The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The first two Human Centipede films are masterpieces of twisted extremes. The third entry goes astray in giving the show over to Dieter Laser in one of the most over-the-top performances ever unleashed
Pixar have slumped into terminal sequelitis during the 2010s – this was only the second original work they have made during that time. While not perfect, it goes regains the creative heights from five years earlier
These I Spit on Your Grave films have considerable brutal effect. On the other hand, by the time of this second sequel to a remake, it does seem exploitative watching the heroine being abused again because the previous films made money
The finale of the saga comes with a tough, gritty edge that make it the best directed of the series. On the other hand, it builds well only to arrive at an ending that goes oddly sideways and throws sympathies to the wind
Sequel to a largely forgotten fantasy series. While never transcending formula, this fares somewhat better than the previous sequel largely because CGI effects have advanced since the original
The third of the Lifetime Channel’s films based on the Gothic incest melodramas of Virginia C. Andrews that began with Flowers in the Attic. The plotting is absurd and the film feels uninhabited by human beings
It’s not another Empire Strikes Back but it makes up for the prequels. A good part fanservice to the original – if overly reliant on rehashing elements from Star Wars – this also does many things right
A rather funny comedy about the making of a disaster-laden low-budget horror film where the filmmaking style depicted makes Ed Wood’s films seem like works of art
Dead Rising was another zombie survival horror videogame from the creators of Resident Evil. Although nowhere near the popularity of the Milla Jovovich films, this was the first of two films based on the game
Whether you loved or hated the crude and raucous, un-PC stoner/fratboy humour of Ted, Seth MacFarlane is back with exactly the same mix here. This manages to be offensive in an amiably inoffensive, even occasionally quite funny, way
The incomprehensibly manic antics of the Minions have a cuteness appeal that has overspilled the Despicable Me films. Here they get a film all to themselves with amiably lightweight results
This doesn’t have James Wan directing and is a far less interesting ghost story before doing a repeat venture into the beyond. On the plus side, incoming director Leigh Whannell does generate a fair degree of eerie tension
Divergent, the first entry in this Young Adult dystopian series, a poor man’s Hunger Games, failed the “I can’t hold any suspension of disbelief” test. This offers more of the same, plus lots of random effects sequences
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
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
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
A low-budget film about an evil doll that was made not long after Annabelle came out and boasting a similar Based on a True Story claim. Four sequels have followed
Contracted was a modestly effective film that depicted its heroine’s progressive meltdown due to a deadly infection. This is a sequel so sub-par you doubt it would even been released without connection to the first film
The first Avengers film came with a massive anticipation in seeing the characters come together and the snappiness of their interplay; here this seems more flat, while the rest is overrun by wall-to-wall action
The original i>Violent Shit films were a series of plotless, gore-drenched German films of the 80-90s. This is a very loose Italian-made remake that is more about the activities of an occult serial killer. Not very well made but there are a lot of homages to classic giallo cinema
Fourth entry in the eminently forgettable sword-and-sorcery series, this heads down into bad movie stakes by writing a series of grating quips over everything, while the action scenes exist in the realm of unbelievability that show that nobody is treating anything with the slightest seriousness
The fourth of The Asylum’s Mega Shark films and the best of the series where they get the balance of tongue-in-cheek absurdity just right and the low-budget effects prove surprisingly good
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
The Maze Runner was one of the better Young Adult films, creating an intriguing conceptual mystery; this sequel ignores all of that, even throws the book out and is essentially a jumble of random sf tropes that amount to no more than running, shooting and things exploding
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes was a fan-made epic fantasy film made with a high degree of creativity and professionalism; this sequel is slightly the lesser but still maintains the high degree of quality
Henry Rollins is a man who may be immortal. Sort of like a dark version of The Man from Earth, this is made by the wittily phlegmatic indifference of Rollins’s performance and fascinatingly littered clues about who he might be
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a rock musical about a war between a gaudily exotic Heaven and Hell. A full-length expansion of Bousman’s earlier short film
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
Sequel to The Asylum’s spendidly grotesque Hansel & Gretel, this pits the two characters against one another for contrived reasons to justify its title but is just cheaply made
The third of the surprisingly good Kickstarter financed Mythica films. This marks a changeover of directors in the series and is slightly the lesser but still does highly imaginative things with a low-budget
The end of Western civilisation is surely upon us that studios have devoted multi-million dollar resources to making four of these films and that audiences flock to them despite universally terribly reviews. Ok so maybe I hated this one marginally less than the preceding three
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.
