The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A curse is an invocation that calls upon a supernatural power to inflict ill will against a person or persons. The curse is usually invoked by speaking words of power such as a ritual or invocation.
In the horror genre, curses are often placed on individuals, their families, their descendants, even entire towns. These can often occur on a particular occasion such as a birthday or an anniversary of some crime in the past. This may often be because of the persecution of a wronged innocent such as a Witch who was burned at the stake. Voodoo also offers a variety of curses.
In fantasy, curses are enacted by wizards and witches. Curses can often be responsible for afflicting a person with bodily transformation of some type (notedly The Beast in various versions of Beauty and the Beast). It can also afflict people with Immortality, leaving them unaging as punishment or until they seek restitution for their crimes.
Places can also be regarded as cursed where those that intrude bring death and retribution on themselves. This has even extended into real-life such as the tabloid belief that those who opened Tutankhamun’s tomb were cursed for doing so. See also Cursed Objects for artefacts that exude evil influence.
A B-budgeted hit from the video era concerning a possessed housewife. This is a film that has only ever been construed around the provision of cheap makeup effects at regular intervals, all of which hold an undeniable entertainment value in their cheesy ridiculousness
The English-language remake of the popular Japanese franchise from Adam Wingard. This essentially remakes the first film and is adequate in its own right but no patch on either of the original Japanese films
Tim Burton’s slide into mediocrity continues with this comedic update of the cult Gothic soap opera tv series, which is now played at a level of cartoonish unseriousness that resembles the Addams Family
Makeup effects man John Carl Buechler directs a film about a resurrected prospector come to enact vengeance against those seeking his gold claim
Jeff Wadlow made the smart Cry Wolf, a slasher film about a campus game turned deadly. In this Blumhouse production, he has simply remade that with a different game where the killer is now a demonic curse
The selfie is such a concept of the moment that I suppose someone had to make the first selfie horror film. The film suffers conceptual confusions and what starts out akin to something like Ring slides into more of a variant on The Den with sinister strangers stalking the heroine online
Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call was one of the more popular of the Ringu-influenced Japanese ghost stories, concerning a viral curse passed by cellphone calls. This was the second Japanese sequel
The first of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended as a soundalike copy of Snakes on a Plane, this ends up defeated by low-budget and one of the most absurd premises of any film in recent memory
Possibly the most conceptually demented film to come out of the 1960s-70s Anglo-horror cycle – one part The Fly, one part a witch’s retribution film about a man who transforms into a vulture creature after teleporting into his ancestor’s grave whereupon he is driven to enact a centuries old curse
Incredibly insipid animated film from Don Bluth about a kind-hearted troll that relocates to Central Park. This feels like a wannabe Disney film that is merely going through the moves.
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
A horror film based around the phenomenon of tarot cards, a surprise that nobody has done so before
Incredibly tepid New Zealand horror film about an American tattooist who unleashes evil forces after he appropriates Samoan cultural tattoos
A romantic comedy in which Amanda Pays has a curse that gives her the ability to read thoughts
An adaptation of an R.L. Stine book, a work of safe anodyne horror about zombies trapped inside a film made by director Dan Aykroyd getting loose and overrunning a town
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
Australian horror that sets out to combine US models like A Nightmare on Elm Street and a few dashes of Poltergeist with the idea of an Aborigine curse but emerges as poorly executed
Cheaply made attempt to turn the fairytale into a fantasy adventure where Beauty becomes a kick-ass heroine who joins the Beast in defeating an evil lord and witch
A British horror film in which people open an old 1980s videogame that is cursed and forces them to make horrible choices concerning the deaths of people around them
Dreary film in which Vincent Price is a magistrate who is haunted by a manifestation of The Devil for his witch persecutions. The publicity falsely tried to sell this as an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation.
TV movie about the historical discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter that inflates the tabloid notion there was a curse and so distorts the historical record that it more properly enters the realm of fantasy
An extension of The Conjuring universe with a film based on the Mexican legend of the crying woman La Llorona. This killed by the director’s constant straining for effect
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
Fruit Chan conducts an English-language remake of a Japanese horror film. A confused and hokey effort about a haunted film set that is only centred around the provision of schlock effects
Another in the spate of social media horror films, this is a blatant copy of Unfriended, albeit mashed up with Ring to create the idea of a cursed newsfeed. This is also the lamest of the bunch
The fourteenth Ju-on/The Grudge film, a reboot of the 2004 English language version from Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. This was dumped by its distributor and received some terrible reviews
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
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
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
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
One of the original Nazi zombies films with zombies protecting an oasis that hides a gold treasure. This was made by prolific exploitation director Jess Franco meaning that much of the film’s potential is drowned in cheap production values and bad dubbing
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
The question you ask going in is after seven Japanese films and a tv series, a Korean film and two previous English-language films, what is left for filmmakers to wring out a third American The Ring film? The answer seems to be not much – just a rehash of the basics for the 18-25 crowd
A film about three American girls who are haunted by a vengeful child spirit while in Thailand. Another post-Insidious film that uses a sinister adjective as title
Sequel to the Japanese original, not the English-language remake. This quickly forgets about haunted phonecalls and becomes even more of a copy of Ring, the inspiration of the original, and fails at generating spooky atmosphere
This holds the distinction of being the world’s first gonzo zombie film – oh and the first zombie musical too. Not many zombies (or nude bodies), the song lyrics are occasionally amusing but the film’s humour is schoolboyish, and the effort amateurish on the whole
A bafflingly incoherent effort – quite what it is about I am at a loss to explain. The sole distinction it has that it was repackaged from its anonymous original title to market it on the tail of Blumhouse’s Ouija: Origin of Evil despite the fact an ouija board only briefly features at the start
One of the earliest films from Charles Band. In the years following, Band went onto produce and occasionally direct a great many often enterprisingly cheap low-budget genre films – this is not one of them
This seems to have been slung together as a mash-up of Jaws and the 1970s fad for occult films. Ridiculous and badly made on all levels, no more so than the climax with a giant snake conducting a devil worship ceremony
Adaptation of the Finn Mac Coll legend, filmed in Gaelic with a cast that learned their lines by rote. An interesting idea that suffers a painful amateurism
Overblown production featuring Turhan Bey as the storyteller Aesop engaged in a romantic adventure
Disastrous tv movie version of the classic musical based on The Princess and the Pea
A painfully unfunny endurance test created by star Kevon Ward centred around the deformed, imbecilic hillbilly he played at Halloween shows. The film is little more than people playing morons in silly voices
This has to be the single worst killer shark film ever made and quite possibly the worst film of the 2010s. A shark film set in a Beverly Hills mansion where the nearest body of water is a swimming pool and where the appearance of the shark will reduce you to tears of laughter
Painfully unfunny vampire comedy from Cannon Films about a vampire teenager who becomes a rock star. This has one of the least credible premises I’ve ever seen in a film. Mostly it seems to have been conceived around placing various musicians of the day in acting roles with bizarre results
An incredibly bad film from the heyday of the VHS era. The incoherent plot involves hauntings and a voodoo curse before arriving at a totally surreal ending
Film based on the supposed real-life Bell Witch Haunting of the 19th Century. Director Courtney Solomon’s constant efforts to make us jump become so tedious that they produce no effect at all.
Maybe the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever, a version made for tv that fails utterly to project any of Poe’s gloom and despair, while a badly overacting Martin Landau is disastrously miscast as Roderick Usher