The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The fifth of the Gamera films, Japanese monster movies that are made for children. This abandons the relative realism of the earlier films for a colourful silliness with frequently lunatic results
Richard Lester adapts an absurdist Spike Milligan play set in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust where the survivors are mutating into animals and items of furniture. A film with a really bizarre sense of humour that most at the time did not get
One of the films from Z-budget director Al Adamson, who should be a rival for Edward D. Wood Jr in the bad movies stakes. This resurrects Count Dracula in the present-day, living in a castle in the California desert
Amid the fad for Jules Verne adaptations in the 1960s, Captain Nemo was spun off in this original adventure. By now Verne’s brooding inventor has become an absurdly larger-than-life comic-book character
The fifth and final of the Fu Manchu films with Christopher Lee as the super-villain Fu Manchu. The last two were made by exploitation director Jess Franco and only worth watching for Lee’s icily autocratic presence
Big-budgeted spy thriller with Gregory Peck as a scientist who poses as a defector to Communist China. This never enervates much as a thriller but its recreations of Communist China are amazing
Produced not long after 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is one of the smartest and best of the super-computer takes over the world films, directed with a tight economy and written with a snappy wit
One of a spate of Disney live-action comedies that was successful enough that it spawned two sequels. A young Kurt Russell is a college student who gets the contents of a computer accidentally transferred into his head
Psycho-thriller about a woman who has an abortion and then years later is married and pregnant when she is stalked by her ex-boyfriend demanding that the child is his. From an early Larry Cohen script
A Marquis de Sade biopic that was problem ridden behind the scenes. The result is an incoherent mess on screen that feels as though it is being handled by several different directors, each with a different idea about what is happening
Gerry Anderson was best known for his puppet tv shows. This was his first film with live actors based around the absurd notion of a space expedition to a planet on the far side of the sun that is a mirror opposite of the Earth
This may possibly be the worst Dracula film ever made. A nudie film that has been dubbed over with excruciatingly unfunny one-liners that makes it sound more like a rifftrack film
Adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story in which Sandra Dee is lured by a young Dean Stockwell in order to summon Elder Gods. This seems like it has potential but befalls plodding, nondescript direction
Psycho-thriller where derelict Michael Sarrazin is taken home by Gayle Hunnicutt and gets wound up in a series of games between her and batty aunt Eleanor Parker
The first film from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio, later known for the Blind Dead series. A Euro vampire film starring Anita Ekberg, this proves dreary on all counts
The fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and the absolute pinnacle of the series. Terence Fisher is on the peak of his form and turns in a series of directorial set pieces that are quite masterful
Film from the muchly underrated Peter Watkins about a future where nations maintain peace by holding televised war games. As always with Watkins, this is stark, potent and highly politicised
The tenth Godzilla film and a low point of the series with the focus now going on the slapstick pratfalls of Godzilla’s son. Many special effects scenes are recycled from previous entries.
The haunted part of the title is misleading but this is an attempt to update the Old Dark House thriller of the 1930s and 40s to the midst of Swinging 60s London and featuring a youth cast
Director Jack Arnold was one of the great voices of 1950s SF cinema. Here he turns to making a none-too-funny comedy set in an underwater habitat. Featuring a teenage Richard Dreyfuss
From the almost unknown Narciso Ibañez Serrador, this is essentially a giallo thriller made with the lush sensibilities of a Hammer film. Set in a girl’s boarding school, this substantially prefigures Suspiria
An anthology that adapts three stories from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection but does so with singularly heavy-handed regard. The best aspect of the film is the framing story with a brooding Rod Steiger in the title role.
