The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
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
Modestly effective zombie film set during the US Civil War. This eschews the usual gore-drenched zombie attacks in favour of a nicely achieved story about one man’s internal journey through the apocalypse
Film about clairvoyance and predestination that owes much to Don’t Look Now. Unfortunately, this reduces everything to the prosaic level of a tv movie thriller
Another Syfy Channel low-budget disaster film. This creates a fascinating if scientifically dubious end of the world premise about a white hole but spends the show on the routine stuff of car chases and gunfights
A blatant copy of Saw, albeit without the Torture Porn sadism, with people imprisoned in a cellar forced to kill one another. An oddly unconvincing film that fails to generate any tension or even conviction
Ryan Nicholson makes an amusing slasher film that takes place on a horror movie set where the set driver is a fan of the scream queen star and decides to start eliminating people to start making the film go his way
Uwe Boll seems to be improving. Here he has abandoned action for a character-driven drama about the appearance of an ambiguous stranger heralding the Biblical end of the world
Syfy Channel film that seems to offer the intriguing premise of a Modernised Little Red Riding Hood but only deals with this in the vaguest ways. Otherwise this is a standard werewolf film and contains maybe the crappiest CGI wolf transformation scenes ever
Groundhog Day with drug addicts – a familiar timeloop scenario that makes for a reasonable story about redemption and reconciliation
A homage to 1970s SF cinema, full of trippy journeys through transcendental space and white antisceptic corridors. In aiming for this look, the film also forgot a small thing like a plot or coherent explanation of what is happening
A genetically engineered creature film from Vincenzo Natali, this ventures into some fascinating places but ultimately returns to Frankenstein science territory
Fascinating true story about a college student who struck up a correspondence with serial killer John Wayne Gacy and fashioned himself according to Gacy’s victim profile so as to get closer to him
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
This feels like a mockbuster thrown together to exploit the popularity of the tv series Lost concerning an island haunted by a sinister cloud of smoke. The scenario quickly collapses into absurdity.
Quebecois (French-speaking Canadian) historical werewolf film. The plot proves entertaining in its whisplash reversals, although the film’s provision of a werewolf falls down amid some ratty CGI effects
An appealingly politicised variant on the Backwoods Brutality film in which two rogue US border guards decide to set up their own home Guantanamo Bay … not Torture Porn but an effectively brutal study on the effect of torture
A piece of filler horror that is utterly generic in every respect about travelers entering a sinister East European village where the locals are up to no good
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
Essentially a feature version of The Twilight Zone‘s classic Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode, this generates some remarkable tension with a group trapped in mid-air in a small plane before a lame twist ending
In his last ever produced screenplay, cult director Larry Cohen turns in a wonderfully playful script with Matthew Lillard as a screenwriting lecturer harassed by a killer only to find real-life doesn’t obey the same rules that screenplays do
An amusing parody of the Backwoods Brutality film where the hillbillies are likeable innocents and the college kids end up killing themselves in a series of bizarre accidents. Amusing, although in the end is only a one-joke film
Disappointing sequel to the modest original that does little but revisit and re-run the first film’s scenario with little to add to it
Okay borrowing from the set-up of The Thing about an outbreak of flesh-eating prehistoric insects at an Arctic research station
George Romero’s sixth and final zombie film where he writes characters and a script with much more of a richness of theme than he did in the last two entries
Another animated Barbie film, this appropriate the name of the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale and makes it now about a fairy who preaches conservation. As these films go, this is one of the better made and comes with quite a degree of colour
One of several films that came out around the same time, including Super and Kick-Ass, about ordinary people who believe they superheroes. Woody Harrelson gives a winning performance as the comically inept title character
A film about the Manson Family killings told through the eyes of one of Manson Girls Leslie Van Houten. This becomes a savage and biting indictment of 1960s social morality
This gets full marks for an attention-grabbing title. Unfortunately, it is the most interesting thing about the film that otherwise only offers up plentiful bikini-clad girls but routine slasher mechanics
Predating Cowboys & Aliens, this is an amusingly titled Western/alien invasion crosshatch that plays itself surprisingly seriously and is better than one might assume
