The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Very strange New Zealand-made film that starts out seeming to be an abduction thriller and then turns into an even stranger ghost story that we cannot be sure is happening or all in the heroine’s imagination
Live-action remake of the classic story this has some lovely moments but also feels over-produced and adds unnecessary adult psychological motivations to the mix
South Korean jump aboard the Ringu phenomenon about a series of haunted phone calls that works well through a clever ending
Enjoyably tongue-in-cheek pirate swashbuckler based on the Disney theme park that proved an enormous hit and spun off a series of sequels, as well as giving Johnny Depp one of his iconic roles
The sort of film that might make Troma radioactive green with envy they didn’t make it concerning a giant rampaging ass. Mind-boggling and willing to be stupid and in frequent bad taste
B killer shark films where environmentalists, oil rig workers and drug dealers converge on a Louisiana river where a shark lurks
The first adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s series of novels where every person who ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet is given an abysmal treatment as a tv movie that ditches and rewrites major aspects of the books
The collaboration of Hong Kong directors Wai Ka Fai and Johnnie To have resulted in some utterly deranged films. This is a madcap one with Andy Lau as a bodybuilding Buddhist monk who can see people’s past lives
The best budgeted of Guy Maddin’s films, a renaissance of his familiar kitsch surrealism and silent movie homages
A bizarre South Korean comedy about a businessman who is imprisoned by a possibly crazed man who insists that he is an alien. Things sit in an absurdly funny ambiguity. Later remade by Yorgos Lanthimos as Bugonia
David Zucker takes over the reins of the franchise from the Wayans Brothers. With a lack of big scary movies in 2002 to parody, the film takes a scattershot approach, parodying any film at all
Alec Baldwin’s financially troubled modernised remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster comes to the screen as a compromised vision
Catholic horror film with Heath Ledger miscast as a priest that was a flopped. This is a fascinating piece of theological horror that plays out with an unusually strong and original script
DreamWorks animated Sinbad adventure by the numbers that seems to go out of its way to tell a Sinbad story divorced of its Islamic cultural background
Disastrous Hollywood version of Dennis Potter’s classic tv mini-series where a hospitalised Robert Downey jr fantasises a dream world of 1940s film noir
The third in the series is no longer even a Spy Kids film but a Virtual Reality videogame film. Robert Rodriguez has some fun creating the virtual worlds but the parody that the other films engaged in is missing
Passable video-released Starship Troopers sequel the heads more in the direction of a body snatchers film. Directed by Phil Tippett
Cheaply made video-released sequel to Lilo & Stitch, which is only a rehash but does surprisingly reunite all the voice talents
True crime film based on a woman who was best friends with serial killer Ted Bundy
A South Korean ghost story that achieves quite a degree of spookiness, albeit influenced by the Japanese Ring phenomenon, although things fall apart at a confusing twist ending
After the highs of James Cameron’s first two Terminator films, this was a crashing disappointment. Schwarzenegger is back but his performance has become self-parody and the uninspired action sequences are accompanied by some terrible effects
A remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic that presaged a host of inferior 70s/80s horror remakes throughout the 2000s/10s. What we have is now a different film although not entirely an uninteresting one
This comes with the undeniable influence of the then recent Minority Report in its story about a telepath recruited by law enforcement
Michael Haneke has risen to great acclaim in recent years; this is one of his earlier works – a slow Tarkovsky-esque work that seems set in a future that is collapsing at the edges. Haneke is a fascinating talent but this is a bit too vague and well free of anything actually happening for me
Sequel to Timecop with more of an action emphasis as Jason Scott Lee replacing Jean-Claude Van Damme trying to stop a criminal who is erasing agents from the timeline.
Michael Crichton adaptation that flopped at the box-office. Crichton tells a story about time travel to the Mediaeval period where he spends a good deal of time researching the era. The film ditches all of this to make no more than an historical film with an SF gimmick
Documentary about Tintin creator Hergé based on audio recordings he made in the 1970s
British tv movie variant on Fatal Attraction where a woman is stalked by her ex-husband Peter Davison
After a decade-long slump, Tobe Hooper started to show he still had what it took with this remake of the 1980 slasher film
Splendidly original and completely off the wall work of stylised animation from Sylvain Chomet
The first part in Peter Greenaway’s three-part mock biography, a surreal, sprawling work of mad information overload and obsessive lists
Appealingly quirky homemade zombie film that launched the career of Australia’s Spierig Brothers. The two demonstrate a considerable inventivity when it comes to the visual and makeup effects, which they created all themselves
This stirs a bunch of elements from the late 90s vampire film and dark poses from the graphic novel to create a slick vampire action film. Several sequels followed.
One of the spate of South Korean ghost stories that came out in 2000s. While made with undeniable directorial style, the two hour running time drags and the plot is often unclear what is happening
Strong return to genre material for Australian director Richard Franklin with Radha Mitchell as a yachtswoman in a round the world race facing ghosts on board that may well all be in her imagination
A blatant copy of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs even down to the near-identical title and a similar plot about crop circles appearing on a farm presaging an alien invasion
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the duo behind Final Destination, remake the 1971 film about a man and his rats. However, this is set in a stylised 1940s world with a caricatured performance from Crispin Glover that causes the film to lack any credibility
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin
Passable effort that copies that basics of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a group of stranded teens running afoul of an in-bred family
Bryan Singer’s immediate sequel to X-Men, this ups the number of new mutant characters, although only sporadically manages to kick in with the spectacular superheroic action sequences the first film had