The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
From the director of The Last Exorcism Part II, a title that does nothing to suggest a horror film. All we get is a ghost story that does an M. Night Shyamalan shift into an improbably contrived fugue state drama
Film that assembles interesting a number of SF elements and twists but is killed by its delivery as a pretentious indie film
This was the second film adaptation of conceptually ingenious Ursula Le Guin novel about a man whose dreams change reality around him whenever he wakes up
Uwe Boll ventures into Torture Porn territory with this tale of a brutish serial killer who returns from the electric chair on a trail of vengeance against his condemners
I was sold from the point of reading the premise where an all-girl punk band is abducted, surgically given weapons attachments and forced to fight in an arena
The selfie is such a concept of the moment that I suppose someone had to make the first selfie horror film. The film suffers conceptual confusions and what starts out akin to something like Ring slides into more of a variant on The Den with sinister strangers stalking the heroine online
In the same vein as Grindhouse, an anthology that consists of two longer stories set around the gimmick of a tv horror host playing a double-bill, along with several mocked-up parody trailers
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
The title and the description of a space station crew dealing with a mutating runner duck gives the expectation of something wacky – what we get is more like a variant on Dark Star, a comedy set around the boredom of life on a space station and a 1970s era episode of Doctor Who
Dystopian action film that could have only been made during the late 70s Oil Crisis where Lee Majors defies a totalitarian system where vehicles are banned by setting out in his racing car
Thriller where student Nicole Eggert begins to have clairvoyant visions leading her to an abducted girl
Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob fame is cast as a rarely speaking, goat-loving hick psycho. The film comes with a number of other offfbeat characterisations that you feel should have made for an amusing horror comedy but instead everything slips into a shrill one-note pitch
Psycho-thriller with Erika Eleniak and Monika Schnarre trapped in a snowbound cabin
TV movie that had a unique selling point – a whodunit set aboard an international space mission – where viewers were invited to guess who the killer was
This is a very loose and somewhat desultory remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night that seems to imagine it is being far more hardcore and controversy defying than it is
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 in the spate of recent A.I. films of the 2010s/20s. Here one can buy android replacements for one’s late spouse but someone is hacking and causing them to go rogue
Action film with Jeff Wincott as a resurrected hitman who makes the discovery that AIDS has been artificially manufactured
Canadian entry from the classic era of slasher films that hits some occasionally effective notes that sit between horror and prank. The last 10 minutes take an abrupt dogleg turn to become an Evil Dead copy
The novelty of a dance film about the end of the world in a giant flood
A Syfy Channel monster movie that seems made with a smidgen more care than their usual B movie output
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
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
Strange Canadian children’s film about a boy who goes bald and is then given a peanut butter solution that causes wild uncontrolled hair growth
Sequel to the remake of the 1980s horror classic, shot back-to-back with its predecessor, this is a better film than the remake was
The second film from the trio that made Turbo Kid. This taps 80s nostalgia focusing on a group of kids who believe a neighbour may be a serial killer but was overshadowed by tv’s very similar Stranger Things
Bruce LaBruce made the world’s first gay pornographic zombie film with L.A. Zombie. This was an earlier trial run, less a porn film and more down around the level of a student art film
You would not be mistaken for thinking this a regular mountaineering drama – and that’s how half of the film transpires. Then it gets weird and introduces everything from monsters to Ancient Astronauts
At the time of reviewing Rodney Ascher’s sleep paralysis documentary The Nightmare, I commented it would make fascinating material for a horror film. This Canadian micro-budgeted feature is one of the first to try and is interesting, even if it never truly grapples with its ideas
Likeable Canadian-made children’s film where Mark Harmon and kids come to rescue of a lake monster
This Syfy Channel production can’t seem to decide if it is a sequel or a remake of the 1984 film. Michael Paré turn up in both versions but goes from being the hero to a menacing heavy. The original had its moments but this is generic and routine in all ways
Routine psycho-thriller where Mimi Rogers’ home is invaded by psycho babysitter David Orth
A Syfy Channel film about the present-day discovery of a lost, still extant 19th Century village that has conducted a deal to preserve themselves by annually sacrificing someone to an ogre
A ghost story that is directed by a married couple who shoot the film in their own apartment and also play a family as they start to be affected by a malign presence
An obscure Canadian film that ambitiously attempts to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula on a low-budget. This introduces some elements of the story that other versions ignore and is not uninteresting
