The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A Blaxploitation copy of The Exorcist – so blatant that it was sued for copyright infringement. Worth seeing for its entertaining absurdities including the climactic exorcism held on a disco dancefloor
Made in the aftermath of the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, a star-studded Agatha Christie adaptation about a guests at a remote hotel being bumped off by someone among their number
An Italian-made ripoff of The Exorcist. Probably the most lavishly produced of all Exorcist ripoffs, this soon slips into lurid shock theatrics. Star Carla Gravina should get full marks for going beyond the call of duty
Controversial director Pier Paolo Pasolini offers up a far more adult telling of the Arabian Nights than we are used to, not to mention one that goes on location in the real Arabia
From the Golden Age of TV Movies, a film where Scott Jacoby hides in the cubbyhole of the wall of his home after he accidentally kills someone and then develops a fixation on the family that move in
Rather ridiculous film where Stewart Moss is bitten by a bat and afterwards turning into a bat creature. Not a terribly interesting film – it takes three-quarters of the show for him to work out what the title tells us
Amicus film that manages the novel idea of combining a werewolf with an an Agatha Christie styled whodunnit as people try to guess which among the guests gathered at a mansion is a werewolf
A blatant Italian copy of The Exorcist. An exploitation film made with almost zero directorial style that only has the schlock amusements of its attempts to outdo The Exorcist going for it
Many argue that this is the original slasher film – and it does the whole formula a good deal better than many of those that came along a few years later, having some wry characterisations and a sardonic sense of humour
The first film from Peter Weir, a deadpan black comedy in which a man comes around from a car crash to find himself in a small town that subsists by creating car crashes
Vastly over-praised French New Wave film that is a ghost story of sorts. Three hours plus of tediously protracted happenings that don’t seem to be about anything at all
Largely remembered now for its premise – survivors in a nuclear fallout shelter find they have been trapped with a horde of vampire bats. Sort of a conceptual collision between The Birds and The Andromeda Strain
John Carpenter’s first film, made as a student project in collaboration with an also unknown Dan O’Bannon. A send-up of the boldly going space exploration of Star Trek, this features a ship where the crew are going stir crazy. The results are hilarious
A very unique and unsettling variant on the zombie film wherein a soldier killed in combat in Vietnam is brought back from the dead by the pleading of his parents but returns not quite the same as before
The original vigilante film that spawned several sequels. This is crudely aimed at one’s red-blooded nature – to get one enraged at the lowlifes that would attack a man’s family and then cheer on seeing said lowlifes being blown away
One of the better among several films based on the activities of the true-life body snatcher and necrophile Ed Gein. Roberts Blossom gives an amazingly creepy performance
One of the original evil children films and undeniably effective too with a group of people snowed in at a mountain lodge being hunted by four malevolent children
TV movie version of Bram Stoker’s book that was released to theatres in some places. Richard Matheson’s script brings back many aspects of the book that are dropped by other productions but the film suffers the fatal miscasting of Jack Palance in the title role
Disaster movie in which Los Angeles is devastated by an earthquake Size 7 on the Richter scale. Despite a script by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, this is the usual soap opera melodramatics
The third in a trilogy of spookily eerie Japanese vampire films. This echoes the basics of Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire in being set at a girls’ boarding school, which is spun in interesting ways
Copy of Willard with Les Tremayne as a man obsessed with snakes who starts using them to take revenge on those who have wronged him. This gets fascinatingly torrid.
