The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Big serious film about reincarnation that places the arguments for into a courtroom setting. Director Robert Wise and a young Anthony Hopkins fail to do much with a talk-heavy script
A film that has gained a cult reputation about a group of people who start suffering flashbacks from a bad batch of LSD taken in the 1960s that now causes them to become crazed killers
Someone seems to have had the idea of combining Steven Spielberg’s killer truck film Duel with The Exorcist to produce an absurdly entertaining film about a possessed car
From the great era of Canuxploitation, an entertainingly ridiculous film about a possessed child wreaking psychic havoc and an often absurd series of deaths against those who are mean to her
Forgotten effort from the heyday of devil children films (The Exorcist, The Omen et al). This takes place in a backwoods setting and has a director who is determined to pile on atmosphere frequently to the point of overkill
This was one of the earliest films from Charles Band who has since gone on to become a prolific producer/director of low-budget films. Here Band offers a very adult take on the Cinderella fairytale
This was made as a fairly blatant mockbuster copy of Jaws. This is basically Jaws on dry land with a bear instead of a shark and an assonant soundalike title Claws instead of Jaws
Steven Spielberg’s film about alien contact was every bit as big as Star Wars in 1977. The whole film is the equivalent of sitting gazing up at a starry sky wondering if we are alone and built up to the wondrous climactic appearance of the UFOs
The most faithful version of Dracula to date. A BBC mini-series that adapts the book as a no-nonsense costume drama and even shoots in the mentioned locations, giving the impression of the story taking place as Bram Stoker visualised it
An attempt to make an American equivalent of a Loch Ness Monster film. This drowns amid a dreary cheapness. The passable stop-motion animation effects have been a frequent source of ridicule
Disastrous adaptation of the Roger Zelazny novel where the story of a Hell’s Angel on a trek across the post-apocalyptic wasteland is recast with a G.I. and a girl and kid along for the journey, plus the addition of giant mutant cockroaches
A cheap 1970s Nature’s Revenge film that blatantly borrows all the essentials of The Birds in the story of a group of trampers in the High Sierras coming under attack by wildlife due to an ozone hole.
Adaptation of an early Dean R. Koontz novel about an A.I who imprisons a woman in her own home with the intention of impregnating her. A variant on Rosemary’s Baby conducted far more tastefully than you might think
Another in the 1970s fad for Animals Attack films. This features David McCallum facing off against hordes of dogs that turn on humanity with killing intent
The first film that Tobe Hooper made immediately after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a dementedly OTT Southern Gothic with Neville Brand as a backwoods motelier serving up his guests to the crocodiles
A bizarre cross between the softcore Emmanuelle films and the Italian cannibal film. It seems perverse to be watching beautiful bodies one minute and next showing their insides being spilled
In the 1950s Bert I. Gordon specialised in cheap giant insect films. Here he takes H.G. Wells’ name in vain and jumps aboard the 1970s Animals Amok cycle but still makes another shoddy film about giant ants
A thorough embarrassment on Christopher Lee’s resume – an early Charles Band film in which Lee is a stranded alien inhabiting the cloned body of priest in a convent of nuns
The first film from David Lynch, a surrealist work that is one the cult films of all-time. A masterpiece of mood that swims in an atmosphere of dream and Freudian symbolism of cryptically inscrutable meaning
This is regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made, featuring many of the actors but with John Boorman stepping in as director. It’s an incomprehensible mishmash of ideas but not without some laudable elements
Based on a popular children’s book, this is a simplistic animated film for very young children about a toy mouse that goes on a quest to find freedom
Harrowing and difficult to watch variation on The Last House on the Left where a trio of escaped convicts brutalise a decent black family in a series of humiliations
A Peter Straub adapted ghost story that sits in an ambiguous state about whether Mia Farrow is seeing her dead daughter or going mad. This comes influenced by Don’t Look Now
One of the notorious 1970s Nazisploitation films, this Italian-made entry is one work that crosses way over taboo lines and makes for extreme watching
From the great and underrated Paul Wendkos, a 1970s tv movie that taps the deviltry movie fads of the day and becomes a blatant copy of The Exorcist, albeit cleaned up for tv sensibilities
An adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic book (or at least the first section) starring Richard Harris as Gulliver, this has been conducted as a mix of live-action and animation
