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.
Another version of the popular figure from Japanese urban legend, which has appeared in a number of films. This is an anthology where four Japanese directors have come to L.A. to shoot a series of strictly average short horror tales, not all of which feature the Slit Mouth Woman
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
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
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
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
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
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
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 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
Harsh and brutal work written by Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame wherein a group of jocks harass and tear apart the life of Bella Heathcote after she accidentally blinds the leader’s eye in the process of rejecting his advances
Sweet and tender anime about a young girl who has a curse placed on her that causes her to lose her voice and how this actually allows everyone around her to voice things they don’t say.
The two most popular Japanese horror franchises come together to fight it out. Both series work on the provision of intensely uncanny effect but brought together the result is diluted at best
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
This takes its title literally – it is made by a woman director and there are no men on screen. The result is somewhere between The Descent and The Blair Witch Project with an undeniably surprise twist ending
From the acclaimed Simon Rumley comes this true crime drama about the execution of an innocent man and the supposed curse he placed on all who condemned him
The Asylum takes on Homer. One is tempted to say Homer loses to The Asylum but this freely rearranges the basics and The Asylum deliver a solid effort that rises above the mediocrity they usually aim for
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings
Modest effort in which Scout Taylor-Compton becomes possessed by an evil spirit while in Thailand. Nothing groundbreaking but this creates reasonable atmosphere
Film based on an urban legend film about a boogeyman that kills everybody that speaks its name. Director Stacy Title creates one or two haunting and unusual scenes but in every other aspect this emerges as exceedingly generic
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
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
Yorgos Lanthimos trains his a bizarrely deadpan black humour to make a horror film where surgeon Colin Farrell finds a strange malady has afflicted his family unless he kills one of them in sacrifice
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
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
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
Nobody much liked Maleficent but did make a reasonable amount of money, hence a sequel. The surprise is that in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, it is far better than one expected
May the Devil Take YouThe Evil Dead. Here Timo Tjajjanto makes a sequel and goes absolutely demented
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
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
The third of the Conjuring films, this lacks the presence of James Wan in the director’s seat while peddling an even more highly dubious Based on a True story claim regarding a demonic possession
A Spanish horror film that develops some reasonable effect in its story about a writer who moves to a small town only to find the locals are keeping sinister secrets
The greatly underrated Sean Ellis returns with a beautifully understated film about the hunt for a possible werewolf creature loose in rural 19th Century France. Everything happens in a state of careful ambiguity
Beautifully made anime from Makoto Shinkai about a young girl and a three-legged chair on a quest to close a series of portals across Japan and prevent unimaginable chaos emerging
Horror film about a viral curse that bends the victim’s sense of reality and illusion, this settles in with some undeniably creepy effect
A multi-director horror anthology where all the directors are Latin American
The most successful Taiwanese horror film of all time, a Found Footage film about paranormal investigators who witness a ritual and are afterwards haunted by it
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
Spanish-made film that feels like a mash-up of Annabelle and The Nun about the communion doll belonging to a girl who went missing that appears and curse everyone it touches
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
Paco Plaza, co-director of the [Rec] films, shows James Wan how to do a nun horror film properly. This is a prequel to Plaza’s earlier Veronica, telling an origin story for Sister Death
Eddie Murphy – one of the funniest talents of the 1980s – has been largely absent for much of the 2010s. He returns here with a Christmas comedy in which he is the recipient of a curse given to him by an evil Santa elf
David Slade seemed a promising directorial name several years ago with works like the charged Hard Candy, before making Twilight films and being lost in tv. Here he returns with a film set around a small town’s deadly Halloween rituals
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
A horror film based around the phenomenon of tarot cards, a surprise that nobody has done so before
Smile was a sleeper hit about a viral curse and created a reasonable spooky atmosphere. The surprise is that this sequel manages to still deliver the goods too
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes a film where Dakota Fanning receives a cursed box and will die unless she places several requested items inside