The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The film adaptation of a popular radio series about a Westerner who has trained in the Eastern mystic arts and uses his powers to create illusions in the fight against crime. One of the first screen superheroes.
One of the classics of mad scientist cinema. A wonderful potboiler of elements with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill on the track of a cannibal killer who has created an artificial flesh. From the director of Casablanca, no less
Shock film in which director Tod Browning depicts the lives of the deformities at a circus, casting real-life freaks in the roles. This was banned for many years before being discovered as a cult classic
The first and best screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr Moreau. Wells was not happy but Charles Laughton is a great Moreau and the film develops a remarkable sexual undertow
Boris Karloff plays the super-villain Fu Manchu, giving a performance of calculating evil in a film of great pulp thrillers
This was misleadingly sold as a monster movie and is otherwise an Old Dark House thriller, most of which is blatantly borrowed from The Cat and the Canary
The first and best version of the oft-told story in which shipwreck survivors are forced to survive with their bare hands while being hunted by a mad Russian aristocrat
The original mummy film starring Boris Karloff. Unlike the sequels where the mummy became a slow, shuffling creature, this is a subtle classic with haunted mood.
This throws out all of the Edgar Allan Poe story except for the title and the ape and instead makes a Bela Lugosi mad scientist film. An entertainingly lurid affair strongly influenced by German Expressionism
A classic Old Dark House thriller from director James Whale, a droll comedy of wonderfully stylised Gothic mood and featuring a near-perfectly cast line-up of eccentrics creeping about
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
Carl Dreyer’s cult film is not a vampire film as we know it but creates an incredibly haunted uncanny mood