The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Surrealistic cinematic joke from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard that mashes up film noir and SF where hard-boiled detective travels to another planet represented by contemporary Paris
The US release of several short Japanese films featuring the superhero Starman. Cheap and entertainingly absurd, filled with tatty superheroics and laughable science
Not a Marquis de Sade adaptation as this was sold as but an Italian giallo film. Mickey Hargitay (aka Mr Jayne Mansfield) has a ball as a mad bodybuilder aristocrat in red tights devising entertainingly lurid tortures.
Psycho-thriller from Otto Preminger about the disappearance of a young girl. As much for the twists and turns of the story, Preminger enjoys the portrayal of the darkly laced characters on the periphery
The title of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem is appropriated in an effort to appeal to the 1960s fad for Poe film adaptations, otherwise this is an unrelated work about a lost underwater city ruled by Vincent Price.
Adaptation of a John Fowles novel where shy Terence Stamp makes Samantha Eggar a prisoner so she can love him. Made not long after Psycho, this tries similar but becomes more of an Odd Couple comedy
One of Herschell Gordon’s Lewis’s splatter films, this readily rips off the plot basics of Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood as an artist starts to paint using human blood
An End of the World film in which an atomic bomb causes a crack in the Earth’s crust. From the era before the disaster movie, this has yet to discover the idea of creating pieces of self-contained spectacle but works in its own sprawling way
The second sequel to the original The Fly, which does feature more teleporter accidents and mutations but for some reason no fly hybrids this time
Pilot for an unsold tv series that was later released theatrically produced by Alfred Hitchcock’s company. Leslie Nielsen plays an occult detective and the film proves surprisingly well-shot and atmospheric
British-made vampire film that very much trying to copy the style of Hammer Films. This has colour and moments of undeniable style that stand out but lacks it in other crucial areas.
Adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space, directed by Roger Corman’s production designer Daniel Haller that draws on the look and mood of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films
Very silly AIP comedy that parodies the massively popular James Bond films of the era, as well as features Vincent Price as the villain spoofing his appearances in the studio’s Edgar Allan Poe films
The first of Amicus’s horror anthologies. The stories are rehashes of five popular horror tropes, all united by Peter Cushing as the title doctor telling the fortunes of five passengers on a train carriage
This was the first of two Doctor Who movies produced during the height of Dalekmania during the 1960s. Alas a comedy element in the form of the asinine buffoonery of Roy Castle is allowed to dominate and kills the show off
Early variation on the giallo film with a frogman abducting people from the canals of Venice and then preserving their bodies as statues
Larry Buchanan must count as one of the all-time bad movie directors and in this ultra-cheap alien invader film, in itself a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), he is true to form
The first and best of the series of films featuring Christopher Lee at his ice cold best as the Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu. This was made at the height of the Anglo-horror cycle and employs the production values to superlative regard.
A film with a bad movie reputation where a NASA android returns to Earth damaged and goes amok where it tackles alien invaders come to Earth to abduct women
This was made as a copy of the Godzilla films by rival studio Daiei. This proved sufficiently successful that it too spawned a long-running series of sequels and monster bashes
After the success of The Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, The Fab Four were quickly packaged in this follow-up. The free-wheeling amiability of that film has become a surreal plotless absurdity where nothing seems too silly
This is regarded as a bad movie classic. An alien invasion tale, it was the first film on the theme of humans being replaced by androids. No worse than any other B movie of the era, it does suffer from a dullness
Soviet film about the invention of a death ray. The first half is a spy thriller, which is fascinating to see from the other side of the fence to James Bond while the second half concerns a great engineering discovery
Gimmick master William Castle turns to making a psycho-thriller about two teenage girls making prank calls and uttering the title phrase – only to inadvertently call a man who has just killed his wife
A standout adaptation of the oft-filmed kaidan eiga (Japanese ghost story) Yotsuya Kaidan/The Yotsuya Ghost Story. A beautifully filmed classic version of the story
The novelty of the only film ever made in Esperanto. Featuring a young William Shatner as a man who stumbles into a village of demonic temptresses
This was the first film to depict an alternate history scenario. With stark and powerful effect, this shows in documentary-like fashion a 1960s England after it had been conquered by Nazis
