The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
One of the better copies of Basic Instinct with detective Ellen Barkin being tempted as she investigates a serial killer who is targeting women who were involved with a lesbian call girl
Wim Wenders film from a story idea by U2’s Bono set around the down-and-outs at a fleapit hotel slightly into the future. The film circles around a cast of eccentrics without ever really coming together
The second of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films where he has the smarts to hire John Woo as director who brings his customary stylish flair with action to transform the film into something exhiliraing
Brian De Palma makes a surprisingly good hard science film about a rescue mission send to save the first manned Mars expedition and their encountering alien artifacts on the planet
The Frankenstein film, which deals with grave robbing and hideously scarred corpses, seems an unlikely choice for adult movie treatment. This is one of the offerings
Amiably silly children’s vampire film that manages to take a juvenile approach off with tongue planted in cheek
Takashi Miike tv mini-series with a mind-bogglingly confusing plot involving a split personalitied detective, possession, a terrorist pop star and barcodes imprinted in eyeballs
The third and final film to date directed, written by and starring Yahoo Serious where he plays an accident prone man obsessed with alien life
Thriller where student Nicole Eggert begins to have clairvoyant visions leading her to an abducted girl
Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, about a planet surrounded by six suns that only experiences nightfall once every thousand years, is considered the No 1 classic science-fiction short story. On film, it has alas befallen two impoverished versions from Roger Corman of which this was the second
Resembling a supernatural version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, this South Korean ghost story delivers considerable spookiness
Fascinating documentary that interviews cult Cyberpunk author William Gibson on his life and writing while being driven around in the backseat of a car
A batshit crazy film involving Nostradamus who is a present-day cop, a time travelling assassin trying to bring about the Biblical Apocalypse at The Millennium, plus alternate timelines and a psychic FBI agent
Sequel to the Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor. That film’s tour-de-force was a scene with Murphy playing all the members of his family. Here the family have been brought to the fore. Murphy’s performance and the effects are expectedly great but the plot is all over the place
The Coen Brothers hilariously adapt The Odyssey into the Depression Era with George Clooney leading a trio of escaped convicts as he tries to return to his wife
B-budget mix of giant animal film and submarine drama with impoverished effects and a script only notable for its ludicrous improbabilities
TV mini-series remake of the 1959 nuclear war film. With no longer the need to make messages as in the original, the story has been expanded out with a lush romantic sweep
Sequel to the live-action 101 Dalmatians remake. This brings back Glenn Close as Cruella DeVil and proves a far more enjoyable film that its predecessor
Hilarious Jan Svankmajer film about a mother who decides to treat a log as a child. Full of blackly funny humour before transforming into a macabre monster movie
Disney Channel film about a cloned kid. The result indifferently slung together and the basic premise dealt with in a hardly serious way
Psycho-thriller in which Jessica Alba finds herself drugged and then held a captive prisoner by Iain Glen
This has the intriguing idea of two Demi Moore’s living on either side of the world, each dreaming that they are the other but the premise pans out as no more than a routine Chick Flick
Modest psycho-thriller with Tracy Nelson as a psychopathic babysitter who kills all in the way to romancing her employer
Okay psycho-thriller with Maxwell Caulfield as the tenant who moves into Linda Purl’s sleepout with the intention of taking revenge against her
A Disney Channel film, this has the amusing idea of translating The Phantom of the Opera to a modern multiplex and telling it as a children’s story
A gripping and particularly well conceived planetary survival story. The film that launched Vin Diesel’s career and he has never been better than as the lethal, tight-lipped serial killer Riddick
Steven E. de Souza directs a film that supposedly tells the true story that inspired The Exorcist but in practice is just another excuse to trot out the possession and exorcism cliches
Quirkily eccentric and surreal New Zealand made comedy about a couple living on a farm
Fairly silly fairytale parody with a prince transformed into a frog trying to find a modern girl to give him the kiss of true love
The third of the Prophecy films with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel. This time the wry humour and interplay of ideas of the other films feels more thinly drawn
Based on an off-Broadway play, this is a drag parody of the beach party movie. It does dig into the squeaky clean image of the genre but never seems a particularly funny parody
One of the more likeable among the 2000s fad for low-budget CGI monster movies, this is aided considerably by a sense of humour and a line-up of oddball characters
Philip Kaufman conducts a biopic of the Marquis de Sade (played by a manic Geoffrey Rush) and how he continued to publish despite being confined to an asylum. This then becomes a debate about modern censorship
TV movie in which aging William Devane travels back in time to try and prevent the death of his father
Wacky offbeat film about a group that set out across post-apocalyptic terrain in search of a pirate radio signal
Rather charming Steve Barron film in which Pete Postlethwaite turns into a rat. The delights are the perfect nonchalance in which everyone accepts the situation
One of a spate of scientifically grounded Mars movies that came out in 2000, featuring a space mission crew stranded on the planet
Serial killer thriller about an FBI team who realise they are hunting a killer who targets other serial killers
True-life film based on a teenager who created a Satanist coven and led a group of friends to kill one of their group
The third of the Japanese Ringu/Ring films. A new director means a different approach but what also becomes apparent is that the original was never intended as a series and the attempts to further draw it out result in a confusing mishmash of ideas
Good-natured DreamWorks animated film set during the Conquistadors arrival in South America. Aztec culture undergoes some modern rewriting but this remains modestly enjoyable (*)
The second entry in the ultra-annoying animated franchise spun off from the animated tv series that only seems to centre around poo and pee jokes, this is marginally more enjoyable than the first film
Michael Madsen is a bank robber who makes an escape from jail and goes on the run to track down the serial killer who killed his daughter
Japanese film about a demon-slaying girl samurai. The creatures effects and world-building mythology gone into this is quite extraordinary
Remake of the classic tv movie with Shannen Doherty investigating her sister’s death among deviltry in a girl’s school
The first in a popular series of comedies, this spoofs the recent hits of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the most vulgar and witless way possible
By the time of this third film and the departure of screenwriter Kevin Williamson, creativity in the Scream series seems to be flagging even though this has critic-proofed itself by calling itself a parody of a sequel
Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa conducts a remake of the British thriller Seance on a Wet Afternoon. Where the original was a mundane film that depicted a kidnap scheme involving a fake medium, Kurosawa builds this out as an actual ghost story
Film where recovering addict Balthazar Getty is dragged into an underworld of vice by mysterious stranger Peter Weller
This comes with the clever and uniquely original premise that asks what would happen if during the making of the 1922 Nosferatu actor Max Schreck turned out to be a real vampire
New Age film where a psychic makes a prediction about the couples at a party splitting up and how this affects all present
An early CGI animated film conducted on a cut-price budget that tells further adventures of Sinbad
Arnold Schwarzenegger revisits something of Total Recall in this modest and clever action film in which he discovers that a clone has stolen his life
Dean R. Koontz adapted mini-series about plane crash survivors and psychic powers that comes with a series of wild twists that the script fails to offer adequate explanation for
From Swedish director Roy Andersson, a series of plotless, surreal vignettes pitched with black humour
Clint Eastwood directs a film about a quartet of aging NASA astronauts reunited for one mission back into space after forty years.
