The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Larry Cohen’s 1974 cult classic about a killer mutant baby gets the remake treatment. Even though Cohen co-writes the script here, the remake manages to wring anything interesting out of the original
This family friendly adaptation of the classic Jules Verne novel was made to highlight the 3D process and throws most of the book out to essentially become Jules Verne the theme park ride
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
Doug Liman makes a film that has a great concept – a secret world of people with the mental ability to teleport anywhere – that emerges as no more than a slickly polished effort that does nothing with its premise
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
Directorial outing from Robert Englund who makes the horror equivalent of a frat comedy where three guys rent a palatial home and throw a party as a portal to Hell opens in the basement
Massively successful animated film for DreamWorks, a comic riff on the martial arts training film that proves amiable and crowd-pleasing without ever being riotously funny
Spinoff from the Japanese Death Note films from Ring director Hideo Nakata featuring the weird detective L. L was a scene-stealer but this fails to come up with an interesting enough plot for him
An Australian Found Footage film about a haunting. Rather than the intense spookiness of Paranormal Activity, this is more a mockumentary that is constantly turning what we expect is going on on its head
A strong and unusual Swedish vampire film that is less a horror film than one about friendship between a boy and the very strange girl next door who we gradually realise is a vampire
A Belgian film about a girl who moves in with her boyfriend only to uncover sinister secrets in the basement as she investigates the disappearance of the previous tenant
One among the series of cheap video-released sequels to their classic animated films made during the 1990s/2000s, this is a prequel that offers up a Little Mermaid origin story
A film made not long after the advent of the Torture Porn fad in which a group of friends are imprisoned on a farm to be broken and sold into slavery
Pointless remake of the cult Australian Nature’s Revenge film. This takes place amid some gorgeously shot natural scenery, is very faithful to the first film but seems to entirely miss the paranoid tone
After 21 years, this was the first of two sequel to The Lost Boys, featuring return performances from Corey Feldman and Corey Haim and, yes, surfer vampires
A conceptually peculiar mix of Indiana Jones and Waterworld about tomb raiding adventures in a drowned future and the quest for Moses’s staff to turn back the rising waters
A great tv mini-series where modern girl Jemima Rooper is transported back into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but disrupts the story with her modern ways
Another highly entertaining entry in the Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film about a schoolgirl who seeks revenge with her arm stump replaced by a Gatling gun
A reasonable sequel to DreamWorks’ Madagascar that this time actually takes the characters to Africa where it determines to give each of them their own story
Really odd, even at times touching, Japanese film about a man’s thwarted attempts to have sex with his android maid
Before the spate of superheroes with no powers films with Kick-Ass and Super, there was this South Korean based-on-a-true-story film about a delusional man who believes he is Superman
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that twists like a pretzel and messes with almost everything we take for granted
Quirky, hilarious Australian claymation film about the mail correspondence between a young girl and a lonely middle-aged man
Based on the popular videogame, this is fairly much Death Wish by way of Jacob’s Ladder and proves an underwhelming delivery of its promise
Lightweight French bodyswap comedy where aging rocker Alain Chabat and mousy bureaucrat Daniel Auteuil end up sharing the same body
Off-the wall Eddie Murphy comedy in which he plays an alien spaceship disguised as a human come to Earth. All the fun comes from watching Murphy’s wacky antics, which buoy it up over its weaker moments
The painfully unfunny films of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are movie parodies, mostly a random assortment of films and celebrities of the last six months run over with crude and vulgar jokes. In this case, they take on parodying principally 300
A work of Arthurian sequelia made for the Syfy Channeal featuring Arthur’s daughter inheriting the sword. This has the feel more of a series of B-budgeted D&D wilderness encounters churned out without much effort rather than being a fantasy work that soars
One of the best Clive Barker adaptations. Japan’s Ryuhei Kitamura brings a masterful assurance with the horror elements and does gore in astonishingly new and unrealised ways
A horror film about the screening of a lost horror film whose director is reputed to have killed people for real. Now the killer emerges from the screen to slaughter the attendees in the theatre
Disney Channel film about a trio of kids who build a time machine and use it to help people around the school
Alexandre Aja film about haunted mirrors. Aja is more a director of physical horror and seems less attuned to the supernatural mood
Documentary about science in the modern world and its reflections in the media
Brutal and harrowing British drama that locates a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-type show in an urban setting, featuring a couple known as Mum and Dad who maintain a family of imprisoned captives. This delves down into a genuinely disturbed headspace in some of the performances
The third of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films that feels like it has no point other than to steal $10 from your hand and give you a bucket of content free mental popcorn in return
Long-planned project that creates an interesting future scenario, epic action, an array of Dirty Dozen characters but emerges as surprisingly trivial
There is a great title and the germ of a good idea here – two rival street gangs and a white cop are forced to set aside their difference and cooperate to deal with the zombie apocalypse. Alas, as a directorial outing from the writer of the Sharknado films, this emerges cheaply and tattily
Whose bright idea was it to give us kid versions of The Avengers (ostensibly their children)? While Marvel have had an unparallelled string of hits on the big screen in the 00s, their attempts to replicate the successes that rival DC have had in animation have been a dismal failure
Nightmare Detective was Shinya Tsukamoto’s venture into the dreamscape theme of works like The Cell and the subsequent Inception. Many regard this sequel as a superior work.
