The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Classic from the heyday of the slasher film, an effort that was clearly designed to exploit another holiday title in the wake of the successes of Halloween and Friday the 13th. This snappily adapts the slasher formula and does better than most of its ilk in serving it back up
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
Solid time travel film about a man who struggles to find a way back to his love as her ex keeps changing the timeline so she doesn’t leave him
Film that assembles interesting a number of SF elements and twists but is killed by its delivery as a pretentious indie film
Frustratingly enigmatic film where student Carly Pope is drawn into a game of mysterious clues where people are being killed
An underwater adventure movie about a submarine that ventures to explore the depths. This tries to emulate 2001: A Space Odyssey but has a bad movie reputation
The novelty of a dance film about the end of the world in a giant flood
Documentary about KNB EFX Group, one of the premiere makeup effects companies in contemporary Hollywood. Although nominally focused around KNB and their history, the documentary principally profiles Greg Nicotero, the N of the group
Film that depicts an alternate world where women have gained the upper-hand and men are a disappearing minority. This proved an unexpected delight, a mockumentary that comes in perfect and side-splitting deadpan, not to mention explores its premise with absolutely logical regard
Post-holocaust film made by and starring Canadian First Nations people. While the film uses the aftermath of a civilisation as a setting, it never seems that interested in exploring it. The film peters out in an uninteresting resoution and features some appallingly pretentious dialogue
Tony Watt, who gets my nomination as the world’s worst filmmaker, does the laughtrack trick of taking a film – in this case, the original Nosferatu – and running his usual inane sound effects and excruciating bad acting over the top
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
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
Underrated film with Peter Weller as a Wall Street banker who has his life overturned in trying to deal with a tenacious, seemingly hyper-intelligent rat that invades his home
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
This takes the old conspiracy theory about the Moon Landing being faked by tv and rather hilariously is a Found Footage film being shot by two filmmakers who have been tasked with fabricating the Moon Landing
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
A sequel to the Gonzo Killer Shark film Ouija Shark, this goes even crazier
Another in the spate of deliberately ridiculous killer shark films concerning a ghost shark that emerges from an ouija board
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
The great and underrated Steven Kostanski makes another of his homages to the 1980s VHS era. This has a winning concept where kids befriend an intergalactic dark lord
From Isaac Ezban in his English-language debut, a cleverly and pleasingly contorted film where a group of friends discover a mirror that leads to a parallel timeline
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
There have been a surprising number of films in recent years offering up the combination of zombies and strippers. Although what we have is never quite specified as zombies, this offers up strippers kicking zombie ass with a great deal of gore-drenched relish
One of the numerous ‘vs’ films that came out after Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, this is actually a B-budget fantasy adventure made for cable. This is not particularly bad, just routine and uninspired on all counts where the budget cramps any of its imaginative horizons
A fascinating documentary about animator Richard Williams that principally focuses on the tragic failure of Williams’s lifework The Thief and the Cobbler, which would have been the most ambitious hand drawn film ever made
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
Creepy and surprisingly well-made Canadian horror film in which a mentally disturbed David Hewlett has a strange relationship with an anatomical dummy that directs him to kill.
A likeable animated adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s popular children’s character from the Canadian company Nelvana
Canadian-made thriller about the accidental release of a deadly plague from a laboratory. This is rather dull and never does anything that does not retread cliches
This is one of a plethora of hard-to-differentiate apart ghost stories that have littered the dvd shelves in recent years, frequently copying Insidious in appropriating a sinister-seeming adjective as title. There is not a single directorial or musical cue, sound effect or line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a cliche
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
The second film from Brandon Cronenberg, a fascinatingly original work about body-hopping assassins
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 documentary about the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe phenomenon. This covers everything from the origins of the toys through the animated series to the live-action film
A shabby Canadian police procedural with David Birney as a detective hunting a killer who is targeting prostitutes
Entry amid the 1980s slasher fad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis. A fairly dreary effort that comes with much disco dancing footage
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
The debut of Canadian director Gerard Ciccoritti who should have become more well known, this goes for broke and becomes splendidly deranged
Chillingly effective film where a teenage girl casts a spell to kill her mother, only to become terrified and try to turn back what she has unleashed
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
The fourth film from David Cronenberg, a clear (although by no means uninteresting) attempt to repeat the success of Shivers with Marilyn Chambers as a woman with a vampiric skin parasite that turns victims into maddened killers
The Soska Sisters take on remaking the classic David Cronenberg film about a woman with a blood-drinking skin graft who leaves a trail of rabid victims. The sisters smartly update the original, bringing a host of new ideas to bear
This comes with a fascinatingly original premise – man wakes up with complete amnesia and finds that he has the ability to kill anyone within thirty feet of him. The case of a film that holds attention with a captivating and unusual plot and a series of constant whiplash reversals