An obscure parody about a team of inept and dysfunctional superheroes that was one of the earliest works from a then unknown James Gunn (who not only writes but stars as one of the superheroes)
In a whole bunch of ways this – plausibility being a big one of them – is a bad film. On the other hand, it does boast an entertaining array of giant spiders all emerged from a space shuttle crash
TV movie where Kyle MacLachlan comes across a town where the residents have discovered a Fountain of Youth
A blatant copy of The Blair Witch Project with a group of people armed with video cameras investigating a haunted house
Psycho-thriller with Andrea Roth as a woman who enviegles herself into a household with malevolent intent
The celebrated Walter Hill directs an Alien-inspired film about a mutated killer loose on a spaceship. This was a problem-ridden production that pans out far less interestingly than it promises to be
Gonzo comedy that looks like a film about post-holocaust mutants that has been directed by Russ Meyer
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
Film about a pair of magical soccer boots, so centred in its local sports culture that it is unlikely to have much appeal outside of its Manchester setting
Hordes of killer roaches overrun an island. A reasonable and not too bad run through of the formula of the bugs on the attack film that comes with the benefit of some convincing effects
Theatrical film spinoff from the Thomas the Tank Engine tv series using several imported American actors
Belgian film shot in the first person about an extreme agoraphobic who seeks to cultivate relationships with other people online
Very nicely made space opera from animator Don Bluth, operating from a Joss Whedon script, that unfortunately proved a big box-office flop
One of the strangest film homages one has come across – an almost complete scene-for-scene remake of Jaws but with the shark substituted by a killer tree being hunted through a park by rangers
The third in a series of Biblical End Times films withGary Busey as a decent cop who wakes up in a future ruled by the Anti-Christ. The heavy-handed slinging of Bible verses makes this hard-going for anyone who is not a believer, while the conspiratorial tone frequently verges on nuttiness
M. Night Shyamalan’s immediate follow-up to the huge hit of The Sixth Sense. This similarly builds a big conceptual mystery before arriving at the rather hokey notion that Bruce Willis is really a superhero
Sequel fairly much in name only to Urban Legend and barely at all about urban legends, this has the amusing idea of taking place at a film school and features a number of sly asides. This alas befalls routine direction
Surreal Japanese horror film in which the world is taken over by spiral patterns. A strange and trippy film.
Yoshiaki Kawajiri, director of Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, steps in to make a sequel(?)/reboot(?) to the cult 1985 anime with visually enthralling regard
Low-budget video release about a group of people holed up in a house preyed on by a vampire. Passable but never amounts to much
The directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura. A film premised on the idea of mashing the John Woo-styled gangster film up with the gore-drenched George Romero zombie film.
A film based on the historic tyrant that gave the world the name Dracula. This ends up being too sympathetic and loses all credibility when it tries to tie in vampire mythology
Completely ridiculous David DeCoteau film about voodoo rites in a boys boarding school that gets hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
Serial killer thriller that is built around the stunt casting of Keanu Reeves as the killer
One of Kathryn Bigelow’s less successful films, an adaptation of an Anita Shreve historical murder mystery that tells a story in two different time periods
Robert Zemeckis takes on the ghost story with uncommon effectiveness. While this is average on a story level, Zemeckis’s directorial approach pushes it to the unnervingly spooky, with the last fifteen minutes being one of the most suspense-filled sequences in recent memory
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around
Amiable romantic comedy in which Mel Gibson comes round after an accident in the shower to find he now has the ability to read women’s thoughts.
French psycho-thriller where Sergi Lopez gives an unnervingly charming performance as a psychopathic schoolfriend who inserts himself into Laurent Lucas’s life
Frothy work of Magical Realism with Penelope Cruz as a woman whose cooking weaves a magical spell
BBC tv adaptation of Gothic potboiler by J. Sheridan Le Fanu with newlywed wife Naomi Watts facing an evil squire and mad women in a big gloomy house
Bryan Singer’s dynamic and exciting adaptation of the Marvel Comic title fairly much kicked off the massive fad for Marvel superheroes in the 00s/10s. This was also the film that mad Hugh Jackman into an international superstar.
A modest and surprisingly well thought out SF film set in a future where swapping bodies is commonplace only for a man to find his original body has been stolen