The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A massive hit in South Korea about a firefighter’s journey through the afterlife and the trials he must undergo. On the other hand, the director seems to be trying to turn a moral redemption story into a superhero film
Sequel to the sarcastically amusing Bad Kids Go to Hell, which is set at the same school a few years later as someone starts eliminating people in detention
Lazer Team was an easy predictable comedy about four screw-ups that accidentally obtain parts of an alien power suit. This sequel is all the same gags on rinse and repeat.
The fifth of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. This comes with more of an outright comedy focus than any of the other films where Bay seems to be second-guessing his critics and spoofing his own peccadilloes in quote marks, only to produce the silliest entry in the series yet
Supposedly a The Texas Chain Saw Massacre prequel that offers us a Leatherface origin story. The least Texas Chain Saw-like of the sequels and eventually a far cry from the original
Prolific Z-budget director Mark Polonia makes something like the 18th film with Amityville in its title. This one concerns possessed lumber (!) from the Amityville house
The seventh of the Child’s Play films with the killer doll Chucky. I never much cared for the original series but the modern films – those with Chucky’s name in the title – have become a lot wittier and playful, constantly making jokes back to the rest of the series
The first in a trilogy of Spanish detective thrillers adapted from Dolores Redondo concerning ritual child killings, a serial killer and a local Bigfoot type creature lurking in the background
Another of the weaker sequels that Pixar seem determined to churn out. This lacks the fun among the anthropomorphic vehicles that its predecessors had with a hardly inspiring story about its hero feeling old and over-the-hill
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
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
The third film in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series. The motion capture effects are at an absolute peak of the art and the motion capture performances astonishing. The whole film almost seems to consist of heart-tugging moments to make you go “aww”
Audiences and critics alike hated the first Annabelle – I went into this prequel with little enthusiasm but ended up pleasantly surprised. All it takes is a change of director to David F. Sandberg who provides a series of genuinely eerie jumps
McG has now become the new inheritor of the title of worst director currently at work in Hollywood, as amply evidenced in this ridiculous film starring Samara Weaving as a Satanist babysitter
Whether we asked for it or not, this is a revival of the Saw series. The upside is that unlike the other sequels it comes from a duo of directors who have made some quite good films elsewhere
WolfCop found an appeal with its amusing title premise. Here the principal talents involved have reunited for a sequel, although the feeling is more that they have done so solely because the first film was a success
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
Skyline was a modest alien invasion film; this is a long-planned sequel. The new director has simply turned it into an action film and tediously deals with every alien encounter with gunfire, stunts and explosions
xXx, with Vin Diesel as an extreme sports junkie version of James Bond, was ridiculous. This second sequel surprisingly turns out halfway watchable, keeping the stunts moving fast and introducing an ensemble to build this out as a Fast and the Furious-type franchise
Cross was a low-budget attempt to copy The Expendables, featuring a C-list team of action stars (plus some fantasy elements). This is a sequel you doubt many people were burning to see
Live-action adaptation of the popular manga and anime series. Despite having a reasonable budget thrown at it and treating the source material with fathfulness, this looks awkward on the screen
Amnesiac persons wake up in a bunker filled with monstrosities. Sort of H.P. Lovecraft served up as a low-budget variant on Resident Evil
I’m not one of the haters on this. It’s the first Star Wars sequel since the 1980s to invigorate the series with fresh action sequences and place more focus on the characters instead of the action
Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart bid farewell to the X-Men franchise. One of the strongest films in the series, having been stripped of superheroics and allowed to play out as a character drama
A horror film that was the biggest box-office hit ever in Indonesia as a family tragedy stirs up hauntings and the occult. A follow-up to an earlier 1970s film that has become a cult hit.
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
The Man from Earth built up a reasonable reputation with a simple concept – a 14,000 year old man tells his life story that comes with a killer of a twist. This sequel far less interestingly becomes a detective story about a group of students trying to find if their professor is the same character
The Asylum, the company behind the Sharknado phenomenon, made 2 Headed Shark Attack. Figuring the only way to top that was to keep adding more heads we had 3 and now 5 Headed Shark Attack
Guardians of the Galaxy was an audience winner with its eccentric humour and effortless charm; this sequel feels buried under bloated production overkill where the charms of the original remain thinly drawn
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a director who specialises in cryptic spooky horror films. This is a sequel to his earlier alien invasion film Before We Vanish about aliens come to steal concepts from people’s minds
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
The title is misleading as this features no Bigfeet but is an animated film about a family that sprouts all-over body hair and big feet. This quickly falls into the usual formulaic inanities of the modern animated film
The idea of a zombie film all shot in a single take. This proves a novelty amusement but then the film spins this on its head and becomes positively ingenious.