Michael Moorcock’s psychedelic adventurer hero Jerry Cornelius gets a disappointing film adaptation here. There are imaginative sets but the plot plays out as a pedestrian spy thriller
This offers the amusing idea of a softcore parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. A surprisingly well-made film in terms of effects but the jokes often seems belaboured amid the witless mugging
Hammer’s seventh and final Frankenstein film and the last great film that the studio would make. Everyone is back on top form – Peter Cushing at his icily arrogant best and director Terence Fisher delivering a stirring show
The ‘true story’ bit is contentious but this tv mini-series was the first production to take the Frankenstein story back to the way Mary Shelley told it. Lavishly produced and with a fantastic cast
A trashy European exploitation version of the Frankenstein story that involves Frankenstein reviving a cavemen, a perverted dwarf and plentiful nude bodies
One of the best of the Amicus horror anthologies. All of the episodes are strong, well cast and well directed. The third episode offers a particularly funny comic take on the exorcism film
The third of the Blind Dead films about the zombies of blind Knights Templar. This is set aboard a ghost ship at sea and is said to have later influenced John Carpenter’s The Fog
The fourteenth Godzilla film, noted for the introduction of Mecha-Godzilla, a robot copy of Godzilla that became a recurring nemesis. By this point in the series, the effects and quality of production had become very shabby
The Green Hornet was a tv series based on the radio and serial masked hero. Following Bruce Lee’s ascent to superstardom, three episodes of the series were re-edited as a feature film
This was the second and best of Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug films. Here the entire show hits an inspired height of nonsensical absurdity in terms of cars doing wacky things
A wonderful little largely unknown film where the seniors in an apartment building due to be demolished group together to take revenge on the real estate developers
This could easily have been titled I Was a Teenage Jekyll and Hyde where a bullied teen creates a formula that brings out his dark side to take revenge on his tormentors
The best film from UK director Pete Walker. All of Walker’s film have a horror of ingrained institutionalism. This, concerning a private prison where morally lax women are abducted and tortured, is depicted with an extraordinary cruelty
Modestly effective Blaxploitation take on House on Haunted Hill that concerns voodoo rites being conducted in a big old Southern mansion
One of the most tasteless films ever made, a sado-sexual work set in a Nazi concentration camp with Dyanne Thorne as a sadistic commandant torturing and having sex with prisoners.
One of the key films from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, a quartet of exquisitely photographed and art directed erotic tales, including one about Countess Bathory
An underrated and quite magnificent lost world adventure from Disney with an airship crew in search of a lost Viking world in the Arctic. Contains some absolutely stunning effects work for the era.
The film about a killer mutant baby that made the name of director Larry Cohen who developed a cult following. Cohen infuses it with rich imagery and dark sense of humour. Several sequels followed
This tv movie’s premise – “a killer bulldozer” – has had it slotted into bad movie stakes. It was clearly intended as a copy of Duel and its killer truck premise but lacks Steven Spielberg as director
TV movie that does nothing to dispel the dictum that there has never been any such thing as a good killer bee film. As always, the effects let the show down and the rest of the piece is slow going and talky
French director Robert Bresson’s take on the Arthurian legends, stripped of nobility and magic. I’m not part of the critical cult around Bresson. Films that are dull and lifeless are not about spiritual yearning just dull
The first in a trilogy of prehistoric lost world adventures based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels, all starring Doug McClure. Despite variable effects, this is a well-made adventure with a strong script
The last of Hammer’s Dracula films made after Christopher Lee departed. A co-production with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers that shows Hammer trying to jump aboard the 1970s kung fu fad
A Freddie Francis directed werewolf film from the latter days entry in the Anglo-horror cycle set in 1900s France. This owes much to Hammer’s earlier Curse of the Werewolf
Director Stanley Donen conducts a star-studded musical adaptation of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s children story about an innocent alien prince come to Earth but with ponderous results
One of the better copies of Night of the Living Dead, a Spanish film where an agricultural pesticide causes the dead to rise from their graves in rural England
An attempt to copy the Dr Phibes films with Vincent Price as a horror actor facing a series of killings on the set of his comeback film
Fascinating, little seen film with Joel Grey giving an amazingly captivating performance as a possibly fraudulent psychic offering to help a murder investigation
Ninth and weakest of the James Bond films. Ian Fleming created a great nemesis in the assassin Scaramanga and the film casts it with Christopher Lee – only to fail to write the role interesting enough for Lee to fill
