The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Asylum conduct their cheap version of the Jules Verne novel, so cheap it doesn’t even look like they went to sea or underwater to film. Here the oft-filmed Verne story has been modernised
Solid vampire film produced by Sam Raimi about a small Alaskan town that suddenly finds itself besieged by vampires who have come because of the month of night
Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the classic Frank Miller graphic novel about the Greek battle of Thermopylae. In replicating the look of the original’s panels, Snyder pushes what would otherwise be a standard historical film into something extraordinarily stylised and fantastic
By the numbers Backwoods Brutality where a woman is imprisoned by crazed backwoods fundamentalists in order to bear them a child
The debut film from Nacho Vigalondo, a time travel (or more correctly time paradox) film that holds a real delight in its conceptual dexterity with which Vigalondo keeps winding the story around on itself
Beautifully written film about an immortal. The result is an entirely captivating SF film whose whole effect emerges simply from people sitting in a living room talking
The fourth of the Die Hard films and the only one that enters into genre territory with Bruce Willis now fighting a catastrophic hack attack that disables the entire US
A documentary about David Lynch made by one of his assistants during the shooting of Inland Empire. Lynch tells assorted anecdotes from his childhood and we see him working on his artworks.
Modernised version of the classic journey though Hell conducted with cardboard puppets – a uniquely appealing experiment peppered with a number of biting contemporary jibes
Tedious psycho film that only seems slung together to feature a series of nasty dispatches. Features some incredibly bad writing and maybe one of the most ridiculous pieces of serial killer motivation ever devised
Blatant Saw copy from Roland Joffe, a director better known for his arthouse works, from a script by cult director Larry Cohen. This starts stylishly before collapsing in a series of ridiculous twists
J-horror film based on the Japanese urban legend of a boogeywoman with a face slit from ear to ear who appears to kill people
A True Crime film based on the shooting of John Lennon. This is anchored by a strong performance from Jared Leto as shooter Mark Chapman that draws you into a disturbed headspace
French Cyberpunk film with a detective investigating the murder of an illegal immigrant girl and finding a blackmarket in stolen and transplanted memories
Another cheap Disney made-for-video-release sequel. This at least offers the novelty of an alternate retelling of Cinderella but everything transpires predictably
Ron Bonk is a director out there making modern exploitation films that often push some fairly outrageous edges. This psycho effort was one of his earlier films
The fifth and final of the Cold Blood films, brings Matthew Kelly’s serial killer back but still lacks the gripping tension of the first two films
An action movie where the toughest criminals are forced into a barehanded survivalism competition against one another while this is livestreamed. As the hero, wrestler Steve Austin has zero charisma
A Japanese romantic comedy about a lonely nerd who falls in love with a cyborg girl that has time travelled back from the future
In his immediate follow-up to Saw, James Wan turns to the old possessed ventriloquist’s dummy theme. The result is not quite another Saw but Wan does deliver a number of very creepy moments
Made by Walden Media following the success of their The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a well-made adaptation of a Christian children’s book even if it sits uncertainly between gentle realism and the push to make it a fantasy film
Quentin Tarantino’s less interesting half of the Grindhouse double-bill. Tarantino makes a film about a psycho stuntman but gets sidetracked by referencing 1970s car chase movies
Although the character names have been changed, this is based on the book sequel to Death Wish. Saw director James Wan goes for broke on the grim vigilantism and turns in an immensely satisfying work
Extremely confusing film in which Mike Vogel keeps waking up in different lives where he is pursued by creatures. Sort of like Dark City reconceived as a horror film.
