The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A cyborg is a human (or in some cases alien) whose body has been replaced by mechanical parts. In its generalised usage a cyborg has come to mean someone who has used mechanical replacements for damaged parts or to enhance their abilities. The Transhumanist movement has embraced the possibility of cyborg replacement and refers to it as Augmentation.
On screens, we have had a range of cyborg heroes and superheroes ranging from The Six Million Dollar Man to RoboCop. The 1980s gave us a whole slate of evil cyborgs or action films with cyborgs battling in post-apocalyptic futures. The Cyberpunk Films genre depicts futures where such enhancements has become commonplace.
Zack Snyder’s original cut of Justice League is a magnificent work that restores much character depth and story. I would far rather watch this than any of the recent MCU films
Exceptionally written UK mini-series from Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies following a diverse family throughout the 2020s that become a projection of current trends turned nightmarish
Another Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film about a Yakuza heir who is blown apart by rivals and then rebuilt with cyborg attachments
One of the best Disney animated films in ages. Has the winning concept of the secret lives of the characters inside videogames. Imagine Tron by way of Toy Story. The animators have clever fun with the idea, while the film creates a character arc that become the strength of the film
Canadian film about a man rebuilt inside a cyborg body. What started as a Frankenstein film is turned into a copy of The Terminator
The popular V/H/S series, an anthology of Found Footage horror tales, is revived for a fourth entry
Leigh Whannell, James Wan’s BFF and co-writer on the Saw and
One of the more cheesily entertaining among the Italian-made ripoffs of Mad Max 2 during the 1980s (as well as more than a few dashes of Escape from New York). The film works up a moderate head of steam
Time travel, Nazis in UFOs and a Nazi-ruled alternate timeline, giant robot spiders – ok, I’m sold. A surprisingly good little film where the fact that this is also made on a low budget and with a good deal of conceptual constraint makes it all the more creative an effort
Disney animated film that proved a flop, this lazily remakes Treasure Island set in space. The result is bad science-fiction with sailing ships in space, Ben Gumm as a malfunctioning robot and so on
Nick Willing conducts the first of his SF revampings of popular tales. Here The Wizard of Oz is reworked into a Steampunk fantasy with some startling reinterpetations of the familiar characters
An Australian entry in the 1980s time travel film fad featuring Carrie Fisher engaged in a war across time in a time-travelling city
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
Shinya Tsukamoto’s third Tetsuo film is a disappointingly commercial concession that waters down all of the surrealism and wild sexual fetishism that made the first film so amazing
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
Charles Band film directed by David DeCoteau, a lame softcore comedy where two guys travel back from a future where sex is outlawed and end up in a girl’s boarding school
The fifteenth Godzilla film, the last of the classic series, featuring a return of Mechagodzilla from the previous film. Original director Ishiro Honda returns to the series and reclaims it from the juvenile focus it had taken over the last few films to make the best entry of the 1970s
Japanese movie made for international sales where a scientist has built a race of amphibian cyborgs to take over the world
The fourth Terminator film is slightly better than you would expect of something directed by the empty-headed McG. There are some undeniably spectacular action sequences, although the film still stands too much in the shadow of what has gone before
A hodgepodge of competing elements – an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger, a soft reboot, alternate timelines, reintroduction of the familiar, twists to the familiar – that make no sense on a narrative level, least of all come anywhere near what James Cameron delivered back in the first two films
The sixth Terminator film that boasts the return of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the franchise. After the troughs of Terminator: Genisys, this makes one forget about the last three sequels
Another videogame adapted film, this has almost entirely been conceived around a series of slick fight sequences and little else
The first film featuring DC Comics; Teen Titans, a spinoff from the Teen Titans animated series
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
Film spinoff from the animated tv series Teen Titans Go! This hits in with an hilairous barrage of one-liners wickedly spoofing the superhero genre and jokes at DC Comics canon
What seems a routine low-budget action film is propelled into the decidedly watchable by a bizarre Philip K. Dick-ian twist that comes mid-film
Interesting conceptual SF film where the populace of the future inhabit a series of perfect avatar bodies. Despite a few logical quibbles with the premise, this does a good job in exploring the idea of such a world
One of the best among the incredibly underrated animated DC Comics films. A beautifully character-driven venture into the Superman mythos where Brainiac gets a magnificently theatric airing, while Supergirl undergoes some astonishing revisions
An animated film that seems premised on not much more than bringing various obscure DC Comics characters out of mothballs for one giant-sized punch up
The nadir of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, one where the desire to add a comedy element in the form of Richard Pryor overtakes and wrecks what is already a random and unfocused plot
A killer android/cyborg film from the genre’s 1990s heyday with a tasteless concept where a raped woman kills herself and is then resurrected as an avenging cyborg. A bizarre melding of killer cyborg film and I Spit on Your Grave
The second of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films where series regular Jonathan Frakes takes the director’s chair and delivers an exciting adventure, showing an excellent hand with the special effects. Far more satisfying than the previous film
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
Animated film that has the madcap premise of a top spy (voiced by Will Smith) transformed into a pigeon. A film that comes with such a level of comedic energy that it makes you think all hope is not lost for Blue Sky Studios, the makers of the interminable Ice Age films.
Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire get it just right in the second entry in their trilogy of Spider-Man films. The writing team deliver a fantastic Soul of the Superhero script while Raimi delivers some superheroic action sequences that are about as exciting as it is possible to get (*)
Planetary adventure in the Star Wars vein with a few shakes of the junkyard future look of Mad Max 2. This was made to exploit the short-lived early 80s 3D revival fad
Stuart Gordon takes a lame concept – a trucker film set in space – and makes something far more enjoyable than one expected with most of the cast getting into the spirit of the exercise
An alien invasion film that exists largely as a series of dazzling effects set-pieces, although proves frustrating when it comes to plot or explanatory rationale
A film ostensibly about alien abductees that has rather pleasurably been construed as a series of wild head-spinning twists that are constantly pulling everything we think we know is going on from under the audience, even if it eventually provides more questions than it ever does answers
The bad movie hit of Sharknado was a surprise to everyone and spawned sequels. By this point, creativity appears to have dried up – essentially, the Sharknado series has jumped the shark
By this point, the Sharknado series has gone from an amusingly tongue-in-cheek original to a series that is widely signalling that it is not taking anything that happens remotely seriously
Brian Yuzna usually makes well worthwhile films but this one about an escaped prisoner hunted by a killer cyborg dog fails to come together
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
From Italy, a blatant copy of Predator – only where instead of a military unit being hunted through the jungle by an alien, they are hunted by a copycat of RoboCop
Hong Kong-made copy of RoboCop where Amy Yip has her mind transferred into a cyborg body to track a mad scientist
Rather entertaining film from The Asylum about the machine revolution that overspills with madcap technological invention
The third Robocop film killed the series off with a disastrous decision to go for a PG rating and pair Robocop with a cute kid
With a script co-written by Frank Miller, this sequel comes in as a leaner work that abandons the campier excesses of its predecessor while expanding on its ideas with considerable ingenuity
I have to admit despite all the bad feeling for this, I liked it. While what went on in terms of the man inside the machine was cut and dried in the original, this has been shifted to give us a “the soul of Robocop” story . Moreover, the original’s biting satire of 1980s corporations and politics has been smartly updated to tackle some big 2010s issues
A popular hit that spins the cyborg cop theme through a Cyberpunk future, while director Paul Verhoeven piles on excesses of violence and black humour. A darkly funny satire of Reaganite America, this is an entertainingly slick comic-book of a movie
Part of the fad for gonzo Japanese splatter films we had in the late 00s, featuring absurdly over-the-top splatter effects and demented action sequences.; Concerning cyborg-enhanced geisha who wade into battle going through a deliriously silly range of bio-mechanical transformations
Second half of the two-part animated adaptation of The Death of Superman, which depicts the aftermath where Metropolis is puzzled over the appearance of four impostors all claiming to be the real Superman
Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon was intended as a two-part space opera saga. This first half emerged watchably and this is Part Two
Zack Snyder returns with a work that is all but a Star Wars film in name where he draws heavily on the basics of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven
This is a standard 90s direct-to-video SF/action film about warring cyborgs in a burned-out future. This has borrowed most of its moves from other films. Not a lot happens
Typical 1990s video-released effort that stands out by dint of a far-out idea – a cyborg werewolf – even if in the end the film does nothing with it and everything only boils down to a standard monster movie that takes everything from the Alien playbook
One of the best films from Full Moon Productions that locates a Western on another planet and manages a perfectly pitched homage to either genre
Another of the string of cyborg action films that low-budget director Albert Pyun made in the 1990s. This has a head-scratching fascination, featuring very weird cyborg sex scenes, the unearthly bodybuilder heroine Sue Price and a series of strange philosophical ruminations
The third of Albert Pyun’s Nemesis films about time-travelling cyborgs – not much plot just action scenes and some moments of undeniable strangeness
The first of several sequels Albert Pyun made to Nemesis. This copies The Terminator with bodybuilder Sue Price being pursued through East Africa by killer androids
Albert Pyun’s finest film. It is another of his standard killer cyborg films but comes with an often hauntingly written gritty Cyberpunk edge that makes it quite unique
Hands down the best film ever produced by The Asylum. How could one not like an entertainingly madcap concoction that features mad scientists, zombie stormtroopers, Nazi UFOs and Adolf Hitler preserved as a head in a jar attached to a robot body?
