentalist message is unpalatable
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
Another remake that nobody asked for. The 1990 film is reworked in a script that ditches almost all of the afterlife themes and instead seems to want to be a film about veterans addicted to reality-blurring drugs
Adrian Lyne became one of the most visually exciting directors of the 1980s. Here he makes an afterlife film that swings between moments of greatness and a script that seems very confused about what is happening
Sentimental Frank Capra film that had become a Christmas classic where an angel shows depressed everyman James Stewart the alternate world that would happen if he had never been born
Another of Bill Pympton’s unique animated films, all stylised artwork and surreal juxtapositions. This is a dialogueless film about a mean-spirited man who suddenly gains a set of angel wings
Chuck Norris’s son Mike directs a laughably ridiculous faith-based film where a miraculous child appears, come to heal the people of an impoverished, drought-ridden town
One of the Coen Brothers’ strangest films – imagine a homage to a 1940s Howard Hawks film conducted on giant oversized sets like something out of Brazil with a blacker-than-black sense of humour and angels in the mix
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
The ninth Hellraiser sequel. Most of the others are a far call from Clive Barker’s original. This demonstrates that all hope is not lost in a wild and imaginative opening sequence
In the second and the best of his two Hellboy films, Guillermo Del Toro expands the first out with an amazing menagerie of eccentric and offbeat creatures, while Ron Perlman is again on winning form in the title role
Lightweight fantasy film with Lewis Smith as a 1950s rocker who is sent back from the afterlife to act as a guardian angel to help a nerdy Jason Gedrick stand up for himself
A 1940s light fantasy with Robert Cummings as an angel comes down in a Western town to help bad guy outlaw Brian Donlevy redeem his ways
Warren Beatty co-directs/stars in a remake of the afterlife film Here Comes Mr Jordan. Amiably lightweight but this was over-praised at the time, inexplicably receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture
A controversy-laden Jean-Luc Godard film that offers an irreverent modern-day retelling of the Immaculate Conception. An amusing idea that vanishes under Godard’s pretensions
Classic 1940s afterlife fantasy with Spencer Tracy as a pilot killed in action who is sent back as a guardian angel. This works fantastically well due to a great character arc and a sharp Dalton Trumbo script
TV mini-series based on the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett novel that spoofs The Omen and Biblical End Times prophecies. The series is very close to the book as though it didn’t want to edit any precious gag
The film where Keanu Reeves plays an angel. Directed/written by and starring Aziz Ansari as a hapless gig worker who Keanu’s angel’s tries to help only to accidentally swap the lives of Ansari and tech bro Seth Rogen
An erotic film starring Donald Trump – I kid you not! A legendarily awful Bo Derek film where she is a widow who searches the world for the perfect body for her late husband’s ghost to reincarnate in
Film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ demon superhero emerges as better than it had the right to be. The risibility of the image of a motorcycle-riding demon hero is made to work through some vivid and way-out effects
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
Possibly THE worst film ever made. Tony Watt throws an mash-up of exploitation elements together in an incomprehensible plot. A film that made me want to hammer a nail through my eyeball rather than keep watching
From Lech Majewski, the Polish director of The Mill and the Cross, comes this supposed modern version of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Alas, the film never amounts to anything more than a series of almost entirely plotless surrealist visions
From Frank LaLogiaa, a director who has made too few films, a low-budget film with Stefan Arngrim as a teenage Antichrist. This is a film filled with as much promise as it does absurd effect
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer offers up his wonderfully bizarre part-live-action, part-Claymation interpretation of the classic story of Faust and his pact with The Devil
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
Troma film that ventures back into their regular bad taste territory. This often feels like a film that never coheses into a particularly clear idea of what it is trying to do, possibly the result of six different directors
Wim Wenders returns to angels in this sequel to Wings of Desire, along with most of the cast. Again Wenders delivers a work of haunting beauty about the angels invisibly looking in on humanity
Brett Ratner conducts a likeable variation on It’s a Wonderful Life with banker Nicolas Cage suddenly finding himself in an alternate life as a regular working class man with wife and kids
