The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth, a supposed adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island and a consistently silly, nonsensical film that operates at the level of a children’s cartoon
TV mini-series sequel to Stephen King’s Firestarter that now sees Charlie McGee in her twenties played by Marguerite Moreau. The story feels under-plotted and over-padded
Batman’s first screen appearance in a fifteen-chapter serial. This is a dull, impoverished adaptation, which sees Batman and Robin rewritten in the service of the US government fighting a Japanese invasion force
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
From the top wrestling superstar in the world in the early 00s to movie action hero to being dressed in a pink tutu with fairy wings, it is hard to believe that Dwayne Johnson’s box-office star would have ever recovered from this family film embarrassment that sees him cast as a fairy
Tim Burton’s superlative duo of Batman films were wrecked after Joel Schumacher took up the director’s chair and turned the films into giant camp fests. Here he allows a madly overacting Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones loose as the villains
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
The first of Albert Pyun’s kickboxing killer cyborg films featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme who was largely unknown at the time. Pyun creates wall-to-wall action but there is almost nothing else to the film
Sequel to the 1999 The Mummy. Here Stephen Sommers amplifies everything in that film by a factor of ten where the constant bombardment by the spectacular reaches an point of absurd overkill
The fifth and last of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, the weakest of the series. Dirty Harry comes up against a betting pool on celebrity deaths and a killer who decides to help it along
Spy movie parody with Rowan Atkinson as an inept agent who is constantly tripping over his own feet. It is Austin Powers reconceived as a Mr Bean film but offering little that is funny.
A weak video-released spinoff of Disney’s Aladdin that began Disney’s habit throughout the 90s/00s of generating cheap sequels to their animated classics
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
The second of the Twilight films where the moderately grounded original is blown up into the near laughable with the ridiculously over-the-top hyper-sexualised posturing of its male leads
Tron was a genuinely groundbreaking work. It is hard to describe how ill conceived this sequel is where we have gone to predicting the idea of cyberspace to a fight over a glorified 3D printer
An extension of The Conjuring universe with a film based on the Mexican legend of the crying woman La Llorona. This killed by the director’s constant straining for effect
Cheaply made sequel to the remake of House on Haunted Hill that turns it into a teen film dominated by gore set-pieces
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
The third in a series of Biblical End Times films withGary Busey as a decent cop who wakes up in a future ruled by the Anti-Christ. The heavy-handed slinging of Bible verses makes this hard-going for anyone who is not a believer, while the conspiratorial tone frequently verges on nuttiness
The widely ridiculed fourth Jaws film. This is at least better than the third film, having one of two okay shark attack scenes but the melodramatics are drawn out and tedious
Sequel to The Neverending Story made with a better budget. This delivers some amazing sets and creature designs but is killed with a script that discards the metaphors and complex level of meta-fiction of the original
Low-budget film that would very much like it if we mistook it for one of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films
The second of the Mexican-made Aztec Mummy films. The film has cheap, dreary set-ups and the running time is padded by footage from the first film. This does have the novelty of being one of the first Mexican films to feature a masked wrestler hero
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
Second of the Alien/Predator crossovers and the absolute nadir of either series. Gone is the suspense of either series’ earlier entries and the creatures are now no more than standard monsters in a teen horror film
The first film from prolific horror and exploitation director Jesus Franco to which he would later make four sequels. This is a blatant copy of the French Eyes Without a Face served up with little directorial flair
Film set around the premise that babies are secretly geniuses and talk in their own language. This makes a beeline for pee and poop jokes and seems to think we should applaud it for the cutsieness of seeing babies doing adult things
The Jeepers Creepers films created a highly original boogeyman with some creepy effect. Mired in controversy, the fourth entry in franchise emerges from Finnish director Timo Vuorensola
Film that tried to jump aboard the newly arrived paradigm of the internet but is mostly a cliched thriller about Sandra Bullock trying to recover her erased identity
Entry amid the 1980s slasher fad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis. A fairly dreary effort that comes with much disco dancing footage
