The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Canadian film about a babysitter being stalked by masked home invaders on Halloween night. Capably put together and generates an okay tension but this still seems to be recycling over-familiar genre tropes
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
Kid’s film that comes with a rather slight gimmick in which a Bigfoot is befriended and persuaded to join the high school basketball team
Another copy of The Thing where a team of archaeologists in the frozen north unearth an object being 20,000 years old from a barrow that proceed to affect the team and cause mass insanity
A film where a girl goes to stay with her girl friend at a cabin in the woods but thinks her friend might be drugging her and taking her blood
Peculiar Canadian-made indie film about the interactions of a vampire and various people at a Toronto donut shop. David Cronenberg is cast as a Mafia head
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
This starts as a Death Wish-styled vigilante film of interesting ambiguities, before abruptly turning into a psycho film. The latter half generates some undeniable tension but the film feels it needed more than that
After some 150 other films, you have to wonder what another version of Hamlet has to offer. This Canadian adaptation does little other than updating the setting to the 1940s
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
H.P. Lovecraft is a cult horror writer whose work brims over with a sense of cosmic dread. One of the most bizarre Lovecraft film adaptations is this work of children’s animation featuring a young Lovecraft
Slasher film that comes with the interestingly original setting of a college dorm webcam porn site. Unfortunately, the film takes an awfully safe and tasteful route in delivering it
A convoluted courtroom thriller where District Attorney Mädchen Amick is forced to team up with serial killer Chris Mulkey
Another Found Footage horror film with a reality tv ghostbusting team investigating a haunted asylum. The Found Footage genre quickly became exhausted and this only treads where others have gone before
Stylish New Wave film about an existential vampire taxi driver meeting a woman film director who has received a terminal diagnosis. From the underrated Gerard Ciccoritti
This Canadian film is a modernised telling of Hansel and Gretel where the witch becomes a man with possibly paedophile intent. A film seems to want to go into dark places but gives them an utterly tepid treatment
Adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut story about a future where everyone must be average wherein Vonnegut’s farcical satire is completely misjudged and played straight
Sequel to the animated Heavy Metal that failed to attract the same cult audience that its predecessor did. Telling only one story instead of several, it only offers a routine space opera adventure
The return of director of Pontypool should be anticipated. But this kills a near-foolproof premise – masked children come after a heroine on Halloween night wanting her unborn baby – with a pink lighting scheme
Dan O’Bannon scripted film that is uncreditedly based on an H.P. Lovecraft story about family horrors and creatures lurking beneath the graveyard. Aka Bleeders
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
The William Shatner documentary is a fascinatingly bizarre beast. This involves Shatner talking to a bunch of scientists and celebrities, before meeting with Stephen Hawking but peculiarly enough seems to have no central thesis or idea about what it is setting out to prove
The second in a series of animated children’s films about the young H.P. Lovecraft and his encounters with the various denizens of the Cthulhu mythos
Forgotten Canadian film about a series of murders around a former funeral home that has been converted into a guest house. Released at the height of the slasher cycle but this comes more in the vein of Psycho
The third of the trilogy of animated films from Arcana Studios based around the adventures of a young H.P. Lovecraft
I was sold on this from the title. A droll Canadian (Quebec-made) vampire comedy about a vampire girl who cannot bring herself to kill and a suicidal teenager who becomes her willing victim
Canadian-made slasher film from the director of the original Prom Night. This mixes slasher standard with a variant on the Mad/Deformed Relative in the Attic plot but mostly seems terminally dull
An action film set against the backdrop of a new Moon mission where Bill Pullman plays a US marshal assigned to protect judge Lena Olin whose life is under threat
Found Footage film about a stalker secretly filming a couple and abducting the wife, this tepidly circles around thriller cliches where other Found Footage films have delved into the psycho genre with more disturbing effect
An enigmatic and baffling Canadian-made film about a man who goes to life in the woods where something (possibly imaginary) seems to be taunting him. This eventually leaves audiences confused what is happening
The haunted house genre has become so overused t feels mined out of original moves. Despite a better cast line-up, this follows all the familiar paths, even if it arrives at a quite different ending
This has an intriguingly original concept where milquetoast Tim Blake Nelson wakes up to find he has faded away and become invisible to other people – and then finds a secret world of other similar Invisibles
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
This is one of the great wacky titles of all time. The film has its deliberately ridiculous amusements but soon fails to provide an interesting enough show to live up to its title
A film that offers the depiction of a totalitarian future USA where Donald Trump has refused to leave office. This was made at the end of Trump’s first term and before his second term return to power.