George Romero returns to zombies, making a Found Footage film. After the disappointment of Land of the Dead, he delivers the goods here, while making powerful political points about modern media
A hackneyed rehash of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window where Shia LaBeouf is a teenager on home detention spying with a pair of binoculars who realises that his neighbour might be a serial killer
One among a handful of animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this conducts a passable telling of the origin story of the Sorcerer Supreme
Film based on the exploits of necrophile killer Ed Gein that throws the facts up in the air and essentially makes up its own story, while the role is miscast with a hulking Kane Hodder
Cryptic and baffling French art science-fiction film involving strange happenings at a laboratory where we never get any explanations about what is going on
British clairvoyance thriller with an almost identical premise to The Dead Zone. Familiar material told with a modest effectiveness
Disney film where an animated fairytale princess emerges into the real world to become Amy Adams. This becomes the opportunity to wittily puncture the unreal world of the Disney fairytale
Vampire hunter film made by two Uwe Boll associates that plays out like a low-budget version of Blade II – it is passably well put together but the scope of action appears constricted to a single warehouse
Neil Jordan teams up with action producer Joel Silver to make a vigilante film where Jodie Foster starts toting a gun against thugs on the streets after the murder of her fiancé
Probably the worst of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer witless and painfully unfunny films – this just consists of a series of vulgar gags run over a bunch of scenes from films that came out in the last twelve months
Sequel to the earlier Barbie animated film Barbie Fairytopia. Extremely colourful but essentially a fantasy version of a teenage girl high school drama that quickly slips into pre-packaged formula
Extraordinary Found Footage film from Shane Ryan shot from the viewpoint of a killer as he seduces and kills a girl. A quasi-pornographic film that makes us question our own complicity in what we are watching
A standout French-made stalker film that leaves Fatal Attraction in its dust. Isabelle Carré giving a frightening performance as a woman who becomes obsessed with a doctor
Another J-horror on the bandwagon created by the Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge films. Some promisingly initial scares traipse off into a dull mystery about investigating the past
One of the bizarre early oddities from The Asylum, a disaster movie about an oncoming asteroid. This also try to jump aboard the mid-2000s fad for Biblical movies where faith elements are combined with the scenario in ways that are bizarre
Shinji Aramaki’s immediate sequel to his reboot of the Appleseed franchise. This lacks the visually stunning qualities of its predecessor and seems more conceptually muddled but Aramaki eventually gets it together
Film spinoff of the cult animated tv show. This feels like a film overtaken by the effort of trying to be surrealistic, wacky, scatological etc more than it is ever a film that creates gag that are funny
You feel that a film about lesbian Japanese schoolgirls vs zombies should have been more interesting. The zombies barely mount to a dozen and the director seems more preoccupied by his softcore predilections
Second of the Alien/Predator crossovers and the absolute nadir of either series. Gone is the suspense of either series’ earlier entries and the creatures are now no more than standard monsters in a teen horror film
A film that feels like it should be an erotic thriller but isn’t. Antonio Sabato Jr. rescues an amnesiac Annalynne McCord who proceeds to exert a fatal influence
Another of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as a desert island castaway accompanied by a retinue of talking animals. Visually colourful but slight
Animated film that has a remarkable number of similarities to Avatar – even though it was released before. A simplistic variant of the same human colonists vs alien natives plot conducted with corner-cut CGI animation
Not to be confused with the Peter Jackson Braindead, although the similarity of titles only emphasizes how weak and unfunny this 1980s splatter homage comedy is in comparison
A spinoff film from the Battlestar Galactica revival series that flashes back to tell the story of the divisive figure of Commander Cain, featuring fine performances and the series’ usual high level of writing
Appealingly nonsensical DreamWorks animated film written by Jerry Seinfeld who also voices a bee who befriends a human woman and then stands up against the exploitation of bees
From The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, a film about two paramedics abducted into a crazed UFO cult who believe their delivery is coming
Girl returns to her hometown after many years, encounters family secrets, ghostly figures, clairvoyant visions. The film holds interest for a time as you try to figure out what is going on but eventually proves a letdown
After the success of the motion captured animated The Polar Express, Robert Zemeckis turned his attentions to the classic legend. Armed with a Neil Gaiman script and a host of name actors in the mocap suits, the result is a soaring fantasy
A bizarre Japanese about a documentary crew who make a film about a man who becomes a giant-sized superhero to fight off giant rubber monsters
Although overshadowed by the same year’s Rogue, this is another Australian killer crocodile film that racks up a remarkable degree of raw, seat-gouging tension in managing to confine its cast of three to a tree for the duration
An interesting attempt to do something different with the werewolf film set in the tribal world of werewolves where Agnes Bruckner decides to defy tradition to liaise with a human
The second in Uwe Boll’s trilogy adapted from the videogame, this plays out as a mix of Western and vampire hunter film and is marginally better than Boll’s usual standards
A blatant copy of Hostel wherein a trio of students cross the Mexican border and fall prey to a Santeria cult. Despite its derivativeness in the plot department, this emerges as a brutal and fairly well made film
Could it be too hard to go wrong in making a film about a doomsday cult hunting people through a subway tunnel? Apparently it is and after a promising beginning, the film churns the cliches with little tension
Sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Steve Carell is transformed into a modern-day Noah. This was pitched to the Christian audiences but feels like a series of lame gags playing on Noah and the Ark devoid of any biblical context
The squeaky helium-voiced Chipmunks are brought to life via CGI in this live-action film, featuring the chipmunks causing chaos, cracking smart-ass one-liners and lots of pee and poop jokes. The results are excrutiating
The fourth film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Nicole Kidman, this badly miscues many key scenes and is missing all the paranoid mood of the original film
