The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Eastern Beliefs is an umbrella term used to refer to various religions to emerge from the Asia and the East – Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto and assorted folk religions. No insult is intended to any followers by grouping these together by region.
Cinematic depictions of these widely differ depending on whether works are Western or made by Eastern filmmakers. Western filmmakers deal with cliche elements – exotic martial arts techniques, Himalayan monasteries where those steeped in yogic practices have gained advanced mental powers, occasionally artefacts of power from said countries.
Eastern filmmakers take a very different approach. Hong Kong Cinema and Wu Xia is afire with a wild melange of elements involving demons, deities, fairies, reincarnation, ghosts, the importance of luck, the use of written prayers as spells, and of course martial arts and swordfighting techniques that allow flamboyantly over-the-top fighting techniques. Similar elements of casually accepted ghosts, malevolent spirits and reincarnation play out in Thai fantastic cinema.
There is a body of ghost stories (kaidan eiga) that emerge from the Japanese tradition and often concern vengeful and wronged spirits. Imitators of these spread throughout Asia and there is a whole other topic for the horror cinema of the region with Asian Horror.
One of a spate of films featuring flyer heroes that were popular in the era. Adapted from a comic-book created by an actual World War I flying ace, this is a thirteen chapter serial but proves rather crudely made today
A twelve-chapter serial based on the comic-book superhero who these days is known as Shazam. Often regarded as one of the best of all serials, this has some decent action scenes and cliffhangers
Anime version of the classic tale Chinese legend Journey to the West made Osamu Tezuka, this comes with a fast-paced action and is undeniably likable
One of Woody Allen’s less interesting films, a modernised version of Alice in Wonderland with Mia Farrow as a bored housewife who passes through various surreal experiences
One of Steve Martin’s finest works, a variant of the bodyswap comedy in which he finds himself sharing his body with Lily Tomlin. Martin’s on-screen contortions are side-splitting
Big serious film about reincarnation that places the arguments for into a courtroom setting. Director Robert Wise and a young Anthony Hopkins fail to do much with a talk-heavy script
After Joel Schumacher killed off the cinematic Batman franchise, Christopher Nolan successfully revives it, bringing back the dark, psychologically brooding superhero and telling a Batman origin story
Painfully derivative US-made attempt to jump aboard the popularity of Wu Xia following The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are talented people involved who should have known better
Critical favourite that he is, I find Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s have some incredibly eerie, haunted moments. But these sit alongside banal, uneventful happenings that never seem to intersect in a plot
The film adaptation of a popular radio series about a Westerner who has trained in the Eastern mystic arts and uses his powers to create illusions in the fight against crime. One of the first screen superheroes.
My introduction to Wu Xia – imagine some vision of Kwaidan as directed by Sam Raimi, filled with sensationally beautiful and out of this world imagery and completely nutsoid fantastical battles with ghosts and demons
A Chinese Ghost Story was one of the greatest Hong Kong fantasy films; this remake gets everything wrong. The aerial combat scenes are replaced by CGI, the characters rewritten and the Buddhist elements eliminated
Sequel to the sensational A Chinese Ghost Story, this reunites the principal talents and actors but is not quite as snappy as the original, placing more of an emphasis on comedy
The second sequel to A Chinese Ghost Story, a slighter effort too reliant on the plot beats of the original. Where it does work is in the enormous degree of slapstick energy with which proceedings are conducted
A Chinese Ghost Story was a classic in Hong Kong cinema, followed by two sequels and then animated spinoff sold in the West under the name of series producer and cult director Tsui Hark
Another adaptation of Journey to the West. Coming from Jeffrey Lau, a director who specialises in rowdy, slapstick films, this is the most nutso adaptation of the story ever, winding in everything from alien visitors and Transformers
Thai entry in the Asian horror fad. A film that has a premise but little beyond that. It feels like it is being too nice to push its audience in any way with all the supernatural manifestations eventually blurring into a sameness
Darren Lynn Bousman is a director that leaves me wondering why he keeps attracting money to make films. Here he makes a work about a couple caught up in sinister rituals while tourists in Thailand
