The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Brazil’s Ze do Caixao or Coffin Joe is one of the most evil characters ever created on film, spearheaded by director/star Jose Mojica Marins’s contempt for the weak and catalogue of brutalities and blasphemies
The film that formulated giallo cinema. Drawing inspiration from the success of Psycho, Mario Bava strips the psycho-thriller down to a parade of killings amid extravagantly arty surroundings and with a gorgeous colour palette
This was the eighth of the Carry On films. The popular British comedy series turn their bawdy sights to conducting a spoof the James Bond film during the height of the spy movie fad
Classic work of 1960s Italian Gothic cinema. Director Antonio Margheriti rises above himself to create a vividly spooky atmosphere, while at the centre of the show is the haunted otherworldly looks of Barbara Steele
The sequel to Village of the Damned, this makes the mistake of humanising the cold alienness of the children and taking their side against humanity, losing much of the stark effect of the original
This is one of the all-time classic bad movies about a rampaging alien monster come to devour people. Filled with hilarious gaffes and ineptitudes, including the famous carpet monster
A low-budget copy of the Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe films with a patriarch seemingly returned from the dead and eliminating his relatives with a series of sensationalistic deaths
The second mummy film from Hammer Films, this is a rather dull variant on the genre. Their usual flair and production values emerge here under a director who makes this turn out plodding
One of the better works on the theme of the malevolent ventriloquist’s dummy with a life of its own. Made with some modest effect.
Stanley Kubrick decided the only way to make a film about nuclear war was to resort to black comedy. Aided by three sidesplitting performances from Peter Sellers, the result are mercilessly funny
One of the overlooked Japanese monster movies directed by Godzilla’s creator Ishiro Honda concerning a giant alien blob that appears in the sky and sucks up coal and diamonds
Terence Fisher was a cornerstone figures at Hammer Films. Less well-regarded is his 1960s trilogy of science-fiction films. This is an alien invasion film that is a model of economy, told with a stark effective tension
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and quite memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
Painfully dull film edited together from two unrelated Mexican films ending an incomprehensible plot featuring a revived Aztec Mummy and another mummy that transforms into a werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr
Work of incredibly stark tension set amidst post-Cuban Missile Crisis nuclear anxieties with the US trying to recall a bomber that has been accidentally dispatched to drop an atomic bomb on Moscow
Adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel about a Victorian journey to the Moon and encounter with its denizens. The film comes with Ray Harryhausen effects but is considerably weakened by a buffoonish tone
A true-bred exploitation film with castaways arriving on an island where they encounter a Nazi mad scientist breeding flesh eating slugs. This has been cited as the first gore film
The fifth Godzilla film, the point where Godzilla becomes a good guy joining Mothra and Rodan to battle Ghidrah. The best Godzilla film from this period with the effects team operating at the peak of their game
The fourth Godzilla film, the first in which Godzilla battled another Toho monster, namely Mothra. Colourfully enjoyable and taking itself more seriously than many of the entries that would follow
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
One of few attempts to create an original movie monster by Hammer Films, which they take from the Medusa of Greek myth. The result is an exquisitely and beautifully made film
One of the numerous Italian peplum films of the 1960s featuring assorted body builders as Hercules. This pits Hercules against invaders from the Moon
For all that Hammer’s Terence Fisher was raised to the status of cult director, there are efforts such as this unfunny Old Dark House comedy that reveal that he was not always on form
A Z movie classic that combines some of the most absurd looking mutant monsters ever created with the era’s fad for beach party movies, including appearances from a wannabe Beach Boys band
Robert Aldrich’s successor to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Bette Davis on the receiving end this time. This is arguably a superior film with a tightly contorted psycho-thriller plot and a decaying Southern setting
The greatest distinction this has is that it was released on a double-bill with I Drink Your Blood. While I Drink‘s vision of rabid hippies was highly entertaining, this is a dreary and uninteresting voodoo film
An appealingly silly blend of live-action and animation where Don Knotts plays a downtrodden clerk obsessed with fish who falls into the ocean and becomes a porpoise
One of the great ridiculous titles of all time. It’s a shame there’s nothing that comes anywhere near matching it in this tatty, poorly made film about a fortune teller turning men into disfigured, hypnotised slaves
The greatest of all Japanese ghost stories. This is an anthology that tells four stories. Each is made with an extraordinary visual flair and great attention to colour, lighting and design
A home invasion thriller starring Olivia de Havilland as a wheelchair-ridden woman who is brutalised and tormented after three hoodlums break in as she is trapped in an elevator cage during a power cut
The first adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and the only one faithful to the novel with Vincent Price as the last man alive facing vampires outside his door
Disney classic that is mostly a series of dance and effects sequences strung together without any real plot nevertheless is conducted with a dizzying absurdism and perfect charm that never wears out its welcome
The seventh of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and usually the best regarded. Vincent Price is at his most cruel and the film looks incredibly sumptuous thanks to a young Nicolas Roeg on camera
An amusingly lurid Z budget film with a widow using an atomic reactor to transfer her mind into a younger body
A legendarily awful spy movie where assorted characters run around a ranch in ethnic disguise trying to stop a Russian who is unleashing a rabbit that contains a deadly virus
One of several psycho-thrillers made by Hammer Films soon after the success of Psycho. Despite a plot that collapses under its contrivances, Freddie Francis shoots amazing cinematographic compositions
A classic Japanese ghost story (kaidan eiga) about two women who survive by preying on passersby. This adopts the lyrical realism of the era and builds to reach an incredibly haunted conclusion
One of the popular Beach Party comedies of the 1960s. Tommy Kirk turns up as a bumbling Martian to romance Annette Funicello
Children’s movie where a Martian dictator abducts Santa, this has gained a cult bad movie status
Standout thriller with Kim Stanley as a medium who fakes a child kidnapping with husband Richard Attelborough to prove her powers
Prolific exploitation director Jesus Franco creates a sequel to his first horror film about a mad scientist creating a mind-controlled man that he sends to go out and kill strippers
Stark black-and-white thriller from John Frankenheimer about a military coup in the US. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling delivers a superb script
William Castle psycho-thriller made to exploit the successes of both PsychoWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with an axe-wielding Joan Crawford letting all stops go
One of the all-time classic bad movie titles, this is cheap and dreary on almost every level, although does offer mild amusement when it comes to the provision of the title concept near the end
One of the better films from cult bad movie maker Ray Dennis Steckler dealing with a quartet of mad killers on the loose. The film also came with a promotional gimmick in which the audience is hypnotised
Modest B-budget SF film with scientists opening a time portal and becoming caught up in a future war between humanity and mutants
The eighth and last of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Some claim this tale of possession by a late wife is the best but it feels an uninspired rehash of the plot elements from Corman’s other Poe films.
One of the better of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s cheap splatter films, set in a Confederate town that exists in a timewarp and slaughters all outsiders
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
This is surely one of the great exploitation titles of all time. Another Mexican wrestling superhero film where a duo of woman wrestlers take on the Aztec Mummy from another Mexican horror series