Likeable film made by fans about a ninja team formed to deal with a zombie onslaught
Hilarious and entertaining documentary about the Australian exploitation film that flourished between the late 1970s and 80s. The film delves into an arena of forgotten films and tells their stories with a great deal of detail
The co-director of The Blair Witch Project makes a film about soldiers lost in the desert encountering mysterious lights in the sky. Essentially Blair Witch but with lost soldiers facing UFO phenomena
Supposedly an adventure based on an untold story from The Odyssey, an entry among the fantasy adventure films made for cable filler in the 2000s
A Syfy Channel film about the present-day discovery of a lost, still extant 19th Century village that has conducted a deal to preserve themselves by annually sacrificing someone to an ogre
This lifts the premise of Disturbia – protagonist confined to home detention who spies a killer next door – but then asks what would happen if the space they were confined was haunted
An Asylum mockbuster released at the same time as Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., this involves time travel mission into the prehistoric past that accidentally brings a dinosaur back to the present
Probably the worst among the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films. Takashi Miike’s original is reduced to affectless CGI pop-up scares
Film about a big overweight psycho who abducts girls and makes them enact a fantasy of being a cheerleader. Produced by one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project
Bruce LaBruce made the world’s first gay pornographic zombie film with L.A. Zombie. This was an earlier trial run, less a porn film and more down around the level of a student art film
Retelling of the epic legend of Beowulf in SF terms where Grendel becomes an alien monster
Unfunny comedy in which Eva Longoria dies and returns as a ghost to make life miserable for fiance Paul Rudd as he becomes involved with another woman
William Malone, the director of House on Haunted Hill remake, makes an interestingly different film about a girl who has spent most of her life asleep being pursued by a genius killer who invades her dreams
Well-cast, nicely made film that seems to be setting out as a supernatural variant on Fearless, which had Jeff Bridges as a reinvigorated plane crash survivor, only to fall apart in a groan-worthy twist ending that has become tediously overused in recent years
Horror anthology featuring four ghost stories from Thai directors. While all the segments vary in approach and style, this is a spooky and above average effort with the real standout being the final segment with an air hostess aboard a plane with a dead body in the midst of a storm
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
Bruce McDonald makes a standout fim with Stephen McHattie as a radio dj dealing with a zombie infection that inhabits the English language that breaks out in the town around him
Probably the least great of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. The plot feels recycled from The Little Mermaid while Miyazaki’s recurrent themes seem more perfunctory and the film lacks many of the beautiful contrasts of epic and fragile he specialises in
Another among the fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. Any connection to the original Jamie Lee Curtis disco slasher is thrown out in favour of a generic modern slasher
This was the first of two sequels to the Wes Craven scripted Pulse, the English language version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intensely spooky film about ghosts from the internet
The Punisher (2004) with Thomas Jane was a dud among the 2000s Marvel Comics adaptations. Here the role is recast with Ray Stevenson and director Lexi Alexander gets the dark, violent tone of the comic-book right
English-language remake of the Spanish Found Footage film [Rec]. A lesser work but in the hands of John Erick Dowdle one of the few English-language horror remakes that stands up to the original
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman conducts a futuristic Gothic rock opera. A film of constant posturings where Bousman demonstrates remarkably little affinity for either music or sf … a musical that feels made by people who are tone deaf
The first in a series of anime films that were produced by Capcom, the creators of the Resident Evil videogames, and intended to run parallel to the live-action films. I was never a big fan of the live-action films. The question is – does Resident Evil work better in the anime format?