Sequel to John Carpenter’s Vampires given over to his regular associate Tommy Lee Wallace, this looks tatty in trying to replicate the action sequences on a B-budget and with the script holes showing through
Very popular mini-series during its day (that was followed by a tv series) concerning the alien invasion and occupation of Earth, this has an utter banality that fails on almost every level – as human drama, science and even basic plausibility
First of a series of Swedish-made live-action films based on Astrid Lindgren’s anarchic child heroine
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
A wholly unnecessary sequel to Hoodwinked!, this again runs the fairytale characters over with modern quips and pop culture references
A sequel that has been arranged for the sole purpose of serving up a series of gory dispatch set-pieces every few minutes
Becky was a modest effort with Lulu Wilson as a thirteen year-old violently fighting off home invaders. This is a sequel with her up against white supremacists
Don’t Fuck in the Woods was a reasonably smart slasher film that came with an attention-grabbing title. This is a sequel that introduces body-snatching parasites to the mix
A sequel to the 2012 ghost story from the revived Hammer Films, this adds precisely nothing to the original, has nothing to say and nothing in its directorial arsenal that is not a tiresomely over-cliched jump – you just ask, why was this film even made?
In recent years, we have seen successful revivals of the Scream and Halloween franchises. Now it is the turn of another classic 1990s slasher film, a reworking that emerges with hugely underwhelming results
Don’t Breathe was a surprise hit with its story of kids invading a home only to be hunted by blind man Stephen Lang. This is a sequel that bafflingly reverses all the sympathies
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
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
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
A Disney live-action film that engenders no believability in its basic premise. Much of the show is regarded as an opportunity for Bette Midler to steal the limelight and play to over-the-top excess
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
The first in a series of interminable sequels to Blue Sky Studios’ animated prehistoric adventure. Everything has a tediousness that feels as though it is created by a script generating computer
This is not a film, it is a money-making machine in the guise of a film aimed squarely at undiscerning family audiences that plays to familiar characters and comic routines and has minimal difference to the preceding three Ice Age films
The 1980 Alligator was amusing but this hardly one of the sequels the world was burning to see. An utterly formulaic copy that is killed by impoverished giant alligator effects
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
Sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Steve Carell is transformed into a modern-day Noah. This was pitched to the Christian audiences but feels like a series of lame gags playing on Noah and the Ark devoid of any biblical context
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
This was the first of two Doctor Who movies produced during the height of Dalekmania during the 1960s. Alas a comedy element in the form of the asinine buffoonery of Roy Castle is allowed to dominate and kills the show off
A psychic powers film like Carrie having been reduced to the crass high school comedy of something like Porky’s
Fourth in a series of energetic Hong Kong slapstick action capers. The film has no pretence to anything more than providing a new action sequence every five minutes, although by now the level is juvenile
The fourth and last in the series of 1980s horror comedies that began with House produced by Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham. This brings the first film’s William Katt back to round the series out
The big screen Addams Family films ended with the death of Raul Julia. Subsequently the rights were sold to Saban Entertainment who made this cheap, terrible direct-to-video film with a new cast
The original Emmanuelle was a supposedly autobiographical memoir about the sexual dalliances of a bored wife in Thailand. Here Emmanuelle is now abducted by aliens for further encounters
A WTF am I watching film where a performing freakshow troupe led by Pervo the Clown are pursued around a farm by topless zombie women
One of the series of softcore Emmanuelle films based on an erotic memoir, which had led to some seventy films so far. Here the originally true-life character of Emmanuelle encounters Count Dracula
A sequel to the teen spy comedy. This moves the action to England but amplifies everything else into inanely loud and noisy slapstick action
Another of the cheap made-for-video Disney animated sequels that were made during the 1990s/2000s, they tries to get by on association with its predecessor’s name
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
Troma film about a group of trampers attacked by a Yeti only for one of the group to discover gay love with the Yeti
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?
