The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
The rarity of a summer blockbuster with smarts – think Groundhog Day reworked by way of Battle Los Angeles. The timeloop idea is dealt with in clever ways making for an action film driven by an original sf story
A compulsively watchable documentary about the making of the 1996 The Island of Dr Moreau and the bizarre stories of how the personalities and star egos made it into a cinematic train wreck
An ingenious mockumentary about the development of a time travel machine. This takes place as a ‘documentary’ discussing the invention but the cleverness is in seeing how small details keep changing in the background
A filmed version of Julie Taymor’s staging of the Shakespeare play about fairt enchantments. Forget standard interpretations, Taymor opens the play up with an extraordinary visual flair
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
Reboot of the Ghost in the Shell series in a quartet of prequel stories. This funnels the essence of Cyberpunk superbly, creating a dazzling world with cyborgised security services fighting terrorists hacking people’s brains
A film about childhood boogeymen that takes place as a work of psychological horrors, where everything could be happening in the imagination of a stressed mother’s collapsing mental state. An extraordinarily assured directorial debut
This Blade Runner-influenced work about robots that develop artificial intelligence is exceptional, featuring a particularly captivating last half with Antonio Banderas journeying with strangely alive robots
Fascinatingly original monster movie – a wild mix of H.P. Lovecraft, The Man from Earth and Before Sunrise. A beautifully realised work that leaves you with the sense of not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next
An Oscar nominees for Best Animated Film – a unique and exquisitely drawn dive into Celtic mythology that comes with wit, humour and the emotional tenderness of a Hayao Miyazaki. This deserves to be seen far more widely than it ended up being
Hands down, this is the best vampire comedy ever made. An incredibly witty effort that contrasts the cliches of the genre with the mundane business of a group of vampires flatting together in New Zealand. A film that comes with sly deadpan gags packed into the corner of every frame
A triumphal Marvel Comics adaptations that manages to mainline the spirit of the original Star Wars, while in in its wryly, self-deflating culture savvy suggesting a Star Wars rewritten by a 14 year-old Quentin Tarantino
Forget about movie melodrama like A Beautiful Mind , this may be one of the best, most credible films about mental illness … Essentially a surreal animated family history of a Latvian animator, this distils some incredibly bleak anecdotal material with a wittily and biting incisive brilliance
An exceptional time travel film, one of the best to emerge in some time. Adapted from a classic Robert Heinlein story, the pleasure of the film all comes in seeing its twists and turns come together into the most ingenious temporal paradox ever conceived
An enormously clever Australian time travel film about the mind-boggling conundrums that occur when a man tries to go back in time and stop his girlfriend leaving only to encounter multiple versions of himself come to fix the snowballing situation
One of the best among the modern Marvel Comics screen adaptations. All involved are at the absolute peak of their game and the balance of superheroic action, humour and tragedy makes you cheer at how well they get it right
The Planet of the Apes series excels itself and stages a massively exciting inter-species war. The CGI/mocap apes come with an extraordinary range of nuance – quite whether it is performance or animation is up for debate but the results are outstanding
Impressive Australian film that recalls the Mad Max films. Rather than action spectacle, this feels like Mad Max as rewritten by Cormac McCarthy wherein a collapsed future echoes a beautifully written exploration of the soul of a man in a violent world
Adaptation of an autobiographical Philip K. Dick book that he wrote in an attempt to make sense of a series of bizarre hallucinations, this long-rumoured film manages, despite a low-budget, to mainline the brain-twisting nature of Dick’s writing better than any other adaptation
A documentary about 2000AD, a weekly British comic-book that gave birth to Judge Dredd and featured some of the earliest works from names like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, among others
Absolutely fascinating Bollywood venture into science-fiction. A comedic variant on the theme of the blankly innocent alien visitor trying to make sense of human culture, this has a daringly ambitious bite in tackling the topic of religion and delivering some sharply pointed barbs
A standout Australian-made zombie film that breathes some life into an overworked genre, focusing on the tensions among the survivors as they try to fend off the dead while at siege on a farm