Third of the Sharktopus films from Roger Corman, an entry in the series that is making no longer making any effort to take itself seriously
A film about giant fire-breathing spiders. This is lifted from formula by a sense of humour and even peculiarly brings many of the cast of the Police Academy series out of retirement
While there is little doubt that Edgar Wright would have made a much better film, this emerges with an engaging likeability. Less epic superheroics, this plays out more as a caper comedy where a good ensemble and comedic playing carry the show
Sharknado was an instant bad movie phenomenon; the first sequel felt a forced attempt to copy that. The good news is that with the third entry, the series gets the balance of tongue in cheek absurdity just right
I had little enthusiasm for this, I tend to like my classic monsters serious rather than defanged – these Hotel Transylvania films are so watered down, Dracula doesn’t even get to drink blood
Why we needed a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine is a big question. Essentially, Back to the Future Part II meets The Hangover, all this does is wind the original’s amiable coarseness up by a factor of ten
It took DC Comics the better part of a decade to catch up with the massive success Marvel Comics are having on screen in crossing their characters over. Zack Snyder comes to the party offering up THE biggest headline double-bill in superherodom
Nobody has good things to say about the 2014 reboot of the Turtles. This sequel is stuck with its legacy – giant over-sized Turtles that lacked the cuteness of the originals; bitchy non-acting Megan Fox – but comes out winningly by doing one thing – emulating the spirit of the original cartoon series
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
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
The seventh X-Men chapter arrives with a certain ennui. Bryan Singer creates some epic scenes but the sprawling ensemble and the series’ ragged continuity makes it hard to invest in the characters, while the new villain looks like a B movie wizard and the mass destruction climax comes surprisingly by the book
This was the fourth in the surprisingly good Mythica series of low-budget epic fantasy films funded via Kickstarter. This proves to be the best of the series yet
Train to Busan was a massive breakout hit from South Korear. Overlooked in the buzz was this animated prequel from the same director released at the same time. The zombie film and animation are an uneasy mix but this works well, if not with the same kick as Train to Busan
The Bollywood horror film is a rare and strange beast – what other horror film would you see that comes with song and dance numbers? This is a Bollywood possession film where, despite the use of local colour and custom, it is surprisingly still drawn from the cliches created by The Exorcist
Stake Land, set in a beautifully wintry post-holocaust world where vampires had taken over, one of the best films from Glass Eye Pix. This is a sequel that reunites most of the same elements from the original but fails to ignite them as memorably as the first film did
A massive letdown of the year. A sequel that brings back several of the original cast and gives it to Yuen Wo-Ping to direct but is merely slickly paced, uninspired action that substitutes CGI for the graceful wirework of the original
A variation on the killer clown film that does rack up quite a degree of tension and pushes the material for something edgy. A popular hit that has produced two sequels.
Pixar have never been the same since giving in to sequelitis but this sequel to Finding Nemo does recapturing some of their heyday. Not perfect but this has a winning array of new characters and some delightfully madcap comic set-pieces
Gene Roddenbery created a tv series that was about boldly going, confronting different ways of life. The choice to hire the director of The Fast and the Furious films to helm the film made for the show’s 50th anniversary says how wrong-headed the reboot series has become – all about cool young leads and hurtling effects sequences
Sequel in name only to Cloverfield, this takes place in a survival shelter where an unspecified catastrophe has happened outside but we cannot be certain what or even if anything at all. Okay but films like Take Shelter and The Divide did this much better
Hard Target was one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s better films, featuring an on-fire John Woo as director. While most have forgotten it, we get a sequel here that copycats Woo’s moves to a point of tedium
For some reason, The Exorcist is hugely popular in Bollywood horror – this is the fourth in a series of otherwise unrelated films about possession. The film conducts its borrowings not unentertainingly and is boosted by a script that turns what we think is happening on its head with quite a degree of dexterity
The Resident Evil films are designed for people who were introduced to drama via the Xbox, action sequences that can be assembled in random order and where it doesn’t matter what happens. I watched this, the sixth and final entry, with next-to-no enthusiasm but then quite unexpectedly it starts to work
The Divergent series is a fundamentally implausible scenario for people that think horoscopes are a profound insight into human nature. This is the most interesting of the films and gives us an imaginative future world
Sequel to one of the few original (ie. non comic-book) superhero films of the 2010s. this takes the interesting route of telling it as a investigative tv report into someone killing off all the superheroes
The third film based on Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books. This is essentially the same plot as The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks following clues to a deadly virus hidden in classic artworks around Europe
Roland Emmerich returns with more of the same. The problem is how to top the first film and here everything is so big and with so much happening that it cannot be taken in and slips into tedium
Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Tusk slides off the cliff somewhere between Johnny Depp’s incredibly silly performance, a nemesis you can’t take seriously and what largely becomes a vanity exercise in nepotism – Smith and Depp creating a vehicle to highlight their daughters
Sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. This has even less in common with Lewis Carroll’s book sequel than its predecessor did – a total of two scenes. The sets and effects are just pretty eye candy
The fifth of the surprisingly good Mythica fan-produced series that has consistently made a strong, rousing variant on the Epic Fantasy tropes on a low budget
I hate the Ice Age films and their tediously extruded adventures. The opening sequence here and its ignorance of even basic science is the most inane thing in the entire series
