The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp in one of their best collaborations. Burton creates this sweet oddball fable that is a take on Frankenstein where the monster becomes an alienated youth with scissors for hands
It is some surprise that Akira Kurosawa’s only full venture into fantastic cinema was with his penultimate film here. A beautifully filmed anthology of eight tales, including several ghost stories and two anti-nuclear parables
French film about true-life serial killer Marcel Petiot, a respectable doctor who operated a lifeline for Jewish refugees during WWII only to kill them
Claude Chabrol updates Fritz Lang super-villain Dr Mabuse to a millennial West Berlin where Alan Bates is a tv mogul who masterminds a mass suicide cult via messages hidden inside advertising
A highly entertaining effort from Charles Band and Full Moon Productions directed by Albert Pyun featuring Tim Thomerson as a hard-boiled miniature alien cop come to Earth
The Warren Beatty directed and starring adaptation of the popular newspaper comic-strip detective proved a flop. Beatty creates a highly stylised world and peoples it with an all-star cast but fails to invest the world with any depth
Part of an attempt to revive the Blaxploitation film, a gospel horror film of sorts in which a young African-American divinity student fights the demon Temptation
A Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle set in a prison that becomes an interestingly stylised realm in a wild plot featuring serial killers and organ harvesting schemes
Amid the early 1990s spate of dark superhero films, Sam Raimi created one of the few original screen superheroes with Darkman, essentially a superhero film where The Joker (by way of The Phantom of the Opera) is the hero of the piece
Conceptually ridiculous film where a spaceship crew in lunar orbit come across a space shuttle that disappeared through the Bermuda Triangle and contains a parasitic organism that is The Devil
Rather enjoyable action film that conducts an amusing spin on Lethal Weapon buddy cop formula with Dolph Lundgren taking on an intergalactic drug dealer
A sequel entirely unrelated to The Curse only worth seeing for a series of entertaining entertainingly ridiculous effects where a man’s arm transforms into a mutant snake
Charles Band film that gives the impression it is a Transformers-type film. While a Transformer does appear in a few scenes, this settles down to be more of a killer android whodunit.
A Paul Schrader director psycho-sexual thriller set in a beautifully brooding Venice as a couple are befriended by menacing husband and wife Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren
Mark L. Lester’s follow-up to his earlier The Class of 1982 about a teacher forced to adopt vigilante actions in a lawless classroom. In the interim, The Terminator came out and this now has killer android schoolteachers
Qurkily appealing Cyberpunk film in which a female bodyguard and a male pleasure android must make a journey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland
This was the fourth and final, as well as the best of the BBC’s tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, which works well enough despite the impoverished production values
Sequel to the sensational A Chinese Ghost Story, this reunites the principal talents and actors but is not quite as snappy as the original, placing more of an emphasis on comedy
The first Child’s Play felt like an incredibly silly film. However, this first sequel takes the same elements and constructs them into a much tighter, better package
Cult Italian horror director Lucio Fulci plays himself, a horror director being driven to hallucinations and acts of murder by the violence he directs in his films
Cheap and fairly terrible adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero from low-budget director Albert Pyun. The superheroics look impoverished and Matt Salinger makes a dopey-looking Steve Rogers
The last gasp of the Cold War nuclear film. A tv movie that features Martin Landau is the US President who tries to stop an accidental Russian nuclear release escalating into full-out war
The directorial debut from Frank Darabont who went on to make The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist. A wife and her lover plot to kill husband off by poisoning him only for him to survive and plot an elaborate revenge scheme
Sequel to the cult splatter hit of Re-Animator, directed by the original’s producer Brian Yuzna. Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott and David Gale are back. This has some amazing effects work but lacks the first film’s outrageous black humour
One of the better 80s attempts to copy A Nightmare on Elm Street from an old Charles Beaumont script in which Bill Pullman is a neurologist who becomes involved in an increasingly wilder series of reality bendings
The second film from Kathryn Bigelow in which Jamie Lee Curtis is a rookie cop who is stalked by a creepily psychopathic Ron Silver. A beautifully stylish rendering of an increasingly improbable plot
Belated Australian entry in the slasher genre about killings at a Catholic girls’ school, this is shabby on all counts
This has next-to-nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, Luigi Cozzi makes a giallo thriller that makes claims to be the unofficial third chapter of Dario Argento’s at that point unfinished Three Mothers trilogy.
The first film from E. Elias Merhige, subsequent director of Shadow of the Vampire. An unfathomably strange film in the Eraserhead vein about gods disemboweling themselves, rebirthing and being beset upon by nomads.
Frank Henenlotter takes the commercial route and makes a sequel to his no-budget cult film. A bigger budget allows the film to become a comic variant on Freaks featuring a series of way-out makeup effects
Fine Curtis Hanson psycho-thriller in which dull yuppie James Spader befriends charismatic psychopath Rob Lowe and is drawn into a series of taunting psychological games
Third of the Back to the Future films, which takes everything back in time to the Old West. Probably the slightest of the trilogy, this nevertheless goes out with a rousing farewell
A wildly deranged and gore-drenched ride. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby with an Alien chesburster where a woman is impregnated by a parasite that maintains a monologue as it urges her to kill and drink blood to feed it.
The second film from Guy Maddin, which comes with all of his familiar homages to German Expressionism and silent cinema, wrapped up in a surrealist plot of hilarious melodrama and side-splittingly deadpan dialogue
Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, a popular revival of the 1970s bugs amok genre about a town overrun by deadly spiders, although this avoids the horror label and plays itself with much humour
One of the last directorial outings from cult director Larry Cohen. Comic-book artist Eric Roberts is wound up in trying to trace a mysterious ambulance that is abducting women into illicit experiments
Paul Hogan became a huge international star with the Crocodile Dundee films. He next went on to appear in this oddity star as an aging ex-con who believes he is an angel
One of Woody Allen’s less interesting films, a modernised version of Alice in Wonderland with Mia Farrow as a bored housewife who passes through various surreal experiences