The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Michael Bay takes on the 1980s toy phenomenon, turning it into a massive blockbuster filled with copious mass destruction and machines beating the metal crap out of each other
The first of several sequels to Charles Band’s Trancers with Tim Thomerson as a hard-boiled time-travelling detective. This does a passably okay job of following up on its predecessor
One of the more enjoyable films from Charles Band with Tim Thomerson giving a highly entertaining performance as a hard-boiled detective travelled back from the future
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 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
Pixar sequelise their very first film for a third time but the surprise is a film that creates a range of eccentric characters and finds the wit and warmth that has been missing through their last few films
After such high standards with the previous two films, there is considerable onus on Pixar when it comes to this third entry nevertheless they manage to wring some strong and effective new twists on the familiar
Pixar’s sequel to their first film and arguably an even better work where they get the plaintive emotion, character arcs and witty humour down perfect
The first film from Pixar and a breakthrough in being the first computer-animated film. Even aside from its technical innovations, this is enormously good fun with extremely well-constructed character arcs
The film that launched the name of Troma Films. The world’s first superhero splatter film, this readily dives into bad taste just to see what kind of offence it can get away with
Not a remake but a sequel to the cult true-crime film The Town That Dreaded Sundown with a series of copycat killings influenced by the film occurring in the present-day. Directed with a bravura stylishness that makes you jump out of your seat in joy
Second sequel to Topper , the screwball light fantasy comedy about a dull man who is driven crazy by ghosts only he can see. This throws everything into an Old Dark House setting but proves there is still a good deal of droll, nonsensical humour to be found in the formula
A deliriously frothy screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as two socialites killed in a crash who then haunt the car’s new owner. Several sequels followed.
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
The second and more sophisticated of the Ze do Caixao/Coffin Joe films with director Jose Mojica Marins as a diabolic undertaker who delights in inflicting a catalogue of tortures on the weak-minded
Pierce Brosnan’s second outing as James Bond holds up fairly well, especially in the action department, although Jonathan Pryce seems miscast as a Rupert Murdoch-modeled super-villain
Another Japanese horror film that stands heavily in the shadow of Ringu. Directed without much style and often uninteresting to the point of being dull, it is hard to tell from this that you are watching a film that inspired eight sequels
The first in a series of films from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio about blind Knights Templar zombies. De Ossorio is clearly influenced by Night of the Living Dead but creates considerable atmosphere
Multiverse films are all the in-thing in superhero films right now. This anime is a treatment of multiverse themes far away from superheroics that works beautifully in its sophistication of ideas
One of the first of the modern wave of darkly romantic vampire films that became the in-thing in the 1990s. This is occasionally effective but was eclipsed by later entries
Animated revival of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which brings them back to the screen with a satisfyingly gritty edge and a series of kinetic action sequences
The first in a series of Disney video-released films based around the Peter Pan fairy who is now reconceived as a contemporary Can Do girl
Sequel to Timecop with more of an action emphasis as Jason Scott Lee replacing Jean-Claude Van Damme trying to stop a criminal who is erasing agents from the timeline.
Film featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme as a temporal police officer. While you expect another time travel action film, this has quite a deal more sophistication in the scripting department than you expect
The Three Investigators books were an essential part of my youth. This does a fair job of remaining faithful to the stories, albeit with the addition of some grating modernisations, and creates reasonable atmosphere as they investigate a seemingly spooky mansion
Less a 300 sequel or prequel than a parallel story, this offers much the same as before but in 3D and with naval instead of land combat. Seeing Zack Snyder’s amazing visuals repeated all over again, all the poses and hyper-masculinity now seem to bubble with an inherent risibility.
Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the classic Frank Miller graphic novel about the Greek battle of Thermopylae. In replicating the look of the original’s panels, Snyder pushes what would otherwise be a standard historical film into something extraordinarily stylised and fantastic
With the Mega Shark and especially the Sharknado films, The Asylum played the killer shark film as ridiculously as possible with delirious results. In this sequel to 2-Headed Shark Attack, they get the blend of the tongue-in-cheek absurdity to a point of near-perfection
Rob Zombie is back,, making the third in his trilogy of Firefly films following House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. It is all fairly much the same as before where Zombie’s sympathies are cleanly with the family of psychopaths and their murderous rampage.
