The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A gender-swapped remake of What Women Want in which Taraji P. Henson gets the ability to read men’s thoughts. Henson displays no talent for comedy and this is a spectacularly unfunny film
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around
Disappointing adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel from Adam Rudolph that substitutes Vonnegut’s satire for clumsy, ham-fisted farce that never gives us any clear idea what it is satirising
From the top wrestling superstar in the world in the early 00s to movie action hero to being dressed in a pink tutu with fairy wings, it is hard to believe that Dwayne Johnson’s box-office star would have ever recovered from this family film embarrassment that sees him cast as a fairy
Comedy in which God appears to Jim Carrey and grants him His powers for one week. Expectedly the film is of zero theological depth and all about Carrey going completely over-the-top
Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel is turned into a comedy vehicle for Jackie Chan. One of Chan’s biggest flops, an overblown turkey packed with celebrity cameos and replacing Verne’s adventure with incredibly unfunny slapstick
This seems like it had all the elements to be a biting satirical crosscut of the 1970s in which the US President holds a telethon to keep the country from going bankrupt but flounders in a series of unfunny skits
Eddie Murphy’s presence is not enough to lift the lame premise of this comedy where he is given a curse where he has a thousand words to say before he dies … a film that has a soggy marshmallow heart rather than one that lets Murphy loose to do what he does best
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.
Another crude and witless genre parody in the vein of Jason Friedberg-Aaron Seltzer of Epic Movie, Disaster Movie et al notoriety. I there is anything worse than that it is surely a failed attempt to imitate them
Bizarre comedy where Nicolas Cage is a literary agent who believes he is a vampire. Cage gives the most absurdly over-the-top performance ever put on film
Mel Brooks had a huge hit with Young Frankenstein, an affectionate spoof of the Universal Frankenstein films. Two decades on he returns to do the same for the Dracula film but with far more scattershot results.
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
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
Unfunny Ivan Reitman comedy with Luke Wilson being stalked by his psychotic superheorine ex Uma Thurman
One of Hollywood’s misguided attempts to appropriate the Wu Xia film. This is turned into an Eddie Murphy comedy vehicle where neither his live wire presence nor the fantasy elements gel together
An inane comedy in which a wimpy teenager goes on a date with Liane Curtis who then becomes possessed by The Devil who is pursued by a chaser of devils
Comedy where the East Side Kids/Bowery Boys encounter Bela Lugosi running a Nazi fifth column operation from a haunted house, although the ghosts part eventually proves misleading
The first in a popular series of comedies, this spoofs the recent hits of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the most vulgar and witless way possible
This sets out to parody the Lord of the Rings fantasy. Or at least you think that is what it is trying to do. All suspension of disbelief is killed by a series of grating and anachronistic quips
David Zucker takes over the reins of the franchise from the Wayans Brothers. With a lack of big scary movies in 2002 to parody, the film takes a scattershot approach, parodying any film at all
Just when you thought that this witless and unfunny series has died off, it drags itself out of mothballs for another outing. As with the other entries, it is a bunch of recent movies overrun with crude, moronic gags
Unfunny comedy in which Harland Williams plays a bumbling idiot who is recruited to take part in a NASA Mars landing mission. Slapstick inanity results.
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.
The live-action film version of the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series. Despite James Gunn on script, this is not very good, a one-dimensional, no-brain film trying to look like a one-dimensional, no-brain cartoon
The big screen remake of the 1960s sitcom about a wacky alien visitor. However, this all of the original’s amusements promptly gets buried under frenetic slapstick and cheap CGI gags
Riding high on the success of The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby flopped on cinema screens with this comedy where he appears as a father who returns as a ghost to sort out his children’s lives
The title sounds like that of an erotic horror film but all that we get is an inane teen comedy in which Scott Valentine turns into a demon whenever he gets turned on
A light whimsical short story about a daydreamer is turned into a bloated and ponderous vehicle for the musical and comedy set-pieces of the perpetually wet-eared Danny Kaye
Film spinoff from tv’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its deplorable habit of inserting jokes into old films. Here it is the turn of This Island Earth, which is a far better film than the attempt to send it up here
The first of the sequels to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Featuring the first screen appearance of George Clooney.
