The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The 17th James Bond film, the first featuring Pierce Brosnan who gives a dazzlingly ruthless performance. The series is rebooted and takes the opportunity to reconstruct the mythos in terms of modern politics in ways that often take you aback
The third of the James Bond films and the point where everything that has been defined as the formula of the series – the gadgets, the villains, the henchmen, the cars, the world domination plots – falls into place perfectly
Classic silent film from the German Expressionist period in which a rabbi brings to life a creature made of clay (played by Paul Wegener), which then proceeds to go amok
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
Cannon Films adaptation of John Norman’s series of books. The books come with heavy BDSM content but this is a planetary adventure about a professor transported to become a hero on a barbarian planet
Grave Encounters was an unremarkable Found Footage film. This much smarter sequel takes its lead from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in being a meta-fiction that investigates the phenomenon of the first film
Another Found Footage horror film with a reality tv ghostbusting team investigating a haunted asylum. The Found Footage genre quickly became exhausted and this only treads where others have gone before
Stylish New Wave film about an existential vampire taxi driver meeting a woman film director who has received a terminal diagnosis. From the underrated Gerard Ciccoritti
A really good, unrecognised early Found Footage film, supposedly a series of videotapes that chronicle the activities of a serial killer. A film that takes us inside an incredibly disturbed headspace
The second of the Muppet films made when Jim Henson was alive and one of the best, this bubbles with a double level of sly grown-up humour that many of the later post Henson entries miss
The first screen appearance of the masked superhero The Green Hornet in a thirteen-chapter serial that was adapted from a popular radio series. Later remade as a tv series and feature film.
There seems something redundant in 2021 with the world in the grip of a very real apocalypse about watching an old-fashioned mass destruction disaster movie about an oncoming comet impact
Greenland was a disaster movie on the familiar theme of a comet colliding with the Earth. This is a desultory sequel where the survivors emerge from the shelters to now have to survive in a changed post-apocalyptic world
The film about malicious creatures that was the runaway box-office hit of 1984. Director Joe Dante runs amok like a schoolboy with a chemistry kit and gleefully trashes the wholesome innocence of producer Steven Spielberg’s E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial
A far less successful sequel to the mega-hit of Gremlins where director Joe Dante brings the gremlins to Manhattan and allows the silliness to go completely over-the-top and into orbit, even breaking the fourth wall
The English-language remake of Ju-on: The Grudge, this has the good sense to retain the original’s director Takashi Shimizu. The script makes more sense and Shimizu replicates the same eerie scares
Follow-up to The Grudge, the English-language remake of the Japanese horror film. Although original Japanese director Takashi Shimizu is present, this is one of the weaker Ju-on/Grudge films
The Ju-on/The Grudge series has spawned thirteen films to date. This was the second sequel to the English-language remake but by this point everything disappears into formulaic scares
A triumphal Marvel Comics adaptations that manages to mainline the spirit of the original Star Wars, while in in its wryly, self-deflating culture savvy suggesting a Star Wars rewritten by a 14 year-old Quentin Tarantino
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
Third of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, this successfully recaptures the nature of the goofy ensemble comedy caper that made the first film such a winner but seemed to be missing in the second
Sequel to the live-action US-made adaptation of the manga about a power-suit superhero. As with the first film, there are lots of rubbery aliens and martial arts fights
John Carpenter’s all-time classic, the film that created the slasher film and has been much imitated, not to mention multiply sequelised and remade. None of these however come anywhere near recapturing Carpenter’s eerie spookiness
Another inferior entry in the mid-00s fad remake of 70s/80s horror films. Whereas John Carpenter gave us Michael Myers as evil incarnate, Rob Zombie gives us Michael Myers as a misunderstood and unloved kid
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
The first sequel to Halloween, with Michael Myers pursuing Jamie Lee Curtis through a hospital. John Carpenter’s suspense is replaced by slasher hackery but in retrospect this is a lot better than the subsequent sequels
Rob Zombie’s follow-up to his Halloween remake is a better film and closer to what the previous film should have been but his approach is still based on callous brutality than John Carpenter’s eerie suspense
Following John Carpenter’s departure from the Halloween series, the sequels begin their progression into a series of interchangeable slasher films in which Michael Myers is inevitably released to kill anew
The fourth of the Halloween sequels where the series is by now is no more than a crudely directed slasher film, a far cry from John Carpenter’s eerily suspenseful original
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
The seventh Halloween film, made for the original’s twentieth anniversary. This erases continuity to the other sequels and has Jamie Lee Curtis alive and pursued by Michael Myers again. Better than most of the other sequels.