This is the one of worst films to come out in the gonzo killer shark fad – it is surely the killer shark genre’s equivalent of The Room. The effects hit a level of terribleness not seen since Birdemic, the rest is full of ridiculous continuity gaffes, bad acting and bad dialogue
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
Heather Thomas starring film about the discovery of a laboratory that has created a vampire virus
Serial killer thriller about an FBI team who realise they are hunting a killer who targets other serial killers
A reasonable arthouse hit, this tells the story of a cursed violin through five different periods of history
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
Routine variant on the psycho child theme, which heads into rather dubious territory when it leads us to think a series of killings are being conducted by an autistic child
Groundhog Day with drug addicts – a familiar timeloop scenario that makes for a reasonable story about redemption and reconciliation
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
A Syfy Channel monster movie that seems made with a smidgen more care than their usual B movie output
A quite good but little seen Backwoods Brutality film from the great era of Canuxploitation with overtones of Deliverance as hikers in the wilderness are harassed by mysterious figures who play taunting psychological games
Promisingly ambitious animated SF film that tries to catch some of the trippy qualities of Heavy Metal where the impressive quality of animation is let down by a juvenile story about a rock band in a post-holocaust future
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
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
Not that the title gives you any reason to expect it but this is actually a vampire film, one of the rare entries in a genre that is looking very anemic these days. An original and quite interesting smalltown take that resembles George Romero’s Martin and Let the Right One In
The best budgeted of Guy Maddin’s films, a renaissance of his familiar kitsch surrealism and silent movie homages
Enormously entertaining David Cronenberg film about psychic powers. Cronenberg is fascinated with the conceptua possibilities and creates some sensational set-pieces
The first of a series of poorly made sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners. Cronenberg’s ideas have been stripped down to no more than a series of head-exploding effects
Second of the sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, this features Liliana Komorowska who becomes crazed after taking a scan suppressant drug
This looked promising but is no more than an unoriginal rehash of the cliches of the Mad Max film – at heart a Western with only token effort made to rewrite the elements in SF terms – and no greater ambition beyond being cable filler
Modest and underrated Philip K. Dick adaptation that builds reasonable atmosphere during its journey across a planet and doubt as to who among the party might be one of a breed of evolving androids
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
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
Cheap Syfy Channel CGI disaster spectacle about runaway plant roots – from the Garden of Eden, no less – growing to endanger the entire planet. Utterly formulaic and seeming to consist of no more than canned pieces of cliche action
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
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
While this Canadian obscurity gives the appearance of being a 70s sex vampire film, it is in fact an X-rated Frankenstein spoof. While the film is not without its moment of complete dementia (mostly involving sex scenes with a gorilla), it eventually fragments into narrative incomprehensibility
Shoddy low-budget Canadian-made attempt to jump aboard the Star Wars fad, this promotes itself as a bogus sequel to the H.G. Wells classic
This is one killer shark film of the 2010s that does not come in a deliberately ridiculous vein and concerns the hunt for a shark that has swallowed a valuable diamond
Sequel to the modest He Never Died with Henry Rollins as an immortal. Women get equal time here in a ferocious performance from Olunike Adeliyi that quite takes you aback
David Cronenberg’s first commercial release, a vivid work about parasites that turn the residents of an apartment building into sexual fetishists. Cronenberg has set out to shock while beneath that he creates fascinating metaphors about sex
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
At age 81, David Cronenberg is still on great form with this perversely fascinating work about the development of a technology that places cameras inside graves to observe corpses as they decay
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
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
Dull and unimaginative Silent Hill sequel that only revisits what went before. The first film had an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere but the sequel reduces everything to no more than pop-up Clive Barker
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
A considerable word of mouth hit, this generates a very spooky atmosphere with highly unusual shooting techniques
A horror film about a pair of possessed jeans!
Psycho-thriller with Erika Eleniak and Monika Schnarre trapped in a snowbound cabin
Okay psycho-thriller where Stefanie Powers is stalked in her new apartment while her son develops a mysterious imaginary companion
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
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
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
A 1980s film that was sold around a single air bladder makeup effects scene where a man swells up and explodes from a snakebite. That and the entirely risible premise of Oliver Reed as a billionaire who has a psychic link with a giant snake
David Cronenberg film that subjectively takes place in the mind of mentally ill Ralph Fiennes, a bewildering film with no easy handholds
A genetically engineered creature film from Vincenzo Natali, this ventures into some fascinating places but ultimately returns to Frankenstein science territory
Perhaps the lamest spy movie idea EVER – a children’s film about a spy who goes into action accompanied by a chimpanzee
A slasher musical??? The mind does a double takes trying to process the incongruity of the genre mash-ups. That said, this works exceedingly well – neither compromising on the slasher aspects, yet equally delivering some clever and witty musical numbers
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.