The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This has the promising idea of a corporate-ruled future where people receive advertising implants but soon dissolves into the equivalent of a B-budget hacker thriller
A British version of Gran Torino featuring Michael Caine as an aging man who becomes fed up with youth crime in the neighbourhood and takes up arms to go all Charles Bronson on them
Sixth of the Harry Potter films, this feels like a step back from what its predecessor built up. The film suffers from trying to cram all of J.K. Rowling’s book into its running time and ends up being frustratingly mannered
Animated film directed by Rob Zombie that feels like an episode of Ren & Stimpy made by someone with an unhealthy obsession with horror and exploitation movies and stripper bars
Another supposed true-life ghost story, an early case by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The film exists as a progression of pop-up scares that through the need to keep producing effect produces no effect at all.
One of the tatty ghost stories made by The Asylum, sold with the association of famous haunted locations or murders. Minor moments of interest if you are prepared to wade through the over-hyped shocks
Fascinating British film about pacts with an ambiguous Devil figure. The film largely exists to push protagonist Jim Sturgess into as many morally uncomfortable places as possible
Predating Cowboys & Aliens, this is an amusingly titled Western/alien invasion crosshatch that plays itself surprisingly seriously and is better than one might assume
A Backwoods Brutality effort that is somewhat better than usual thanks to a darkly acerbic David J. Schow script that constantly subverts the expectations of the genre
One of the less known films of Joe Dante. A 3D work that just predates Avatar, it is a YA horror story in the vein of The Goonies or Dante’s own Explorers crafted with care and an affection for the characters
A low-budget film about a homeless man who has been turned into a serial killer by a series of experiments designed to create urban mayhem
This could be The Raid reconceived as a zombie film (and a few borrowings from Assault on Precinct 13). This never reinvents the basics, just delivers a ferociously entertaining, bared to the bone zombie survival film
A low-budget regionally made film about a zombie outbreak. This does better than most of the vast horde of low-budget zombie films that came out in the late 2000s
Serial killer thriller that brims with much Biblical imagery about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and passes through assorted increasingly improbable twists without much affect
The film that started to get attention for Ti West as a director, a slow burn work where Jocelin Donahue is hired for a babysitting job only to find sinister things going on when she arrives at the house
An animated Marvel Comics adaptation that is actually two separate stories involving The Incredible Hulk, who battles respectively Wolverine and Thor
An astonishingly perverse work where a mad surgeon abducts three people intending to connect their bodies as a single digestive tract. This is a work that pushes itself into truly warped territory
Another of Blue Sky Studios’ interminable animated sequels to its likeable original about prehistoric talking animals. This has little substance beyond a kinetic rush from one gag to the next
Another formula Syfy Channel disaster movie based around a scientifically improbable meteorological premise. This does at least make the characters work with more of a sparring vigour than usual
A New Zealand-made film about a crime writer joining a party tramping through the bush as the group starts to be killed off by one among their number
This wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn’t cursed by bad luck – the death of star Heath Ledger. It’s the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism
Eddie Murphy in another of the lame flops that marked his career in the 2000s where he plays a stockbroker who gets stock tips from his daughter’s imaginary companion
A throwback to the 1950s giant bug film, a humorous effort with a group of people trying to survive in the aftermath of an insect invasion. From Mel Gibson’s production company, no less!
An ingenue film about a dream journey that is made with undeniable imagination. However, the eventual allegory makes it a work that thinks it far more profound than it ends up being
Ricky Gervais co-directs and stars in a comedy set in an alternate world where everybody tells the truth and he discovers he is the one person who can lie and how this proceeds to change the world
Karyn Kusama directs a black comedy from a wryly funny Diablo Cody script in which Megan Fox is a cheerleader who becomes possessed after a devil worship ceremony gone wrong
One of a duo of spinoff films made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Ju-on/The Grudge series. Seven films in and the series is starting to resemble much of a muchness
The better of two spinoff films made for the tenth anniversary of the Ju-on/The Grudge series. The series is suffering over-familiarity, but this manage to create moments of uncanny spookiness
This has clearly been conceived as Saw by way of Big Brother in which a group of teens are imprisoned in a house and forced to eliminate one another until only one remains
Alex Proyas seemed a promising genre director during the 1990s. Here Nicolas Cage finds a time capsule that predicts a series of disasters, before the film tangents off into a strange Biblical End of the World scenario
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
A low-budget modernised version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs book about a group ending up on a lost island where dinosaurs still roam. Slightly better than usual for The Asylum
A low-budget indie comedy about a house that is plagued by demons and vampires. This comes with moments of appealing silliness