Sequel to the 2018 reboot/sequel to Halloween from David Gordon Greene, this is more scrupulous about paying homage to the original and recapturing something of John Carpenter’s original stylism
The eighth Halloween film. This tries to throw in some novelty by combining Michael Myers with a reality tv show being filmed in his family home but is still the same uninspired thrills of the other sequels
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
An indie horror film about a strange and disturbing family of adult children. The whole film hangs on an interesting mid-film conceptual revelation
The immediate sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Anthony Hopkins is back but Jodie Foster is not. Ridley Scott takes the director’s chair and creates a slick film but it lacks the compulsive grip the original held
Building on the successes of the Hannibal Lecter films, this is a prequel that goes back sets out to tell an origin story of how the young teenage Hannibal came to be who he was during World War II
Amid the 2010s spate of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies, this was a quite good mockbuster copy from The Asylum. From the director of Sharknado, this is Hansel and Gretel by way of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
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
Another in the spate of animated fairytale parodies that came out in the wake of Shrek, this subjects Cinderella to an excruciating barrage of pop-culture jokes and one-liners
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
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
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a motion-capture animated film about a young penguin who sets out to fulfill his dream of tap-dancing. This ends up being a film of unexpectedly winning charms
George Miller had a charming and delightful hit with his dancing penguin film Happy Feet. He returns to make a sequel here that merely tries to repeat the same
A popular Hong Kong hit in its day where a schoolgirl gains a ghostly scholar as an invisible companion, resulting in a series of slapstick sequences. Several sequels followed
Ferociously entertaining Japanese film about a cyborg-enhanced heroine on a revenge trail. Mostly a series of ridiculously over-the-top action moves combined with copious degrees of blood
Full-length follow-up to Hard Revenge, Milly and the same mix of ferocious action and over-the-top splatter. Despite a large budget, this is marginally the lesser in sheer entertainment
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
John Woo made his US debut with this Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, which is essentially an urban version of The Most Dangerous Game. Woo’s stylised action set-ups give a slight script a dynamism that blows his contemporaries away
Likeable effort from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Productions in which a Bigfoot is befriended by a family. The star of the show is Kevin Peter Hall in the amazingly expressive Bigfoot makeup from Rick Baker
The second of the Harry Potter films and better than its predecessor. Chris Columbus has his tendency to overblown effects more in check but that does leave the film more dependent on J.K. Rowling’s contrived deus ex machina plotting
The penultimate chapter in the Harry Potter series surprisingly strips out most of the effects and is much slower, more character driven, while moving the saga towards an epic conclusion
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Harry Potter series but the final chapter rounds out the boy wizard saga in rousing style, mounting an epic-sized battle and finding characters depths that hold some of the best writing of the series
Fourth of the Harry Potter films and one that feels much more seamless and sure of itself as a story. The problem is the absurd contrivation of J.K. Rowling’s weak story that wheels out every sports movie cliche in the book
Sixth of the Harry Potter films, this feels like a step back from what its predecessor built up. The film suffers from trying to cram all of J.K. Rowling’s book into its running time and ends up being frustratingly mannered
The fifth and in my opinion the best of the Harry Potter films. It is the first film where we see the darkening of emotions and the children growing up as storm clouds gather. Much of the show is stolen by Imelda Staunton
The third Harry Potter film where it seems all that it took for the series to become quite good was the exit of the perpetually banal Chris Columbus and the entry of a new director in Alfonso Cuaron
The first of the Harry Potter films. The first is the weakest and lumbers due to being placed in the hands of the perpetually banal Chris Columbus who allows visual effects wow and simplistic emotional cues to dominate
This was Adam Green’s homage to the Friday the 13th series that comes with the virtue of a high level of gore and a sense of humour. This was subsequently spun out to several sequels
Hatchet was a homage to the 1980s slasher film that had a mild amusement. In the sequels, Adam Green upped the number of genre cameos and in-jokes, while pushing the gore effects to an extreme
Third in the series of slasher homage films where Adam Green steps back from the director’s chair. This ups the gore content and number of genre cameos, otherwise is fairly much the same as before
A madcap Hong Kong comedy that takes more than a few leaves from the Mr Vampire films with cops fighting off vampires in a haunted police station. A popular hit.
Marlon Wayans treads the same territory as the Scary Movie films in this parody take on Paranormal Activity. Most of the film is pitched as a series of crude lowest common denominator gags
Sequel to A Haunted House where writer/star Marlon Wayans conducted a riff on the Scary Movie films. This is marginally more amusing than its predecessor
Another supposed true-life ghost story, an early case by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The film exists as a progression of pop-up scares that through the need to keep producing effect produces no effect at all.