The third of the Prom Night films, a direct follow-on from the second in which Mary Lou becomes a campy Freddy Krueger-like villain firing off bad puns amid her dispatches
Canadian film about a woman alone in a cabin that has a set-up that seems to be heading in the direction of an effective horror film about cabin fever and/or paranoia – only for things to then get completely baffling as to what is happening
Supposedly an adventure based on an untold story from The Odyssey, an entry among the fantasy adventure films made for cable filler in the 2000s
Lowell Dean, director of WolfCop, makes what feels like a revival of the low-budget Mad Max film – an action film set in a socially collapsed future
Difficult to find 1970s Canadian-made occult film that doesn’t quite live up to expectation. Mostly it is a police procedural and the devil worship cult angle only emerges as a left field ending in the last ten minutes.; Not tight enough as a detective story to fully work
Another of the Mickey Mouse horror films that emerged when the character entered public domain. This features a Mickey Mouse masked killer pursuing teens through an amusement arcade
Actor Jay Baruchel directs a film in which a comic-book artist bases a graphic novel on a true-life serial killer only to find that the killer has returned and is imitating his work
Animated film based on the popular computer game. On screen, this emerges as essentially an instantly forgettable variant on one of the Star Wars prequels retooled for the Under Tens with the emphasis all on frenetic slapstick and visual eye candy
Chris Sarandon is a writer who becomes embroiled in solving a series of murder that mimic his own books. An okay set-up that rarely moves beyond the unfolding of cliches
A reasonable arthouse hit, this tells the story of a cursed violin through five different periods of history
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
The Backwoods Brutality film given an LGBT spin where a lesbian couple run afoul of backwoods rednecks
The second in a series of Biblical End Times films from Canada’s faith-based Cloud Ten Pictures, this offers the peculiarity of the Anti-Christ appearing in Virtual Reality
A plague has killed off all adults. In the ruins, two girlfriends venture into the domain ruled by the tyrannical football jocks to rescue one’s brother
Low-budget action film with Dolph Lundgren as a modern-day Knights Templar tasked with preventing The Devil returning to Earth at the millennium
A film about a shapeshifting demonic rapist. This is far more tastefully presented than its premise would suggest, in fact comes with he plodding sedateness of a tv movie
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
An anthology that offers a quartet of Christmas horror stories, including ones of zombified elves and a Krampus monster. Hosted by William Shatner who plays a radio talkshow host in the wraparound
A film about a marijuana crop that is grown using zombie brains as fertiliser. This starts with a promising gonzo zombie film tone but never quite sustains its approach
A pilot for a tv series that never went ahead set in a future where Global Warming has turned the Arctic into a thawed-out tundra where various countries seek to claim the new territory
A Quebecois (French Canadian) zombie film about the residents of an island being turned into zombies by a fertiliser used on the golf course
Another of the last films made by Bruce Willis, before his retirement. Here Bruce is on form and gives a decent performance. The film is an Alien copy with the crew of a space mission under attack by a parasitic lifeform
For a long time, this effort about a girl experiencing nightmare visions on her family farm doesn’t seem to be doing anything – then gets interesting as it switches to a parallel reality where what happens is mirrored slightly different
Legendary Canucksploitation film from Ivan Reitman about a cannibal hotel. This has gained a cult reputation. Seen it seems to lack the essential trashiness that justifies its reputation
A Canadian-made micro-budgeted Found Footage film about a couple filming themselves as they plan out a murder for the thrill of it – only to fall out in the midst of doing so
The third of the Care Bears film conducts a crossover with Alice in Wonderland, although it is an adaptation that is liberal in its treatment of Lewis Carroll to say the least
A zombie comedy from the Quebecois trio who were responsible for Turbo Kid, this takes place in a world where zombies are less a horde than an annoyance who have been relegated to the fringes of society
From the great era of Canuxploitation, an entertainingly ridiculous film about a possessed child wreaking psychic havoc and an often absurd series of deaths against those who are mean to her
There is potential to the premise here – a dark horror riff of sorts on The Little Mermaid in a 1930s Depression era setting – but it is squandered by an unimaginative script and direction
One of the few original, non-comic book based superhero films of the 2010s set in a world where those with powers are treated as a minority. This is essentially a heist film but with the addition of super-powers
Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Victoria Tennant kills an attacker only for him to be found alive again and return to attack her, involving her in a complex web involving Satanism, vampirism and twins
The Canadian-made Code 8 was one of the few non-comic book adapted superhero films of recent years. This is a sequel where a bigger budget has been afforded to the superheroics