A Federico Fellini film in which Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina plays a housewife whose grasp starts to slip over until it is taken over by hallucination and fantasy
An epic Indian-made film based around the foundation text of Hinduism, concerning the saga of two warring and the intercession of the gods in these matters
3D restoration of a classic Chinese adaptation of Journey to the West and the best film version of the story to date … an incredible film filled with psychedelically eye-popping animation and amazing action scenes, while gleefully celebrating a defiance of all authority
One of the wacky inventor live-action comedies Disney made in the 1960s, a sequel to The Misadventures of Merlin Jones where Tommy Kirk variously adopts a chimpanzee and tries to sleep-coach football jocks
Another Z movie attempt to join the 1960s beach party movie fad with the additions of monsters that ends up being fairly ridiculous on all counts
This has the most ridiculous premise of any alien invasion film – an alien is abducting women from ads for models placed in girlie magazines – but is played with a stone-faced seriousness that defies you to laugh
William Castle psycho-thriller (from a Robert Bloch script) that creates an incredibly haunted mood between dream and reality only to fall apart in an absurdly contrived ending
Classic work of the 1960s Italian Gothic cycle featuring Barbara Steele, shot in beautifully brooding black-and-white and with a remarkable sadomasochistic undertow
Thought to be a long-lost Edward D. Wood, Jr film for many years. Although only written by Wood, this has all the bad acting and hilarious purple prose of a Wood film. The film consists of strippers doing routines in a graveyard
Cult Italian horror director Mario Bava makes an SF film where explorers find an alien planet where aliens possess the dead (not vampires despite the title). In many ways a precursor of Alien
A work of considerable brilliance from a young Roman Polanski with Catherine Deneuve as a woman slipping into madness in an apartment over the course of a weekend. What makes the film particularly disturbing is Polanski’s lack of a blurring line between reality and hallucination
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
Cult Polish film that is a series of tall tales nested within a labyrinth of other tales and digressions
One of the first films about biowarfare, a tightly effective techno-thriller from John Sturges
Hammer Films conduct an adaptation of the classic H. Rider Haggard adventure story about the discovery of a lost city and its immortal queen but the epic spectacle never much comes to life
Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee vehicle from Amicus with Cushing as a collector who obtains the Marquis de Sade’s possessed skull. One of the more over-rated Anglo-horror films, this feels more like an episode from one of their anthologies than a full film
There have been great films about unseen threats before (Cat People, The Haunting) but in this case the idea of an invisible monster is just the excuse for a cheap film to avoid any special effects. It has been a long time since I have seen a film so mind-numbingly boring and dull
The second of the feature films repackaged from the tv series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one of the better copies of the James Bond spy fad of the 1960s. Despite the low conceptual horizons of a tv episode, this plays itself with a splendidly droll tongue-in-cheek panache
Largely forgotten Sherlock Holmes entry that was the first film to pit Holmes against Jack the Ripper. Both sides are treated with respect amid lush production values
Satiric film set in a future where contestants hunt and kill one another on a tv show. The first film on the theme of human bloodsports later popularised by The Hunger Games and others
An entry in the Italian Gothic cycle featuring the great Barbara Steele, This comes with superbly eerie black-and-white mood but proves slow-paced when it comes to its supernatural retribution plot. It even manages to waste Steele in a nothing role.
The fourth James Bond film and crippled by the misfortune of coming just after Goldfinger, which defined the formula and became the peak of the series. By contrast, this is stuck with having to make everything bigger and more spectacular
The second in a duo of live-action French-language adaptations of Herge’s famous comic-book character, which gets the resemblance to the characters almost perfect
Bert I. Gordon, who spent most of his career making giant animal and people films, makes a film about giant rock’n’rolling teenagers. Supposedly adapted from a novel by H.G. Wells
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet
Peter Watkins stark, brutal mockumentary about a nuclear strike on England, this was banned from the BBC and still makes for harsh viewing today
One of the cheap Italian space operas of the 1960s from Antonio Margheriti. This has a certain colourful absurdity amid the mostly dull happenings and B-budget effects
Likeable puppet animated film about a time-travelling boy and his monkey companion
Low-budget film about an expedition to Mars The novelty the film holds is that it attempts to rework The Wizard of Oz in SF terms