The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Akira director/creator Katsuhiro Otomo returns with this live-action manga adaptation about a wandering exorcist. Very different to any of Otomo’s anime, this is much quieter and rooted in Japanese folklore but has some undeniably way out scenes
One of the last films from William Friedkin, an astonishingly deranged descent into paranoia and madness, featuring an alarming performance from a young, unknown Michael Shannon
Highly effective British venture into the Torture Porn fad made not long after the successes of Saw and Hostel. A brutal and harrowing tale about women kept prisoner in the woods that travels to some grim and gore-drenched extremes
Produced by Wes Craven and directed by his assistant director, this features a group of twentysomethings led by Michelle Rodriguez trapped on an island with a horde of killer dogs
Another of Guy Maddin’s silent movie pastiches, all shot in a deadpan style throwing together a hilariously convoluted madcap plot involving child detectives, mad scientists and spy capers
A very black Norwegian comedy in which a man who committed suicide wakes up in an afterlife very much like this world but where everyone suffers from a maddening blandness
British tv mini-series reminiscent of And Soon the Darkness about an English couple who have their children abducted by sinister strangers while holidaying in France. From the director of Ginger Snaps
In the aftermath of the huge success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, this was another supposedly true account of an exorcism. Made on a low-budget, this fails to surmount the cliches of The Exorcist
An enthusiastically gore-drenched New Zealand comedy about mutant sheep, this favourably harkens back to the heyday of Peter Jackson’s early splatter films
Of all the concepts in physics, the wildest of these is the black hole. It seems highly disappointing that this set out to be a film about a black hole but all we get is a film about an electrical monster amok
Another in the mid-2000s fad for 1970s remakes. This revives what has been cited as the first slasher film but throws most of the original out and turns the rest into a gore-drenched slasher film
This is one of Takashi Miike’s most incomprehensible films – what appears to be a murder mystery and gay love story set in a prison, along with random SF elements
What starts out as a seeming mockumentary about a serial killer turns into an hilarious deconstruction of the tropes and cliches of the slasher film. Imagine a film like Man Bites Dog crossbred with Scream
A gonzo post holocaust film that was put out under the National Lampoon label. Beyond having a great title, this represents as close to near-total ineptitude in filmmaking as it is possible to get
Sequel to Basic Instinct made fourteen years later. Sharon Stone vamps her way across the screen but the heated sexuality of the original has been watered down to a lukewarm whimper
An incredibly silly animated film set around the antics of talking barnyard animals. Directed by comedy writer Steve Oedekerk, this is almost entirely centred around gags involving animals doing parodies of human things
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
Another animated Barbie film that leaves you quite certain that every problem in life can be solved with a positive upbeat ditty
One of the better video-released Disney sequels churned out during the 90s/00s, this finds some of the innocence of the original even if it never scales the same heights
Next to Hayao Miyazaki, Michel Ocelot is the greatest animators of all time but one of the least widely recognised. Here he conducts a beautifully made Arabian fairytale
Despite a title that resembles more a 1990s killer cyborg film, this is actually a zombie film. Made soon into the mid-2000s zombie revival, this is driven more by fannish enthusiasm and copious gore than anything else
The Polish Brothers are a greatly underrated force in US filmmaking. Here they make a fine film with Billy Bob Thornton as an everyday farmer who decides to build and launch his own space rocket
Lightweight Luc Besson directed children’s fantasy with a young boy shrunken down to miniature size to engage in a series of CGI animated adventures among a race of fairy-like people. Several sequels followed
Young Adult fantasy in which two girls befriend a mermaid. A film very much made for teenage girls, bubbly, silly and lightweight
Mel Gibson seems to love directing historical spectacles with an emphasis on bloody brutality. Here he creates a bloodthirsty adventure set among the Mayan peoples
An animated film about a child who is cruel to ants only to be magically reduced down to their size and then have to become their saviour against an exterminator
A variation on The Defiant Ones with a human and an android chained together but this fails to find anything to say either about androids or prejudice
A fine film from The Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sanchez about the tensions among a group of friends who hold a captured alien in their garage that then begins to affect them
Quite why this received a theatrical release is a major scratch of the head. A slasher film that is slickly put together but beneath that a work of thorough ordinariness
A Syfy Channel disaster movie based around the scientifically nonsensical idea of the Earth’s pole undergoing a magnetic shift and temperatures being reduced to absolute zero
This offers the novelty of a Bigfoot film by way of Hitchcock’s Rear Window where wheelchair-ridden witnesses Bigfoot preying on a house of girls. This generates a reasonable degree of tension
Spanish film about a woman travelling to her family home on the Russian steppes that creates a very haunted atmosphere. On the other hand, the twist ending has borrowed too much M. Night Shyamalan
South Korean anime that is set in a future world where people are obsessed with shit. This comes with a demented energy and a filthy-mindedness that is determined to outrage
A tv movie remake of a classic 1960s BBC serial where astronomers pick up messages from space that gives instructions for the construction of a body for themselves