The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Old Dark House film hit a peak in the late 1930s. This was a comedy variant featuring the entirely forgotten comedy act The Ritz Brothers stumbling around an old mansion
Winning comedy with Bill Murray trapped in a timeloop and forced to repeat the same day over. Murray is at a career-peak best and served by a great script. The surprise is how much the timeloop theme was copied by subsequent films
Australian film that is a romantic comedy take on The Quiet Earth, the classic work about three people who awake in an entirely deserted world
Jonathan Swift’s classic tale of a man in a land of miniature people is turned into a comedy vehicle for Jack Black and outfitted with a series of vulgar and pop culture gags
A gonzo comedy about an alien invasion that takes place during a getaway at a remote cabin by assorted comically dysfunctional characters including a man who is accompanied by a talking handkerchief
A popular Hong Kong hit in its day where a schoolgirl gains a ghostly scholar as an invisible companion, resulting in a series of slapstick sequences. Several sequels followed
A madcap Hong Kong comedy that takes more than a few leaves from the Mr Vampire films with cops fighting off vampires in a haunted police station. A popular hit.
Both directing and starring here, Gene Wilder attempts to revive the Old Dark House comedy. By the 1980s, this was datedly creaky, while Wilder’s comedy mugging histrionics are excruciating to sit through
Marlon Wayans treads the same territory as the Scary Movie films in this parody take on Paranormal Activity. Most of the film is pitched as a series of crude lowest common denominator gags
Sequel to A Haunted House where writer/star Marlon Wayans conducted a riff on the Scary Movie films. This is marginally more amusing than its predecessor
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
The second attempt to spin a film off from the Disney theme park ride, this comes in a more serious tone than the prior Eddie Murphy film but still emerges as lightweight in terms of horror
Full-length comedy from The Three Stooges where the idiots are janitors at a space centre who accidentally launch themselves into space. One of several Space Age films where popular comics where launched into space
An appealingly witty comedy where two losers set out to become vampire hunters with fumblingly inept results. Written and played with a snappy, sarcastic appeal
Likeable light fantasy comedy where Robert Downey Jr is possessed by four disembodies souls and sets out to help them achieve their purpose. Filled with some great performances.
From the creators of Reno 911, a comedy spoofing possession, exorcism and diabolical pregnancy cliches. This assembles material that feels as though it should have been funnier than it is
This has a witty idea – a parody of a soap opera combined with a slasher film. This is amusing, but the rest of the film consists of frenzied caricatures and a dearth of laugh out loud moments
A frustratingly insipid light fantasy comedy with Shelley Long as a housewife who returns from the dead where she proceeds to turn the life of her family into chaos
Director Jack Arnold was one of the great voices of 1950s SF cinema. Here he turns to making a none-too-funny comedy set in an underwater habitat. Featuring a teenage Richard Dreyfuss
A not terribly funny parody of the Italian-made Hercules films of the 1960s. This is mostly known for featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger (billed as Arnold Strong) in his first acting role
Excrutiatingly unfunny Australian film that has taken an old Italian 1960s Italian Hercules film and redubbed it with a comedy rifftrack
Comedy where John Ritter is an actor dressed in a superhero costume for a promotion who then starts to fight crimes for real. The first of several comedy films about superheroes who have no powers.
Roland Emmerich produced comedy about a group of crusaders abducted by aliens where their bumbling ends up accidentally winning a space war. A promising idea rendered as idiotic knockabout farce.
Neil Jordan has shown himself as an excellent director elsewhere but seems to have little aptitude for comedy when it comes to this raucous knockabout farce about a haunted castle
Aliens come to Earth and form a bluegrass band! The basic idea holds an undeniable appeal but the film seems caught between wanting to be a B-movie parody and an indie film that takes itself seriously
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences
The fourth of Abbott and Costello’s films, a knockoff of the then recent hit of the Bob Hope remake of The Cat and the Canary involving much comedic running around a supposedly haunted mansion
A screwball comedy with Jack Benny as a trumpeter send down from Heaven to Earth to blow the Last Trumpet who ends up getting distracted by a series of comic mishaps
The Polish Brothers make some great Midwestern dramas but seem out of their depth trying to make a comedy about a sex robot. that comes out an embarrassingly unfunny variant on Weird Science
Adam Sandler produced film that is a variant on the bodyswap standard in which Rob Schneider and Rachel McAdams switch bodies. Much crass humour ensues in between a good-naturedly all-inclusive message
An excruciating comedy built out of the basics of Mr Ed where Bobcat Goldthwait gives an imbecilic performance as an idiot who inherits a talking horse
A raucous and vulgar, if at times undeniably funny, comedy where John Cusack and three friends use a hot tub at a resort that causes them to travel back in time to the 1980s.