One film that defies the dictum that there has yet to be a decent killer plant film, this does a reasonable job of developing out tension in its story of teens encountering malevolent flora at a South American pyramid
A dark and mysterious historical fantasy about cartographers mapping the Finnish-Russian border who arrive at a mysterious village and an enigmatic stone sauna in the forest
Fifth of the Saw films. By now the series has developed such a complicated backstory it is difficult following how it all pieces together
Prequel to The Scorpion King. Unfortunately director Russell Mulcahy allows his broad hand with comedy free reign and the plot is overrun by glib character banter and constant flip modern one-liners
An almost interesting low-budget film with artistic pretensions that invokes the mythic Christian figure of Prester John
Beautifully filmed Victorian-set fantasy in which orphan Dakota Blue Richards moves to her uncle’s estate and discovers the magical secrets it holds
This is where the Sharknado and the modern gonzo shark movie phenomenon began. A ridiculous and cheap film that forgets the necessary tongue-in-cheek attitude and comes out as cheap on all fronts
An English-language remake of a Thai horror film about haunted photographs. Another by-the-numbers remake that is a pale shadow of its original
A group of people taking a shuttle back from the airport are taken abducted and made prisoner. One of what this author has termed Conceptual Containment Thrillers, which confine the action to a single locale, this has some twists and turns but does nothing remarkable with the idea
Belgian-made black comedy where a filmmaker frustrated with trying to raise funding starts shooting producers and filming the result
From Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, an anime that seems a mix of Biggles and Never Let Me Go, all taking place in an alternate world. The film is exquisite in its detail
Daniel Myrick, one of the co-directors of The Blair Witch Project, conducts a remake of a Danish-Swedish ghost story, relocating it to Lousiana. Myrick does nothing remarkable with the material, even at the twist ending, largely treading in the safety of antebellum cliches
An animated film about NASA experimental chimpanzees. Not quite up there with Pixar but an amiable and unpretentious and amiable outing
The Wachowskis live-action remake of the anime series is a sublimely madcap confection, a film that is alive with vibrant visuals and all the colours of the rainbow. A box-office flop but glorious, even groundbreaking visually
Film version of a popular series of children’s books that has a good deal of fun bringing to life a secret world of trolls and goblins
A real head-scratcher. Legendary comic-book writer Frank Miller directs an adaptation of the famous Will Eisner comic-book. A completely madcap film that deserves to be rediscovered as a cult classic
A surprisingly good film that generates a great deal of tension in the story of a group of people trapped inside a gas station by a deadly plant infection that takes over bodies
Theatrical spinoff from the Star Wars prequels, released to introduce the popular animated series. This shows it is time for George Lucas to move beyond recycling something that was successful three decades ago
A harrowing home assault film that highlighted the debut of Bryan Bertino, a new director of considerable promise. The surprise about the film is just how much influence it has had on other works subsequently
A Scary Movie-styled parody of the early 00s spate of superhero films, this has a few amsingly on-target spoofs of its targets (especially Spider-Man) but is mostly scattershot
Mind-bending Charlie Kaufman meta-fiction in which Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a vast theatre project that drags on for years and starts to merge into his own life
An anthology of horror tales from Indonesia, most being too short to make much distinction,, the exception being The Mo Brothers gore-drenched first film Dara
Appealingly old-fashioned film about chivalry and heroism, much quieter than the other animation out there but this still holds its own
Roland Emmerich leaves epic mass destruction behind to make a prehistoric film, but this is one that soon collapses into a remarkable anthropological silliness
Strong and well written independent film about a vampire family trying to survive in the modern world
The first in a series of Disney video-released films based around the Peter Pan fairy who is now reconceived as a contemporary Can Do girl
Directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho make an anthology of strange and surreal tales that take place in Tokyo
One among the 00s spate of gonzo Japanese splatter films. The film exists as a series of outlandishly over-the-top and absurdly entertaining splatter and bizarrely cartoonish bio-mechanoid transformation
A blatant copy of Hostel featuring tourists caught aboard a train in Ukraine that runs an organ-harvesting operation
Disappointing Bryan Singer produced horror anthology set around Halloween where its potential is frequently dragged down by over-emphatic direction
Animated adaption of the comic-book about a Native American warrior stranded in a prehistoric lost world
Before the teen idol phenomenon took over, the original in the massively popular Young Adult series works as an earnest romance where all involved are clearly making an effort to play with a conviction
There is a certain potential to the concept of two rival teams, parapsychological debunkers and a tabloid tv crew, researching a reputedly haunted prison. Only a couple of years later, this would have been mandatorily made as a Found Footage film but suffers from a director with no aptitude for atmosphere
Gregory Hoblit has proven a fine director but this film about a site showing murders live on the internet feels like an hysterical rant about the dangers of the internet masquerading as a thriller
The second film from Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz is an intensely haunted albeit enigmatic journey into Southeast Asian jungles in search of a missing child
Not to be confused with the Oliver Stone film, this is a surrealist satire on the George W. Bush presidency
A near-dialogueless story of a lonely robot clearing up junk in the aftermath of civilisation. This is surely Pixar’s most endearing film to date where they are operating at the peak of their creativity