The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Clairvoyance is a Psychic Power. It deals with the ability to foresee the future or detect information at a distance. This usually come in the form of the clairvoyant receiving visions that offer cryptic clues. There are clairvoyants in the real world that claim to offer aid to police investigations (although there are no cited examples where they have actually solved a crime).
From the 1970s, there have been a number of thrillers featuring clairvoyants. Most of these are detective stories in which an individual receives a vision of events that have or are about to happen and then tries to solve a mystery or prevent a tragedy from happening. These are in effect detective thrillers but where psychic insight is used instead of the investigation of clues. Since Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), there has also been a body of these films about psychics seeing through the eyes of a killer.
Other forms of precognition can come from dreams. Other works deal with fortune-tellers who see futures via tarot cards and crystal balls. There are a smaller number of films about people who are able to predict or see the future with the aid of some science-fictional device.
South Korean film that borrows the premise of the film Frequency in having two characters separated across twenty years have clairvoyant dreams of the other’s life and combining forces to stop a killer
This was part of a late 90s spate of revival of the mummy movie. This effort from Highlander director Russell Mulcahy revives the genre with a modern arsenal of effects
Serial killer thriller with Aaron Eckhart on the trail of an ambiguous Ben Kingsley. This offers some interesting twists but fails in the core issue of developing it into an absorbing thriller plot
An object lessons in how not to adapt a Young Adult series – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
British quota quickie, a comedy about a man who discovers an oracle in a well that gives him tips on horse races
A gay version of Don’t Look Now – a film that takes forever to go anywhere and fails to wind its twists up to anything interesting
Israeli film co-directed by Ari Folman about a girl with precognitive powers. After a great opening, the film loses all real dramatic impetus
Vincent Ward is one of the directors who should be granted more opportunities to make films. This is his least satisfying work, a troubled behind-the-scenes epic set during New Zealand’s Maori Wars with some Magical Realist touches
A blatant copy of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now from cult Italian director Lucio Fulci. Here Don’t Look Now reduced to no more than a dull clairvoyant murder mystery
Weepie drama in which Sandra Bullock becomes unstuck in time flipping back and forward with the foreknowledge that her husband Julian McMahon will befall a tragedy
Japanese horror film about a professor who receives newspaper headlines that predict deaths before they occur
This Philip K. Dick adaptation has a great premise – Ben Affleck is an engineer with a blanked memory blanked only to find he has left himself clues from the future of things that are starting to come true. Alas, this is reduced to an action vehicle in the hands of John Woo
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Back when Dwayne Johnson was a wrestler billing himself as The Rock, this was a forgettable sword and sorcery effort spun off from his appearance in The Mummy Returns. This led to a surprising number of sequels
A film based on the Zodiac Killer. Unlike other Zodiac films, this was made while the killer was still active. The film comes with a fascinating backstory where it was made as part of an elaborate trap to lure the Zodiac Killer out
The first of the sequels, this has a group receiving bizarre deaths after receiving a premonition that prevents a deadly pile-up on the highway. It reveals the problems of creating a sequel to a film that was never intended to be a series
This would be the last of the films made by stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen where he turns his creations towards conducting another Greek Mythology adventure. With an all-star cast playing the Greek gods.
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
Another in the spate of serious Stephen King adaptations that seeks to avoid the horror label. Although psychic powers do feature, this is more of a wistful 1960s Coming of Age story
Released for the fiftieth anniversary of the Manson Killings, this details the attacks on Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. The film expands on the claim that Tate had a precognitive dream about what was going to happen
An uncommon misstep from Sam Raimi. Despite the fact he has a sterling cast onboard and a script from Billy Bob Thornton, the medium thriller plot rehashes comes out fairly bland
Frustratingly insipid indie slice-of-life film following three guys affected by a fortune-teller’s prophecy, this never surmounts the banalities of its characters’ lives
Adaptation of a series of Young Adult books that should have emerged as Harry Potter made with the sensibilities of a Tim Burton. But the result fails to come to life in Paul Weitz’s hands
The original creative team behind the Final Destination series, James Wong and Glen Morgan, return for this sequel but only provide a routine series of bizarre novelty deaths following the premonition of a rollercoaster disaster
Perhaps the best thing about this is that the Twilight saga is finally ended. This provides a moderately spectacular showdown but also wraps its plotlines up with absurd deus ex machina wimp outs and an infuriating twist ending
This feels like the Final Destination franchise updated for the mobile user generation concerning a sinister app that predicts how long the user has to live
The first sequel to The Crow extends the look of the original into an amazingly lit Goth designer world. However, the plot (an early work from David S. Goyer) is no more than a rehash of the first film
This spins the old plot about a clairvoyant dream of an airline disaster out as a teen horror film based around a series of bizarre novelty deaths. This became the first in a franchise of popular horror films.
