The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A wonderfully cool film about malevolent twins with psychic abilities. that is an astonishingly assured effort where the various set-pieces come with the confidence of a director who has been working in the genre for years
South Korean monster movie set that only rehashes the cliches set down by Alien/Aliens. On the plus side, the CGI monster looks great and there are some particularly imaginative set-pieces with it but the film is at best only a rehash of Deepstar Six on an oil rig
Cheap Syfy Channel CGI disaster spectacle about runaway plant roots – from the Garden of Eden, no less – growing to endanger the entire planet. Utterly formulaic and seeming to consist of no more than canned pieces of cliche action
A revival of the 1990s Sex and Zen series of erotic comedies, this comes with the novelty of being presented in 3D
Ignore the bad reviews, this is a film that is determined not to take itself seriously and keeps piling on the absurdities until it enters into the realm of the entertainingly preposterous
Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob fame is cast as a rarely speaking, goat-loving hick psycho. The film comes with a number of other offfbeat characterisations that you feel should have made for an amusing horror comedy but instead everything slips into a shrill one-note pitch
A haunted house film that comes with the novelty of being shot entirely in one take. This delivers some okay but in the end you appreciate it more for its technical novelty than producing scares
Pedro Almodovar’s exquisitely lush homage to the mad surgeon fiilm Eyes Without a Face features a superb left field twist to become an extraordinary meditation on gender and identity
Jaume Balaguero delivers this dark and gripping psycho-thriller about a likeable building manager who enjoys secretly playing cruel games and making life miserable for his tenants
Live-action version of the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. In its favour, it is at least slickly polished and comes with far less in the way of irritating smartass humour that one expected
Amidst the spate of modern gonzo killer shark films, this is one of the worst – terrible acting, pitiful effects – but the saddest thing is that it isn’t there are worse entries than this
Underrated and quite brilliant film about a series of true-life Australian serial killings, this has an extraordinary dangerousness in the way it observes highly disturbing things with calm detachment
Hong Kong director Ching Siu-Tung returns with a Wu Xia film made with extravagant Chinese backing. Wu Xia of the 00s have slowly taken to CGI and Ching readily adapts his moves to this with often breathtaking effect
Fascinating film about a cult centred around a woman who claims to come from the future. Featuring an ethereal performance from a then unknown Brit Marling, the film remains ambiguous about her claims. Less a script than a series of often emotionally raw scenes that have been improvised between the actors
The second film from Duncan Jones, this places Jake Gyllenhaal through a Groundhog Day scenario as he is forced to relive the same eight minutes in order to find who planted a bomb on a train
A series that reached its maximum level of cuteness two films ago is dragged out for another pointless entry that nobody was asking for. Robert Rodriguez delivers shabby juvenile slapstick
Another wholly unnecessary remake that waters the raw savagery of the original down to a safe tepidness. Everything that the original set down has now become formulaic
Bizarrely uncategorisable film from Zack Snyder that seems a mix of Girl, Interrupted and Inception
Billed as the world’s first interactive film, although it falls well short of what one expected. his involves film noir homage, mad scientists and sinister rejuvenation institutes but lacks any real narrative, just feels like a series of random information pop-ups and flickering MTV graphics
A Christian-made film based on the intriguing idea of Satan on trial in a courtroom. A film that in its bad acting, laughable dialogue and lack of conviction rivals The Room in bad movie stakes. The usually worthwhile Malcolm McDowell, who for some reason also produces, gives one of his worst performances
The unique idea of an anthology made up of five different slasher tales. Unfortunately, the film’s only raison d’etre is serving up serial gore scenes, which have the effect taken out of them because they are all conducted digitally and look biologically preposterous
J.J. Abrams makes a homages to 8mm filmmaking and the films of his youth – you could easily imagine this as a Steven Spielberg-produced film of the era. On the other hand, after the obsessive secrecy in pre-release, the results emerge as underwhelming
Syfy Channel disaster movie about the efforts to dispose of a container of antimatter being carried on board a tanker, where things proceed to go wrong
Fascinating documentary portrait of a series of individuals who dress up in costume and set out to be real-life superheroes
A feature-length Superman fan film made as homage to the Christopher Reeve films. You have to applaud the film for sterling effort even if it comes woefully short in trying to create its superheroics on a $20,000 budget
Strong and effective film with Michael Shannon as a man who has precognitive vision of a terrible coming storm and tries to build a shelter while everyone around him thinks he is going mad
Russian SF film about a rejuvenation process where an interesting set-up tapers off into telling the stories of the newborns, not all of which are developed enough despite the lengthy time the film takes telling them
A horror anthology featuring episodes from seven different directors. As with other anthologies, the episodes vary in quality, ranging between the so-so, the mostly quite good and one standout segment
Though pitched as a prequel, this is essentially a remake of John Carpenter’s classic. Alas, this only finds the same phantasmagoric outlandishness as Carpenter did in a couple of scenes that may be moderately impressive for those who have never seen the original
