The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Anime about two homeless boys living in an inner city neighbourhood. The background artwork has a stunning degree of detail such that the city almost becomes its own character
Film spinoff of the rock parody act headed by Jack Black. This emerges like i>The Blues Brothers recast with Cheech and Chong and delivers some occasionally surreal and amusing gags
Prequel to the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which sets out to tell the origin story of the cannibal family. New director Jonathan Liebesman pushes the gore and sadism to Torture Porn extremes
French horror film that generates a reasonable level of tension as a couple are attacked in their home by mysterious strangers
Children’s film made with care and attention, written and produced to an adult level, far superior to 95% of the US studio efforts
Quite evidently modelled on Se7en even to the lookalike title, this is the novelty of a Christian serial killer thriller. The results are quite strange to say the least
John Boorman makes a film where Brendan Gleeson has his life taken over by a doppelganger
Adaptation of the legendary historical romance was considered a box-office flop but emerges as a better film than one expected it would
Thriller starring Jennifer Beals as an FBI agent who receives clairvoyant visions during the hunt for an abducted girl
A blatant copy of Hostel about tourists in Brazil being abducted into an organ harvesting scheme. Director John Stockwell seems distracted by filming diving scenes
A likeable and colourful French animated film
The first of several animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this does a solid job in adapting Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, a retelling of The Avengers origin story
Follow-up to the previous animated Marvel Comics film featuring The Avengers, this serves to introduce Black Panther to the screen for the first time
Milla Jovovich is a part of a vampire rebel underground in a dystopian future. A film filled with incredible design schemes and action scenes that are as spectacular as they are ridiculously improbable
The second of the Underworld films where Len Wiseman gets a bigger budget and amplifies the CGI and action sequences,. On the other hand, the characters and story are so stripped to a minimum you lose track of why things are happening
Adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic novel with a script from The Wachowskis. Moore’s repudiation aside, this is a fine and literate work that retells the story of an anarchist trickster and potently politicises it for the era of the George W. Bush.
Not to be confused with tv’s i>The Vampire Diaries, this is a British film that sets out to reconstruct the lesbian vampire film within the frame of modern LGBT relationships. It is also Found Footage, an early and rather amateurish variant, but not without some effect
The novelty of the first Christian horror film. As opposed to much of the message-heavy tripe that usually gets peddled in this niche market, this is actually well structured with a number of interesting ambiguities and engaging as a story for the better part
Pedro Almodovar film in which two daughters try to deal with their mother’s seeming return from the dead
WarGames was a thriller that was way ahead of its time; this sequel is no more than video fodder exploiting recognition factor that reduces the original to hacker movie cliches in a technically ill-informed and incoherent plot
Disney Channel film where a modern teenager finds she is the reincarnation of a martial arts warrior
One of The Asylum’s first mockbusters, designed to popularise on the remake of When a Stranger Calls
Passable remake of the 1979 slasher film that streamlines the original and sets it all in amazing designer dream home
Despite being pitched as a zombie film, this is more of a ghost story featuring undead children who were killed in a mine disaster. Director J.S. Cardone does well with the horror elements
The 1973 version of The Wicker Man is a cult classic; this is one of the worst remakes of all time that gets nothing about the original right, blunts its themes about religion and tosses in crude shocks and killings
Likeable animated film about a group of zoo animals making an escape that ended up being overshadowed by the similar, more high-profile Madagascar
Tough brutal British film where a group of youth offenders are hunted while on a wilderness survival course on an island
Amiable live-action adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s work made for the BBC with an all-star cast
Oddball film set in an afterlife for suicides. You keep expecting the film to burst out into a vein of rich black comedy that never comes and you are left with a film that feels as though it is being eccentric for the sake of it.
Brett Ratner inherits the X-Men franchise from Bryan Singer for the third film in the series and promptly killed it off (after this point everything became prequels featuring Young X-Men). Ratner’s handling of the superheroic action lacks Singer’s exhilaration or any affinity for the characters
Dull live-action tv remake of the Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated Christmas special
Troma film about a group of trampers attacked by a Yeti only for one of the group to discover gay love with the Yeti
A blatant Bollywood copy of Oldboy, often scene-for-scene
Family-friendly superhero film that places more focus on slapstick than superheroics and contains an embarrassing return to the screen for Chevy Chase