A fitfully amusing H.P. Lovecraft fanboy comedy. Lovecraft, a noted conservative, would likely have deplored the idea of the nerd comedy but this gets the flavour of Lovecraft’s works down better than most
This was made following the success of Hostel, a low-budget film concerning a group of girls abandoned at a deserted Mexican resort town that may be haunted
Vigilante film where Gerard Butler exacts revenge against the justice system while imprisoned in a jail cell. The dispatches become entertainingly improbable to the point that Butler almost becomes a Batman villain in all but name
This seems to want to do for the lesbian vampire film what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie film. Alas, the film makes its appeal fairly and squarely into the crude, sexism of British lad culture
A film about the Manson Family killings told through the eyes of one of Manson Girls Leslie Van Houten. This becomes a savage and biting indictment of 1960s social morality
Neo-noir variation on a clairvoyant murder mystery. This works well in terms of capturing an extraordinary sense of its the central character’s loneliness and melancholy
Overshadowed by the much more controversial A Serbian Film, a similar Serbian film about the world of snuff movie-making. This is more character-driven although is no less shocking in its own way
Todd Solondz is one of the finest US indie directors. This sequel to his masterpiece Happiness lacks the original’s savage bite and is his weakest work to date
Modernised adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story. Poe might be turning in his grave with visits to fetish clubs added to the mix but mostly the film befalls a low-budget and tepid delivery
Cryptic and baffling Jim Jarmusch film with Isaach De Bankole as a mysterious assassin who passes through a series of enigmatic and surreal conversations
Fourth version of the tale about a family who believe their boarder might be Jack the Ripper. This is updated to the present and abandons most of the story for a mind-bending pretzel of identity speculations
Australian black comedy about a guy imprisoned to be a girl’s perfect prom date. The film takes to horror with enthusiasm and is owned by two fantastic performances from the women of the show
A film about a dead girl trying to stop her paedophile murderer from the afterlife. A grim story becomes a visual effects vehicle wrecked by Peter Jackson’s overblown amateur hour symbolism
A Found Footage film that has fun uniting wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning
An Indonesian copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that is one of the most enthusiastically gore-drenched bloodbaths in ages. This announced directors Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto to the world
Every B killer shark movie of recent years has tried to become as absurd as possible in (a la Sharknado), but this is one that plays itself seriously and generates okay tension in places
A modernised retelling of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice takes a colourfully surreal trip through an urban landscape and criminal underworld
A strange Japanese film in which a suicidal lesbian receives relationship advice and from the ghost of a drag queen
The Asylum’s first venture into the gonzo shark movie that would spin off a series of sequels and culminate in the Sharknado phenomenon. Despite one of the great attention grabbing titles of all time, this is an unmemorable affair
Film based on the supposed Psychic Warfare Division of the US Army. Based on a non-fiction book, this is played by director Grant Heslov as a broad farce and sits on an uncertain line as to whether the powers are real
Disaster TV mini-series where assorted well-known faces fight through the chaos to prevent an impending meteor strike
Animated film set in a dystopian near-future Europe of constant surveillance where even people’s heads are monitored
SF film with Sam Rockwell as a lone man stationed on The Moon discovering the truth of his existence, this gained much word of mouth when it came out
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
Another in the fad for remakes of 70s/80s films. where the 1981 slasher film gets reworked if this did not come with the 3D gimmick, it would be no more than a routine direct-to-dvd release
As might be expected, a collaboration between Werner Herzog and David Lynch makes for an exceedingly strange film, involving matricide, mental illness and ostriches – and all apparently based on a true life murder. Very strange, if in the end it only produces a puzzled scratch of the head
Drawing very clear influence from Clive Barker and Saw, this is a delve down into perverse fetish, gateways to Hell and bizarre hallucinations. After watching the film through twice, I still remain confused to what it was all about
Sequel to the Ben Stiller hit offers more of the same with a bigger museum and more exhibits come to life but little else
Another pointless remake of an 80s horror film. The original was a cheap Evil Dead ripoff driven by cheesy effects; this provides more professional effects but only becomes a slickly produced assemblage of cliches we have seen dozens of times before
A unique homage to Night of the Living Dead wherein the original has been recreated with a bewildering range of artwork and short pieces of animation from dozens of different artists, even scenes conducted by sock puppets and animated Barbie dolls
Extraordinary animated film from Shane Acker concerning the lives of a series of stitchpunk dolls as they try to make sense of the world in the aftermath of civilisation
Promising film about two people at a mine in the desert affected by what would appear to be the drill having dug all the way down to Hell. The film plays a corny idea seriously and sits in an interestingly ambiguous place about what is going on.