The third of Tsui Hark’s films based on the historical figure of De Renjie/Detective Dee. While the other films were rooted in a relative realism, Tsui lets all restraints loose here and goes way over the top
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
One among a handful of animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this conducts a passable telling of the origin story of the Sorcerer Supreme
South Korean anthology containing a trio of tales on the theme of the end of the world. The standout is the middle segment, a very Asimovian tale wherein a robot claims to have logically attained Buddhist enlightenment
A Hong Kong martial arts film set among the triad wars that is made with an assured blend of turbo-charged and frequently fantastical CGI-assisted action sequences
Hong Kong comedy designed to bring together an ensemble of local stars. The film starts out about the efforts to reunite a band and turns into a wacky effort where everybody discovers they are avatars of deities
A South Korean possession film that creates a fascinatingly outlandish and original plot by dropping the usual cliches to instead draw on Buddhism to create its own mythology
The idea of (some chapters of) the classic Chinese legend Journey to the West retold in contemporary terms. This makes for some amusing interpolations, while also acting as a social critique of modern-day Chinese society
Gaspar Noe’s hallucinatory Day-Glo vision of a soul’s departure into the afterlife all shot in first-person perspective. This could be a 2001: A Space Odyssey for the trance culture generation
A completely wild South Korean film set among the rituals of Confucian shamanism during the attempts to relocate a coffin and exorcise a troublesome spirit
The Pang Brothers are in this author’s opinion some of the finest genre directors in the world. This sequel to their breakout hit The Eye is an even better film that achieves some genuinely haunted moments
The third and weakest of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye films, this has occasional moments of spookiness but mostly feels made up of leftover ideas that didn’t make it to the other films
Willfully cryptic and baffling South Korean film that only ends up being dull and confusing. Disappointingly, the big denouement reveals that all we have is another copy of The Sixth Sense with pretensions to meaningfulness
Westernised homage to Wu Xia and the Shaw Brothers film with an American teen transported back to Ancient China, this has all the thrill of junior-grade martial arts tournament
New Zealand director David Blyth directs a ghost story that draws on Chinese supernatural. Blyth seems to be straining to generate anything vaguely spooky
From Andrew Lau, director of Infernal Affairs, a weepy Hong Kong comedy about a man caught up in a romantic quandary from his previous reincarnation
Low-budgeted independent US film that sets a ghost story around Chinese rituals. You can admire the serious ambition but the film only provides scares that are utterly tame
Hong Kong supernatural film about a new tower block that is haunted because its feng shui is out. This goes well beyond the initial fantasy it starts out as being into moments of out-and-out dementia
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
A depiction of the lives of Buddhist orphans in remote Myanmar, this also has a number of Magical Realist elements. What the film lacks in big dramatics, it makes up for with some genteel and lovely imagery
Made following the international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang Yimou makes an exquisite Wu Xia fantasy that is an even superior film, filled with visually stunning set-pieces and costuming
A key work in the cult of Alejandro Jodorowsky in which he plays a character called The Alchemist who guides a group on a mystical awakening. Surreal, challenging and mind-expanding
One of several cheap Italian copies that were made after the success of Star Wars starring Richard Kiel as a peaceful intergalactic police inspector who is mutated into a killer humanoid
This wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn’t cursed by bad luck – the death of star Heath Ledger. It’s the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism
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
One of the handful of animated Marvel Comics films. This confusingly presents a different origin story to the live-action Iorn Man film, while the major villain of The Mandarin is completely mishandled
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
Hong Kong kung fu films of the 1970/80s contains some bizarre crosshatches in a search for novelty. Here a kung fu practitioner takes on a sorcerer who raises ghosts and even Count Dracula to fight
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.
