The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The last really good animated film made during Walt Disney’s lifetime and for the next couple of decades. Filled with cuddly anthropomorphism and charmed delights
This live-action remake of the classic Disney animated film benefits from Glenn Close chewing scenery in grand style as Cruella De Ville but the latter half essentially degenerates into no more than a series of Home Alone-styled slapstick violence scenes
Sequel to the live-action 101 Dalmatians remake. This brings back Glenn Close as Cruella DeVil and proves a far more enjoyable film that its predecessor
Cult director Takashi Miike jumps aboard the J-horror fad of the 2000s and makes a Ringu copy that substitutes haunted videos for haunted cellphone calls. Two sequels and an English-language remake followed
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
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
Passable animated film from Sony Pictures Animation, although the story arcs too closely resemble every other animated film for it to have much in the way of notability
A true story about a couple on a diving expedition who are accidentally stranded in a sea of sharks. A minimalist film, shot almost completely at sea, that works up incredibly raw tension
A low-budget spy/action film with entertainingly bizarre elements including a cryogenically frozen Hitler and the hero going into action accompanied by a baboon
I was fairly ho-hum about the first Orphan but this is a sequel that entirely surprises you
Blumhouse horror film based around the Parker Brothers boardgame. Modern multiplex horror films don’t come more generic than this. On the other hand, you cannot deny that debuting director Stiles White creates some occasionally quite spooky moments, it’s just that the rest of the show comes entirely by the numbers
Blumhouse’s Ouija didn’t get many good reviews but they proceeded with a prequel here. This is automatically the better film from the outset by employing Mike Flanagan, behind amazing works like Absentia, Hush and The Haunting of Hill House, as director, even if it comes out as one of Flanagan’s lesser works
A sequel to the Gonzo Killer Shark film Ouija Shark, this goes even crazier
One of the more amusing of the numerous James Bond copies of the 1960s featuring James Coburn as agent Derek Flint, this plants tongue in cheek and cheerfully spoofs the whole spy fad
Above average revival of the Nazi zombie concept in a film that has spawned two sequels. The plot of soldiers venturing into an old bunker is conducted with tight, lean suspense and some undeniably gory dispatches
Outpost was a solid and reasonably effective rehashing of the Nazi zombie theme; this was the first of two sequels. The first had a formula that seems difficult to mess up but this does – it’s over half the film before we get zombies after which we get Just the Same As Before and little more
Outpost was a modestly effective Nazi zombie film. This was the second of two sequels, a prequel that goes back to depict the original Nazi experiments
Sam Raimi’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz is now; the story of how a conman fools an entire land rather than of an innocent girl just trying to find her way home. The reconceptualisation of Oz comes with a colourful sweep
Giant mecha robots beating the crap out of giant monsters – what’s not to like? In comparison to the Transformers films, Guillermo Del Toro looks to find the soul of the robot jock – in essence, Transformers for grown-ups
Pacific Rim wasn’t Guillermo Del Toro’s best film but it was a fun attempt to imagine giant Japanese mecha robots battling giant monsters. This is a sequel but without Del Toro it is reduced to no more than one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films
Modestly effective film about a haunted suburban house. Debuting director Nicholas McCarthy produces a number of accomplished and eerie scares that stand him as a promising new name. The film weakens in the last act when trying to tie everything together with an improbable rationale
The Pact was a modest and rather effective ghost story about a serial killer hiding inside the walls of a house. This seems to be straining to find some way to justify any relevance a sequel – for one, where do you go with the premise? Another killer hiding inside a different family home?
From the awful slapstick-heavy trailer, the prospects for this seem dismal – less Paddington Bear than a reprise of the live-action Yogi Bear. The finished result confounds expectation and the story of a small unassuming bear at large in the world comes full of considerable charm
Sequel to the 2014 film based on the much loved children’s books … This comes with exactly the same mix of silliness, overblown slapstick and sweetness that made the first film work – albeit on a more elaborate budget – and succeeds with the same winning charms
Third of the Paddington series, this has more of an adventure film feel as it takes Paddington and the Browns to Peru in search of a lost city
One of the popular Beach Party comedies of the 1960s. Tommy Kirk turns up as a bumbling Martian to romance Annette Funicello
No-budget film that became a word of mouth hit, spawned a series of sequels and sparked off the Found Footage fascination that took over the 2010s. Unlike most of the films that followed, Oren Peli creates a creepingly chill atmosphere and some undeniable jumps
This necessarily lacks the surprise effect of the first film but still captures some of the same eerie dread anticipation as spooky things begin happening
The Paranormal Activity series still manages to produce a reasonable amount of eerie scares and jumps a third time around, although by now the claim to still being found footage is starting to strain credulity
