The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Slumber Party Massacre was an mundane and unmemorable slasher entry; this is a nonsensical sequel that tries to turn it into a copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Contains some of the bizarrely ridiculous scenes to ever take part in any slasher film of the era
A sequel to the Mannequin, the inane comedy about a romance with a storefront dummy come to life. Here Kristy Swanson plays a princess who is turned into a statue before being awoken in the present
Shazam! was one of the more enjoyable DCEU superhero offerings, placing a light-hearted spin on the superheroics. This is the sequel
Sequel to The Ring, the English-language remake of Ringu. The filmmakers have returned to the source and brought in original director Hideo Nakata only to produce one of the most disappointing of all the Ringu/Ring films
A series that reached its maximum level of cuteness two films ago is dragged out for another pointless entry that nobody was asking for. Robert Rodriguez delivers shabby juvenile slapstick
Sequel to Single Santa Seeks Mrs Claus where here Santa’s son (Steve Guttenberg) ties the knot – amazingly traditional and conservative in its sentiments and with everything so predictable that there is no real drama
This was the third of the Cube films but has nothing new to add to the mix except a focus on the technicians monitoring the operation and the addition of gore effects
The sixth of the Halloween films, the fifth with Michael Myers. By now John Carpenter’s original eerie suspense has been reduced to crude slasher movie payoffs. This tries to add some nonsense about druidic cults
Where the first live-action Garfield film approximated the original comic-strip and its focus on a cat delivering sarcastic lines, this sequel pitches everything down to the level of an inane children’s film
The eleventh Godzilla in which Godzilla faces the pollution monster Hedorah. For some reason, this gets a listing in The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, but there are far worse entries in the series
Third of the Cross films, a more fantastical variant on The Expendables, bringing 90s action actors back out of mothballs to form a team as they face various super-villains in present-day L.A.
Third of the Santa Clause films starring Tim Allen as Santa where his reality is upended by the evil Jack Frost
Popular film with Tim Allen as a regular family man who is forced to become Santa. Several sequels followed.
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
Another Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptation, this feels slung together from vampire film and sword and sorcery cliches. Among the badly mismatched casting, the most eyebrow raising is Ben Kingsley as the vampire villain
John Barrowman fights a giant prehistoric shark in a film that gained a certain reputation as a Bad Movie
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
Sequel to the Jim Carrey starring The Mask with Jamie Kennedy taking over in a film that was regarded as one of the worst sequels of all time
This is a wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko, featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister but without the same culty weirdness
David Gordon Green and Jamie Lee Curtis return to round out their highly underwhelming Halloween reboot trilogy. By now, this feels like a Halloween film in name only
One of the essential Troma films, this seems to have been conceived as Rock’n’Roll High School with Evil Dead-styled makeup effects and lots of moronic bad taste humour
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
The 2003 Freaky Friday was one of the better Disney remakes with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan giving inspired performances as mother and daughter who swap bodies. The two reunite for a sequel here
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
A sequel to the killer android school teacher film Class of 1999. The sequel was made on a far lesser budget and is wrecked by an absurd twist ending
The infamous miscalculated Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong where the stop-motion is replaced by Rick Baker in an ape suit, while the fairytale romance is replaced by Jessica Lange as a flower child who cracks jokes
This was the fourth (or maybe the fifth) of the Spanish films in the popular series about the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky starring Paul Naschy. Also one of the shabbiest of the series.
Sequel to the Stephen King adapted film about hoodlums resurrected from the dead, this descends into an incredible silliness. Featuring a teenage Hillary Swank
The third of the original live-action Turtles films is a lazily conceived affair that transplants the Turtles back in time to feudal Japan in a plot that rips off The Seven Samurai
The third Robocop film killed the series off with a disastrous decision to go for a PG rating and pair Robocop with a cute kid
This reboot of the pop culture icons of 80s/90s is an ugly failure on almost every level. The Turtles I remember were hip, funky and bubbled with boyish enthusiasm; these Turtles seem sinister oversized creations, while the film’s adrenalised over-production and emphasis on grit seems to have missed the essential element of fun
Jon Favreau had success recreating The Jungle Book in live-action with CGI animals and does the same with The Lion King – only to produce an exacting, lifeless replication missing the charms of the original
The Asylum’s first venture into the gonzo shark movie that would spin off a series of sequels and culminate in the Sharknado phenomenon. Despite one of the great attention grabbing titles of all time, this is an unmemorable affair
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
The Car concerning a possessed car is one of the forgotten films of the 1970s. Why it has produced a sequel 42 years later is a scratch of the head. Not that the two films even resemble one another
Mawkishly sentimental Christmas tv movie with Steve Guttenberg as Santa’s son who needs to find a wife before he can take over the role. So cliched and written to expectation that it lacks any conflict
Heavily disappointing remake of the Ray Harryhausen film where the replacement of Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation with CGI fails to achieve any magic
The Wishmaster series was a franchise based around a series of novelty effects wherein a malevolent djinn turned wishes against the wisher. This third entry is the utter nadir of the series
A copy of Gremlins produced by Charles Band’s Empire, featuring much slime and cheap-looking creatures. A surprise hit on video shelves; three sequels followed.