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
Micheal Bafaro is a justifiably obscure director whose entire career has been built on recycling other horror films. This is his version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is passable until a Sixth Sense-styled twist ending
A series of short film interpretations of the Frankenstein story, with interpretations ranging from BDSM to kung fu and modern police procedural
A Syfy Channel monster movie that seems made with a smidgen more care than their usual B movie output
Alexandre Dumas’s classic adventure story is turned into an animated vehicle for Barbie with genders reversed and an absurdly upbeat Girls Can Do Anything vibe. Being a kid’s film, the girl Musketeers are no longer allowed to wield swords
Modernised version of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story starring Dougary Scott. The principal novelty here is that the bulk of the story takes place in a courtroom as Hyde is placed on trial for murder
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
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
This offers the novelty of a Loch Ness monster film that takes place in Canada! This is otherwise a routine monster of the era made for the Syfy Channel
Film about a series of gory deaths at a bowling alley, this really pushes an envelope of good taste. This gained attention for makeup effects artist Ryan Nicholson and was the cause of much censorship controversy
Bruce McDonald makes a standout fim with Stephen McHattie as a radio dj dealing with a zombie infection that inhabits the English language that breaks out in the town around him
One of the worst of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. This consists of action sequences slung together with random indifference and badly mismatched casting
Another of Mainframe’s interminable Barbie films that soon slip into a sameness. This is at least directed with a visual sweep
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
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
A hugely underrated film that depicts the brutal collapse of society that occurs when the entire world is affected by a plague that causes blindness. Directed in strong and powerful images
The second in Uwe Boll’s trilogy adapted from the videogame, this plays out as a mix of Western and vampire hunter film and is marginally better than Boll’s usual standards
Guy Maddin was hired by the Documentary Channel to make a documentary about his hometown Winnipeg and turns it into a surreal confabulation of fact and tall tale
Another Uwe Boll videogame adaptation, a satire where Zack Ward sets out on a shooting spree. Boll sets out to offend as many people as possible but somehow forgets to make any of it funny
A sSequel in name only to White Noise, this is a very silly film with Nathan Fillion returning from a near-death experience able to see the auras of those about to die
A blatant copy of Snakes on a Plane featuring mutated ants aboard a plane. Without the other film’s tongue-in-cheek approach, this collapses into absurdity
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
A halfway reasonable Syfy Channel film with people under attack by treacheries of ravens. This homages The Birds, including featuring an aging Rod Taylor, to modest effect
Could it be too hard to go wrong in making a film about a doomsday cult hunting people through a subway tunnel? Apparently it is and after a promising beginning, the film churns the cliches with little tension
This leads to you expect a horror comedy but spends half its running time in build-up with no comedy or monster slaying, although does deliver on this with an entertaining effects-heavy climax
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
Another of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations and one of his better. Boll is seeking to emulate the 00s epic fantasy fad and succeeds with some great action choreography from Ching Siu-Tung
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
Charmingly droll film that posits an alternate version of the 1950s where zombies have been domesticated. This has a perfect sense of mood and admirable deadpan playing by all involved
One of the best of all filmed videogame adaptations. Christophe Gans creates a creepy and unworldly atmosphere, along with a series of genuinely outlandish creature effects
Thriller starring Jennifer Beals as an FBI agent who receives clairvoyant visions during the hunt for an abducted girl
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
Okay ghost story in which Gabrielle Anwar rents a haunted farmhouse. Forest Whitaker turns up as a neighbouring occult expert
A largely routine haunted house film where Lara Flynn Boyle plays a wife who becomes certain that the house next door is parasitic and preys upon people’s minds
Set in a nowhere New England town where fisherman Colm Meaney discovers a moss with miracle-healing properties. Sort of a Magical Realist version of The Shipping News
Perhaps the lamest spy movie idea EVER – a children’s film about a spy who goes into action accompanied by a chimpanzee
Routine psycho-thriller where Mimi Rogers’ home is invaded by psycho babysitter David Orth
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
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