Third of the Fantastic Beasts films, this comes as a mix of ennui with the franchise and promise. It feels like about right now would be a good time to retire the series
Faye Dunaway is a fashion photographer who gains a psychic link into the mind of a killer. From a John Carpenter script but the thriller plotting is never up to the chic suggestiveness the film is given
An English-language remake of the ghost story from the Pang Brothers follows the other film faithfully but in terms of atmosphere is a pallid copy of the original
The third of the Twilight films. This extrudes the dramatic irresolution of the last film’s cliffhanger – should Bella marry Edward or does she really love Jacob? – with over-padded momentousness
An Australian clairvoyance thriller that seems to have substantially drawn its influence from Eyes of Laura Mars. The film was little seen when it came out and the uninvolved direction does little to draw us into what is taking place
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
A star-studded but ponderous adaptation of Isabel Allende’s cross-generational family saga set in an unnamed South American republic that comes with Magical Realist elements
Very slight Disney live-action comedy with Kurt Russell as a tv network mailboy with a chimpanzee that can predict which tv shows are going to be hits
Thriller where student Nicole Eggert begins to have clairvoyant visions leading her to an abducted girl
Magical Realist film with Aishwarya Rai running a spice bazaar where she is able to tell fortunes
Cheerfully outrageous early Pedro Almodovar black comedy where virginal Antonio Banderas confesses to a series of murders conducted by his death obsessed lawyer
Based on an acclaimed book, once to be directed by David Cronenberg. This opened to bad reviews but is not uninteresting. A near future setting, precognitive dreams and Amber Heard as a sizzling femme fatale
A young and dashing Leonard Nimoy plays a clairvoyant racing driver in this unsold tv pilot. The disappointment is that his powers amount to no more than a detective deducing clues in a standard murder mystery
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
Ghost story from one of the directors of the Saw sequels that settles in with halfway reasonable build-up, before being killed off by an improbable left field twist ending
The title suggests either a comedic take on the superhero film or a teen film about a kid discovering superpowers. The least thing you expect this to be is a French police thriller about a unit investigating super-powered crimes
TV mini-series made for the 100th anniversary of the Jack the Ripper killings. While the show adheres more to the facts of the case of any filmed work up to that point and to have uncovered new evidence, it should be considered fiction
David Lynch’s last theatrical films and probably the most divided of Lynch’s films. Another delve into cryptic surrealism that arrives at no clear plot destinations or clues about what is going on
There are few fantastic themes more tired than the clairvoyant thriller – a standard murder mystery where the detective just intuits all their deductions psychically. Apart from a couple of interesting twists, this is no different
In one of his more mainstream films, Neil Jordan takes a leaf from Eyes of Laura Mars as Annette Bening gains psychic insight into the mind of serial killer Robert Downey Jr
Eddie Murphy in another of the lame flops that marked his career in the 2000s where he plays a stockbroker who gets stock tips from his daughter’s imaginary companion
An anthology that adapts three stories from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection but does so with singularly heavy-handed regard. The best aspect of the film is the framing story with a brooding Rod Steiger in the title role.
