The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
South Korean-made cheapie intended to ride the coattails of the 1976 remake of King Kong, this must be one of the worst films ever made with some of the most pitiful special effects ever put on film
The second film from John Carpenter, a powerful and effective work about a handful of police and prisoners trapped in a police station at siege from an all-out assault by gang members outside
Second in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations starring Doug McClure. This opens with the fabulous invention of the drilling mole but the arrival at the earth’s core look cheap and tatty
Intermittently amusing parody of the disaster movie set aboard an atomically-powered luxury bus where everything proceeds to go wrong. The better parody of the genre would have to wait for Airplane
Film that gained a notoriety for its scenes of a stage magician torturing and mutilating people. This seems fueled by a nasty misogyny involving the degradation and killing of women.
A ghastly fairytale adaptation. Classic Hollywood director George Cukor took several stars to shoot in the Soviet Union and the results look like a badly choreographed amateur pantomime, lacking in any essential whimsy
The first film from the great Alan Parker, a 1920s gangster film but where the entire show is played out with kids, which include a young Jodie Foster. Regarded as a classic by many, this is a one-gimmick film dependent on kids (not) being able to play a complex range of adult emotions
A theatrical film directed by 1970s genre tv producer Dan Curtis. This has the intriguing idea of a house that acts as a psychic vampire. In all other respects, this plays out as a standard haunted house story
The very first Stephen King adaptation, a hit that made King’s name. Brian De Palma directs with flamboyant visuals that make you gasp but the film would be nothing without its amazing central performances from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie
From the heyday of the disaster movie, an all-star cast head up a big scale drama about a train where a passenger is carrying a deadly plague, only for the train to be shunted all across Europe
A psycho-thriller that has gained a modest cult reputation. This comes seeped in Catholic guilt and director Alfred Sole delivers twists and turns with a fine hand. Featuring a young Brooke Shields in her film debut.
A 1970s Bigfoot/Sasquatch film made for drive-in audiences about students searching for the creature in rural backwater Louisiana
A reasonable and effective Canadian entry in the 1970s Backwoods Brutality cycle with Brenda Vaccaro on a weekend getaway with a boyfriend as they are brutaised by three petty hoods
Another of the giallo psycho-thrillers from Dario Argento in his heyday as David Hemmings is witness to a murder and tries to find the killer. As with Argento’s films of this period, focused around a series of stylish and sadistic dispatches
After the Blaxploitation fad gave us Blacula and Blackenstein, there came this wild variation on the Jekyll/Hyde story where a good African-American doctor takes a potion and turns into a rampaging white monster
A hit Brazilian film with Sonia Braga as a widow who remarries only for her wayward late husband to reappear as a ghost after she finds she is missing his passion. Charming and whimsical
Almost certainly this is the one Christopher Lee Dracula film you will never have heard about. This was a French comedy made not long after Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, spoofing the Dracula film
Scientist Rock Hudson brings an unborn embryo to life as beautiful emotionless Barbara Carrera. Though it uses the trappings of modern science, this still has its feet in the creaky old mad scientist film
Federico Fellini conducts his version of the life of the great lover but turns it into a fantastical film of gorgeously surreal excess, filled with extravagant sets and costuming
The original version of the Disney live-action comedy with mother Barbara Harris and a young Jodie Foster as her daughter who swap bodies for one day. The performances are hilarious and this is filled with witty deadpan gags
A sequel to the original Westworld. Here the cleverness of Michael Crichton’s film is rehashed as a B movie plot about the amusement park now hosting android takeover conspiracies
One of the key films in the cult of director Larry Cohen, this throws in a mind-bending mix involving an androgynous alien messiah, random shootings, alien abduction and Catholicism
A surprise hit when it came out, this is a blatant copy of Jaws, substituting a killer grizzly bear on the rampage in a national park for a shark. Not a very well made film.
From British director Pete Walker who specialised in films about insane authority figures slaughtering Swinging Sixties youth – in this case, he caused a considerable stir with a film featuring a psychopathic Catholic priest
The first of the sequels to the notorious Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. The dispenses with the first film’s unpleasant use of the Nazi concentration camps as a source of exploitation grist and is an altogether better film
A deranged madcap film produced by the Shaw Brothers featuring an enhanced superhero fighting off a bizarre menagerie of monsters commanded by an alien princess
A version of the Jack the Ripper killings from cult exploitation director Jess Franco starring Klaus Kinski. Neither Franco or Kinski are up to much. The film’s resemblance to the facts of the Ripper case is close to zero
A Blaxploitation film where decent law student Glynn Turman is possessed by the spirit of J.D., a petty hood who was shot in the 1940s and now sets out to take revenge
The original film version of the Jim Thompson novel with Stacy Keach as a charismatic and well-liked sheriff’s deputy in a small Montana town who harbours a psychopathic side
The infamous miscalculated Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong where the stop-motion is replaced by Rick Baker in an ape suit, while the fairytale romance is replaced by Jessica Lange as a flower child who cracks jokes
Dystopian SF mounted on a big budget by people that don’t have a clue what they are doing. This creates one of prettiest depictions of the future of any film of this era but it is only a surface deep depiction
Nicolas Roeg’s film featuring David Bowie as an alienated alien visitor to Earth, a film that is equal amounts brilliance and pretentious distractions
This first film from B-budget producer Charles Band, a blatant copy of Eyes Without a Face with mad surgeon Richard Basehart abducting women and transplanting their eyeballs into his blind daughter
George Romero’s deconstruction of the vampire film is one of his most remarkable films. In contrast to vampire cliches, all we get is a pale teen with an unhealthy obsession contrasted with a religious extremist who demands he be exorcised.
