The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cinematic revival of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle series having the two animated characters emerge into the real (live-action) world. A film that you feel should have been funnier and more energetic than is
Excellent psycho-thriller in which family man William R. Moses has his life taken over by an evil twin. Filled with a series of gripping unexpected twists and tensions
Interesting and worthwhile documentary that focuses on the six key and most influential horror films of the 1970s and interviews their makers in depth
Mary Harron takes on Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial work about a yuppie serial killer and refines it to a blackly funny satire on 1980s pop culture and corporate greed
Extremely satisfying German medical thriller about a secret society that conducts illicit experiments. The film comes with a torturous suspense and goes way out on a limb in the gore department
Work of softcore erotica that gives the old 1950s B movie plot of astronauts encountering a planet inhabited only by women an Adults Only workover. Aside from the obvious reasons to watch this, the SF content is entirely negligible
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of the classic tales has been granted a decent budget that allows the stories to emerge with lavish spectacle and the fantasy to fly with exceptional regard
Splendidly nasty French film that feels like Thelma and Louise by way of Natural Born Killers where two women pick up guns and go on a shooting spree against men who are abusive jerks. Directed by two women and cast with porn actresses, this holds little back
The Bare Wench Project was an inane softcore parody of The Blair Witch Project. This is the first of four sequels in which another troupe of girls go wandering in the woods while finding almost any opportunity to take their clothes off
Film spinoff of Batman Beyond, an animated tv series set in the future as a youngster inherits a hi-tech Batsuit from an aging Bruce Wayne. The film resurrects The Joker but fails to do anything interesting with the character
An entertainingly violent Japanese comic-book of a movie in which a classroom of school pupils is abandoned on an island with weapons to eliminate one another. Frequently cited as the inspiration for The Hunger Games
The adaptation of the alien invasion novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard starring John Travolta is a completely ridiculous film that was laughed off screens and is regarded as a classic bad movie
US remake of the British comedy where Brendan Fraser is a schmuck who sells his soul to The Devil who twists the wording of each wish. The bite of the original is lacking
A children’s ghost story that is written with uncommon depth and care and directed with reasonable effect
Hong Kong comedy with a police station under siege from zombies. The emphasis is more on comedy than the horror element
Reasonable budgeted film that does no more than rehash Devil Child cliches from The Omen – or even more so the basic plot of Servants of Twilight. Chuck Russell throws in lots of CGI effects to little effect
One of the most impressive overhaulings of the vampire theme in recent years in which vampirism is treated as an addiction in which humans become hooked on the vampire’s blood
Stunning Mamoru Oshii-prodcued anime short about a vampire girl who operates as an American agent eliminating vampires in post-War Japan
Epic and beautifully animated anime set largely underwater about the struggle to save a dying Earth from an evil super-computer that wants eradicate humanity
An anthology made up of six short film spoofs of The Blair Witch Project with a wraparound featuring the excrutiatingly unfunny Pauly Shore
The much lambasted but not entirely uninteresting sequel to The Blair Witch Project. Documentary director Joe Berlinger adds a fascinating layer of meta-fiction that winds in the real-world reaction to the first film
Uneven George Romero film from his less satisfying latter period in which Jason Flemyng wakes up with a blank white mask on his face and finds it allows him to unleash vengeance against those who wronged him
Video-released spinoff of the Toy Story films featuring Buzz Lightyear in an adventure. Although released under the Pixar name, the animation is all cheaply produced by a Chinese studio
The second entry in a surprisingly prolific series of low-budget films – currently running to fifteen films – that homage the 1980s slasher film
The first in a surprisingly prolific series of slasher films, which has produced some fourteen sequels at current count. Made on a micro-budget, this vigorously homages the 1980s basics
The dreamscape film was given extraordinary life by Tarsem Singh in his directorial debut who transforms a fairly ordinary script with visuals and costuming that is out of this world
Halfway reasonable action film in which US President Roy Scheider is taken hostage by Taiwanese terrorists who want to use the nuclear launch codes against China. The surprise about the film is how political it is willing to get
Witty and rather funny slasher film in which the killer targets virgins in a community. The genre’s usual tropes about the chaste girl surviving are turned on their head in rather hilarious ways
The first full-length Claymation film from the UK’s Aardman Animations. With typical Aardman eccentricity, this is a parody of a WWII escape film conducted with talking chickens
Magical Realism film where Juliette Binoche’s magic chocolates serve to unleash passions in a conservative French village. An incredibly overrated film that was for some reason nominated for an Academy Award Best Picture
A so-so adaptation of an Iain Banks novel featuring Jonny Lee Miller as a crusading journalist who becomes involved in the hunt for a serial killer who is tied to his own past
Thriller with Peter Weller as an aging man who is infected with a bio-agent that causes anyone he comes in contact with to bodily melt down within a matter of seconds
Early Mike Mendez film that quickly abandons being a standard venture into a haunted convent and launches into an entertainingly over-the-top splatter show filled with zombified nuns
A strong well-made French thriller that comes with the influence of Se7en involving murders on a mountainside glacier and a secretive boarding school with ties back to the Nazi era
Low-budget Fred Olen Ray action film is another variant on Die Hard with security guard Treat Williams foiling a terrorist hijacking of a nuclear power plant. For some reason this also includes reuse of footage from Terminator 2
Tobe Hooper delivers an entry amid the early-00s vogue for B-budget CGI monster movies, drawing clear inspiration from Lake Placid. Hooper had not made a good film since the 1980s and this does little to reverse the path of mediocrity
Japanese director Shusuke Kaneko turns his attention to the pyrokinesis theme. Thanks to Kaneko’s expertise with effects, this becomes the best film on the firestarter theme yet
Sensational hit that introduced most of the West to the Wu Xia film. Directed with elan by Ang Lee, there comes a sublimely graceful poetry in the film’s imagery of sword combatants dancing up walls and flying through the air
The third of the Crow films has a more substantial story than the second but is killed by a director who has no feel for the atmosphere created by the other films
Luc Besson produced film set among drum and bass dance culture in New York that follows an aspiring mute dancer (Mia Frye) who is asked to test a new technology that translates dance to music
Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive was a Yakuza film with a gonzo ending. In this sequel, Miike brings back the same two actors and makes it ALL gonzo
Stylish French slasher film about actors being stalked as they put on a performance of Little Red Riding Hood at a country estate. The fairytale is adeptly wound in and out as metaphor.
