The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Disney’s animated adaptation is usually hated by Lewis Carroll purists for its free and easy treatment of the story but for everyone else comes with a splendidly demented visual absurdism
An amiable venture into the light fantasy films that were popular during this era., Here angels come down and intervene to aid a baseball team on a losing streak
A classic of the 1950s Golden Age of SF, featuring Michael Rennie as an alien visitor film who comes to make a warning about the need to make peace. This stands at the start of the Atomic Age with a stark urgency
SF cinema’s first ever portrayal of nuclear war. The film is sometimes incredibly naive and mostly wants to make a parable of racial tolerance. It is often heavy-handed but also holds moments of undeniable lyricism
1950s SF film about an expedition to Mars. This fails to find anything interesting to happen once there where the astronauts do no more than engage in romances with the Martian women
The second in a surprisingly popular series of comedies about Francis the talking mule, this involves Donald O’Connor and Francis in a series of hijinks set around horse racing track
Another of the films from the East Side Kids/Bowery Boys, a prolific comedy act of the era. Here the boys set out to bust a fake medium racket during the course of which they are aided by a ghost
Low-budget film with scientists in search of a downed rocket who encounter a prehistoric lost world of dinosaurs on an island plateau
The Hollywood remake of Fritz Lang’s film about how the criminal underworld hunts a child killer. Lang’s film is a classic but this comes with visuals maybe even superior to Lang’s version
One of the earliest 1950s alien visitor films, although here the alien is peaceful and humanity the aggressor. A moodily effective entry from cult director Edgar G. Ulmer.
Classic Ealing comedy where Alex Guinness causes social disruption when he invents a suit that never wears out or gets dirty
One of the classics of the Italian Neo-Realist period, a charming whimsy about homeless people who built a shantytown
One of a spate of miracle films during this period, Catholic nonsense with Jane Wyman and Van Johnson finding love that transcends death
A serial adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic survival story about escapees aboard a hot-air balloon who wash up on a desert island. To the regular story, this sees fit to add hostile natives, pirates and invading aliens from Mercury
Exquisitely shot Technicolor fantasy in which Ava Gardner is romanced by James Mason as the Flying Dutchman, cursed to eternally sail the seas
This is usually regarded as one of the best versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a British-made production starring Alistair Sim
One of the most darkly engrossing of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, a classic about two strangers who make a murder pact after meeting on a train. Where any other director would have made a straight thriller, Hitchcock lingers on the mordant humour with unnerving effect
Aside from two earlier serials, this was the first Superman feature film, featuring George Reeves in a dry run for tv’s Adventures of Superman. With its crude effects and avoidance of much in the way of superheroics, this makes fascinating contrast to the modern Superman of Man of Steel
One of the greatest of all fantasy films. A reasonable percentage of you are going to switch off when I use the word ballet but I urge you to bear with me and discover this stunningly cinematic Technicolor epic that uses sets in extraordinary ways that no other film ever has
The fifteenth of the MGM/RKO Tarzan films and third starring Lex Barker. What makes this stand out is that it was the first Tarzan film to go and shoot in Africa, otherwise it follows exactly the same well-worn formula as before and has one of the worst screens Janes ever
The very first alien invader film of the 1950s. Maybe or maybe not directed by Howard Hawks, this has a dramatic urgency and tight tension that makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the films that came after
Overlooked 1950s journey to the centre of the earth film that transcends its B-budget with an often uniquely melancholic poetry
Classic George Pal produced effects spectacular where Earth faces destruction in the face of collision with an oncoming planet and the efforts to build an ark so that some might survive
One of the first Reds Under the Bed hysteria films of the 1950s where a man stumbles on a small town where a Communist fifth column are conducting biowarfare experiments as part of a planned invasion