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
Sequel to The Houses October Built with the same group touring Halloween haunts encountered sinister figures beneath the masquerade as everything starts happening all over again
The 30th Japanese Godzilla film, this is the first anime Godzilla film and the first in a trilogy. More disappointingly, it is more a space opera and planetary adventure than it is ever a Godzilla film
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
A Christopher Landon film released by Blumhouse. This has been conceived as a mash-up between Groundhog Day and a slasher film with a girl who wakes up every day to be pursued by a masked killer
Sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet, which retold Shakespeare with garden gnomes. This for some reason adds a garden gnome Sherlock Holmes to the mix. The high speed whirring you hear is probably Arthur Conan Doyle rotating in his grave,
I’m not a fan of the Hotel Transylvania films and their reduction of the Famous Monsters to slapstick yocks. This is exactly the same as the preceding films, no better, no worse and with only minute plotting difference
Slasher film in which a group of unlikeable teens on Springbreak are slaughtered by backwoods hicks in the Everglades. Sold as a sequel to Lake Fear despite neither film being connected in any way
The Scorpion King films are such a low expectation series that it is hard to drum up enthusiasm for a fifth entry. The rehashes stock sword and sorcery cliches and passes its time forgettably
The Strangers has been cited as one of the best horror films of the 2000s. This sequel emerges as a by-the-numbers entry that plays out no differently than a generic teen slasher film
Blumhouse have handed the reigns of The Purge series to African-American filmmaker Gerard McMurray who takes the opportunity to get political and drag the series into the era of Black Lives Matter
This is a British-made fantasy film in the vein of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones but conducted on a B-budget where it does seem to be making an effort
Unfriended had a unique novelty approach – everything took place in one take where the film screen was a computer screen. You wonder what a sequel can add to this. The surprise is that we get a film even better than the original
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
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum switched US seaboards to make Atlantic Rim. With the release of the Pacific Rim sequel, The Asylum followed in kind
Ant-Man was a lightweight but perfectly enjoyable entry in the horde of Marvel Comics adaptations. This sequel has amplified the comedy element, seemingly with the intent of being the joker among the MCU pack
The second film spun off from R.L. Stine’s popular horror stories promotes the wonderfully evil ventriloquist’s dummy Slappy to principal nemesis. The rest of the film is predictable but Slappy deserves his own series
After two fairly good initial entries, the Insidious series began its downward slide. Here new director Adam Robitel’s clumsy jumpshocks are a far cry from the eerie effects James Wan pulled off
Indonesia’s Timo Tjahjanto has emerged as a Must Watch director on the basis of his jaw-dropping brutal action films plus assorted ventures into horror. Here he pays homage to the 1980s horror films in particular to The Evil Dead
Very similar to A Quiet Place from several months earlier where here people cannot look outdoors and must remain blindfolded. Hindered by a frustrating lack of any explanations as to what is happening
The second of the anime Godzilla films and much more successful than its predecessor. The reconceptions of some of the classic monsters has a dazzling ambitiousness while Godzilla has all the ferocity it should have had in the first film
Manos: The Hands of Fate is considered one of the worst films of all time. 42 years later some of those involved in the original decided to make a sequel that manages to be just as bad a film
Sequel to the hit Korean film Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds about a journey of redemption through the afterlife. This is a much better polished effort than its predecessor
The second of the Stars Wars spinoff films tells a Han Solo origin story. After a change of directors, it emerges in the hands of Ron Howard who has spent four decades being the world’s most ploddingly sedate director
The Maze Runner was a solid Young Adult effort that built out an effective Conceptual Breakthrough story; this, the second of two sequels, feeld like a series of canned action scenes in search of a purpose
Rowan Atkinson in his third outing as the inept spy. Atkinson is a talented comic but these Johnny English films, which are like less sophisticated versions of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Closeau, are the least of his comedy incarnations
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to capitalise on the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this is a low-budget CGI dinosaur film that is slightly better than most
For an original that was only a modest box-office hit, it is surprising how long the Tremors series has kept going – five sequels, plus a tv series. This is the sixth film in the series and despite a limited and repetitive premise, characters running about hunting underground-burrowing monsters, it pulls off another enjoyable entry and fails to set a foot wrong
Leprechaun was a hit of the VHS era. This, the eighth of the films, was made to celebrate the series’ 25th anniversary and contains many tributes to the original
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
Spinoff from the Transformers films. As though all it took was a change of director, this is a small sweet film that has more in common with E.T. as opposed to Michael Bay’s mass destruction spectaculars
The sixth of the Mission: Impossible films. Not the best of the series but Tom Cruise and associates have everything polished to an expertly honed formula by now and the film is a kinetic ride of intensive and often jaw-dropping action sequences
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