Inferior sequel to the modest Devil in the Flesh which had Rose McGowan as a psychopathic schoolgirl. Recast with Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, this is now a routine slasher effort
The first film from Mamoru Hosoda based on a tv series that was a blatant attempt to copy the Pokemon phenomenon and concerning cute creatures that live on the internet
The first full computer animated film from Disney. It feels like someone decided to give the Jurassic Park dinosaurs their own film, mixed up with the plot of The Land Before Time
A South Korean film that came out around the same time as Frequency and has an almost identical premise about two people who start talking by radio while separated in time by twenty years.
A low-budget video-released action effort that attempts to copy the James Bond films featuring the hunt for a device that can trigger all nuclear reactors
An interesting attempt to bring Dracula into the modern day – the film that Dracula A.D. 1972 should have been. An unknown Gerard Butler makes a captivatingly magnetic Dracula
A shabby video-released sequel to DragonHeart (the first of several). Although this is quite clearly not being made with the services of Industrial Light and Magic this time
A bizarrely surreal, anything goes comedy as two bros set out to find their car after a night partying. This feels like Repo Man as though directed by the Farrelly Brothers after they had inhaled a few bongs
A Wu Xia film from Andrew Lau, the director of the Infernal Affairs films, in which the two top martial artists in the world issue a challenge to a duel on the roof of the imperial palace
This TV mini-series remake of the Frank Herbert novel is much more faithful to the essence and complexity of the book, even if it lacks the visual resplendence of the film versions
Film based on the enormously popular roleplaying game, this appears to have been quickly thrown together in advance of The Lord of the Rings films but is a shabby effort filled with some disastrous off-tone casting
A film based on true-life necrophile killer Ed Gein starring Steve Railsback. While accurate to the case, this suffers a crucial tameness of spirit when it comes to depicting Gein’s activities
One of the head-scratching animated oddities produced by Disney during the 2000s. Not unlikeable, the story concerns a self-centered Aztec emperor who is transformed into a llama
Live tv broadcast remake of the 1960s Cold War nightmare about an accidental nuclear release over Russia, now with an all-star cast. This proves far more suspenseful and expertly played than one might have thought
Brett Ratner conducts a likeable variation on It’s a Wonderful Life with banker Nicolas Cage suddenly finding himself in an alternate life as a regular working class man with wife and kids
This film version of the massively popular Broadway musical was a miserable flop. The musical is a minimalist one but the film has replaced all of that with literalisations that kill the effect
Brian Yuzna’s adaptation of the cult comic-book is a disappointment that has tamed down any of the censorship-pushing controversy the original had and emerges as no more than a standard dark avenging superhero film
This spins the old plot about a clairvoyant dream of an airline disaster out as a teen horror film based around a series of bizarre novelty deaths. This became the first in a franchise of popular horror films.
Sequel to the live-action The Flintstones film. Whether we asked for it or not, this offers up a Flintstones origin story where we see familiar elements of the series fall into place
Matthew Modine stars in the remake of the classic story about an experiment that turns an intellectually handicapped man into a genius. Everything comes in the simplistic emotions of a tv movie
Sequel to the Christopher Lambert starring future prison film, this relocates the action to an orbiting space station. Less brainless than its predecessor if in the end no more than average
Intelligent and well written film where freak weather conditions allow a son to communicate with his late father by radio across thirty years in time. Where the film starts to get interesting is when this creates unexpected changes in the present
The second and best of the From Dusk Till Dawn sequels. This takes the story back and retells it in a Western setting where it offers some clever twists on the original
An uncommon misstep from Sam Raimi. Despite the fact he has a sterling cast onboard and a script from Billy Bob Thornton, the medium thriller plot rehashes comes out fairly bland
Witty, wryly sarcastic modern take on the werewolf film where two teenage sister become affected – sort of like a remake of I Was a Teenage Werewolf by way of Ghost World. Two sequels followed.