Third of the original Herbie the Love Bug films from Disney. This is an amiable effort that takes place at a car race across Europe and sees the return of Dean Jones, plus has Herbie fall in love
The second film from Wes Craven, a classic in the 1970s Backwoods Brutality cycle with a family stranded in the desert as they come under attack from a family of cannibals lurking in the hills
Generally overlooked animated adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien book made for tv by Rankin-Bass. This keeps to the text very faithfully – more so than Peter Jackson – and is only let down by some limited animation
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen industrialist Kirk Douglas fighting the coming of the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant
Very strange Japanese ghost story that has been rediscovered as a cult classic. It resembles a film like Willy Wonka turned into a haunted house film where the intention seems to have been to be a bizarre and wacky as possible
This was the third of the notorious Ilsa films featuring a hyper-sexed Dyanne Thorne. This locates everything in Russian where she is the commandant torturing the prisoners of a Soviet gulag
The theatrically released pilot film for the 1970s/80s tv series based on the Marvel Comic that tells the Hulk’s origin story. This is one of the better episodes of the otherwise banal series
Throwback to 1950s films like The Quatermass Xperiment with Alex Rebar as an astronaut infected with a condition that causes his flesh to melt. A B movie boosted by great melting effects from Rick Baker
The second film adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel following The Island of Lost Souls. This has remade with a decent budget but the story’s primal charge has been cleaned up
This was the first solo directorial outing from Terry Gilliam outside of Monty Python, a fantasy film that is a dark and frenetic skewering of the cinematic portrayal of the Middle Ages
A really shoddily Greek made film that imports Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence in a story concerning a cult of minotaur worshippers who are snatching tourists in a Greek village
The Italian cannibal film is the most extreme genre ever seen. An earlier effort from the director of Cannibal Holocaust, this delivers the gut-munching goods
A team of explorers find a humid world at the Arctic where dinosaurs and cavemen still roam. The men in rubber suit effects are adequate, although the film itself is on the slow side
A work of exploitation notoriety about snuff movies. Seen in heavily cut and edited forms, the film holds an undeniably sordid and nasty charge but mostly comes across as amateurish
A psycho-thriller with a difference where Jodie Foster plays a teenager with secrets who maintains the pretence of living with her late father while fending off a pedophile Martin Sheen
Cheap and ridiculous attempt to cash-in on the 1976 remake of King Kong made by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers. A classic bad movie on most counts
Horror host John Stanley directs a film with an amusing premise where a famous horror actor known for playing a vampire turns out to be a vampire for real, causing problems when he turns up for a convention
Amiable and quite likeable light fantasy in which supermarket manager John Denver receives a visit from God in the person of George Burns. This throws barbs in the direction of organised religion but in a way intended not to offend anybody
A West German-made film where a space mission to Jupiter returns only for the crew to find the Earth deserted. This captures something of the original Planet of the Apes in its better moments
After his crass remake of King Kong, Dino de Laurentiis went on to make this blatant copy of Jaws, which was widely ridiculed. Contrarily, i rather liked it – a Moby Dick by way of Jaws, it comes with some visually fantastic moments
Solid and effective entry in the 1970s Animals Attack genre with a group on an island under attack by killer dogs
The third in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations with Doug McClure. This has much imagination despite the special effects often not being up to the task
Disney live-action film about a boy and his dragon where the dragon is represented by animation
Modest effort featuring some stop-motion animated dinosaur effects that are reasonably accomplished for the pre-CGI era. On the other hand, it seems a professionally-made amateur production designed to highlight effects and with not much beyond that
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
Alain Resnais meta-fiction with John Gielgud as an aging writer sits in bed writing a story that is based on the people around him
A blatant copy of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now from cult Italian director Lucio Fulci. Here Don’t Look Now reduced to no more than a dull clairvoyant murder mystery
The fourth film from David Cronenberg, a clear (although by no means uninteresting) attempt to repeat the success of Shivers with Marilyn Chambers as a woman with a vampiric skin parasite that turns victims into maddened killers