This, which is sort of The People Under the Stairs by way of Wait Until Dark, was greeted with terms like ‘an instant classic’. It is a well-oiled machine that produces some undeniable jumps but little remains in memory after it is over
I have lowered expectations of animated films these days but was surprised what an effortlessly engaging film this is. Essentially a version of American Idol but recast with talking/singing animals, it is a film that bursts with confidence and its own natural energy from every pore
Spinoff from the Harry Potter films – unlike those, written directly for the screen and feels more like it belongs there. The US locations open the story up, while the magic creatures and new ensemble cast prove a delight
A really good Disney animated film set in a world that imagines what might happen if animals lived in cities, this is an ingenious reworking of the talking animals premise that overflows with visual ingenuity and warm humour
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
If you want a genuinely scary spook show that will make you jump out of your seat, you would not go wrong with this. On the other hand, the Conjuring films with their claims to true stories of peddle superstition and fabricate most of their so-called facts
Ready or Not was a reasonable hit with audiences. Now Samara Weaving and the same creative team are back with a sequel that expands the game and polishes the black humour to a point of perfection
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
Less Captain America 3 than The Avengers 3 – the entire film has been conceived as a massive superheroic punch-up. The results move with an exhilarating pace, but the Russo Brothers haven’t yet mastered Joss Whedon’s hand with character humour
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
I am at a loss to understand who the audience for the Underworld films is – they are films devoid of minimal requirements like plotting and seem to only exist as a series of forgettable action sequences and interchangeable Gothic poses by characters in black leather – and yet we keep getting more of them
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
The Blair Witch Project was genuinely innovative. It is a surprise that we never saw a string of sequels. Adam Wingard finally does here but at a time when the Found Footage genre feels played out of moves
Lavalantula with Steve Guttenberg facing giant fire-breathing spiders was a modestly enjoyable creature feature. This sequel feels like a Sharknado wannabe with shittier effects and an unfunny sense of humour
Despite being a huge box-office and critical success and being nominated for an Academy Award, I am in a minority in disliking this. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that it appropriates the culture from my neck of the woods and only spins it out as a series of glib jokes and one-liners
Disney are now doing what Lucasfilm did with their novels in the 80s and spinning adventures off from even minor background characters. This is a grittier Dirty Dozen adventure but still recycles the same basic elements
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
The 29th of the Japanese Godzilla films. Coming after the longest gap in the series to date, this functions as a complete reboot of the original. Godzilla is reconceived as a fearsome creation amid epic mass destruction and what are hands down the best effects of any film in the series
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
The zombie film has become an overworked vein in the last few years. This South Korean film does nothing to reinvent it, just contains the drama aboard a train but manages to create a grippingly intense epic of the genre
The Purge was a routine film that caught on with audiences but the premise lacks the legs to be a franchise – for one, it is based on a future scenario that has zero plausibility. This makes paper-thin stabs in terms of social issues but all interest evaporates when the guns start blazing
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
Despicable Me was a delightful debut for Illumination Entertainment but has come close to making the studio a one-hit wonder they have milked that one hit for all they can
Ridley Scott makes a further Alien prequel that is an improvement on Prometheus. While the first half gives us the stuff of aliens hunting humans, the second less interestingly doglegs off into the story of a mad android
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 third of the MCU’s Thor films. This time Kiwi director Taikia Waititi gives much more of a comedic emphasis where you get the impression the intention has been to push the film in the direction of Guardians of the Galaxy. On the other hand, the superheroics are routine
Creep was a wonderfully creepy film with Mark Duplass as someone who invites a videographer to make a film but proves over-friendly to the point of highly disturbed. This is a sequel where Duplass returns for more
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
A revival of Jumanji. The original’s boardgame is now a videogame that sucks the players inside. The adventure elements are routine but the film’s has comedic fun with its bodyswapped characters
Blade Runner is a landmark classic but this is well worthwhile sequel from Denis Villeneuve that recreates the fascinating Cyberpunk world in more detail and expands out on the themes laid down in the original. Made with impeccably beautiful detail
The third of the Robert the Doll films. Here Andrew Jones takes a few leaves from the Puppet Master films in creating an origin story set during the Nazi era
Having been promised for a long time, this is the third of Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers films. Filled with some unworldly jumps, this is also the slightest of the Jeepers Creepers trilogy
The fourth film in the Dragonheart franchise. Is there truly anybody out there who was begging for this? Cheaply made in Romania where it seems to be straining to drag the original premise out for another film
Another killer shark film from The Asylum, the people behind the Sharknado. This is a sequel to their earlier Planet of the Sharks and takes placed in a Waterworld-styled drowned future
Adam Green has enjoyed some success with the Hatchet films; this is the fourth entry in the series … Most of the other films have consisted of not much more than buckets of gore and a host of genre cameos – here though, Green adds a considerable sense of humour to the mix
Nominally a sequel to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first film Resolution, this concerns a strange cult but expands outwards to involve a mind-boggling array of backwoods timeloops and reality blurrings
Tyler Perry is an accomplished impressionist but his two Halloween comedies appropriate elements of the horror film while having no interest in the genre. Here all the horror elements only serve to deliver a lecture on child rearing