Wrongly referred to as an adaptation of the original Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, this South Korean Cyberpunk film does homage many aspects of Blade Runner
A sequel to the 2021 revival of the film series based on the videogame and a much more satisfying film than its predecessor. The first film was all origin story, but this plunges us into the actual kombat itself
The second of the Mortal Kombat animated films, this continues into another tournament, introducing a bewildering array of characters from the games amid a high degree of violence and bloodshed
Sequel to the Mortal Kombat film. While the first film was fun, here anything resembling plot has been stripped away to concentrate on fight scenes such that the film blurs into a single shapeless action sequence
A reboot of the film series adapted from the popular videogame. Produced by James Wan, this emerges as a kinetic and enjoyable effort that has clearly designed to introduce an ongoing franchise
Peter Jackson written-produced film that creates a fascinatingly original world. As always with a Jackson film, all the fun is in the massively scaled effects sequences and the design of the world. Alas, Jackson is not as well attuned in the story department, which often drags up corny cliched scenes
Mike Flanagan horror mini-series adapted from Christopher Pike’s book, this is set around a group of patients in a hospice who form a group to tell each other horror stories
Early Charles Band film made in the mid-80s 3D revival fad. A cheap planetary adventure that feels like a collage of other SF films around at the time, most notably Star Wars and Mad Max 2
A sequel to Meatball Machine, the film that started the gonzo Japanese splatter genre, filled with wild mutations, over-the-top splatter, a surreal sense of humour and an obsession with schoolgirls in panties
In the late 2000s, Japan has produced a series of films drenched in gore, featuring absurd creature effects and action moves; this was the first of them – a wonderfully cartoonish film with rival bio-mechanoid creatures fighting
A miracle of no-budget filmmaking made on a budget of $1000. A homage/parody of 80s/90s cyborg action films with some extremely accomplished effects posing and a sidesplitting ear for the era’s dialogue
A fascinating and well told work about artificial intelligence and mind upload. If the third act falls into disappointingly cliched patterns, this is nearly three-quarters of a strong and intelligent science-fiction film
Low-budget Mad Max copycat with Michael Paré as an officer from the lunar colony who comes down to Earth to take on the marauders of the post-apocalyptic wasteland
The sixth of the Sharknado films, this has the usual crew fighting sharknados throughout history. With this comes the recognition there is nowhere more ridiculous and over-the-top for the series to go
Action film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as a cyborg soldier fighting a one-man war against rogue police drones of the future. A fairly generic assemblage of cliches
Another of Albert Pyun’s post-apocalyptic kickboxing cyborg films. The film consists of almost nothing but action scenes as pint-size Kathy Long and a cyborg Kris Kristofferson battle warlord Lance Henriksen
Kingsman with its parody of gentlemanliness and action movie sensibilities, was the smartest of the modern spy movie parodies. This sequel has gone to the excesses of the Roger Moore Bond films in the space of one film
Another of the DC Universe Animated Films that rewrites the Justice League into DC’s New 52 continuity reboot. This changes the character’s origins and designs to little point
Though sold as a Justice League film, this DC Universe Original Animated Movie serves to introduce the Teen Titans to the animated universe
Not so much a Justice League film as an Aquaman origin film, which at least conducts a character oft regard as a DC laughing stock with suitable dignity
A strong, intelligent DC Universe animated film set in an alternate timeline where the histories of various familiar DC characters have turned out radically different
A relative disappointment among the mostly excellent animated DC superhero films, this pits each member of the Justice League with a matching super-villain only who seemingly kills them off
The DC Comics animated version of an Avengers film where they put every superhero under their roof on screen at once, including Justice League Dark, the regular Justice League, Suicide Squad and Teen Titans
Zack Snyder completes his run through DC superheroes with mixed results. The introduction of the characters works well but Snyder too readily throws established continuity out the window, while the visual dourness becomes tedious
The tenth Friday the 13th film. This tries to add novelty as Jason is thawed out in the future aboard a space station to slaughter anew. Featuring no less than David Cronenberg as a victim
A Japanese film about a cyborg-enhanced bounty hunter chick, the second in a series. This is sort of like RoboCop but played with a much more softcore focus
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
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
An alternate world take on DC Comics continuity where Superman snaps and creates a totalitarian police state and the other DC superheroes come together to stop him
A deranged madcap film produced by the Shaw Brothers featuring an enhanced superhero fighting off a bizarre menagerie of monsters commanded by an alien princess
After the ultra-violent Oldboy, Park Chan-wook puzzled everyone by next making this frothily surreal comedy about a girl in an asylum who believes she is a cyborg
A British film about a teen who gets a cellphone embedded in his head and develops the ability to tap into cellular and internet traffic. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes with an admirably gritty edge
Disappointing adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories. The film pays token acknowledgement to Asimov’s characters and universe and mostly seems interested in spectacular effects set-pieces
Another of Albert Pyun’s cyborg films set around a kickboxing competition where Pyun seems to have cut costs by using real competition footage with dramatically dull results
An intense kick of pure adrenaline. Imagine a version of The Six Million Dollar Man shot First Person Shooter style by hyper-adrenalised parkour junkies dragging the audience through a series of death-defying stunts
Full-length follow-up to Hard Revenge, Milly and the same mix of ferocious action and over-the-top splatter. Despite a large budget, this is marginally the lesser in sheer entertainment
Ferociously entertaining Japanese film about a cyborg-enhanced heroine on a revenge trail. Mostly a series of ridiculously over-the-top action moves combined with copious degrees of blood
Third of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, this successfully recaptures the nature of the goofy ensemble comedy caper that made the first film such a winner but seemed to be missing in the second