A disappointment from Guy Maddin where he abandons his trademark surrealism and makes what feels like cross between a haunted house film and a 1940s crime drama by way of the French New Wave
Gore-drenched French-Canadian film where teens play a board game that forces them to kill a select number of people lest their heads explode
There is a fantastically witty idea here – a low-tech parody of the 1980s post-holocaust film – but one that seems in search of an accompanying film. The film overspills with retro ephemera and stylistic jokes but I wish there had been more to it beyond the hook of the initial joke
A psycho-thriller featuring Bo Derek as an agoraphobic wife dealing with the shock of seeing her husband murdered only to then find that his body has disappeared
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
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
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
Horror comedy set around the wonderfully appealing idea of a support group for serial killers
Bruce McDonald, who directed the standout Pontypool, makes a crime film where Stephen McHattie plays both a hitman and a heroin-addicted trumpet player. For head-scratching reasons, the film also includes a vampire
There is considerable conceptual ambition to this – a giallo homage, most of which takes place inside a limo. Charitably, you call it is a micro-budgeted collision between Cosmopolis and The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, alas the film lets narrative fragment into incoherence in the latter half
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
This is a Canadian-made remake of the Alyssa Milano-starring erotic vampire film The Nosferatu Diaries: Embrace of the Vampire. For some reason, this is now minus the erotica and emerges as tepid
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
Makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski has become a fine director in recent years. Here he makes a Gremlins-styled film about a 1-900 number that unleashes a mischievous goblin
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
A film about a sinister small town with secrets and Bigfoot creatures lurking around in the background. Quite what is going on any more than that is unclear
Low-budget SF film about a ship at sea carrying a cargo of convicts, toxic waste, a deadly virus and a killer android
A production from Amicus founder Milton Subtosky in the style of the horror anthology that made the company’s name
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
Sequel to Graveyard Shift with a vampire appearing on a vampire film set and taking over the role in the 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
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
An undistinguished low-budget haunted house effort that was quickly retitled to jump aboard the bandwagon of James Wan’s The Conjuring films
Dull serial killer thriller with Andrew McCarthy tracking a killer that has a Catholic fixation
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
Serial killer thriller about an FBI team who realise they are hunting a killer who targets other serial killers
Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, returns with a possession film that uniquely takes places in Virtual Reality as Carly Pope must use a device that enters her comatose mother’s dreamspace
This Canadian effort about Soviet super-soldiers unfrozen in the present-day feels like one of a bunch of cheap direct-to-video copies of Universal Soldier that came out in the late 1990s
This starts out seeming like it is going to be a regular Backwoods Brutality film about a regular family threatened by hicks before expectations are abruptly turned on their head
A film that comes with an interesting sounding premise where a woman ventures through a doorway into a labyrinth world of interconnected rooms and ends up in a fight against the ruling theocracy
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
he second of two cheap video-released sequels to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film. This has the novelty of featuring Burt Reynolds as the bad guy
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
A Canadian-made horror film about a teenage runaway who signs into a mysterious dream institute that conduct experiments that open up something disturbing inside her
This rehashes I Spit on Your Grave by way of The Crow with a heroine who is raped and killed and then becomes resurrected as a supernatural avenger
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
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
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
Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the classics of the original slasher film fad. This is a remake
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
I have to search my memory to think of another film that is so openly plagiaristic – this is almost a scene-for-scene remake of Steven Spielberg’s Duel about a man facing a killer truck on a highway. This misses the subtlety of the original so widely you could run a highway through it
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
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
A dull Canadian-made police procedural with detective Richard Crenna on the trail of a sniper that is killing prostitutes
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
The first of two cheap Universal Soldier sequels made in Canada with Matt Battaglia inheriting Jean-Claude Van Damme’s role
The third in a series of Biblical End Times films withGary Busey as a decent cop who wakes up in a future ruled by the Anti-Christ. The heavy-handed slinging of Bible verses makes this hard-going for anyone who is not a believer, while the conspiratorial tone frequently verges on nuttiness
Roger Christian was art director on Alien but will always be remembered as director of the notorious Battlefield Earth. Here he is stuck making a cheap, tatty and frequently incomprehensible copy of Alien about alien impregnation
Canadian film about a man rebuilt inside a cyborg body. What started as a Frankenstein film is turned into a copy of The Terminator
Thriller starring Jennifer Beals as an FBI agent who receives clairvoyant visions during the hunt for an abducted girl
An erotic thriller where a couple are stalked by psychopathic couple after venturing into the swingers scene, this comes with a ridiculously high-handed condemnatory moralism
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
Horror film from regular Canadian genre director Micheal Bafaro about a group of friends who enact a curse in which they are pursued and killed by a mannequin come to life
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
Nicolas Cage is a lawman of the future who rebels against the system to protect a woman and child. Essentially a copy of the basics of Logan’s Run, this manages to be uninteresting in every way
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
Another adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes quasi-supernatural mystery. This is also one of the worst ever thanks to the wildly over-acted, scenery chewing performance from Matt Frewer, badly miscast as Holmes
Slasher film from the 1980s heyday directed by the once great J. Lee Thompson. This drags drearily where the only going for it are some novelty splatter effects and a twist ending that makes no sense whatsoever
Baffling mix of teen drama and eco-SF film set in an ozone depleted future with Tcheky Karyo engaged in a series of human-plant mutations that transform him into a swarm of insects
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
Canadian film set in a dystopian future where private use of cars has been banned and Darren McGavin is among the aging car aficionado who race custom cars in defiance of the authorities
The Soska Sisters made a splash on the genre scene a few years ago. Here they make a tribute/follow-up to Night of the Living Dead but produce an utterly safe work that is the antithesis of the edginess that gained them a name
One of the worst of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. This consists of action sequences slung together with random indifference and badly mismatched casting
A bland Canadian police procedural with detective Alexandra Paul investigating a woman who is killing the men who bullied and harassed her