Comedy vehicle for Marlon Wayans in which he becomes a test subject for a sense-heightening drug. Marlon’s natural comic energy far exceeds the slightness of the premise
Popular entry among the early 1970s spate of British sex comedies featuring Hywell Bennett as the recipient of the world’s first penis transplant. Mostly this serves as an excuse to string a series of sexual encounters together.
Unfunny comedy in which Eva Longoria dies and returns as a ghost to make life miserable for fiance Paul Rudd as he becomes involved with another woman
Vin Diesel seemed to fairly much kill his career off with this excruciating comedy in which he deflates his tough guy persona by playing off a bunch of kids
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
The slasher film only really came into existence in 1980 but was so prolifically milked that by even two years later it had spawned its own sub-cycle of parodies. This hits in with a wacky anything goes absurdity but, aside from an amusing Carrie spoof, little of it is funny
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
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
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
This wants to conduct an Airplane styled parody of The Exorcist to which extent it conducts the coup of casting a grown-up Linda Blair
A flop theatrical film spinoff from the Get Smart tv series with Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart trying to stop a bomb that renders people naked
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
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.
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.
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
A tv movie revival of the hit 1980s tv sitcom ALF. Looking back it’s hard to wonder what ever seemed funny about the show at the time
There is irresistible appeal to the idea of a comedy that conducts a spoof of the Biblical Rapture. Despite a script from one of the Bill and Ted writers, this emerges as a remarkably unfunny film that consists of about an hour of Craig Robinson delivering crude sexual innuendos
Rather silly and not particularly funny Disney comedy in which a teenager returns from the dead as a zombie and nobody seems to notice any difference. Does contain a number of before-they-were-famous names
The third of Disney Dexter Reilly films in which teen inventor Kurt Russell creates a super-strength cereal
One of a spate of films of the 90s/00s that adapted animated tv series in live-action – in this case Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Here all we get is the animated characters emerging into the real world for slapstick inanity
The 2003 Freaky Friday was one of the better Disney remakes with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan giving inspired performances as mother and daughter who swap bodies. The two reunite for a sequel here
Well produced but otherwise unfunny comedy about a group of bumbling Martian invaders who turn up on Halloween, following a rebroadcast of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show
Sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Steve Carell is transformed into a modern-day Noah. This was pitched to the Christian audiences but feels like a series of lame gags playing on Noah and the Ark devoid of any biblical context
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.
This has a cute title pun but otherwise is a feeble SF comedy
This was the first in a series of excruciating comedies that pairs hapless Donald O’Connor with Francis, a talking mule. Six sequels followed
1980s comedy in which teenager Robert Sean Leonard is bitten by a vampire on a one-night stand an has to deal with the complications of turning into one while keeping it a secret at school
The Three Stooges are transplanted into a retelling of the fairytale, although their slapstick inanity feels drowned out amid the maudlin banality and Cinemascope spectacle
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
Terry Jones of Monty Python fame makes a comedy with Tim Robbins as a non-violent Viking on a quest to bring about Ragnarok. A film that seems to think it is funnier than it ends up being
Another failed attempt to film the works of Kurt Vonnegut where Vonnegut’s ironic pessimism ends up as witless slapstick chaos on screen
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
A wannabe entry aboard the HK supernatural fantasy fad of the late 80s/early 90s sparked by the likes of the Mr Vampire and A Chinese Ghost Story films … This, which involves a time travel plot, is crippled by a pandering to a slapstick inanity that makes it a painful watching experience
Following the highly successful Animal House, this was the second of the films made using the name of the satirical magazine National Lampoon and is a feeble parody of the slasher film
The painfully unfunny films of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are movie parodies, mostly a random assortment of films and celebrities of the last six months run over with crude and vulgar jokes. In this case, they take on parodying principally 300
Unfunny comedy in which husband and wife John Ritter and Pam Dawber are trapped in Hell, which consists of various parodies of popular tv shows
The most bizarre of the variants on the buddy cop film that came out after Lethal Weapon in which Anthony Michael Hall is partnered with a gnome. Directed by makeup effects man Stan Winston and an embarrassment to all involved
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
A not very funny science-fiction spoof that has been intended in the vein of Airplane/Flying High but sending up Alien – one where the creature also gets to sing.