It may say how doomed the Western world is that people have paid to watch three films so far all centred around these annoyingly cutsie helium-voiced chipmunks. This is marginally less annoying that the preceding two
This is a sequel to Cannon Films’ excruciating camp version of King Solomon’s Mines. Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone are back. This is a marginal improvement but far from a good film
This is not even a sequel The Amityville Horror but a cheaply and tattily made Canadian effort seeking to sell itself using the name. The first in an industry of films employing some relevance to Amityville
The Hidden was a wittily enjoyable hit about body-hopping aliens. This is a cheap sequel that substantially reuses material from the first film, while missing everything that made the original work
Utterly generic sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s invisible man film Hollow Man. This one has been so cheaply made that it even recycles its effects from the first film
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
A Uwe Boll film that feels as though he didn’t cared about what he was making. You’d have to go back to the Italian sword-and-sorcery films of the 1980s to find a more shoddy work of epic fantasy
Seventh and worst of the Hellraiser films. Clive Barker had departed three films ago and the copyright taken by a company that specialises in cheap sequels. This blurs reality and illusion so much it makes no sense
The second sequel to the hit killer shark film. This is shot with gimmick of the early 80s 3D revival fad but this has the effect of reducing Steven Spielberg’s masterful suspense to a series of novelty pop-up shocks
Sequel to the bad movie classic of Cannon Films’ Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno and only a marginally less terrible film that its predecessor
Misguided attempt to make a sequel to Carrie, this reduces that film’s cry of the downtrodden to petty teen bitcheries, while the psychic eruptions are absurd, the complete antithesis of anything Brian De Palma directed
Sequel to the 1996 CGI The Adventures of Pinocchio, this is a shabby and drearily made piece of filler that unimaginatively shuffles around the basic elements of the first film without making an effort at all
The third of the Left Behind films with Kirk Cameron facing the Biblical End of the World and the Antichrist. This travels well down into bad movie territory
Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler was one of the worst of all Stephen King adaptations and this is modern sequel generating of the worst order where the Mangler now becomes an A.I. and a computer virus
A third entry in the Creepshow series but made without the involvement of George Romero (or Stephen King). This tries to give more of the same but is abysmally made on all counts
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
It Came from Outer Space was one of the classics of the 1950s SF film. Here it was resurrected as a cable-made sequel. Without Jack Arnold or Ray Bradbury on board, the results are dreary
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
Albert Pyun makes a long promised sequel to his first film The Sword and the Sorcerer but delivers an impoverished mess that is all over the place plotwise
Sequel to the hit killer rat film Willard, which brings back the scene-stealing bad rat but kills the film off by pairing him with a nauseatingly cute kid
Shabbily made hanger-on to the 00s zombie fad that would have gained zero attention without its pedigree name. This completely misses the black humour of the original
Martial arts film about a bullied teenager who gets aid from the ghost of Bruce Lee. A shabby effort lifted by the dynamic presence of a then unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme
The Lawnmower Man was far from a classic but this sequel has an absurdity that pushes it into extremely bad movie stakes with Matt Frewer as a messiah trying to move everybody into cyberspace
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
The Bare Wench Project was an inane softcore parody of The Blair Witch Project. This is the first of four sequels in which another troupe of girls go wandering in the woods while finding almost any opportunity to take their clothes off
The third of the Urban Legend films, unconnected to any of the previous two. This lamely tries to stretch the thin premise out to a story of high school supernatural vengeance
Sequel to the ridiculous Project Shadowchaser, which has another android terrorist this time take over a nuclear power plant
Stuart Gordon, a cult director on the basis of Re-Animator, ventures into making an SF action film set in a futuristic prison. The film has a bone-headed script that feels like it is only rehashing cliches from every SF film
Supposedly a sequel to the 2011 Fright Night remake but more a loose reworking of the original. This conducts some novel variations such as making Jerry Dandridge into a woman, but is also one of the worst directed horror films in some time
