The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
James Cameron had mixed success with this alien contact film. Much of the show is designed to highlight Cameron’s interest in diving and the effects on display are spectacular but the film peters out at a peculiarly abrupt non-ending
Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of the adventures of the world’s greatest liar was another problem ridden Gilliam production that emerges as an absurd, colourful spectacle filled with a dizzying greatness of imagination
Modest and effective horror anthology from the two brothers responsible for Pitch Black and the Ewoks tv movies. Featuring a quarter of stories, all of them are strong efforts generating a more than reasonable degree of tension throughout
In his second to last film, Italian B-budget director Antonio Margheriti makes a cheap and not very good Alien copy that feels like a throwback to the 1950s monster movie
One of the better animated films from Don Bluth that sets up a likeable arc in the relationship between a redeemable mobster dog who returns from Heaven and a young girl
One of Steven Spielberg’s more overlooked and quieter films, a remake of the 1940s guardian angel fantasy A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg never much ignites the love story but the film has some magical moments and a scene-stealing John Goodman
The fourth and one of the worst of the numerous Amityville films. This reduces everything to a series of crude and increasingly more preposterous, eventually laughable, shocks
This is not even a sequel The Amityville Horror but a cheaply and tattily made Canadian effort seeking to sell itself using the name. The first in an industry of films employing some relevance to Amityville
The first of the Back to the Future sequels has a whiplash ingenuity that propels us through several different scenarios, including a trip to the future, a dark alternate present and requiring Michael J. Fox to duck unseen in and around the margins of the first film
Psycho film in which an investment banker relieves the pressures of the corporate world by going out hunting people with a crossbow. A film rich in ideas is given a disappointing B movie treatment
Tim Burton borrows from the dark brooding graphic novels of the era and gives us a beautiful, stunningly designed film that digs deep into the psychological recesses of the masks and funny faces
Unfunny comedy set around a morgue where a mad doctor has found a process to resurrect the dead. Sort of like Night Shift crossbred with a PG-rated version of Re-Animator
Animated version of the Roald Dahl tale about the friendship between a young girl and a Big Griendly Giant, this is simply made but has an appealing mix of eccentricity and sweet charms
An amiable comedy that relocates the basic story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame to a modern American campus about the taming of a scruffy hunchback who lives in the university belltower
A quirky hit that jumped aboard the 1980s popularity of time travel themes and laid into them with an appealingly offbeat eccentricity. The film that propelled Keanu Reeves onto become a star
Enormously underrated film from Mike Hodges with Rosanna Arquette as a fake medium whose abilities start to become real. The quality of writing and Arquette’s performance is exceptional
TV mini-series from the great Dennis Potter in which the lead character in a smutty novel by an aging writer rebels against her fate. As always with Potter, this blurs fiction, meta-fiction and autobiographical elements
Rather witty little Troma release about a killer lawnmower hunting people at a golf course that in its last half becomes an hilarious parody of Jaws
Disastrous Brooke Shields starring film adaptation of the famous comic-strip about a girl reporter. Nobody involved is taking the show seriously and everything is blown into camp farce.
The first film from Enki Bilal set in a decaying luxury bunker where the elite of the future take shelter from a civil war. A film that creates a fascinating world – in which nothing interesting ends up happening
Joe Dante black comedy about a neighbourhood where everybody becomes paranoid about the weird new people moved in. The film’s bite gets lots amid everything being pitched at a clumsily shrill level of hysteria
Obscure and little seen thriller where a Florida sheriff deals with a series of radioactive murder victims where all clues seem to lead to an abandoned nuclear power plant
The film that Bill Maher would prefer to forget. Beyond the deliberately absurd title, this is an amusing spoof of the jungle adventure and contains a far cleverer degree of wit than you expect
A low-budget 1980s film where a family buy a house in the desert only to find that there is a Native American demon imprisoned in the cellar
One of a spate of killers returned from the electric chair films that came out around the time of Wes Craven’s Shocker. The film is all build-up and almost no delivery, although is enlivened by an undeniable sense of humour
From the director of the hit Dirty Dancing, an inane romantic comedy in which Cybill Shepard thinks her daughter’s boyfriend Robert Downey Jr is her reincarnated husband
The second of the BBC’s tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the slightest of the works where the story is reduced to two half-hour episode
This was the third of the four BBC tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. The tv versions treats the books with quite reasonable faithfulness but suffer from extremely cheap looking effects
