The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A Hollywood version of the Arabian Nights that throws out the story’s unique narrative structure and substitutes the colourful spectacle of the swashbuckling adventure. With Shemp Howard as Sinbad!
One of the unquestionable classics from Disney’s Golden Age of animation between 1939 and 1942. This is an absolute delight for its unalloyed innocence and tragically affecting emotions
Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre make an unexpectedly great comic pairing in this mad scientist screwball comedy that comes with an exhaustingly madcap pace
Low-budget film with Bela Lugosi as a respectable psychology professor who disguises himself as someone running a soup kitchen from which he runs a criminal operation and keeps zombies
This was Hollywood’s first film featuring an all-Black cast, a musical in which enjoys from both Heaven and Hell come down to engage in a war over a man’s soul
Val Lewton’s classic work of psychological ambiguity about a woman who believes she is turning into a panther. Lewton’s ingenuity was to leave the actuality of the monster one that was merely suggested
One of a host of low-budget mad scientist films Bela Lugosi made during the 1940s, slightly better than most of the others. Here he uses orchids to place brides in death-like comas
Beautifully pure-hearted French Wartime allegory set during the Middle Ages about The Devil who has sent out envoys to tempt mortals into damnation via affairs of the heart
A film from the heyday of the mad scientist film in which George Zucco turns an ape into a human being. Zucco is on marvellously demented form as the title doctor
The fourth of Universal’s Frankenstein films where Lon Chaney Jr inherits the role of the monster and makes it into a stumbling brute that lacks the pathos of Boris Karloff. The plot recycles what has now become the cliches of the series
A screwball comedy with Jack Benny as a trumpeter send down from Heaven to Earth to blow the Last Trumpet who ends up getting distracted by a series of comic mishaps
Charming and delightful film starring Veronica Lake as a witch burned at the stake who returns to life in the present to make life miserable for her judge’s descendant Frederic March
In the fourth entry in Universal’s series of Invisible Man films, particularly in the effects department. here, made just after Pearl Harbor, The Invisible Man now becomes a spy fighting Nazi and Japanese villains
Lush and beautifully produced live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories. In comparison to the studio backlot Tarzan films of the era, this is in colour, builds entire jungle sets and even goes on location in India
A poverty row mad scientist film where a magnificently sinister George Zucco turns his gardener into a werewolf. A copycat that was made not long after Universal’s The Wolf Man
The third of Universal’s Mummy films where Lon Chaney Jr inherits the role of Kharis
James Mason stars as a brooding composer who may be a murderer in this Gothic thriller
Entertaining and quite well made potboiler with Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill skulking around a big old mansion as someone or thing starts killing people off
Road to Morocco was the third of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road films and takes them on a parody of the Arabian Nights adventure
The novelty of an animated Disney travelogue. Pitched to the South American market, the four stories see Donald Duck and Goofy visiting various locations
One of the mad scientist films of the era – or perhaps more correctly a murder mystery/comedy with an identity disorder. This features an amazing cast, including bad guy Lionel Atwill as a sinister doctor and Shemp Howard, of Three Stooges fame, as a comic-relief detective
Sixth of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, this takes Tarzan out of the jungle to civilisation and is mostly played for comedy
One of the first few werewolf films ever made, this takes place at a big old mansion and is a murder mystery whodunnit about who might be the werewolf