The second film from Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk who made Atanarjuat about a Danish anthropologist charting the lives of the Inuit as they are in the process of assimilation by Westerners
The third of the Left Behind films with Kirk Cameron facing the Biblical End of the World and the Antichrist. This travels well down into bad movie territory
Beyond the attention-grabbing title, this is a documentary about the influence that Star Trek has had in the real world. A not uninteresting concept wrecked by Shatner’s condescending attitude to interview subjects
A formula Syfy Channel killer bug film wherein a new experimental insecticide creates a horde of deadly genetically tinkered wasps that run amok through a small town
Uwe Boll gained a reputation as the world’s worst director on the basis of his videogame adaptations. Prize exhibit was Alone in the Dark, which abandons the game and is a series of action scenes without explanatory rationale
Film that assembles interesting a number of SF elements and twists but is killed by its delivery as a pretentious indie film
A Canadian entry made soon into the zombie movie revival of the mid-00s and before the copycats started to become tediously familiar and the genre turned to self-parody. This delivers a solid rehash of the essentials – IMHO a better job that Zack Snyder did in Dawn of the Dead
Another Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptation, this feels slung together from vampire film and sword and sorcery cliches. Among the badly mismatched casting, the most eyebrow raising is Ben Kingsley as the vampire villain
An interesting and worthwhile attempt to retell the epic legend of Beowulf but to give it grounding as an historical work. Filmed in Iceland with an international cast
Ghost story about so-called Electronic Voice Phenomenon with Michael Keaton as a widower being contacted from beyond by his late wife. A film that achieves some quite reasonable spooky effect
A film about Elizabeth Bathory living in the present day, this comes with the suggestion of erotic allure but disappointingly proves to be a pose without much substance
Fine and underrated Sf film set in a future where memory recording devices are commonplace with Robin Williams as a man whose job is to edit these for funeral services
The previous Barbie animated films had adapted various fairytales but this casts her as a fairy in a magical kingdom – simplistic, but one of the most colourfully animated of Mainframe’s Barbie 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
This Canadian film is a mishmash of hauntings, psychic powers, ghost hunters, possibly imaginary friends and End of the World prophecies that fails to make the slightest sense
The first of two sequels to the Canadian werewolf film. This takes place with the surviving sister placed in a rehab facility and is the best of the trilogy, even better than the first film was in its writing and characters
Third of the Ginger Snaps films, a prequel set during the pioneer era with Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle again as sisters taking refuge at a fort under attack by werewolves. The scene-setting and atmosphere of foreboding is superlative
This was the third of the Cube films but has nothing new to add to the mix except a focus on the technicians monitoring the operation and the addition of gore effects
Quirky and wittily clever film from Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube, where two characters wish themselves into a blank white void filled with literally nothing
The first of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations and the beginning of his bad director reputation. This is a zombie film by the numbers but it was at the forefront of zombie film revival of the 2000s
Splendidly original and completely off the wall work of stylised animation from Sylvain Chomet
Frustratingly enigmatic film where student Carly Pope is drawn into a game of mysterious clues where people are being killed
The best budgeted of Guy Maddin’s films, a renaissance of his familiar kitsch surrealism and silent movie homages
The third animated film based on the popular girl’s doll Barbie. This places Barbie into Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake in an okay telling, if one that suffers from the usual limited animation of Mainframe’s early films
Another of the surreal films from Guy Maddin, involving incest, strange love triangles and transplanted hands, all shot of which has been shot as a silent movie
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
One of a series of cheap Canadian-made made Sherlock Holmes tv movies featuring a wildly overacting Matt Frewer who makes possibly the worst screen Holmes ever
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
David Cronenberg film that subjectively takes place in the mind of mentally ill Ralph Fiennes, a bewildering film with no easy handholds
Film about a monster hunter from the 1940s thawed out in the present-day. This appears to have been made as a tv pilot
The first sequel to Vincenzo Natali’s fine conceptual puzzlebox film. This expands out on the idea, having a cube that bends through time and space, and has a certain fascination if not as much as the original did
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