Lightweight film based around the Disney theme park attraction that becomes a Eddie Murphy comedy where he and his family enter a big old mansion that proves to be haunted
Dwayne Johnson starring Hercules film that just wants to be a big dumb cartoon without a brain cell in its body. This takes the interesting approach that Hercules was an ordinary man whose exploits were all down to PR
A South African-made copycat of Halloween with a figure in a black mask stalking women. Cameron Mitchell turns up as a weird clairvoyant hired to find one of the missing girls
Fred Olen Ray and Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson combine forces on a low-budget action film about psychic powers. The action scenes are competent but the film lacking in the script department
A fifteen page Stephen King story about a patricidal child cult has spawned this film, nine sequels and a remake. Not a very good film, this is stuck with padding a very slight original out to a full-length film
Girl returns to her hometown after many years, encounters family secrets, ghostly figures, clairvoyant visions. The film holds interest for a time as you try to figure out what is going on but eventually proves a letdown
Thriller starring Jennifer Beals as an FBI agent who receives clairvoyant visions during the hunt for an abducted girl
The second theatrical spinoff from The X Files, a dismally dull entry where one wonders how the people who created one of the great tv shows of the 1990s got it all wrong
Sequel to Tarsem Singh’s The Cell that feels made by people who haven’t even seen the original. The original’s fascinating journey into dream terrain is replaced by a dull psychic with a link to a serial killer plot
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman gives us an utterly mangled version of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series that has little resemblance to the books, yet makes little sense if you haven’t read them
A horror film based around the phenomenon of tarot cards, a surprise that nobody has done so before
This adapts a Philip K. Dick story and then throws it out to make a generic action film with Nicolas Cage as a psychic. All the potential of its idea is lost amid a series of ridiculous plot twists
Action film starring Lorenzo Lamas as a detective drawn into underground fight clubs while discovering a mystic sword owned by Alexander the Great
Dreary action film with Michael Paré as a soldier with the army’s psychic warfare unit who is sent on a mission to rescue a girl from the hands of terrorists
Another of the films spun off from Sony’s hold on the Spider-Man copyright, this has been called the worst Marvel Comics superhero film ever. This also bears next-to-no resemblance to its comic-book counterpart
A big-budget fantasy film made too much in the shadow of Star Wars by people with little understanding of the genre. The fantasy elements feel leaden and fail to take any imaginative flight
An over-the-top New Zealand-made Gothic horror with Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as psychically connected brother and sister who set out on a quest to find their parents, killing all in the way
The first film from the acclaimed Alan Rudolph, a hippie era nightmare where smoking marijuana causes people to have disturbing visions of sinister figures
Wes Craven makes a sequel to his earlier Backwoods Brutality classic but the result is a mess that is all over the place and counts as one of Craven’s worst films
A Dean R. Koontz adaptation from the director of The Lawnmower Man, this is a numbingly predictable film in which Jeff Goldblum returns from the dead to find he has a psychic link with a serial killer
This is a wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko, featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister but without the same culty weirdness
Mini-series with the intriguing premise of Timothy Hutton receiving a briefcase from the future with clues that foretells his death in five days time. This befalls utterly predictable handling and is padded out to fill a five-hour slot
The second of the Twilight films where the moderately grounded original is blown up into the near laughable with the ridiculously over-the-top hyper-sexualised posturing of its male leads
The fourth in the series of films about a series of deaths for survivors after premonition of disaster at a speedway. This is shot in 3D but the novelty death set-pieces have become preposterous
Kari Wuhrer stars in a tawdry erotic thriller as an art student who gains clairvoyant abilities and gets caught up in solving a murder
Wes Craven’s attempt to top his A Nightmare on Elm Street and the phenomenon that Freddy Krueger subsequently became was this remarkably silly film with Mitch Pileggi as a serial killer returned from the electric chair
Film about premonition of an airline disaster and the survivor being haunted in the aftermath. Not dissimilar to the James Herbert adaptation The Survivor, this goes in predictable directions while never being entirely clear what is happening
Psychic thriller that draws much from Eyes of Laura Mars as photographer Michael Callan has visions of his models being killed before they are in reality
Early Derek Jarman film that acts as a snapshot of the 70s punk movement, a rambling indulgent treatise that depicts a future England that has collapsed into anarchy
The movie parodies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, which consist of crude, witless gags run over replication of scenes from films of the last twelve months, are painfully unfunny. This doesn’t even spoof the disaster movie
For the stew of elements this throws together – a famous unsolved murder case, ghosts, a blind psychic killer, possession, a sinister psychiatrist – it is surprising how dull the film that emerges is
A cheapie from cult Ozploitation director Brian Trenchard-Smith about a man having clairvoyant visions of an astral killer
The third of The Crow sequels, starring a miscast Edward Furlong as a resurrected trailer park kid. This has a bad movie ridiculousness that killed the series off
An absurd monster movie that was started by Tobe Hooper who walked off set whereupon it was completed by another director whereupon SF elements were added to sell it as a copy of Alien