The film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ The Mighty Thor is placed in the hands of Kenneth Branagh who delivers an okay film, if one where he never quite seems at home with the superheroic action
Though Marvel Comics have had massive success with their big screen adaptations in the 00s, they have been far less successful with their attempts to spin off animated films. An okay but unexceptional animated prequel released at the same time as the first Thor live-action film
Found Footage film about a stalker secretly filming a couple and abducting the wife, this tepidly circles around thriller cliches where other Found Footage films have delved into the psycho genre with more disturbing effect
The third of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. While the human scenes opt for a ghastly miscalculated sense of humour, the effects houses are at the peak of their game, even if Bay allows them to drag the mass destruction out to a numbing excess
Terrence Malick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe the best work yet about the great Lost American Childhood yet – a film that doesn’t seem to be about anything but has far more to say than almost all other multiplex films
Construed as a Found Footage version of The Descent or perhaps more so of Creep about a camera crew venturing into the tunnels beneath Sydney, Australia, this follows where others have gone before and fails to produce much in the way of jolts
One of several disaster movies set around the supposed year 2012 apocalypse made by The Asylum. Bad science abounds as a giant adrift glacier ends up creating a new Ice Age
Francis Ford Coppola makes what may be a ghost story or a vampire film but things are so confused you are never sure what. Less like the mature work of one of the great American filmmakers than an ingenue effort from director straight out of film school with a head full of muddled pretensions
In the vein of films like Phone Booth and Buried, a Conceptual Containment Thriller with a group of people trapped in a sauna with the heat being turned up. From the director who later made Landmine Goes Click in this same vein
Technically not a vampire film at all, rather about a kind and caring serial killer with a blood-drinking fetish who frequents suicide support boards looking for victims. A remarkable film, shot in a plain, unaffected manner and managing to discover an extraordinary intimacy between the characters
This is essentially intended as a gay version of Twilight and features a near-identical plot in which a vampire fixates on a youth and decides he is his true love.
The third film in the series of stoner comedies trips off into gonzo genre territory. A relentlessly and unashamedly vulgar film that also manages to be occasionally quite funny
I’m tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting
Another entry from the revived Hammer Films, an intelligent and effective variant on Pet Semetary that manages to delve into some dark and chilling places
The Nazi zombie film has enjoyed a revival in recent years, this is one entry in the genre from Finland made with a reasonable grit and realism
Almost an arthouse variation of the evil psycho child thriller but one stripped of thriller tropes and told in terms of an alternately striking and hauntingly elliptical tableaux of impressionistic images
Chinese remake of the romcom where Mel Gibson was suddenly able to hear women’s thoughts. A second time over, the premise seems slight while the film crucially fails to create much passion between its two stars
An H.P. Lovecraft adaptation that makes exacting effort to get the mood and period setting right
Another South Korean copy of Ring with haunted pop songs instead of tv broadcasts. This offers interesting insight into the K-pop phenomenon but nothing particularly standout in the way of scares
Sold as a sequel to The Wicker Man, although works as more of an update and expansion of its themes. Received a muted reception but is a not entirely uninteresting film, if nowhere near the league of the original
On the slight side as a Disney theatrical film, nevertheless this keeps to the essence of the original tales and comes with some appealingly playful fourth-wall breaking visuals
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
Lucky McKee’s highly controversial film about a family man who makes a feral woman prisoner is out-there, takes-no-prisoners horror. Forget the kneejerk reactions, this is brutal, highly original and with a whiplash sense of dark humour
European arthouse film that feels like it should have been a horror film. This starts well but when it veers into genre territory, its big twist has been done by too many genre films of recent and holds nothing interesting in its treatment
An X-Men origin story that serves as the occasion to recast the series with younger actors. This works far better than the previous two films, integrating the characters in a strong story, although is quiet at the superheroic action
Amid the vast horde of low-budget zombie films of the 00s, this Norwegian effort in 3D emerges as possibly the worst. It has no discernible plot, while the gore only consists of cheap digital overlays that looks like Monty Python cutout animation
Another Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film about a Yakuza heir who is blown apart by rivals and then rebuilt with cyborg attachments
The epic fantasy quest film is well due a parody, unfortunately this majorly unfunny effort written by its leading man Danny McBride only makes a beeline for the witless and vulgar
Adam Wingard directs a home invasion thriller in a similar vein to The Strangers. This is a film that strips everything extraneous away and simply lets Wingard go for broke and give the audience a brutal and intense workout – at which you cannot deny he succeeds most satisfyingly
Completely insane gonzo Japanese horror that feels like it is made by a mad scat fetishist involving parasites that emerge out of people’s asses. The film is driven by its outrageously perverse imagery but for all that is haphazard and incoherent when it comes to explanatory rationale
Animals in a zoo offer schmuck zoo keeper Kevin James romantic advice based on their mating behaviours. The premise runs out of steam soon in, the rest is an irritating smartass CGI talking animals comedy