A quite good but little seen Backwoods Brutality film from the great era of Canuxploitation with overtones of Deliverance as hikers in the wilderness are harassed by mysterious figures who play taunting psychological games
1970s disaster movie with George Segal tracking Timothy Bottoms as a mad bomber blowing up rollercoasters
The underrated Curtis Harrington makes a quickie possession film about a haunted drive-in theatre. Cast soon after Carrie, the film is headed by a fierily passionate performance from Piper Laurie
The last film from the great Mario Bava – an uncanny effort filled with some strikingly spooky scenes that leaves you uncertain whether what we are seeing is a haunting, a possession or is taking place in a mad woman’s fraying mind
Michael Winner directs a film about a sinister apartment building but his typical crude and heavy-handed style fails to conjure anything remotely scary
This is nominally a Western – one of the harsh and realistic ones made at the end of the 1970s – and quite a good one too. It comes with a real surprise ending that takes it over into fantasy
The very first Nazi zombie film, a genre that proven surprisingly prolific since. A modestly effective film filled with great images of dead stormtroopers rising from the surf
The third of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, this came out the same year as Star Wars and Harryhauden’s stop-motion animated creatures look much more flat in comparison
The cornerstone of the modern New Zealand film industry – the first film of both Sam Neill and Roger Donaldson – a vigorous dystopian action film that offers up a nightmare of sleepy parochial 1970s NZ being brutally overrun by the imagery of totalitarianism
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
Another unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot, this would have made for a potentially worthwhile series involving Robert Culp and Gig Young as occult investigators
The first big screen incarnation of the Marvel Comics character, the theatrically released pilot for a dreary tv series starring Nicholas Hammond that stripped Spider-Man down to being no more than a superpowered detective in a tv cop show
The tenth of the James Bond films, the third for Roger Moore. This determines to be spectacular in terms of international locales, effects and sets. It was also the point where the Moore Bond films started to become giant cartoon spectacles of the absurd
The single most influential science-fiction film of all time, one that created a massive industry of sequels and spinoffs, not to mention copycats, and changed the way that people thought of science-fiction
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
An The Exorcist copy made as a tv movie – where The Exorcist shocked audiences with barf bag theatrics and obscenities, this merely has Karen Black shucking her staid fashion sense and buying a sexy red dress. Rather peculiarly, this becomes a possession story as women’s self-actualisation drama
The work on which the cult of director Dario Argento was built. The film consists of a series of extravagantly arty deaths at a girls boarding school, although comes without any real plot connecting this
A 1970s Animals Attack film as deadly tarantula spiders take over a small town
One of the more absurd of the Animals Attack films that sought to cash in on the success of Jaws concerning a giant octopus on the attack
The great Robert Altman was one of the most individualistic and downright eccentric American directors. His most head-scratching efforts were when he experimented in genre cinema like this cryptic and baffling work in which three (mainly two) women appear to exchange identities
One of the better killer shark copycats made in the immediate aftermath of Jaws, this approaches the familiar in unexpected ways
Robert Aldrich makes a thriller in which rogue general Burt Lancaster hijacks a nuclear missile silo and demands the truth about the Vietnam War be released. A big muscular production that attained some controversy at the time
A production from Amicus founder Milton Subtosky in the style of the horror anthology that made the company’s name
Less well known adaptation of the Frankenstein story that can arguably be considered the most faithful of all the film versions
Clearly influenced by the original Westworld, this is an interesting film about people waking up inside a computer-simulated Western town. Without realising it, this was the very first film to depict Virtual Reality
Probably the strangest film that Charles Bronson ever made – a retelling of Moby Dick where he plays the real-life figure of Wild Bill Hickok hunting a mythic white buffalo instead of a whale. This was a big financial flop but is a not unworthwhile film
Ralph Bakshi left behind counter-culture animation to embark on this original fantasy film that comes with a trippily surreal quality, mixing fantasy tropes with a science-fictional rationalisation
A film that comes with such a level of psychotronic dementia that it may seriously damage your sanity concerning the relationship between a man and his pet worms