Originally intended as a Demons sequel, director Michele Soavi decided to head in more arty directions. Imagine a Demons sequel mounted with the artistic ambitions of producer Dario Argento’s Three Mothers films
An incredibly eerie and haunting killer clown film from Victor Salva. This is one of the few films that capture something of the spooky suspense of John Carpenter’s Halloween
Film adaptation of writer Whitley Strieber’s true-life claims to have been abducted by aliens. I am not sure if the film convinces us of Strieber’s claims but what is interesting is the thoughtful way it examines the phenomenon
Peer Greeaway’s finest film, an elegant, surrealistic satire on fine dining with Michael Gambon as the mob boss owner of a restaurant with Helen Mirren as his unfaithful wife
A low-budget SF-action film produced by Roger Corman with David Carradine as a police chief in a dystopian future who becomes wound up in the lives of two young lovers on the run
The first of Albert Pyun’s kickboxing killer cyborg films featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme who was largely unknown at the time. Pyun creates wall-to-wall action but there is almost nothing else to the film
Stunningly photographed yachtboard psycho-thriller with Nicole Kidman (in her first major film performance) and husband Sam Neill taken prisoner by a psycho Billy Zane. Produced by George Miller
Known under various titles including Dead Dudes in the House and The House on Tombstone Hill, a film about a group of young people who go to renovate a house but find themselves trapped inside being killed
Sam Raimi gave some money to independent filmmaker J.R. Bookwalter to see what he would do. The result is a modest and gory if amateurish copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
A typical 80s film with a mad doctor resurrecting the dead in the abandoned wing of an asylum amid gory makeup effects. The first film from Brett Leonard who next went on to make The Lawnmower Man
Albert Pyun film that takes place entirely in a warehouse where a woman is taken prisoner by a man who may or may not be an alien. As with much of Pyun’s output from this period, this is cheap and eventually incoherent
Entertainingly cheesy monster underwater film from Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham. One of several such Aliens located underwater films that came out the same year that James Cameron made The Abyss
A documentary about George Romero that was filmed during the shooting of Dawn of the Dead. Originally made as a teaching aid for a film school class before being given commercial release
The original The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a classic of silent German Expressionist cinema; this loose remake feels like Eraserhead reconceived with absurd Day-Glo disco decor
One of the forgotten entries in the mid-1980s spate of bodyswap comedies where elderly Jason Robards finds himself in teenager Corey Feldman’s body. This suffers from a very confused script
Wackily funny SF musical with Jeff Goldblum, Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey as aliens who land in the San Fernando Valley. Directed by Julien Temple with a giddily effervescent silliness
Probably the worst film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this opts for a trashy sordidness with a lunatically over-the-top Anthony Perkins in the centre of the show
Terry Jones of Monty Python fame makes a comedy with Tim Robbins as a non-violent Viking on a quest to bring about Ragnarok. A film that seems to think it is funnier than it ends up being
Beautiful fantasy where Kevin Costner hears a voice that directs him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield where dead players to return to life. A genteel fantasy filled with nostalgia for lost Americana and the 1960s
Sequel to the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly directed by that film’s effects creator Chris Walas. This reduces Cronenberg’s obsessive bodily transformation film into just another monster on the loose tale
An often subtle ghost story where widower Terry O’Quinn moves into a new house where he becomes involved with the ghost of the woman who lived there
From the heyday of the 1980s VHS release, a cheap psycho film in which maniac James Courtney (later Michael Myers in the Halloween reboot) pursues a young actress around the desert
The eighth of the Friday the 13th films that offers the novelty of taking a revived Jason to New York City. Actually, one of the better entries in the series, which plays his encounters with New York locals for some amusement
Sequel to Fright Night, this basically rehashes what went before but introduces Jerry Dandridge’s sister. This does come with the benefit of some way-out stylistic effects from director Tommy Lee Wallace
A tv mini-series where Lindsay Wagner has a near-death experience and is then haunted by people come back from the dead to kill her. From the author of The Howling
1990s VHS SF/action with David Carradine as a future cyborg bounty hunter on the run with a wrongly convicted girl while hunted by his own side
Light fantasy comedy with Audrey Landers as a writer who befriends the ghost of a starlet played by real-life sister Judy Landers
A weak follow-up to the hit original that essentially killed off any further Ghostbusters sequels. Most of the the cast are back but the plot and proceedings feel like a walk-through for all involved.