The Paranormal Activity series has had a better run than most horror franchises up until now but the cracks are starting to show through here. This feels like it is straining to find some new way to do the familiar moves but fails to provide anything unexpected or original
Blumhouse resurrects the Paranormal Activity series for another outing about an investigation into the secrets of an Amish cult
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Less another sequel than a spinoff of the Paranormal Activity series, this takes place with Latino characters and in a whole different culture and socio-economic strata. While this gives the series a face change, everything else it feels like the shuffling of a well-worn deck of plot cards
The Asylum’s answer to Paranormal Activity Oren Peli made his film for $15,000, which is about as cheap as it is possible to make a film; this manages to look even cheaper – simply someone wandering around with a camcorder that is at best aimed in the general direction of things happening
Live-action adaptation of a manga about the war between body-snatching parasites that are capable of rearranging their host’s bodies. This plays out as a madcap version of The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school
Parasyte Part 1 was a manga adaptation filled with wild effects sequences. This sequel is an even better film that expands the characters and ideas in quite fascinating directions
Low-budget director Fred Olen Ray makes a softcore variation on Fatal Attraction with a vengeful Shauna O’Brien obtaining a job as the babysitter with the married man who jilted her
Ti West made the extraordinary X earlier in the year. Here he and the greatly underrated Mia Goth return to make a prequel
Pee-Wee Herman is someone who polarises crowds to love or extreme hate. The was the first film from Tim Burton who seems charmingly attuned to the kitsch banality of Pee-Wee’s universe
This spinoff from the Madagascar films is a lot more fun that I was anticipating – how could you dislike a film with John Malkovich as an octopus super-villain? Essentially cast as a spy parody, the film has a gonzo insanity that hits in with a manic delirium
Yeon Sang-ho makes a sequel to his international breakout zombie film hit of Train to Busan, appropriating the basics of Escape to New York to good ends
The third in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations with Doug McClure. This has much imagination despite the special effects often not being up to the task
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.
Chris Columbus seeks to emulate the success of the Harry Potter films with this adaptation of a Young Adult series about the children of Greek gods. The film falls apart due to Columbus’s typical banal cues and effects overkill
This sequel is marginally better than the first film (largely due to Chris Columbus no longer being in the director’s chair), being more dramatically engaged and with effects that feel less like random eye candy. That still doesn’t disguise the fact that the Percy Jackson series is no more than a lightweight and forgettable Harry Potter knockoff
Sequel to the British sex comedy Percy about the world’s first penis transplant in which the central character is now the last fertile man on Earth
Spinoff of characters featured in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and a greatly underrated film for Alex de la Iglesia. this pushes into even darker and more anarchic places than Lynch did, featuring outlaw lovers who are black sorcerers on a trail of murder and kidmap
When the Bough Breaks was one of the better 1990s serial killer thrillers; though it didn’t need it, this is a sequel, albeit with a completely different cast. While the original was clever, this falls into drawing too much from The Silence of the Lambs, the inspiration behind both films
Remake of the Stephen King novel that opened to very divided reaction. The surprise about the film is bar one central aspect it is surprisingly faithful to the book. On the other hand, the changes make the crucial difference
A sequel, or more correctly, prequel to the recent remake of the Stephen King novel. This has some legitimacy in that it is adapted from a story recounted in the book
An okay Stephen King adaptation that does nothing particularly wrong but lacks the impact that has caused people to regard the novel as one of the best of King’s works
Sequel to the 1989 Pet Sematary that reverses the sympathies of the original – now it is a child that resurrects a parent – but this never quite finds the same effectiveness
Sequel to the Lifetime channel adaptation of Virginia C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. Andrews’ prolific output of Gothic melodramas are really the horror equivalent of daytime soap operas. Though marginally better, this drowns in the same stultifying blandness as its predecessor
One of the animated Disney classics, if probably an overrated film. It throws slapstick and derring-do together in a likeable package
The first Peter Rabbit film was an abomination that trashed Beatrix Potter’s genteel stories. It made this site’s Worst of 2018 list. This is a sequel
Beatrix Potter wrote genteel stories of talking animals in the English countryside. This is a film so astonishingly awful in its treatment of the source material – it feels like someone drunkenly urinating on Beatrix Potter’s gravestone for lulz. The No 1 contender for Worst Film of 2018
Cult film from Don Coscarelli that takes place in a funereal twilight world and is filled with images of wild surrealism. Not a lot makes sense but the film is meant to operate on the logic of a dream. Several sequels followed.