Produced by The Wachowskis who take the opportunity to reinvent the ninja film with the same flamboyant visuals they employed on The Matrix with exhilarating results
Exquisitely lovely anime set in a world of creatures that live on scavenged human junk. If in the end, the heroine’s allegorical quest is on the generic side, the film captivates you with the richness of colour and detail that has gone into imagining its world
A strong and at times quite brutal film about a town that is terrorised by attacks from a feral cannibal family. The controversial The Woman was a better-known sequel
Neil Jordan directs a beautifully earthy Irish fairytale in which Colin Farrell fishes up a possible selkie woman
Another variant on the evil child film featuring a maliciously psychopathic Isabelle Fuhrman
Rare cinematic treatment of the generation ship story that conducts it with a modest degree of affectiveness. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.
The Asylum’s answer to Paranormal Activity Oren Peli made his film for $15,000, which is about as cheap as it is possible to make a film; this manages to look even cheaper – simply someone wandering around with a camcorder that is at best aimed in the general direction of things happening
David Twohy has shown himself a standout screenwriter and director with the Riddick films but came unstuck with this effort where tourists in Hawaii come to believe their traveling companions are wanted killers. A film killed by far-fetched twists
A mini-series based on the classic comic-book masked hero but the attempts to modernise The Phantom for the post-Dark Knight era seem bizarrely awkward
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
A one-gag animated film that essentially reverses the plot of E.T, and has a human astronaut stranded on a planet of aliens and adopted by one boy. More likeable than it has a right to be.
A painfully amateurish zombie films – the entire show has been shot in someone’s house. There are only two gore effects throughout and the titular platoon the soldiers is limited to only three in number
Low-budget occult film about guests at a motel trapped in a mysterious twilight zone. A work sits between the cheap and occasionally effective
One of the more enjoyable Disney animated films from the latter half of the 00s. Featuring Disney’s first Black heroine, this embraces its New Orleans setting and turns Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale on its head with enjoyable results
The Asylum conduct their own version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars adventures three years before the Disney film and, despite one of their impoverished budgets, do an almost halfway reasonable version
aka Jaws in Japan. A Japanese entry in the Gonzo Killer Shark Film fad
A positively ingenious film about psychic powers that comes with an enormous conceptual joy in seeing the ways the various powers can be combined
Revival of the Disney Witch Mountain films of the 1970s. Now the films have been dragged into the post-X Files era and flashy effects added to negligible result
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Lesser sequel to the Spanish Found Footage zombie film [Rec] that repeats the original to variable effect but needlessly breaks up the single camera point-of-view
Depending on how you saw this, this is either a UK tv mini-series or three separately released films. Taking place over a decade, the three stories have a common locale and overlapping characters in the story of the hunt for a serial killer and the battle against a corrupt police department in Yorkshire
Essentially a variation on The Keep updated to the contemporary US occupation of Afghanistan. A film that one watches with no high expectation but proves to be a slow burner that eventually develops an eerie atmosphere
Alex Cox sequelizes his off-the-wall cult hit Repo Man but only turns it into an amateurish, meandering effort that is only trying to be wacky and cultish
Not to be confused with the high-profile Leonardo DiCaprio film, this is a rather amusing film about a soldier who returns home as undead. Rather than the usual zombie/vampire film one would expect, this develops a wonderfully sustained sarcastic tone to expand out as a kind of undead Boondock Saints
A Syfy Channel monster movie that seems made with a smidgen more care than their usual B movie output
The extraordinary poetry of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a man trying to retain his humanity amid the harsh struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic world is necessarily weakened in being translated to screen but the film still does a fine job of capturing the essence of the book
Part of the fad for gonzo Japanese splatter films we had in the late 00s, featuring absurdly over-the-top splatter effects and demented action sequences.; Concerning cyborg-enhanced geisha who wade into battle going through a deliriously silly range of bio-mechanical transformations
This is a wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko, featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister but without the same culty weirdness
A modestly effective British variation on the mass insanity outbreak film. The film has one of the best out of the blue openings of any film one has seen in some time and is good at finding a kitchen sink realism, less so when it comes to explanations for what is happening
Sixth time around and the backstory is starting to become so excessively complicated it is hard to follow what is going on. All the gruesome torturings now seem passe, although this does redeem itself somewhat in making a few black digs at the medical health industry
A side-splittingly funny spoof of Found Footage films as a crime scene video crew uncover evidence of a serial killer and decide to make a documentary about it
Disappointing sequel to the modest original that does little but revisit and re-run the first film’s scenario with little to add to it
Amateur production that seems like a version of the X-Men crossbred with The Amazing Race. Not very good on most counts
Beautifully made animated film that won surprise recognition at the Academy Awards. More a festival film than necessarily a box-office one
Ageswap fantasy in which middle-aged Matthew Perry is rejuvenated as a teenage Zac Efron. A glib fantasy that seems made by abstinence campaigners
Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of Sherlock Holmes seemed a miscalculated disaster in the offing. It doesn’t radically reinvent the basics but emerges passably well