A majorly unfunny film about the arrival of aliens in Hawaiian shirts that do bad stand-up comedy routines and tell everybody’s embarrassing secrets
Light fantasy comedy with Audrey Landers as a writer who befriends the ghost of a starlet played by real-life sister Judy Landers
Witless and inane comedy in which nerdy high school student Daniel Roebuck is thrown back in time to the Stone Age where he romances cavegirl Cindy Ann Thompson
Styled in the same movie parody style vein as Airplane, this digs into the spy movie, although in actuality it is more of a scattershot spoof of films of then-recent vintage. Leslie Nielsen found regular employ in these types of film
In the 1960s, a number of popular comics made films about the Space Race. This was a vehicle for Norman Wisdom, a minor British comic of the era, and has him enrolled in the Navy and launched into orbit
Excruciating West German-made vampire sex comedy (that doesn’t feature Count Dracula despite the title). Painful and agonisingly unfunny comedy routines directed by someone who has no idea how to set them up
Light fantasy comedy where Glenn Close plays a housewife who is possessed by the ghost of Maxie, a Hollywood starlet who is determined to revive her career
Unfunny John Landis film with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd as two bumbling CIA agents. This aspires to being one of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road films but only arrives at inane slapstick
It is hard to believe this ever received a greenlight, a film in which Andrew McCarthy falls for a storefront mannequin (Kim Cattrall) who comes to life. The comedy has an excruciating inanity
Probably the worst of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer witless and painfully unfunny films – this just consists of a series of vulgar gags run over a bunch of scenes from films that came out in the last twelve months
Excrutiatingly unfunny Australian film that has taken an old Italian 1960s Italian Hercules film and redubbed it with a comedy rifftrack
The first Weekend at Bernie’s had the lame concept of two jerks forced to pretend that their boss’s body was still alive. For the sequel, the body is resurrected by voodoo
As with numerous examples in the zombie and killer shark film of recent, the idea has been to parody an existing title with the addition of a monster and a pun on the original’s title. Essentially what we have is a Scary Movie-like parody of the true-life rapper tale Straight Outta Compton but with the addition of a giant snake
Cheap and feeble-minded invisible man comedy that was made as part of the short-lived early 80s 3D fad. The first starring role from Steve Guttenberg
Mary Tyler Moore stars as a beatnik in a bizarre comedy where people are infected with a virus that makes them happy
This was the eighth of the Carry On films. The popular British comedy series turn their bawdy sights to conducting a spoof the James Bond film during the height of the spy movie fad
Bizarre effort in which actors play Laurel and Hardy who are engaged in a comedic caper against a mummy. The film is all excruciating knockabout slapstick
An excruciatingly unfunny teen comedy with Brendan Fraser as a caveman who is unfrozen in the present-day. The film served to introduce Pauly Shore, one of the most annoying figures to ever appear on screen
The worst film from the usually great Larry Cohen, an unfunny comedy in which a household is taken over by a witch. Bette Davis quit soon into shooting and is replaced partway through by Barbara Carrera
A ridiculous American conservative satire that turns Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a heavy-handed farce where a Michael Moore lookalike is made to see the error of his liberal ways
A mind-boggling oddity – a slapstick comedy Western where there seems no limit on how nutty things are allowed to go, including characters venturing to Heaven and Hell
This seems to be intended as a parody of a 1960s beach party film but with the addition of comic aliens. Well and truly a black star film, this is excruciating on every level
No-one is pretending that the Bill Murray summer camp comedy Meatballs was a masterpiece but it looks a work of art in comparison to this unfunny sequel, which also throw in a stiff E.T. lookalike
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
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 live-action film adaptation of the old animated tv show with Brendan Fraser in the title role as a bumbling mountie. This drowns in excruciating slapstick and one-dimensional pantomime caricatures
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
A sequel to the teen psychic powers comedy Zapped! that takes things even more crass and vulgar
One of several vampire comedies that came out in the 1980s , an unfunny effort with a young unknown Jim Carrey as a teen looking to lose his virginity being seduced by vampire countess Lauren Hutton
A comedy in which Griffin Dunne’s penis begins talking to him. Contrary to expectation, most of the film is PG-13 but some of the films attitudes and unfunny routines are fairly mind-boggling