Classic 1970s exploitation film about a new kid in high school who takes violent reprisals against bullies. The film comes with surprising levels of allegory.
A William Shatner-hosted documentary based on the works of pseudo-science author Erich von Daniken and his claims that various archaeological mysteries were created by alien visitors
Brian De Palma with Paul Schrader on script make a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Cliff Robertson wandering Venice believing he has found the reincarnation of his late wife
Outrageously whacked Hong Kong film that prefigures The Toxic Avenger in having a downtrodden hero jump into a pool of oil and emerge as an avenging superhero made of oil. Crudely made and pitched, the film’s novelty all lies in the bizarreness of its title character
This is where all the cliches of Devil Children began. A big hit among the 1970s occult boom, this is essentially Sunday tabloid Christianity – a lurid, doom-filled take on Book of Revelation End Times prophecies that moves with a slick polish and a series of schlocky deaths every few minutes
Spanish film about a group of orgiasts at a villa who survive a nuclear explosion outside but are then held at siege from an attack by blinded villagers
Fourth of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films, this lets all restraints go and becomes completely madcap
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
An entry in the 1970s Animals Attack cycle about a small desert town under attack by rattlesnakes
With the sensation of the Gimlin-Patterson film that supposedly depicted a Bigfoot, the 1970s gave us a spate of Bigfoot films. This was the most high-profile, a mockumentary about an expedition that sets out to find Sasquatch
There has very rarely been a good killer bee movie. This is one exception, a directorial effort from no less than the creator of Mission: Impossible that gains its effectiveness by using real rather than optical bees
UK. 1976. Crew Director/Producer – Pete Walker, Screenplay – David McGillivray, Photography – Peter Jessop, Music – Stanley Myers, Makeup Supervisor – George Partleton, Art Direction – Chris Burke. Production Company – Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd. Cast Lynne Frederick (Samantha Gray Falconer/Jean Longmarsh), Jack Watson (William Haskin), John Leyton (Alan Falconer), Stephanie Beacham (Beth), John […]
Jan-Michael Vincent plays a young man who is reluctantly drawn in by his Native American grandfather’s war against a black sorcerer
A musical adaptation of Cinderella from the Sherman Brothers, behind the hit of Mary Poppins
Animated film based on the original Belgian Smurfs comics made prior to the hit of the Hanna-Barbera series.
Arguably the world’s first Found Footage film, this gained a notoriety by conducting a scam that tried to sell it as a real snuff movie
Rather of an oddity – a French adult film about women from the future that in the aftermath of Star Wars was re-edited to become a film about alien women visitors come to kill off the human species via sex. Often directed with an artiness that proves far more than you expect
Jose Mojica Marins, the cult Brazilian director/actor best known as the demoniac undertaker Ze do Caixao/Coffin Joe, presides over a hotel where the guests meet sinister fates
Possibly the best film made by Martin Scorsese. A disturbing vision of urban psychosis set in a morally festering New York City where the psycho, Robert De Niro’s title character who spills over with pent-up violence, actually becomes the hero of the show
One of Roman Polanski’s least recognised films in which he both directs and plays the lead as a mousy man driven to a state of paranoia and the point he loses his identity by the neighbours in a Parisian apartment building
The fifteenth Godzilla film, the last of the classic series, featuring a return of Mechagodzilla from the previous film. Original director Ishiro Honda returns to the series and reclaims it from the juvenile focus it had taken over the last few films to make the best entry of the 1970s
Unsold tv pilot that was a collaboration between Irwin Allen and Rod Serling where time travelers visit the Great Fire of Chicago
The second-to-last Hammer film, an adaptation of one of Dennis Wheatley’s occult novels, shows them trying to catch up with The Exorcist and its ilk
Interesting little film that has gained a small cult reputation, a True Crime work based on a series of unsolved killings conducted by a masked figure in a small Southern town in 1946. A solid, quasi-documentary-like depiction that adheres to the facts for the most part
Cheap and unmemorable film that is essentially a werewolf film with an SF rationale in which an archaeologist transforms into a lizard creature under the moonlight after touching a moon rock. The most incredible thing is that this has a screenplay by Bill Finger, the unacknowledged co-creator of Batman
Animated film based on the popular comic-books co-directed by the comic-book’s creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo,. This is disappointingly weak animation that substitutes slapstick cartoon gags for the comic’s more sophisticated humour
A classic from 70s Euro trash cinema. The title is misleading as this is not about a female werewolf but more akin to Cat People about a disturbed woman who thinks she has turned into a werewolf at the thought of sex
Fine Spanish-made killer children film inspired by The Birds where children inexplicably turn and kill adults. This has developed a modest cult and works with frequently unsettling effect
Cult film with Millie Perkins as a disturbed waitress with a troubled background, this takes place in a fascinating swim of dream and symbolism