The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Andrzej Zulawski, known for the demented Possession, makes an SF film about planetary colonisation. The spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky hangs over the film, which is long and philosophically rambling. What you cannot deny is the film’s epic scope and the mad splendour of Zulawski’s visuals
Mind-twisting mini-series where videogame designer Stephen Dillane is wound into a series of reality and illusion games
Hong Kong-made Wu Xia based on a Japanese manga about warrior monks fighting to stop the opening of portals to Hell. This seems uninspired when it comes to the flights of fantasy the genre specialises in, although picks up when it comes to the vigour of its cheap makeup effects scenes
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
Creepy and surprisingly well-made Canadian horror film in which a mentally disturbed David Hewlett has a strange relationship with an anatomical dummy that directs him to kill.
The third of the Poltergeist sequels, which moves the locale to an apartment building and is better than its predecessor thanks to a series of eerie mirror effects
Modest and underrated film where the electrics all around start conspiring against people with murderous intent
Makeup effects artist Stan Winston takes the director’s chair and creates one of the truly original monsters of the 1980s. Several sequels followed
An inanely awful film based on the Sheb Wooley song. This is a really lame copy of E.T. in which a young Neil Patrick Harris forms a band with the title alien
An astoundingly bad low-budget RoboCop copy about an android motorcycle cop that goes amok
An Italian exploitation film about models in the Caribbean being hunted by a vicious rat-monkey hybrid. Some occasionally gory deaths but not much happens
This is essentially a 1940s mad scientist film having been given a workover with an arsenal of gory and gooey 1980s makeup effects. The plot concerns an aging movie star who obtains a rejuvenation serum
A film that comes with a lame premise about aliens distributing a video of a 1950s SF film that turns people into mind-controlled killers all as prelude to an invasion
The first of the sequels to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Featuring the first screen appearance of George Clooney.
Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead came with a cheerfully black cynicism that was a wonderfully fresh alternative to George Romero amid the 1980s zombie fad – this sequel has a painfully unfunny lameness that could not sit at more removed extreme to that
A Hong Kong take on RoboCop with Sally Yeh as crimefighting android. Though produced by and also starring Tsui Hark, a very silly slapstick element comes to dominate what are otherwise imaginative action sequences
From Italy, a blatant copy of Predator – only where instead of a military unit being hunted through the jungle by an alien, they are hunted by a copycat of RoboCop
Completely obscure, this is fairly terrible on almost every level – an effort about a rock singer given the gift by an alien woman of a special frequency that creates peace when he sings. This would be a guaranteed bad movie classic if anybody else had ever heard about it
One of the better of several films depicting the famous meeting between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati that led to her writing Frankenstein. Starring a then unknown Hugh Grant as Byron
Vietnam War film where the setting makes a unique and surprisingly effective backdrop for a modern film noir psycho-thriller
An overlooked effort from the direct-to-VHS era concerning itself with a field of undead scarecrows. Amid the numerous zombie and splatter effects efforts of the day that were being churned out, this settles in with an unusual atmosphere that is often hard to shake
A modernised version of A Christmas Carol that seems to have been construed in the shadow of Ghostbusters right down to casting Bill Murray as Scrooge
One of Wes Craven’s best films. Loosely based on true-life book by botanist Wade Davis who set out to find the drug that creates zombies, Craven delves into Haitian voodoo in a striking blend of dream and horror
A much more elevated version of an Omen-styled Biblical End Times film with Demi Moore worried if her child can save the world
Sequel to the cute robot film pushes the cutsie elements to a nauseatingly anthropomorphished extreme, having it spout smartass colloquialisms and erasing even basic credibility
Sleepaway Camp with its unforgettable twist ending stood out in the wasteland of most 80s slasher films. This was the first of four sequels where Bruce Springsteen’s younger sister inherits the role of Angela. While the original stood out, this merely slips into unmemorable formula
Killer slug movie from hack Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon where the sole notable aspect amid the cheapness of the production is some very gory deaths
Mini-series that was a popular hit in its day, which largely steals its premise of a human and alien cop hunting a body-hopping alien from The Hidden. What makes the show work past its rather ordinary story, is the two leads and their wittily sparring Lethal Weapon-type relationship
This is widely regarded as a classic bad movie. A South African-made space opera where the corner-cutting cheapness of the production proves frequently hilarious
Modest 1980s video release that builds with some unnerving effect as Timothy Daly grants shelter to Kelly Preston only to earn the wrath of a pursuing Satanic cult
Italian giallo with a professor in Budapest investigating a cult of spider worshippers
John Carpenter makes an alien invasion film that works as a biting satire of Reaganomics in which aliens are manipulating reality to increase their profit shares in Earth
Very obscure horror anthology re-edited from episodes of a Canadian tv series featuring names like John Hurt, Charles Gray and Keir Dullea.
This collaboration between Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter results in a mind-boggling blurring of dream, reality, symbolism and sexual obsession. A name cast are allowed their heads and go wild
The nearest that Troma Films ever made to an epic, their biggest budgeted film ever, a satiric war film, albeit conducted with their usual cartoon splatter effects and bad taste humour
An 80s horror film that suffers a bizarre identity crisis and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a haunted house film, a home invasion film or a makeup effects vehicle
A one-note joke premised on casting Arnold Schwarzenegger and diminutive Danny DeVito as mismatched clone twins. Unexpectedly charming with Schwarzenegger and comedy director Ivan Reitman turning out what are probably their best works.
Sequel to Graveyard Shift with a vampire appearing on a vampire film set and taking over the role in the film
A parody of the slasher film with an amusing central idea – what if a slasher maniac found a love interest and wanted to give up hacking and slashing to be with them?
One of the spate of H.P. Lovecraft adaptations that came out in the late 80s/early 90s. This feels like an effort by earnest amateurs but does take its Lovecraft seriously unlike most of the other films of this cycle.
Bizarre comedy where Nicolas Cage is a literary agent who believes he is a vampire. Cage gives the most absurdly over-the-top performance ever put on film
A grippingly good Dutch thriller about a husband who becomes obsessed following the disappearance of his wife, while at the tame time we also get a parallel plot about the comically jolly serial killer responsible
Psychic powers comedy made in the aftermath of Ghostbusters where Jeff Goldblum is upstaged by a kooky Cyndi Lauper
One of a spate of bodyswap comedies in the mid-1980s where father and son Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage end up swapping bodies
B-budget director offers up a copy of Mad Max 2 and peppers it with plentiful tongue-in-cheek exploitation elements stirred with undeniable vigour
Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Corey Haim adopts an unusually intelligent dog unaware it is part of a genetically engineered killing machine. Produced by Roger Corman who spun out a series of sequels.
Groundbreaking film that hilariously imagines an alternate world where cartoon characters live alongside humans. The energy and creativity of the film is superlative
Outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, not much else that George Lucas has made has been a success. This Ron Howard-directed epic fantasy proved to be a big flop where Howard’s lightweight touch fails to make a one-dimensional plot fly
Italian horror film featuring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair that has little going for it bar some imaginatively gruesome deaths
Film based on the character created by Mike Jittlov about an amateur filmmaker/effects artist trying to make it
Bizarrely surreal comedy directed by and starring Yahoo Serious who plays Albert Einstein as an Australian who discovers surfing and rock