A shabby video-released sequel to DragonHeart (the first of several). Although this is quite clearly not being made with the services of Industrial Light and Magic this time
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.
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
Third in the Hostel series, an indifferent piece of formula hackwork minus Eli Roth where suspension of disbelief is constantly being disrupted by absurdly contrived scenes
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
The first of a string of bad follow-ups to Joe Dante’s classic. Sybil Danning plays the werewolf queen and displays her impressive chest measurements, while Christopher Lee was somehow persuaded to appear
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
One of the most tasteless films ever made, a sado-sexual work set in a Nazi concentration camp with Dyanne Thorne as a sadistic commandant torturing and having sex with prisoners.
Completely ridiculous mix of The Terminator and Die Hard where, for no clear reason, an android terrorist decides to take hostages in an office building and the FBI’s only hope is a cryogenically unfrozen football player
The third of the Venom films, which has become one of the worst of the modern Marvel spinoffs. By this point any pretence that the films are taking themselves seriously has been long forgotten
Someone had the bright idea to make a film centred around the creepy doll that appears in the wraparound scenes of The Conjuring. But without James Wan as director, everything disappears into formulaic scares
Sequel to Poltergeist that without Tobe Hopper in the director’s seat is an unimaginative by-the-numbers effort
Complete and utter bastardisation of Hugh Lofting’s charming Doctor Dolittle stories, which are turned into a modern comedy with Eddie Murphy and talking animals doing lots of pee and poop jokes
The fourth Highlander film sets out to merge the film and tv series, bringing together Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul. This only produces a continuity nightmare that is a headache trying to follow
Designed as a copycat of The Hunger Games, this Young Adult film as a modest hit. The premise is fundamentally implausible as human psychology – and when there’s no basic credibility, you cease to care about the contrived dramatics
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
A disappointing sequel to the madcap Hong Kong superheroines film. This reunites the principal cast members but seems to miss all the fun of its predecessor
The first sequel to the passable Venom. Next to Batman & Robin, this could be a strong contender for the worst big-budget superhero film ever made
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
The Fast and the Furious series has escalated from films about illegal street racing to essentially superhero films involving ridiculous stunt work that defies the laws of physics. This takes the characters into orbit
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
In the aftermath of the success of Jurassic Park, Albert and Charles Band quickly responded with this children’s dinosaur film that contains some of the most pitiful effects in any film of this era
A killer shark film concerning a prehistoric megalodon prowling the waters of a lake. This once had the distinction of being the lowest rated film on the IMDB
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
The third and probably the best of the children’s dinosaur films from Charles Band where the pitiful effects are at least compensated for by an eccentric sense of humour
The fourth and last of the original Herbie the Love Bug films from Disney, this takes a trip to South America where the inanity reaches a nadir for the series
Poverty row cheapie with Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist transformed into an ape-man by an experiment who goes hunting victims for the spinal fluids he needs joined by his pet gorilla
Ron Howard and Tom Hanks follow up their adaptation of The Da Vinci Code by turning to an earlier Dan Brown novel concerning conspiratorial goings-on in The Vatican but the show collapses amid absurdly contrived plotting
One of the numerous Virtual Reality films to come out in the mid-90s, this seems undecided whether it wants to be an SF or an erotic film
A sSequel in name only to White Noise, this is a very silly film with Nathan Fillion returning from a near-death experience able to see the auras of those about to die
Julian Sands returns in a sequel to Warlock where the frequently unserious effects of director Anthony Hickox turn it into a silly comic-book of a film
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
In much the same way as they did with Halloween, Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green offer up a sequel to The Exorcist on the original’s fiftieth anniversary. The results are a bizarre scratch of the head
Uwe Boll strikes again! Sequel to his passable earlier epic fantasy, which is dragged down by a lack of action and the need to provide star Dolph Lundgren with a series of excrutiating witticims
A sequel that has almost no connection to the original and has Mila Kunis as a psychopathic student trying to get into a prestigious criminal profiling course