Why we needed a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine is a big question. Essentially, Back to the Future Part II meets The Hangover, all this does is wind the original’s amiable coarseness up by a factor of ten
A variant on the much more charming Mad Monster Party?, an animated film featuring cute cuddly versions of the Famous Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, wolfman etc) with Adam Sandler voicing Dracula
I had little enthusiasm for this, I tend to like my classic monsters serious rather than defanged – these Hotel Transylvania films are so watered down, Dracula doesn’t even get to drink blood
I’m not a fan of the Hotel Transylvania films and their reduction of the Famous Monsters to slapstick yocks. This is exactly the same as the preceding films, no better, no worse and with only minute plotting difference
Minus Adam Sandler this time, the Hotel Transylvania series trots out a fourth entry. Here, in some search for novelty on what has gone before, the monsters are turned back into humans
Adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novel made as a comedy vehicle for Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Given the duo’s reputations as comics, the results are fairly excruciating
Amidst the Anglo-horror cycle of the 1970s, there was this throwback to the 1940s styled Old Dark House comedy. Made as a vehicle for comedian Frankie Howerd, this only demonstrates how creaky the genre was
A shot during the Covid lockdown film. An amiable comedy set on the last day of the world where Zoe Lister-Jones and her imaginary younger self Cailee Spaeny walk across L.A. to find closure with the people in her life
Madcap slapstick caper comedy with Bruce Willis as a cat burglar. This was a massive box-office flop at the time but remains a lunatically out-of-control mess that is frequently hilarious
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
A completely madcap gonzo comedy that all takes place without dialogue, the live-action equivalent of a Looney Tunes cartoon. One of the most unique and creative films I have seen in some time
In the vein of the Scary Movies films, this offers the amusing idea of a mash-up between The Hunger Games and The Hangover where the characters are forced into a death match against characters from other media franchises
A lightweight comedy in which nerd Steve Levitt makes a pact with The Devil to have the perfect male body but soon comes to regret his decision
From the director of Hellbound: Hellraiser II, this is an unfunny monster comedy that plays out like it is trying to be a live-action version of the Hotel Transylvania films
Charming and delightful film starring Veronica Lake as a witch burned at the stake who returns to life in the present to make life miserable for her judge’s descendant Frederic March
Painfully unfunny big screen revival of the 1960s spy tv series. This has been reduced to a series of plotless gags that involve Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson doing nothing except bickering with each other
A very lightweight made-for-tv comedy where a nerdy teen signs a pact with a desperate agent of The Devil who offers him cool and the girl of his dreams
An absolutely delightful comedy from Maurizio Nichetti, a parody of Bicycle Thieves, which becomes a meta-fiction where the characters emerge from the screen and enter the modern world
A film about stupid people that for once actually is funny. This a raucous but often biting satire where Luke Wilson wakes up in the year 2025 to find that the stupid have inherited the future
Way back before Austin Powers, the James Bond/spy movie parody began here with this silly effort in which teenager Richard Grieco is propelled into an international spy caper
An appealing comedy remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man with Lily Tomlin as a housewife who starts to shrink after exposure to household cleaning products. One of the better films from the usually terrible Joel Schumacher
Joe Dante pays homage to Fantastic Voyage, the classic film about a submarine journey through the human body. Here Dante plays it as a screwball comedy but his in-joke heavy style failed to catch on with audiences
A live-action adaptation of the popular animated series, one of the spate of such films made after the live-action The Flintstones. Amiably silly and frequently slapstick fun that proves to be exactly what one expects of it
A video-released sequel to the live-action Matthew Broderick film starring French Stewart. This is played as much more of a cartoon and amped to a maximum level of slapstick inanity
W.C. Fields starring screwball comedy set at a hotel around a series of variety sketches and featuring an early prediction of television
Comedy about two idiot soldiers captured by alien women. The painfully unfunny routines, laughable vegetable monsters and attitudes to women make this one of the great unrecognised bad movies of all time
Ricky Gervais co-directs and stars in a comedy set in an alternate world where everybody tells the truth and he discovers he is the one person who can lie and how this proceeds to change the world
An inane invisibility film that plays out as no more than a crude 1980s teen makeout comedy with the addition of invisibility gags
Third entry in Universal’s Invisible Man series. Though less recognised, The Invisible Man series had a level of creativity higher than Universal’s other monster series. This one plays everything for broad comedy
A classic screwball comedy with Dick Powell as a journalist who becomes recipient of newspapers that predict tomorrow’s headlines. The same premise has appeared in a number of other works since.
A comedy in which Ray Milland is cast as a chemistry professor who becomes a baseball star after inventing a wood-repelling chemical
Abbott and Costello take on the fairytale as a vehicle for their usual inanities. This is the only film the two made in colour and financed it themselves, but is not one of their more inspired offerings.