A horror anthology featuring episodes from three Asian directors originally titled Three. The better known Three … Extremes was a sequel whereupon this was retitled and re-released as Three Extremes II
Standout horror anthology designed to highlight episodes from three Asian directors – Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan, South Korea’s Park Chan-wook and Japan’s Takashi Miike – all of whom are on top form
The third film about the title criminal mastermind from Fritz Lang. Here Lang returns to a radically different Germany to the one he fled in the 1930s, the West Germany of the Cold War, to deliver a creepily paranoid work about the surveillance society
Sequel to Thor that earranges the same basic elements much more satisfyingly than the first film – the actors (with the exception of a tranquilised Natalie Portman) seem more at home in their roles and a director who is more confident with the effects and superheroics. That said, it is starting to feel like Marvel is shuffling the same plot ingredients around between films
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
The fourth of Marvel’s Thor films, where director Taika Waititi gets the balance of humour down much more successfully than he did in the previous film
The film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ The Mighty Thor is placed in the hands of Kenneth Branagh who delivers an okay film, if one where he never quite seems at home with the superheroic action
The Hamiltons was an unusual film about a strange family who were eventually revealed to be vampires. By the time of this sequel, all the interesting elements of the original have been eliminated and all that we have is a film of tired poses that fails to add anything to the overworked vampire genre
Sequel to the modestly effective Alaskan-set vampire film 30 Days of Night, this holds up surprisingly well for something that gives all indication of being a throwaway video sequel
Solid vampire film produced by Sam Raimi about a small Alaskan town that suddenly finds itself besieged by vampires who have come because of the month of night
The Asylum made 11/11/11 and 12/12/12 and released them on said dates. Despite running out of exploitable months in the year, they then released a third film here
Prequel to the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which sets out to tell the origin story of the cannibal family. New director Jonathan Liebesman pushes the gore and sadism to Torture Porn extremes
The ninth Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, this offers the intriguing idea of Leatherface vs millennials
A remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic that presaged a host of inferior 70s/80s horror remakes throughout the 2000s/10s. What we have is now a different film although not entirely an uninteresting one
The first sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Tobe Hooper returns and pushes the series into an outrageously black sense of humour
A Texas Chainsaw sequel in 3D with chainsaws and gore coming out at the screen seems the complete antithesis of the raw savagery of the original. The result is like a formulaic modern slasher, while the film is wrecked by a ridiculous reversal of sympathies in the last half
An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one’s nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
Shinya Tsukamoto’s third Tetsuo film is a disappointingly commercial concession that waters down all of the surrealism and wild sexual fetishism that made the first film so amazing
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
The second of Fritz Lang;s films about the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, which was banned under the Nazi regime and forced Lang to flee the country. Not quite the equal of its predecessor, Lang is still on fine form and makes an exciting crime melodrama
Roger Corman produces a blatant copy of Alien with a group of people being pursued around a desert laboratory by a rubbery mutant creature
Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the classics of the original slasher film fad. This is a remake
Sequel to the remake of the 1980s horror classic, shot back-to-back with its predecessor, this is a better film than the remake was
The fifteenth Godzilla film, the last of the classic series, featuring a return of Mechagodzilla from the previous film. Original director Ishiro Honda returns to the series and reclaims it from the juvenile focus it had taken over the last few films to make the best entry of the 1970s
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.