The 24th Godzilla film where Godzilla faces a giant prehistoric dragonfly. While the modern Godzilla films have readily adopted CGI and animatronics, the effects here are much more variable
I enjoyed Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books far more than J.R.R. Tolkien. Alas, the sublime texture and eccentricity is completely missing in this BBC tv version, which aims for colourful silliness
Low-budget but fascinating documentary about cult SF writer Philip K. Dick in particular focusing around the bizarre series of hallucinations he had during the 1970s
The always interesting Michael Almereyda conducts a modernised version of the Shakespeare play where Ethan Hawke’s anguish at inheriting a corporation plays out against a barrage of modern media
A serial killer thriller with Lou Diamond Phillips as a detective investigating a killer who challenges the police to games of hangman
Clever and intelligent comedy where Marisa Tomei finds the perfect man (Vincent D’Onofrio) who also claims to be a time traveller from the future. The film sits in an appealing state of ambiguity about whether this is true
Sequel to the animated Heavy Metal that failed to attract the same cult audience that its predecessor did. Telling only one story instead of several, it only offers a routine space opera adventure
Fifth and best of Hellraiser sequels after Clive Barker bowed out. Scott Derrickson made his directorial debut here and infuses the series with some of the wild imagery and perverse darkness that Barker gave the original
Okay if never standout Danish-made attempt to copy a Disney animated film concerning the underwater adventures of three children transformed into fish
The fourth Highlander film sets out to merge the film and tv series, bringing together Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul. This only produces a continuity nightmare that is a headache trying to follow
One of the worst films ever made – a parody of The Blair Witch Project that mostly consists of various rappers (including Eminem and Vanilla Ice) incoherently improvising a series of monologues about said witch
Paul Verhoeven uses CGI effects to revamp the invisible man film with amazing results. On the other hand, Verhoeven’s penchant for sex and violence overkill quickly emerges with distasteful results
Another adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes quasi-supernatural mystery. This is also one of the worst ever thanks to the wildly over-acted, scenery chewing performance from Matt Frewer, badly miscast as Holmes
Ron Howard’s live-action adaptation of the Dr Seuss story visually embraces the nonsense absurdism but the charms get buried beneath the lavish production polish. Jim Carrey saves the day as The Grinch however.
Described as a cyberporn fantasy, a quasi-pornographic film set in a Cyberpunk future where androids are designed to consume sexual experience
This is sold with the appealing idea of someone slaughtering their way through a bitchy teen clique. However, the film on show is far tamer than anything that it is promises to be
A New Zealand-made horror film with Karl Urban as an anthropology lecturer who debunks the occult who is targeted and forced to go on the run from a Satanist cult
Jack Frost, not to be confused with the Michael Keaton film of the same name, was an amusing horror comedy about a killer mutant snowman. This is a sequel that takes Jack to a beach resort in Hawaii
A Hallmark tv mini-series remake of the Greek myths that fails to stand up to the classic 1963 version. Here Ray Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion animated effects are replaced by cut-price CGI
A quite good thriller where Dolph Lundgren plays a detective who is drawn into a underworld of sadomasochistic sex during the hunt for a female serial killer
The Japanese Ju-on/The Grudge is one of the most popular modern kaidan eiga series, having produced fourteen films to date. This was the very first of the series
Likeable and appealing Disney film in which Bruce Willis is an asshole executive who suddenly finds a kid in his apartment who turns out to be his nerdier boyhood self
A reasonable B-budget slasher film in which teens accept a dare to spend a night in an abandoned asylum only for someone to have rigged the facility with traps and start stalking them
Adaptation of the best-selling Christian book series about the Biblical End of the World. There is a mini-industry of these films and, if one can stomach the preachiness, this is not entirely bad
A forgettable entry in Hong Kong’s Wu Xia cycle that suffers from an overly confusing plot and crucially much in the way of flying swordplay
Fifth film in the series starring Warwick Davis as a malevolent leprechaun dispatching bizarre novelty deaths. In a bizarre novelty twist, this sets the leprechaun loose in the world of rap
One of the video-released sequels to their animated films that Disney made in the 90s/00s, this slavishly imitates its predecessor but does have a likeable line-up of supporting characters
The Adam Sandler comedy and its pitch to the most vulgar common denominator is an acquired taste. This not very funny effort casts Sandler as The Devil’s Son
The film version of a popular series of German children’s books about a buy who befriends a young vampire kid. The proves lightweight and likeable enough
A documentary about the legendary silent actor Lon Chaney who was the original Phantom of the Opera among other horror roles. Chaney would undergo incredible physical transformations for each role
Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski takes the director’s chair and conducts a modest and effective revival of the 1970s occult/Anti-Christ film
South Korean romantic film about a couple exchanging letters across time. This later underwent a Hollywood remake as The Lake House with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock
Film with Ryan Merriman as a teen who rebuilds an old Mercury rocket as a school science project and then has to save a NASA mission