An erotic film starring Donald Trump – I kid you not! A legendarily awful Bo Derek film where she is a widow who searches the world for the perfect body for her late husband’s ghost to reincarnate in
An inane comedy in which a wimpy teenager goes on a date with Liane Curtis who then becomes possessed by The Devil who is pursued by a chaser of devils
An incredibly bad Canadian-made sequel to Food of the Gods about a scientist who devises a growth hormone that accidentally creates a horde of giant rats
The 17th Godzilla film and the second of the modern era where Toho started to employ top drawer effects. Toho created a new nemesis, the plant monster Biollante, although this was not popular with the public
A live-action Japanese-made mecha/transformer film that creates a dark industrial world as setting and fills it with some stunning effects
The fourth of the Halloween sequels where the series is by now is no more than a crudely directed slasher film, a far cry from John Carpenter’s eerily suspenseful original
Adaptation of the Strugatski Brothers’ book about human observers becoming involved in the affairs of a barbarous alien society. Essentially a Star Trek Prime Directive story, the Strugatskis didn’t much like this version
Frequently ridiculous low-budget horror film set in a Western recreation town where the owner has resurrected his daughter from the dead
A psycho film with an original premise – Gary Busey as a psycho who builds a hidey-hole in the attic of a house where he spies on and tries to manipulate the lives of the family living there
A delightful Disney film about the adventures of a group of kids who are accidentally miniaturised and have to make their way across a now giant-sized backyard. The effects are top-notch and the film pure and unabashed fun
Routine executed killer comes back from the electric chair film made to exploit the success of Wes Craven’s Shocker. In some places this was sold as another of the House films
This makes an interesting attempt to tell a modern-day version of the Edgar Allan Poe story but the film’s emphasis on cheap shock effects is a far cry from Poe’s masterful mood of despair and desolation
An hilarious black comedy written with a biting savagery where advertising executive Richard E. Grant has his life taken over by a ruthless boil on his shoulder
A rather interesting horror film in which both the heroine and the heroine of the story she is reading are stalked by a disfigured madman, as the boundary between fiction and reality begins to dissolve
An enormously entertaining Hong Kong variation on Highlander in which two rival swordsmen are frozen in a glacier and then awakened in the modern day
An absolutely delightful comedy from Maurizio Nichetti, a parody of Bicycle Thieves, which becomes a meta-fiction where the characters emerge from the screen and enter the modern world
Third of the Indiana Jones films. This comes with all the breakneck action sequences and Sean Connery doing a fine comic turn as Indiana’s irascible father but also plays to a much greater slapstick emphasis
A slasher film set in a supermarket! This proliferates in a series of cut/uncut versions and has an amazing cast line-up, including acting appearances from Sam Raimi and most of his regular troupe
A completely ridiculous thriller with Kevin Kline playing a fireman-detective who is tracking a serial killer. It is hard to tell if it was intended as a comedy but it managed to attract an impressive cast list
One of the loveliest of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, the story of a young witch who creates a parcel delivery service using her broomstick. As always, Miyazaki gives the film a simple beauty and an adult emotional complexity
An Italian exploitation ripoff of Jaws with a group of environmentalists in South America dealing with a killer crocodile that has been made giant size by radioactive waste
A crazed Evil Dead-styled film directed by sf/horror writer S.P. Somtow about modern-day Aztec sacrifices, this makes a beeline for bizarrely over-the-top gore effects
A cult anime about a demon war on Earth and a half-demon child who has been born in the body of a teenager. This quite takes you aback with its extremes of violence and sexual fetishism
A film where makeup effects artist Tom Burman takes the director’s in this head-scratchingly strange film about a family set in a bizarre future world
A VHS era light fantasy Nancy Allen plays a futures trader in Chicago who is offered the chance for business success if she will trade her soul
Gimmicky thriller about teen girls making prank phone calls who end up calling and then becoming the target of a serial killer
The beginning of the big Disney renaissance of the 1990s. An adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that is conducted with an enormous degree of energy, colour and good cheer
A very likeable children’s film about a boy befriending the monsters under his bed. Made with a gleefully malicious anarchy and some great creature effects
Anime film based on Winsor McCay’s celebrated comic strip about a boy’s adventures in dreams. Despite a script from Ray Bradbury, the film waters the comic-strip down to the formula of the modern children’s film
This is intended as a deliberately bad parody of a 1950s SF film. It is a fairly silly effort that almost ends up being too well made for its own good to mimic the originals that weren’t even trying
Low-budget but not uninteresting action film about a group of immortal mercenaries. This would be interesting on a better budget, which is sort of became with The Old Guard
A film about a psychopathic circus geek who kills using a pair of steel dentures. One of the better critically received releases from Troma. Things get quite nasty.
A rare venture into kung fu cinema made in Mainland China
Hilariously adult and filthy minded retelling of the Marquis de Sade story using puppets. Quills crossbred with Meet the Feebles if you like.
Dull and dreary version of the Edgar Allan Poe story especially when placed in contrast to producer Roger Corman’s definitive 1964 version
Disappointingly, not an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story but more of a Poe-themed slasher film about a masked killer dressed as the Red Death
Film adaptation of a time travel novel by John Varley, one of the finest SF writers in the world, that ends up bluntening and dumbing the story down
There was undeniable shock value watching 1960s sex symbol Diana Rigg cast as a venomous middle-aged woman with murder on her mind. While this BBC mini-series won awards, you feel that a 1960s Hammer psycho-thriller would have conducted it in half the time
Murder mystery set on a moonbase. Aside from assuming the Soviet Union would exist in the future and the datedness of its technology, this creates a surprisingly credible lunar environment set amid East-West tensions. Brigitte Nielsen even gives something approaching a performance
This has a cute title pun but otherwise is a feeble SF comedy
Fairly silly comedy in which housewife Susan Blakely discovers that she is turning into a werewolf. This varies between the over-the-top and the oddly amusing line
Dry and typically laconic trio of tales from Jim Jarmusch all set around characters at a Memphis hotel on the same night. Included here for one episode featuring the appearance of a ghost Elvis
Anthology where directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen each contribute an episode set in New York. Allen’s contribution in which a magician’s trick manifests a giant nagging mother in the sky is side-splitting
Police procedural with Roy Scheider as a detective tracking a serial killer who strikes on the nights of big baseball games