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
The third of Don Soscarelli’s Phantasm films reunites many of the regulars and goes some way towards offering explanations for everything
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
Based on a non-fiction, fringe science book that makes claims that the US Navy conducted experiments that turned a ship invisible during WWII, this spins the idea out into a modest time travel story
A sequel to The Philadelphia Experiment where Brad Johnson is thrown into an alternate timeline where the Nazis have overtaken the USA
Horror anthology featuring four ghost stories from Thai directors. While all the segments vary in approach and style, this is a spooky and above average effort with the real standout being the final segment with an air hostess aboard a plane with a dead body in the midst of a storm
Fourth of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films, this lets all restraints go and becomes completely madcap
The second of the excruciatingly dull Swedish-made Pippi Longstocking live-action films
Third of the Swedish live-action Pippi Longstocking films and more likeable than the others due to capturing some of Astrid Lindgren’s absurdism
First of a series of Swedish-made live-action films based on Astrid Lindgren’s anarchic child heroine
Fourth and final of the Swedish live-action films based on Astrid Lindgren’s child heroine Pippi Longstocking
The second film from Joe Dante. Mounted as a quickie copy of Jaws by producer Roger Corman, Dante succeeds in peppering it with a lot of sly jokes and genre in-references
Another in the fad for 70s/80s remakes where Alexandre Aja for once captures the spirit of Joe Dante’s 1978 original by planting tongue in cheek and wading in with mind-bogglingly gory enthusiasm
The film that James Cameron would prefer we forget about. A nominal sequel to Joe Dante’s enjoyable tongue-in-cheek Piranha, this misses that film’s sense of humour and lets the show sink amid absurd effects
Sequel to the Piranha remake. Much the same as before but up one cup size. Well not really, the sequel is more like a joke that was funny the first time that becomes belaboured in the retelling
Another of Disney’s Tinker Bell spinoff adventures. This has some slickly produced animation and does some occasionally cute pieces of fanservice that tie in to Peter Pan but is ultimately fantasy being produced for the single digit age groups
Third of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and purportedly made without a completed script, this becomes bloated and sprawling
The second of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Johnny Depp and all the principals are back and much of the eccentric humour is present but the action has undergone budget bloat
After the two last lacklustre entries, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise starts to recover where the two new directors pull off some spectacular comedy-action sequences that go a long way towards recapturing what the series used to be
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is revived for a fifth outing. There is a new director in Rob Marshall but bar an energetic comic opening, he never does much that hits the zany heights of the previous entries
Enjoyably tongue-in-cheek pirate swashbuckler based on the Disney theme park that proved an enormous hit and spun off a series of sequels, as well as giving Johnny Depp one of his iconic roles
A gripping and particularly well conceived planetary survival story. The film that launched Vin Diesel’s career and he has never been better than as the lethal, tight-lipped serial killer Riddick
A rare Indian venture into the horror film, this is a haunted house film of modest effect that suddenly becomes a whole lot more watchable when it pulls a major M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist on us
The second of Disney’s spinoffs from Pixar’s Cars films featuring talking anthropomorphic planes. Like the first film, this is amiable and occasionally cute but lightweight. This is beginning to feel like a franchise that is spinning out thinning ideas solely for its own sake
The second of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s unsold Genesis II pilots. While you can see the series had some potential, the plot about the venture to a society where women keep men as slaves has a giggly silliness that feels like a throwback to 50s films like Queen of Outer Space
The film that started it all. This takes what could have been a jokey premise and delivers it in bold, exciting stokes. What elevates the film is Rod Serling’s script. filled with embittered soliloquies that become a biting commentary on the human condition, before the film reaches one of the great cinematic twist endings
The Platform offered a striking allegory with a prison where a banquet table of food moved down 300 levels each day. This is a sequel
A stunningly allegorical film that falls somewhere between Cube and High-Rise where people are trapped in a prison and forced to fight over food as a banquet table passes down the levels each day, resulting in a society where those at the top claim superiority over those below.
Slasher film where a girl is hired as a housekeeper in a remote location only to find she is being stalked by a masked killer and forced to survive with her bare hands. Two sequels followed.
The second in a trilogy of slasher films about people being staked by a maniac at a backwoods cabin while everything is secretly being filmed by tv cameras
Third of a trilogy of slasher films where people isolated at a cabin are stalked by a hulking maniac in a barbed wire mask. This mixes the formula of the previous films up in some interesting ways
Disney bases an animated film on the historical character but warps the story considerably. It feels that this is a Disney animated film made more to adhere to Political Correctness than it is a good one
One of the better among the cheap video-released sequels to their animated films Disney released during the 1990s/2000s, this actually works better than the original
The third of the Poltergeist sequels, which moves the locale to an apartment building and is better than its predecessor thanks to a series of eerie mirror effects
Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that doesn’t always make sense but pulls its effects off flawlessly
Sequel to Poltergeist that without Tobe Hopper in the director’s seat is an unimaginative by-the-numbers effort
Produced by Bloody Disgusting, an anthology from different directors about a series of mysterious alien portals that appear around the world
An appealing bittersweet film based around the improbable premise of a young girl finding what she believes is one of Santa’s reindeer. In a genre that usually deals in sugary sentiment, this has a much more rewarding downbeat realism
This takes the previous year’s big hit of Aliens and fuses it with The Most Dangerous Game, swapping that story’s bored aristocratic hunter for an alien hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger and a team of soldiers in the jungles of South America
Shane Black, a writer-director with a reasonable cult following, makes the sixth Predator film (he also appeared as an actor in the original). Black shakes the series up, introduces a number of new ideas and makes an okay entry
Predator was one of the better Alien/Aliens copies of the 1980s. This sequel does little more than serve the same up all over again bar the substitution of a near-future L.A. for the jungle but manages to generate a reasonably intensive ride out of the action
The ninth Predator film. This changes the mix quite considerably from the usual alien huntsman vs human prey formula we have had so far. It also offers a return to the Alien universe, although not quite what we expect
The Predator series continues. Dan Trachtenberg, the director of Prey, makes an animated offering that tells three stories of encounters between human and Predator in different eras of history