A striking variant on the vampire film full of rich metaphor. Set against the backdrop of Oxford university, this explains vampirism as a psychological condition brought on by sexual impotence and academic pressure
Larry Buchanan is a director on a par with Edward D. Wood Jr. This, not to be confused with the 1974 killer baby film, is his best film. Buchanan creates a perverse obsessiveness that is fascinating to watch
This was the first of Disney’s Herbie films about a Volkswagen with a life and mind of its own. Not quite as good as the sequels, this still has a charming silliness to it
The original Filipino exploitation classic, this pumps the 1940s mad scientist film up with gore, toplessness and tropical locations. A reasonable hit but surprisingly dull and sedate despite
One among the spate of 1960s psycho films with Stella Stevens dealing with her brother and sister, one of whom is a killer
Released three months after the Moon Landing, this was a big-budget film depicting a space mission disaster that leaves three astronauts marooned in orbit
The controversial Pier Paolo Pasolini makes a film based on Medea – the wife of Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts fame), from Greek myth, not to be confused with Tyler Perry’s films, Contrary to the way she is usually portrayed on screen as Jason’s love interest, there is another whole story where she is a vengeance-crazed witch who slaughters their children after he leaves her for another woman
A copycat of King Kong made on a budget of about $1.98 and featuring some pitiful giant ape effects
This comes with a great premise – a man is woken from a coma for the first time and is forced to deal with the world with the mind of a newborn infant. A clear attempt to copy Charly, this would be a great vehicle for a modern character actor but suffers from stodgy unimaginative handling
Comedy about aliens who have invaded Earth and keep broadcasting commercials to tell how wonderful life is. You feel like this should be great satire but instead the film flounders about without any plot tapping a 60s counter-culture vibe before finding it doesn’t have anything to say
Muchly ridiculed Hammer film that was billed as a ‘Space Western’. Once one gets past that it is actually a far more interesting film than it suggests
Freddie Francis was one of the key players of the 1960s/70s Anglo-horror cycle – he always claimed that this was his favourite film, although it has seen little distribution. The film consists of an annoyingly giggly scenes of adults running around playing children’s games
A Mexican film about a scientist who turns his son into an ape man that goes amok. A 1940s mad scientist film with the addition of modern exploitation elements. Listed as a Video Nasty in the UK.
Undeniably influenced by the classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, an entertainingly lurid film with Cameron Mitchell as a mad waxworks curator taking revenge on a Hollywood studio by encasing the bodies of its’ stars in wax
One of the films seeking to exploit the fad for Edgar Allan Poe adaptations started by Roger Corman in the 1960s. This has nothing to do with the Poe story and mostly shuffles around the familiar elements of the cycle
The sixth James Bond film where Sean Connery was replaced by Australian model George Lazenby who had never acted before. Lazenby is a disliked Bond but that tends does stand in the way of the fact that this is a fine character-driven Bond film with some of the best action sequences of the series
A lost Edward D. Wood Jr film. Clearly made as a parody on the hit Raquel Welch-starring One Million Years B.C., this is adult work depicting the sex lives of cave people
A British children’s tv mini-series about a mysterious dinner service that presages the playing out of a Welsh myth, this is seen as one of the original influences on the Folk Horror genre
First of a series of Swedish-made live-action films based on Astrid Lindgren’s anarchic child heroine
On the face of it, this is not the most likely of films to be included – a depiction of the ill-fated true-life expedition to cross the North Pole in a dirigible in 1928 – but is for a wraparound wherein the survivor is judged by a tribunal of ghosts. A beautifully made and epical film
A film from cult exploitation director Jesus Franco that combines a masked thief and a killer artist plot but emerges tawdrily, not to mention has nothing whatsoever to do with the suggestive title
Bulldog Drummond was a gentleman adventurer hero popular in books and films of the 1930s/40s. Here he is reincarnated as a playboy spy amid the spate of James Bond inspired spy films of the 1960s, battling a super-villain outfitted with an army of women with robot brains
The very first film from David Cronenberg. An incredibly experimental work even today, which consists of people wandering the halls of a university and the soundtrack of voices discussing psychic powers experiments in a dryly funny parody of an academic paper. Fascinatingly oblique
Ray Harryhausen film featuring cowboys roping dinosaurs. The plot rehashes King Kong but with a dinosaur instead of an ape however it is Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion animation effects that make the film watchable
Robert Aldrich had massive success with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and later produced another Grand Dame Guignol film here with Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon playing psychological games with one another
This wants to be a little of everything – part 1960s spy film, part British sex comedy, and another part an sf film involving invading alien women – and proves none too satisfying at any of them. The softcore scenes featuring semi-clad alien women are fairly much allowed to overrun the show