Wes Craven’s adaptation of DC’s Swamp Thing was not a very good film. This sequel has been handed over to prolific B-budget hack Jim Wynorski who shows he is unable to take any of it seriously
Key film from cult exploitation director Ted V. Mikels. The film’s premise – “pet food company uses bodies from the graveyard as their cat food, making the cats hungry for human flesh” – seems the essence of the grindhouse film
The single worst Stephen King adaptation ever made. Director Tobe Hooper fails to approach the story of a possessed laundry press with the same drollness that King did and inflates it into something ridiculous
The second of the excruciatingly dull Swedish-made Pippi Longstocking live-action films
It is hard to believe this ever received a greenlight, a film in which Andrew McCarthy falls for a storefront mannequin (Kim Cattrall) who comes to life. The comedy has an excruciating inanity
This was the seventh of the 1960s Gamera films and one of the worst of the series. By now, the film is pitched entirely to juvenile audiences, while the effects are pitiful
No-one is pretending that the Bill Murray summer camp comedy Meatballs was a masterpiece but it looks a work of art in comparison to this unfunny sequel, which also throw in a stiff E.T. lookalike
A dreadful sequel to the Ron Howard hit Cocoon about seniors encountering aliens. This misses all the interesting potential of a sequel and drowns in schmaltz and unfunny comedy routines
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
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
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
A sequel to the teen psychic powers comedy Zapped! that takes things even more crass and vulgar
The Howling was a witty and genre savvy werewolf film; this is one of several all-terrible sequels. The plot tiresomely rehashes the first film and the only point of note are the variably effective wolf transformation effects
Third of The Howling films where director Philippe Mora travels to Australia to show us marsupial werewolves. A conceptually wild mix that fails abysmally due to cheap effects and Mora not taking things seriously
Animated film that offers a revisionist take on Little Red Riding Hood. Everything is played in a manic barrage of pop culture gags and level of inanity that is seriously mind damaging
Unrelated to the Bill Murray film in anything but name, this is a moronic teen summer camp comedy in which Patrick Dempsey is aided in trying to lose his virginity by angel Sally Kellerman
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
This is surely one of the great exploitation titles of all time. Another Mexican wrestling superhero film where a duo of woman wrestlers take on the Aztec Mummy from another Mexican horror series
Sequel to the cute robot film pushes the cutsie elements to a nauseatingly anthropomorphished extreme, having it spout smartass colloquialisms and erasing even basic credibility
A sequel to the Gonzo Killer Shark film Ouija Shark, this goes even crazier
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
The third of the films based on the Stephen King short story, this moves the locale to the city but is otherwise based around a series of completely ridiculous makeup effects every few minutes
When 20th Century Fox began their Planet of the Apes reboot series, director Mark Polonia quickly jumped in with his own Z-budget mockbuster take. Several sequels followed
The Stephen King short story only runs to 16 pages. This is the eleventh film spinoff to date (which runs at about one film per 1.4 pages of story). Unlike the other sequels, this claims to be an origin story
The fourth and final of the Ghoulies films. This one comes from B-budget hack Jim Wynorski who seems to not be taking any of the show seriously
The first sequel to the Santa slasher film. This has become a bad movie classic because half the film brazenly consists of footage recycled from the first, while the other half is dominated by the hilariously bad acting of psycho Eric Freeman
Possibly the worst Kaiju film ever made – produced by a bankrupt studio in order to recoup losses and cheaply slung together by rehashing footage from the other Gamera films
One of the most brainless action films ever made. This has the laughable notion of trying to make a James Bond film but recasting it with Vin Diesel as an extreme sports junkie. Everything about the film is absurd.
The third and last of the theatrically released films recut from the 1970s live-action Spider-Man tv series. The near sleep-inducing plot takes Nicholas Hammond’s Spider-Man to Hong Kong
This ended up being the lowest rated of all MCU films. One wondered whether this was just fannish hyperbole but no what we end up with is the Batman & Robin of The MCU, the single worst film that franchise has produced
Actor David Keith directs an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space. Unfortunately the focus on cheesy and ridiculous effects quickly takes the exercise down into Grade Z territory
A video-released sequel to the live-action Matthew Broderick film starring French Stewart. This is played as much more of a cartoon and amped to a maximum level of slapstick inanity