The fourth Terminator film is slightly better than you would expect of something directed by the empty-headed McG. There are some undeniably spectacular action sequences, although the film still stands too much in the shadow of what has gone before
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
The sixth Terminator film that boasts the return of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the franchise. After the troughs of Terminator: Genisys, this makes one forget about the last three sequels
After the highs of James Cameron’s first two Terminator films, this was a crashing disappointment. Schwarzenegger is back but his performance has become self-parody and the uninspired action sequences are accompanied by some terrible effects
The first sequel to The Terminator where James Cameron returns with the biggest budget for a film at the time. Cameron harnesses then top-drawer CGI technology to create one of the most original nemeses in any SF film
One of the 2-3 most influential SF films since 1980. James Cameron creates a barrelling powerhouse of a film, all lorded over by Arnold Schwarzenegger as the relentless killer machine in the role that defined his career
Disaster mini-series based around the great belief that a super-earthquake will come and pitch most of California into the ocean. Despite devoting some four hour of screen time to it, the drama feels painfully padded at times, while the special effects sequences come out as not very special
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
Nobody seemed to care about Tekken, the 2010 film based on the popular videogame. Despite that, this is a sequel – albeit one that has almost nothing to do with the first film. This consists of nothing more than a series of efficiently unmemorable action scenes and a plot that makes no real sense
Another videogame adapted film, this has almost entirely been conceived around a series of slick fight sequences and little else
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 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 second live-action Turtles film is a disappointment. The Turtles are infectiously enjoyable characters but the script has an indifferent laziness, while parental concerns over violence have mandated that the fight scenes be watered down to an absurd level
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
The first live-action spinoff of the comic-book and animated series still holds up well two decades later. Little of the manic barrage of pop culture has dated, there are some excellent animatronics that allow the Turtles to engage in a series of high-energy fights and more importantly emerge as distinctive characters
Feeble sequel to the unexpected Michael J. Fox comedy hit where Jason Bateman plays his cousin who discovers his inner wolf as he heads to university
This lamely updates I Was a Teenage Werewolf to the 1980s high school, strips all horror elements and has Michael J. Fox’s transformation be regarded as an instant injection of cool. The result was a surprising hit
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
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
Comedy about a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear. This gets its laughs from much scatological, decidedly non-PC humour that occasionally manages to be funny, especially when it comes to some of the 80s pop culture jokes
The fifth of Hammer’s Dracula films and by general consensus the last worthwhile entry. New director Peter Sasdy brings something fresh and this has an interesting plot that digs beneath Victorian hypocrisy
Fifth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and a thoroughly ordinary run through of the by now well-established formula of the series
Sixth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, this takes Tarzan out of the jungle to civilisation and is mostly played for comedy
The first Tarzan film after Johnny Weissmuller’s departure and replacement by a blank Lex Barker, although in all other ways is still the same tired formula. One of the few Tarzan films of the era to employ fantastic plot devices (a Fountain of Youth) but seems to have little idea what to do with it
The first of the Gordon Scott Tarzan films although it does little to vary from the well-established formula of the previous eighteen entries
One of the best of all Tarzan films made under producer Sy Weintraub who dispensed with the cutsie elements of the earlier films and focused on gritty adventure
Third of the Gordon Scott Tarzan films, the second in colour and to be shot in real African locations
The eight of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. The same formula as before but in a desire for novelty the action is relocated to North Africa
The seventh of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films made as a work of Wartime propaganda where Tarzan faces Nazis
The second Tarzan film from producer Sy Weintraub who threw out the custie elements of the Johnny Weissmuller films, while going to Africa to shoot rather than a studio backlot. The effort makes a satisfying difference
The first of the Johnny Weissmuller films and where the cinematic Tarzan was essentially formed. The film changes Edgar Rice Burroughs conception in many ways but is a superbly exciting adventure in its own right, while the Tarzan/Jane romance is played with an oddball sweetness
The best ever Tarzan films were the series made in the 1960s, which abandoned the cutsie elements of the earlier efforts. This comes with an emphasis on pure spectacle and adventure that is visually amazing
Fourth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, the point where John Sheffield’s Boy enters the series because the Hays Code required that Jane could not get pregnant
Third of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, the point where the formula of the series started to kick in
One of the best Tarzan films of the 1960s, the first starring US footballer Mike Henry. This goes to shoot in Mexico with Tarzan in search of a lost valley and plays the action with a fine gritty edge
The second of Lex Barker’s Tarzan films, another traipse through the studio backlot jungle sets and well-worn formula – lost cities, mysterious tribes, Jane abducted, Cheeta comic relief antics – with little to distinguish it
The last of the Tarzan outings featuring Lex Barker, as well as an interesting cast line-up including Raymond Burr as the villain
The ninth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. All but the first two Weissmuller films slip into the utterly banal and formulaic. The novelty this time is Tarzan encountering a city inhabited all by all women
The second and very best of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, this has an incredible sense of adventure and even a surprising eroticism for the era
This Disney animated adaptation treats the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with surprising respect and faithfulness for the most part where the addition of talking animals even works for it. Fun and with a great deal of creative energy, one of the better films from the 90s Disney renaissance
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
Tales from the Hood was a horror anthology made by African American filmmakers that worked familiar horror themes in around race issues. It has developed a small cult reputation. This was the second of two sequels
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
Amicus adapts several stories from the notorious EC Comics as one of their anthology films. Missing is EC’s black humour but this is a worthwhile Amicus anthology
From the high-profile release this had, I was expecting it to be a Wu Xia epic – instead we get what feels like a martial arts film by way of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World where instead of amazing us with the fight scenes the director seems in love with self-conscious cuteness of his own visuals