Another disappointing remake of an 80s horror film, this misses the gripping suspense and everything that worked about the 1986 original and turns it into just another teen horror film
Disappointing film adaptation of the videogame from Xavier Gens that comes with unremarkable action scenes, a script filled with holes and Timothy Olyphant miscast as Agent 47
The first film from Adam Wingard from which it is hard to guess he would be a major director. This is a very amateurish work, nevertheless comes with an undeniable enthusiasm for the genre
Eli Roth’s sequel to his earlier hit, this emerges as a pallid copy of its predecessor, having merely changed the sexes of the protagonists and lacking the original’s gut-churning impact
The third film version of Richard Matheson’s book is only a remake of the previous version The Omega Man. Crucially, this throws out the essence of the book for a far less interesting piece about Will Smith fighting mutants in the ruins
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was intended to capitalise on the release of I Am Legend and in fact gets much more of the essence of the original Richard Matheson novel than the official film did
Widely ridiculed psycho-thriller starring Lindsay Lohan at the height of her tabloid headline phase and giving a zero effort performance as twins. Quite what is going on in the confused screenplay is anybody’s guess
Another of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations and one of his better. Boll is seeking to emulate the 00s epic fantasy fad and succeeds with some great action choreography from Ching Siu-Tung
The most difficult to watch of the films to come out of French Extremism about a pregnant woman pursued by a mystery woman determined to tear the baby from her womb
British psycho-thriller that is a little too laidback to work but does eventually put some effective twists on its audience
One of the handful of animated Marvel Comics films. This confusingly presents a different origin story to the live-action Iorn Man film, while the major villain of The Mandarin is completely mishandled
The fifth of the Highlander films. It is hard to believe people could actually make a film worse than Highlander II but this is akin to Edward D. Wood Jr on a multi-million dollar budget
David S. Goyer directed remake of a Swedish film about a teenager stuck in a disembodied state between life and death. Despite Goyer’s sterling resume as a screenwriter, this fails to work
This leads to you expect a horror comedy but spends half its running time in build-up with no comedy or monster slaying, although does deliver on this with an entertaining effects-heavy climax
Doctor Who writer/producer Steven Moffat’s modernised Jekyll and Hyde reworks the story in fascinatingly radical ways, while James Nesbitt gives a gleeful rafter-rattling performance
Another variant on the evil child theme, this suffers from far too mannered an approach where you keep waiting for it to pull back and sink its teeth into something shocking
A halfway reasonable Syfy Channel film with people under attack by treacheries of ravens. This homages The Birds, including featuring an aging Rod Taylor, to modest effect
A solid Spanish variant on the Backwoods Brutality cycle in which a man driving through the countryside is shot at and pursued by mysterious hunters with rifles
A not uninteresting historical epic from Dino de Laurentiis that merges the tale of the deposed last emperor of Rome into the beginnings of the Arthurian legends
Adaptation of a classic SF short story about children’s toys from the future that give them expanded mental powers. Much of the story has been dropped in favour of banal New Age thinking
Action film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as a cyborg soldier fighting a one-man war against rogue police drones of the future. A fairly generic assemblage of cliches
Rather witty low-budget slasher film that takes place on the set of a slasher film and pokes considerable at the process of filmmaking
Sequel to the 2006 remake of Wes Craven’s Backwoods Brutality classic (not to be confused with the sequel that Craven made to his original), this is premised around a series of extremely gory set-pieces
The Highlander series conducts an anime variant on the franchise set in a post-apocalyptic future. Co-directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri of Ninja Scroll fame who adds some highly stylised moves
The first in a series of film reboots of the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime tv series. Epic animation but you need to the part of the fanbase of the original to understand what is going on
Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his earlier home invasion film has a sense of pointlessness to it. But in following the original so closely, it also cannot help but work where it did
A Found Footage film from the early days before Paranormal Activity went big. This unnervingly charts the psychological disintegration of an ordinary English family under economic pressure
An earlier effort from Shion Sono that concerns itself with hair extensions that take over and kill their host. More straightforward than many of Sono’s other works but the outlandish of the effects make the film
The 2005 Fantastic Four was an amiable entry among the Marvel Comics adaptations of the 2000s. This sequel substitutes lowbrow comedy and renders the great character of the Silver Surfer as a CGI cartoon
A visually striking compilation of five animated French horror tales. Each varies widely in style but the result is far more extraordinary than many live-action counterparts
A blatant copy of the Clint Eastwood film Firefox where Steven Seagal is sent to retrieve a hi-tech stealth bomber that has been stolen by a rogue colonel
One of several films that came out not long after Snakes on a Plane offering similar wacky collusions – in this case, a zombie outbreak aboard a plane. The surprise is that the film plays itself seriously
A British disaster tv mini-series that depicts London being overwhelmed by vast flooding and the struggle by civil authorities to cope
Very spooky Stephen King adaptation about a haunted hotel room. In contrast to other haunted house films, this is a one-man show that keeps itself minimally contained inside the room with considerable effect
A Christmas film with Vince Vaughn as Santa’s younger brother, a petty street hustler. A promising sarcastic tone falls into easy predictable routines and characters arcs
Xavier Gens delivers a French copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is largely by the numbers excepting for a gore level raised to what must be a maximum for the genre
Animated film spun off from the Garfield comic-strips in which Garfield emerges out into the real world. A cute premise that the film fails to develop
A Pakistani copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Backwoods Brutality film, all served up with reasonable vigour. It is fascinating seeing the genre tropes translated between different cultures
Modest Cyberpunk film set in a future where gene editing and hacking has become a norm. Bai Ling owns the show as the kick-ass fetish-gear clad heroine