A family try to make it through the woods in the aftermath of a mysterious catastrophe while hunted by something unseen. Sort of a zombie apocalypse film without any zombies where the terrors are psychological
This creates a fascinatingly different future – a world of grim survivalism amid a new Ice Age in the aftermath of Global Warming. The look of the film is fantastic, only to fritter it on an action focus and Mad Max cliches
Film where scientists creates an an atom-sized black hole that has the potential to destroy the Earth
A horror film made by Canada’s indigenous Metis people that concerns a group of women on a therapeutic wilderness trek are stalked and attacked by a monster
This comes with an original idea where a troubled girl starts drawing a graphic novel that mirrors her own life only for the characters to emerge into the real world. Less horror than a dark allegorical fantasy
A zombie film from the director who subsequently went on to make the WolfCop films. The one thing this has going for it are some convincing zombie makeups and exxxxtremely gory splatter effects
Action film set aboard a space station that houses cryogenically frozen survivors of a devastated Earth as C. Thomas Howell tries to stop a mad Matt Frewer
The debut film from the Soska Sisters – a demented road movie – is scrappy, all over the place and highly uneven but shows the two are definitely going places
James Herbert was a writer of extraordinary ferocity and gore-drenched extremes. This is an adaptation of his first book The Rats where all the ferocity has been watered down to a standard Animals Amok film
Film about a ghost ship haunted by Nazi atrocities. This gives the impression it was made to highlight a series of novelty deaths styled after the then-recent hit of The Omen
Actor David Hewlett directs a B-budget film where a team of convicted hackers are sent to clean out the computers on a spaceship only to come up against a malevolent A.I.
Canadian-made horror from the heyday of the VHS era about psychic vampires terrorising people via astral projection in order to steal their bodies
Canadian horror comedy that feels like a warmed-over rehash of Oliver Stone’s The Hand. A film made in wilful bad taste that feels like it came along twenty years too late for the mid-80s heyday of Troma
The bizarre story of a man who believes his young daughter is the reincarnation of a NASA astronaut. The film makes great claim that it is based on a true story but fails to make a compelling argument for its case
Another of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as a desert island castaway accompanied by a retinue of talking animals. Visually colourful but slight
Lee Majors starring thriller set around the 1970s fad over subliminal advertising. The film fails to generate much in the way of thrills.
A variation on The Defiant Ones with a human and an android chained together but this fails to find anything to say either about androids or prejudice
Evidently intended to be a werewolf equivalent of the Star Wars saga in in its epically contorted familial struggles, this sits just between the stylish and another classic monster repackaged for the teen crowd and cast with handsome good-looking faces
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
A zombie apocalypse that occurs via social networking sites??? To the film’s credit, it makes such a wacky idea plausible but the low-budget leads to a zombie apocalypse that mostly occurs off-stage
Another of the last films that Bruce Willis made before his mental deterioration forced him to retire. A variation on The Most Dangerous Game where Bruce plays a bad-ass facing hunters with his bare hands
A French Canadian (Quebec)-made slasher film set around an aqua park. This builds to a memorably gore-drenched finale
Psycho-thriller in which Daphne Zuniga is a woman accused of the murder of her psychiatrist and may or may not have been faking her mental illness
Uwe Boll makes a big issue film about the subprime mortgage crisis. The film is packed by Boll with messages but comes down to being a variant on Death Wish with its blue-collar hero on a shooting rampage against bankers
Space movies were big following successes like Gravity and The Martian. At complete contrast, this is a genteel laidback film with Richard Dreyfuss as a senior obsessed with boarding a spaceflight
This comes with a great hook – a couple buy up the contents of a defaulted storage locker only to find film reels taken by The Zodiac Killer, leading them on a pursuit of his identity
The second of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as the title character in the popular Brothers Grimm fairytale, which has been considerably embellished. This suffers the glassy plasticity of the early Mainframe films
Here the Barbie films turn to Mark Twain’s classic (non-fantasy) tale of rags and riches and spins it as a fairytale This has the same blank, plastic style of the early Barbie films and is otherwise bland
Promising film about an ingénue singer under the control of a Svengali-esque record producer who is struggling against giving in to her true werewolf nature
Sequel to the earlier Barbie animated film Barbie Fairytopia. Extremely colourful but essentially a fantasy version of a teenage girl high school drama that quickly slips into pre-packaged formula
The first in a long series of animated films based on Mattel’s girl’s doll Barbie. This casts Barbie as a lead in an adaptation of The Nutcracker ballet
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
Taking inspiration from Battle Los Angeles, this is another shakycam-shot war film but with the intriguing idea of being focused around human soldiers trapped behind alien enemy lines