Rather tedious throwback to the 1940s mad scientist film in which Donald Pleasence is turning people into plant mutations and pawning his mistakes off to the circus
Absolutely extraordinary British tv play that was one of the formative works in the development of Folk Horror on screen
Sequel to the British sex comedy Percy about the world’s first penis transplant in which the central character is now the last fertile man on Earth
A British psycho-thriller in the Baby Jane mold with Lana Turner as a deranged mother determined to wreck son Ralph Bates’s marriage
Predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brian De Palma conducts a very funny parody of The Phantom of the Opera (and several other horror films) as a glitter rock musical
Another of the unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilots, the story of an android searching for its purpose. This is excellent science-fiction, one of the most credible portraits of an android intelligence on screen up to this point, while Questor later became the model for Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation
This tv movie was the first English-language remake of the classic French thriller Les Diaboliques. It follows the original closely and still works effectively, although being shot in colour rather than black-and-white lacks the stark tension. Sam Waterston gives a performance of amazing cruelty as the husband
The first film from Oliver Stone and a head-scratching puzzle as a writer is haunted by various supernatural figures from out of his imagination
While this Canadian obscurity gives the appearance of being a 70s sex vampire film, it is in fact an X-rated Frankenstein spoof. While the film is not without its moment of complete dementia (mostly involving sex scenes with a gorilla), it eventually fragments into narrative incomprehensibility
The last film of gimmick master William Castle, a head-scratching oddity where mime artist Marcel Marceau plays a puppeteer who gains the ability to bring people back to life and control them like puppets
Bizarre musical monster bash with singer Harry Nilsson as Dracula’s son and Ringo Starr as Merlin. A film that seems to have no real clue what it is doing beyond friends having a good time. Nilsson makes surely the screen’s least threatening Dracula, while this is the worst film from the usually great Freddie Francis
An obscure item among the fad for Edgar Allan Poe films during the 1960s, this threadbare production features Poe himself investigating sinister happenings at an asylum
Visually extraordinary Coming of Age story set during the Spanish Civil War in which a young girl imagines seeing the Frankenstein monster
TV movie with a script from Richard Matheson in which Barbara Eden becomes mysteriously pregnant. The film seems to be a copy of Rosemary’s Baby before it is suddenly turns into an alien impregnation film
Strange film from Spanish director Joseph Larraz about mysterious happenings at a country mansion
An obscure French comedy in which Peter Cushing plays a vampire or more correctly plays a horror actor used to playing vampires. Assorted extremely unfunny shenanigans running around his castle ensue
Adaptation of a Michael Crichton book about an experimental neurological implant that ends up going amok. This adopts the blinding white-on-white look that has chilling effect in the early hospital sections but stifles the drama when it is extended to the real world too
An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one’s nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original
Interest in UFO phenomena peaked in the 1970s with numerous books seriously studying it and twice as many crackpot ones. While there had been various flying saucers in 1950s alien invasion cinema, this obscure and rather dull oddity was the first fictional film investigating the phenomena
Dismissed at the time as a copy of Young Frankenstein even though it had been made earlier, this is a none too funny vampire comedy featuring David Niven as Dracula
Quite possibly the most boring 1970s Euro horror film ever made. Innocent travellers stray into a village of vampires but hardly anything happens in this soporific Spanish effort least of all the title orgy
A Spanish thriller about the investigation into mysterious payment made to an executed killer, which is then followed by a series of copycat killings that mimic those conducted by the dead killer
Essentially a 1940s mummy film with a voodoo priest resurrected in the present and stalking the reincarnation of his love. In English translation, this has been thrown together with a meaningless word salad title to appeal to the era’s fads for Blaxploitation and exorcism films
Okay stalker psycho-thriller designed as a vehicle for the British model Twiggy that after a slow start eventually develops some sharp twists and surprises
One of the first films about a mysterious catastrophe that empties the world of all but a handful of survivors that formed the template of later films like The Quiet Earth
Mel Brooks’ finest moment, a witty stylistic homage to and spoof of the Universal Frankenstein films. A great cast are on perfect form all around.
Most science-fiction films lack worthy ideas, this is one that contrarily suffers from too many and collapses under the weight of its pretensions to profundity