Massively successful animated film for DreamWorks, a comic riff on the martial arts training film that proves amiable and crowd-pleasing without ever being riotously funny
Sequel to DreamWorks hit animated film, this does little more than repeat its predecessor. The detail and texture is amplified to a work of art, although you cannot help but wonder if the under tens care about this
The Kung Fu Panda series are films for couch potatoes – martial arts films with a hero who proclaims the virtues of laziness, overeating and goes into combat with an self-inflated sense of his own awesomeness
One of the weird mash-ups of horror and martial arts popular in Hong Kong during the late 70s/80s. Despite a great title, this suffers from an emphasis on frenetic slapstick and caricatures
The greatest of all Japanese ghost stories. This is an anthology that tells four stories. Each is made with an extraordinary visual flair and great attention to colour, lighting and design
Live-action film adaptation of the popular animated tv series, this was widely seen as a disaster for M. Night Shyamalan. I am one of the few that liked the film for Shyamalan’s superbly designed world
Adaptation of a classic SF short story about children’s toys from the future that give them expanded mental powers. Much of the story has been dropped in favour of banal New Age thinking
Bernardo Bertolucci directs a biopic of the Buddha, which is interspersed with a modern story where a Western boy learns that he is the reincarnation of a revered abbot
Intriguingly different Chinese film about a wife who develops a mystery dream lover and the havoc this wreaks in her life. Largely a work about female desire, this seems to want to be a horror film
Hugely successful and probably overrated classic from Frank Capra about the discovery of a lost valley in the Himalayas that offers the secret of immortality
Stodgy, bloated musical remake of the 1937 classic about the discovery of a lost valley in the Himalayas. The film dies an ungainly death with a cast awkward in ill-fitting costumery
Madcap Hong Kong comedy starring Stephen Chow as a man sent back down from the afterlife to get three people to repent of their ways. Full of deliriously crazed action and slapstick
Lushly beautiful Japanese film from a Chinese folklore tale about a mortal who marries a snake goddess. An early Japanese colour film with fantastical touches way ahead of their time
Beautifully written film about an immortal. The result is an entirely captivating SF film whose whole effect emerges simply from people sitting in a living room talking
I had a liking for RZA’s Shaw Brothers homage The Man with the Iron Fists more than most other critics.This sequel has been handed over to a generic action direction, which certainly leaves it more slickly polished than the original but also quickly forgettable
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
The first of the sequels to The Matrix inevitably disappointed on the massive build-up. The Wachowskis leave more questions than answers, while the new action scenes are often jaw-dropping they also feel boiler-plated on
Third of The Matrix sequels and the weakest of the series. This offers one showstopping effects sequence, on the other hand it also leaves a host of unanswered questions dangling
Imagine a weird mix between the basic premise of Saw and Waiting for Godot. A South Korean film about a man inexplicably chained up in a park that is less interested in his escape than it becomes a surreal existential allegory for life
Gentle affecting film about a boy learning Buddhist life lessons as he journeys across Mongolia with an old man
Enjoyably colourful and silly retelling of the classic Chinese legend. This is one Wu Xia film that leaps aboard the CGI and 3D bandwagon to create a wildly fantastical airbrushed world that comes out resembling a flying swordsman film by way of Avatar
Sequel to the earlier The Monkey King, which was fun but this is altogether a better film. While the first film was more prelude to Journey to the West, this sets out on the journey and tells one of its stories. Directed with an immensely assured command of the live-action and CGi elements
The Monkey King films are a series of extraordinary works that exists somewhere between CGI and live-action and have a lushness of design. That is balanced against a dated plot that basically rehashes Cat Women of the Moon
A tv mini-series adaptation of the famous Chinese legend Journey to the West made for US audiences by Hallmark Entertainment. The story remains stolidly earthbound and the meta-fictional contortions the story has to add to engage in to have the monk hero replaced by a contemporary Thomas Gibson are bizarre
An animated version of the epic Chinese legend Journey to the West that was overshadowed by the hit live-action film that came out some months earlier that retold the tale with CGI