The Haunting in Connecticut was a reasonable success in the claim to being a true story ghost story stakes. This is a sequel, seemingly unaware that Connecticut and Georgia are about a thousand miles apart
Mike Flanagan follows up the hit of The Haunting of Hill House with a mini-series that adapts another classic work The Turn of the Screw out into a similar kind of cross-generational ghost story. The results are extraordinary
Lost in La Mancha was a documentary charting the collapse Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Gilliam later finished the film and brought the same documentary-makers back to chart the process here
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
Cult animated film that adapts several stories from the adult fantasy comic-book Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal. These vary but in its better moments that has a trippy cult hallucinatory quality
Sequel to the animated Heavy Metal that failed to attract the same cult audience that its predecessor did. Telling only one story instead of several, it only offers a routine space opera adventure
The first of the Hellraiser sequels. This lacks Clive Barker’s original dark obsessive vision but is worthwhile in its own right, expanding the scope of the story out into a magnificent vision of Hell
The first of Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptations of Mike Mignola’s comic-book about a demon superhero. Not as good as the sequel, the film’s ace in the hole is Ron Perlman in the title role
The second of two animated Hellboy spinoffs, this renders what might have been impressive superheroics had they been conducted in live-action down at the level of children’s animation
The first of two animated Hellboy spinoffs with the live-action actors returning to voice their parts. This is the better of the two animated films, developing a weirdness as it takes Hellboy inside a Japanese spirit realm
In the second and the best of his two Hellboy films, Guillermo Del Toro expands the first out with an amazing menagerie of eccentric and offbeat creatures, while Ron Perlman is again on winning form in the title role
After a disastrous reboot of the Hellboy franchise, Millennium Media get it right, employing the comic’s creator on script, taking the series into wild directions with Hellboy up against Appalachian folk horrors
Unrelated in any way to the slasher film Prom Night, this plants tongue in cheek as it tries to imitate the A Nightmare on Elm Street films in its story of a vengeful undead prom queen
The Hellraiser sequels begin their descent to mediocrity. Clive Barker’s original vision of dark, forbidden pleasures has been watered down and the Cenobites become little more than campy variations on Freddy Krueger
The fifth Hellraiser sequel and the only one among the last four worth watching. It brings back Ashley Laurence but abandons the Cenobites for a fascinating series of reality bending games
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 film that put the name of Clive Barker on the map. A work of considerable imagination where Barker delves into forbidden pleasures and fuses the film with S&M imagery for the memorable creations of the Cenobites
Fourth of the Hellraiser films. This attempts to tell a story set in three different eras but was subject to much studio interference that waters the vision down to something forgettable
The eighth of the Hellraiser films. By now a long way from Clive Barker’s original vision and no more than a haunted house story where the Cenobites occasionally turn up. With a young unknown Henry Cavill
Fifth and best of Hellraiser sequels after Clive Barker bowed out. Scott Derrickson made his directorial debut here and infuses the series with some of the wild imagery and perverse darkness that Barker gave the original
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
The ninth of the
An immensely disturbing film loosely based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. John McNaughton directs with a chillingly understated ordinariness and Michael Rooker has never been better in a role.
A sequel to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer that lacks the raw and disturbing quality of its predecessor both in its direction and in the recasting of anonymous Neil Giuntoli as Henry
This was a revival of Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug films. Here it becomes a vehicle for Lindsay Lohan who is cast as a racing driver but is missing all the cute charms the original films had
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
Third of the original Herbie the Love Bug films from Disney. This is an amiable effort that takes place at a car race across Europe and sees the return of Dean Jones, plus has Herbie fall in love
This was the second and best of Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug films. Here the entire show hits an inspired height of nonsensical absurdity in terms of cars doing wacky things
The hugely successful film that started the Italian peplum cycle featuring muscle-builder heroes in togas. This is rather stolid and strips much of the fantasy out of the Greek legends, nevertheless has its own pulp spectacle
An incredibly bad Hercules film from Cannon Films made in Italy by Luigi Cozzi. This was the immediate aftermath of Star Wars so we get a bizarre attempt to rework Greek mythology as science-fiction
Sequel to the Steve Reeves-starring Hercules where Hercules is wooed by an evil queen after drinking the Waters of Forgetfulness. Spectacular but stolid
Enormously entertaining and hilariously tongue-in-cheek Hong Kong action film featuring three popular actresses as superheroines who go into action in a series of wildly over-the-top moves
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
This was a minor cult hit at the time and concerns an alien that hops between human host bodies while having the invincibility of a Terminator. The idea is played with considerable panache and directed with great flair
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