The ninth Hellraiser sequel. Most of the others are a far call from Clive Barker’s original. This demonstrates that all hope is not lost in a wild and imaginative opening sequence
I had a lot of liking for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, a depiction of the inside of a videogame from the viewpoint of the characters. This expands the concept to the internet. Despite being the ultimate product placement film, this also rather appealingly shows Disney poking fun at themselves
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
The third of the trilogy of animated films from Arcana Studios based around the adventures of a young H.P. Lovecraft
An uncommonly effective film that takes place in the aftermath of an invasion by creatures with ultra-sensitive hearing where the survivors must maintain an existence that requires not making the slightest sound. Director (also lead actor) John Krasinski uses the set-up to create unbearable tension
The third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
Fifth of the Jurassic Park films. Industrial Light and Magic do their usual excellent job but this time the film is just recycling the same thing as before with minimal change
Sequel to Mimesis, which had people trapped in a simulation of Night of the Living Dead, where this time people are trapped in a recreation of Nosferatu
Mary Poppins was one of the greatest of all Disney live-action films, made with nonsensical charm and has become a much loved favourite. As part of the ongoing firesale that involves resurrecting almost all of their properties, this is a sequel. Its an exacting replication/homage to the original but that is the problem – it is a recapturing rather than seems to create its own sparkle
Deadpool was an hilarious breath of fresh air amid the Marvel Comics adaptations. This sequel is even better, with the self-deflating, fourth-wall breaking humour even funnier and more slickly polished action
An Indian horror film about a folk tale of a witch spirit the Stree, this was a popular success that was then built out into an Indian version of The Conjuring Universe
Marvel’s third Avengers film, uniting almost every superhero under their roof, resulting in some thirty characters on screen and a plot that becomes a blur of changing locations and superheroic punch-ups
For some reason, nineteen years years later, someone has decided to produce a sequel to Renny Harlin’s unintentionally funny killer shark film only to give it a pitiful budget that causes it to sink well into bad movie stakes
40 years later, Jamie Lee Curtis returns to pay homage to Halloween in what is a direct sequel to the original, erasing the continuity of every other sequel. This fails to conjure what made the original a classic
Anything with the Marvel Comics name on it is box-office gold. This spins a standalone film off from one of the main villains of the Spider-Man comic-book. This is watchable by several showstopping effects set-pieces.
The concluding chapter in the trilogy of Godzilla anime films. This reintroduces two familiar monsters but takes a long time to build to the monster bash we have come to see
Pixar’s venture into sequels has resulted in works playing off past successes that are lesser than their originals. This came with much anticipation but it too must be counted as another disappointment
The Asylum’s Multi-Headed Shark Attack series hasn’t quite hit the sense of delirious absurdism that their Sharknado films did – the only gimmick the series has is to keep adding heads to the shark. On the other hand, a scene where where the shark emerges onto land walking on two of its heads will have you rolling on the floor in laughter
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
The first Fantastic Beasts was a welcome opening up of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and offered something fresh in the series. This is a more mixed bag where it feels like it is back to business as usual for Rowling
Another spinoff from The Conjuring films. James Wan is one of the finest horror directors of the 2010s but has had difficulty imparting his skills to the directors of the films he has produced. This feels like a fairground haunted house show of tedious and repetitive pop-up shocks that runs free of any connection to a plot
The Asylum’s low-budget mockbuster copy of The Meg, which is an irony in that The Meg was really an Asylum killer shark film with an A-budget. Two sequels followed.
Tales from the Hood was the novelty of an African-American made horror anthology. 23 years later the principal talents (including producer Spike Lee) reunite for a sequel
The third sequel to Death Race and the most interesting of the series. This sets up an Escape from New York scenario and has fun with bad-ass posturing in depicting the interior of the prison as a open air biker bar
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
Released at the same time as Avengers: Infinity War, this was a mockbuster from The Asylum involving a team-up between fairytale characters. The third in their Avengers Grimm series
Sequel to Monster Hunt, an audience pleasing comedy about a couple and a cute monster that became the biggest hit in Chinese box-office history. This offers more of the same
Happy Death Day seemed a gimmicky marriage between Groundhog Day and a slasher film. This sequel is a far better film that places some funny and quite clever spins on the previous film
This is The Most Dangerous Game in the setting of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Samara Weaving marries into a family of privilege only to find her wedding night requires her to engage in a deadly game of Hide and Seek
47 Meters Down, with two sisters trapped underwater in a shark cage with a failing supply of air, didn’t require a sequel. Here we get two different sisters trapped underwater with a limited air supply and surrounded by sharks
I don’t enjoy watching these rape and revenge films. Continuing to make sequels showing abuse definitely crosses an exploitative line. After 41 years, director Meir Zarchi and star Camille Keaton re-team to make a sequel to the original
The thirteenth film in the Ring/Ringu franchise. The question is whether the return of original director Hideo Nakata to the franchise can revitalise the series
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.