3D restoration of a classic Chinese adaptation of Journey to the West and the best film version of the story to date … an incredible film filled with psychedelically eye-popping animation and amazing action scenes, while gleefully celebrating a defiance of all authority
The first of several sequels to the hopping vampire hit. While the original was an adept and clever blend of fantasy and comedy, this promptly heads for loud and noisy slapstick
Fourth in the popular hopping vampire saga that spawned six films and an uncredited copycat series, all blending a manic mix of comedy, fantastique moves and Eastern beliefs
Hong Kong hopping vampire film that produced a string of sequels. The original is the best, a clever, fast-paced blend of comedy, supernatural and traditional Eastern beliefs
The last of the popular Hong Kong comedy series about hopping vampires. While the other sequels became very silly, this goes out on an inspired final note
Third in the popular series of Hong Kong hopping vampire films. As in the previous entry, a frenetic slapstick element dominates
The third of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films that feels like it has no point other than to steal $10 from your hand and give you a bucket of content free mental popcorn in return
A Hong Kong supernatural fantasy that has been made as a copy of the ground-changing A Chinese Ghost Story. The last film directed the legendary King Hu, the man who created the Wu Xia film
Chinese-made Wu Xia film – sort of a flying swordsman variant on A History of Violence. This comes on an impressive scale but also plays down the action element and leaves all the flying swordsman moves sitting on the fence as being possibly mundane
From the brothers who made the classic White Zombie, a similar film about an expedition to Cambodia to find the secret of creating zombies
The collaboration of Hong Kong directors Wai Ka Fai and Johnnie To have resulted in some utterly deranged films. This is a madcap one with Andy Lau as a bodybuilding Buddhist monk who can see people’s past lives
Sequel to the madcap Hong Kong fantasy Peacock King with Gloria Yip as a hell demon trying to adjust to living on Earth, which then turns into a comedy variant on Gremlins
A completely deranged film from Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers involving the resurrection of a dead wife to exact retribution. Full of ghost sex, gore and madcap creature effects
Sequel to the Hong Kong erotic film, an entirely unrelated work that inflates the original into a madcap Wu Xia film filled with crude, rude humour
Charming and delightful Hong Kong erotic comedy about a scholar who sets out on a journey of sexual freedom
Beautifully produced film version of the old radio superhero where director Russell Mulcahy does a wonderful job with the period design and adventure
Hilarious Stephen Chow directed/starring film where he parodies The Matrix et al with Buddhist monks using flying martial arts moves to aid a failing soccer team
Spookily effective Japanese ghost story about a mother’s pilgrimage around a series of shrines to raise her daughter’s spirit from the dead
Bizarre Bruce Lee conceived conceived martial arts film, a bizarre allegorical work of philosophy steeped in inscrutable Zen epigrams
Hong Kong director Ching Siu-Tung returns with a Wu Xia film made with extravagant Chinese backing. Wu Xia of the 00s have slowly taken to CGI and Ching readily adapts his moves to this with often breathtaking effect
George Lucas’s first sequel to Star Wars and a work that holds up every bit as well as its predecessor, in many places betters it. The story darkens the mythos and introduces new characters, while the special effects sequences are the peak of the series
Sequel to the 1994 Street Fighter film based on the videogame, this provides the wall-to-wall action that the first film needed but falls down with a wimpily miscast heroine
Mind-bogglingly bizarre documentary that conducts a tour of the bizarre practices of Chinese religion
Sequel to Stephen Fung’s Taichi Zero. The first film was distractingly self-conscious and hyper-active; by contrast, this is much less so, allowing it to settle down and start being the fantastic martial arts film it sets out to be. Even so, classic Wu Xia directors leave everything Fung does for dead
From the high-profile release this had, I was expecting it to be a Wu Xia epic – instead we get what feels like a martial arts film by way of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World where instead of amazing us with the fight scenes the director seems in love with self-conscious cuteness of his own visuals
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 anthology featuring episodes from three Asian directors originally titled Three. The better known Three … Extremes was a sequel whereupon this was retitled and re-released as Three Extremes II