This comes out like a comedy version of The Purge almost, where a future California lottery awards the winner millions if they can avoid every other person trying to kill them
An enjoyable comedy where a scientist is visited by his older self who has travelled back in time to beg him not to invent the time machine that he is about to create
A completely ridiculous thriller with Kevin Kline playing a fireman-detective who is tracking a serial killer. It is hard to tell if it was intended as a comedy but it managed to attract an impressive cast list
Extremely silly and at times undeniably funny spoof on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – here Dr Jekyll becomes a coke addict who snorts his formula and turns into a swinger with a giant afro
Amiable comedy about an annoyingly intrusive artificially intelligent mobile assistant that wreaks havoc on its owner’s life
Spy movie parody with Rowan Atkinson as an inept agent who is constantly tripping over his own feet. It is Austin Powers reconceived as a Mr Bean film but offering little that is funny.
Rowan Atkinson is a very funny man but try as I might I cannot get into these Johnny English films – they seem at best lame Austin Powers castoffs with gags designed for the single digit age range
Rowan Atkinson in his third outing as the inept spy. Atkinson is a talented comic but these Johnny English films, which are like less sophisticated versions of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Closeau, are the least of his comedy incarnations
Bollywood SF film that is like a version of Shyamalan’s aliens film Signs with a few dashes of The Mouse That Roared, all played as a comic farce with much singing and dancing
Director/actor Stephen Chow is one of the undisputed comedy geniuses of Hong Kong cinema. Alas, he comes astray with this version of the classic Chinese legend
A sequel to Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. Directed by the legendary Tsui Hark who leaps in with wildly fantastic regard but is also forced to incorporate Chow’s slapstick
Likeable comedy variant on E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial in which senior citizen Ben Kingsley befriends an alien visitor after its UFO crashes in his backyard. Few films are made with such an acute awareness of aging
This jumps aboard the 1960s fad for Jules Verne film adaptations but it has nothing to do with Verne and is instead a slapstick caper film about the building of a rocket during the Victorian era
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman set out to repeat the success of their hit Twins in this amiable comedy with Schwarzenegger as a pregnant man
A demented Jeffrey Lau comedy that seems to have no limits on how silly it is willing to be, while parodying just about every other film made around the same time
This was one of the first US films to depict the future. It is essentially Metropolis having been remade as a Broadway musical with an emphasis on comedy
A painfully unfunny Lindsay Lohan romcom in which she has good luck and Chris Pine has bad luck and they swap after a kiss. Lohan seems to regard this as an exercise in her adulation
The US remake of the French time travel comedy Les Visiteurs. With a script by John Hughes, this imports the original film’s stars but misses its comedy charms by a mile
Lightweight and likeable Meg Ryan romcom in which she is romanced by a chivalrous and perfectly mannered Hugh Jackman travelled through time from the 19th Century
Comedy in which reverend Rowan Atkinson’s home is invaded by murderous nanny Maggie Smith. A promisingly black idea ends up being delivered as a quaintly mumsy British rural comedy
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
Fourth and final of the Killer Tomatoes films by which time the slight appeal of the original concept has been well and truly worn out
This was the third of the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes films. This hits an appealingly silly and wilfully ridiculous note that makes it the best of the sequels.
A comedy where the Royal Family is wiped out and vulgar American nightclub singer John Goodman inherits the crown. Much comedic play between American vulgarity and British ceremony ensues.
A modernised version of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Whoopi Goldberg as a physicist who time travels back to Camelot
Stephen Chow excels himself in this comic take on the martial arts film. Sensational over-the-top fight sequences sit alongside Chow’s frequently sidesplitting comic hand.
Pitched as a parody of the martial arts moves in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In actuality, this is a witless and unfunny comedy that only takes a 1970s martial arts film and dubs it with a laughtrack
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
A bizarrely funny deadpan satire about aliens that have invaded the Earth and turned humanity into an economic underclass. With possibly the weirdest looking aliens to ever appear in an SF film
Film spinoff from a YouTube channel that features two comedians giving absurdly over-the-top survivalist tips. What works as a series of short clips has difficulty extending the gags to a dramatic plot
Lazer Team was an easy predictable comedy about four screw-ups that accidentally obtain parts of an alien power suit. This sequel is all the same gags on rinse and repeat.
A film from the comedy collective Rooster Teeth about four screw-ups who pick up power suit items from an alien spaceship only to find they are to defend Earth in a tournament
Film spinoff from the popular British comedy series sees the familiar characters entering the real world to meet their creators and deal with the cancellation of the show
Bill Cosby was massive on tv during the 1980s but when he tried to move to film it resulted in this bizarre flop of a gonzo spy comedy starring Cosby as a retired agent forced to return to the field
This seems to want to do for the lesbian vampire film what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie film. Alas, the film makes its appeal fairly and squarely into the crude, sexism of British lad culture