Adaption of a Young Adult series of books – this is essentially Twilight but with angels instead of vampires. Another YA effort where we never saw successive chapters due to its box-office flop
An underrated mini-series – sort of the anti-Supernatural. This creates a highly original afterlife mythology and some great characters arcs, while overspilling with wry nerdish in-humour
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman delivers a loopy cross between The Number 23 and an occult film whose sole selling point is the significance of the date it was released
An anthology film produced by Charles Band where assorted directors turn in seven episodes all centred around a videogame warrior put through a series of tests by The Devil
Jemma Redgrave is a socialite who is plagued by nightmares that take over her life. A British attempt to copy A Nightmare on Elm Street that collapses into a muddle of symbolism and reality-blurring dreams
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
Remake of Heaven Can Wait/Here Comes Mr Jordan as a vehicle for comedian Chris Rock where the heavenly body mix-up now becomes about a black man ending up in a white man’s body
This was a semi-sequel to Here Comes Mr Jordan featuring Rita Hayworth as the goddess Terpsichore descended to Earth to inspire a Broadway producer
Kevin Smith makes a film about Catholicism. Smith’s irreverent humour caused considerable controversy when the film came out, although this is also an interesting and thoughtful work that does make a number of thoughtful theological points
This has an insane plot about Satanists stealing the Shroud of Turin to clone a body to incarnate The Devil and a priest possessed by the archangel Michael wading into action with a glowing sword
A rather charming comedy in which two nerds find an angel fallen knocked down by an orbiting satellite. Much silliness but Emmenualle Beart has an otherworldly loveliness as the angel
This is an absolutely fascinating film about the efforts to perfect an occult ritual. It feels as though the filmmakers have dispensed with Hollywood cliches and has researched the real thing
The underrated Victor Salva, director of Jeepers Creepers, takes on the deviltry and occult film where with his ability to conjure eerie jumps and outlandish images produces something original and out of this world
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
Adaptation of DC’s Hellblazer comic-book that gets the Hollywood treatment where all of the character’s background and look has been thrown out and the part badly miscast with Keanu Reeves
Christopher Smith was a highly promising director several years ago with Creep, Triangle and Black Death. Here he returns with a film about sinister happenings in a convent
An Adam Sandler comedy in which he is an ordinary family man who is given a magical remote control that allows him to pause and fast forward his way through the boring bits of his life
In undergoing a Hollywood remake, Wim Wenders’ exquisitely lovely angel fantasy Wings of Desire becomes a weepy romance with angel Nicolas Cage wooing Meg Ryan
One of the most eccentric and strangest films in the oeuvre of Robert Altman in which Bud Cort set out to build a set of wings to fly, amid aid from angels and lots of bird symbolism
An interesting little film from Adam Mason that starts out seeming a variant on The Hitcher with Andrew Howard as a drifter taunting a couple on a desert highway before morphing into something very strange
A typical entry in the 1940s fad for light fantasy films in which Cary Grant plays an angel who comes down to Earth to assist poor overworked bishop David Niven
Perhaps the strangest film on Chuck Norris’s cv – the film where Chuck plays an angel. A work of Christian horror where Chuck’s son Mike plays a decent man trapped in a sinister Western town of devil worshipping children
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
A possession film that takes the Found Footage approach. This takes the traditional approach of Catholic priests intoning exorcism rituals etc and fails to do anything interesting
A film about alien visitors, transcendental states of mind and sinister government agencies. This boggles the mind in terms of laughable writing and all-round bad filmmaking
Disney remake of the old light fantasy film in which angels step in to aid a losing baseball team. This is pitched to family audiences and holds a surprisingly ardent evangelical message
An amiable venture into the light fantasy films that were popular during this era., Here angels come down and intervene to aid a baseball team on a losing streak
Stunning tv mini-series adaptation of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play about the impact of the AIDS crisis on gay culture in the 1980s, which becomes a surreal fantasy filled with appearances of angels and ghosts
An obscure oddity in which elderly Jewish man Zero Mostel finds Harry Belafonte in his home insisting that he is an angel sent to help