The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This is fake SF, an animated film that has no interest in its concept, one that exists solely as a series of pop culture jokes, cutsie supporting characters, thrills and feelgood epiphanies
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 return of the talented Steve Barron after a decade’s absence in a film that was shot in my own backyard (literally). Disappointingly, all we get is a work that unimaginatively rehashes cliches about amok A.I.s
Canadian-made home invasion thriller that reminds of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. A film that seems set to brutalise a middle class couple’s sensibilities only to slip into utter tameness
This imagines a future where people have become so absorbed in online communication that they live in isolated cubicles. An interesting idea that the film does zero to make believable
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.
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
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
Baffling and pretentious Canadian-made surrealist film with Scheherazade (from Arabian Nights) in a psychiatric asylum making up stories all derived from tabloid headlines
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
A film about the scientific efforts to explore the afterlife, this suffers from too many good ideas and not enough of the effects needed to convey its journey
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
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
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
Rather silly thriller in which Richard Chamberlain tries to track a madman who has discovered a means of transmitting explosions by telephone
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
WolfCop found an appeal with its amusing title premise. Here the principal talents involved have reunited for a sequel, although the feeling is more that they have done so solely because the first film was a success
Horror film about a heroine imprisoned by a family who insist on absurdly outmoded traditional values. Mostly an opportunity for the cast, led by Rod Steiger as the family patriarch, to go completely over-the-top
Uwe Boll strikes again! Sequel to his passable earlier epic fantasy, which is dragged down by a lack of action and the need to provide star Dolph Lundgren with a series of excrutiating witticims
A time travel that has the near-soporific pace of a Lifetime tv movie. Here Haley Joel Osment discovers that his father built a stable wormhole that allowed him to travel back in time to 1947
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
Film that has a minor cult reputation for its cheaply trippy 3D hallucination scenes. Outside of that, The Mask (not to be confused with the Jim Carrey film) is a dull variant on the Dr Jekyll story in which a ritual mask causes the wearer’s dark side to emerge
Entry amid the 1980s slasher fad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis. A fairly dreary effort that comes with much disco dancing footage
Another in the spate of deliberately ridiculous killer shark films concerning a ghost shark that emerges from an ouija board
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
Second of the sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, this features Liliana Komorowska who becomes crazed after taking a scan suppressant drug
Frustratingly enigmatic film where student Carly Pope is drawn into a game of mysterious clues where people are being killed
This has the mildly amusing idea of taking the idea of films like Dracula vs Frankenstein et al one step further and actually pitting various classic monsters against one another in a wrestling match. Beyond its mimicry of televised wrestling though, there is almost nothing else to the film
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
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
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
An impressively designed Quebecois sf film where it is it is sad to see so much artistry lavished on something completely nonsensical and utterly woolly-headed in terms of its ideas
A dull Quebec-made about the discovery of how a pharmaceutical company is conducting illicit experiments to create an artificial womb to breed embryos
A film spun off from the popular Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall. The loose plot concerns a happiness drug but is mostly there to feature the regulars playing multiple character
A killer shark film concerning a prehistoric megalodon prowling the waters of a lake. This once had the distinction of being the lowest rated film on the IMDB
This is not even a sequel The Amityville Horror but a cheaply and tattily made Canadian effort seeking to sell itself using the name. The first in an industry of films employing some relevance to Amityville
An obscure Canadian-made thriller about an evil twin
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
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
A Uwe Boll film that feels as though he didn’t cared about what he was making. You’d have to go back to the Italian sword-and-sorcery films of the 1980s to find a more shoddy work of epic fantasy
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
A Virtual Reality film that came out the same year as The Matrix and prefigures the dreamscape themes of Inception. Despite the possibilities, this has a dreary pace that very nearly approaches falling asleep
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
Very obscure horror anthology re-edited from episodes of a Canadian tv series featuring names like John Hurt, Charles Gray and Keir Dullea.
Poorly made psycho-sexual thriller where Richard Grieco becomes a predator after getting an injection of feline DNA
Perhaps the lamest spy movie idea EVER – a children’s film about a spy who goes into action accompanied by a chimpanzee
Uwe Boll sets out to offend everybody in a film founded on making constant insults about its’ plus-size heroine’s weight and bad jokes about the Holocaust, including the Boll playing a comic Hitler
Tony Watt strikes again with another of wilfully bad, agonisingly unwatchable films. All the bad acting, plotlessly rambling scenes and random exploitation movie homages that one expects of a Tony Watt film
Cheap badly directed film starring Martin Kove as detective who is shot but comes back haunted by visions of the afterlife
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
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 sequel to the Gonzo Killer Shark film Ouija Shark, this goes even crazier
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
Cheaply made and mind bogglingly bizarre Quebecois film about a Martian who takes two children on a journey around the world at Christmas
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
A shabby Canadian police procedural with David Birney as a detective hunting a killer who is targeting prostitutes
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
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
This may quite possibly be the worst vampire film ever made – a children’s film about a boy and a cute vampire dog. Being a children’s film, the vampire dog is not allowed to drink blood so has to have a ravenous hunger for red jelly! The slapstick is excruciating and the film painful on every level
Underwater adventure movie that tries to emulate 2001: A Space Odyssey, this has a bad movie reputation
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
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
An incredibly bad Canadian-made sequel to Food of the Gods about a scientist who devises a growth hormone that accidentally creates a horde of giant rats
An hilariously bad film in which Christians launch a space mission to flee a Bible-censoring dystopia on Earth
Hilariously nonsensical horror film with Joanna Pacula as a sinister aunt. The plot throws in laughable novelty effects, including a killer cat, absurdly overwrought symbolism and some voodoo rationale
Incredibly bad and frequently laughable variation on The Hidden and in turn The Terminator with Jesse Ventura as an intergalactic law enforcement officer hunting a criminal on Earth