A very funny film about a horde of zombie schoolchildren. Co-written by Saw‘s Leigh Whannell, this has a great deal of fun deflating zombie cliches and is wittily on the ball in its characterisations of the teachers
Claimedly the world’s first Iranian vampire film. Although not quite the case, this is an attention grabbing pitch. The film has the wonderfully haunted quality of a Nadja while inverting vampiric and Islamic imagery with sensational regard
Spike Lee makes a vampire film (even though the title gives the impression is he has detoured off into gospel). The even bigger surprise is he conducts a remake of the Blaxploitation classic Ganja & Hess
Robert Rodriguez makes his return to Frank Miller’s classic film noir-styled graphic novels. You keep expecting this to hit in with the astonishing freshness the first film did. Rodriguez and Miller give us more of the same amazing visuals but there is the feeling it is no longer original and new
Absolutely fascinating documentary about Golan and Globus, the producers of a great deal of action, ninja, Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson films in the 1980s, plus many genre works, under the Cannon Films banner
A slightly different beast to its Japanese counterparts and an impressive revival of the series. Gareth Edwards, who made the excellent Monsters, delivers mass destruction on a mind-bogglingly vast scale in ways that approach painterly beauty
Effective and disturbing work about two boys who begin to think that someone else might have taken their mother’s place after she returns in bandages. The film reaches a particularly chill and nasty climax
An animated film produced by Guillermo Del Toro that draws on his Mexican heritage and Day of the Dead mythology. An amazingly colourful and happy film with one of the most unique design schemes ever
From the awful slapstick-heavy trailer, the prospects for this seem dismal – less Paddington Bear than a reprise of the live-action Yogi Bear. The finished result confounds expectation and the story of a small unassuming bear at large in the world comes full of considerable charm
Undeniably effective horror about a deadly shapeshifting phantom that gets passed by sexual contact. Imagine Ring by way of a Larry Clark film. This creates rather good unsettlingly uncanny atmosphere
A highly original treatment of werewolf themes that begins with the unique premise of ‘Werewolf in a Retirement Village’ and features a hero who is an aging blind man
Third of the V/H/S films, all horror anthologies in the Found Footage style. While the other two were fairly hit and miss, this is extremely good. Each of the four stories sits among the very best episodes among the current crop of multi-director horror anthologies
Beautifully made and exquisitely directed film with Nicole Kidman as a widow who meets a ten-year-old boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her late husband
The second film from Indonesia’s Mo Brothers follows the internet friendship between a serial killer and another he decides to mentor in the ways of killing. The Mo’s take to the material with a dark relish
On the scale of weird movies, this is about as out there as it gets – Ryan Reynolds has conversations with his cat and dog who urge him to cut people’s heads off, which continue to talk as he keeps them in his refrigerator. A mind-bogglingly warped film and quite brilliant in its dark funniness when you work out what is going on
Not to be confused with the cult British comedy series, the anonymous title disguises an excellent film about a drought-ridden future. Less another Mad Max-inspired film than an SF version of There Will Be Blood that becomes a study in greed, ambition and the fight for resource control
How much fun can a film based around Lego characters be? A film that overflows with cleverness, wit and energy. The most fun is in the film’s creating a madcap mix-up of characters from different franchises
The best among the films made from the Asterix comics. This delivers the characters and the visual humour the way they should be, plus leaves the sly satiric wit of the originals intact with side-splitting results
This offers the expectation of a sequel to the sleeper hit of Monsters; what we instead get is not many monsters and a film about recruits in a Middle Eastern war zone. That said, you cannot deny that what we have is an undeniably well made film
A documentary about Gerry Anderson and the making of his various puppet tv shows, the most famous of which was Thunderbirds. Each show is covered in depth and surviving personnel interviewed
Mike Cahill’s follow-up to Another Earth, an intriguingly different work about how research into the human eye leads to a very unusual discovery. As much a relationship drama as SF
A ghost story that borrows quite a few touches from Assault on Precinct 13 in its tale of a haunted police station. Director Anthony DiBlasi spends his time on accumulating atmosphere with considerable effectiveness
This spinoff from the Madagascar films is a lot more fun that I was anticipating – how could you dislike a film with John Malkovich as an octopus super-villain? Essentially cast as a spy parody, the film has a gonzo insanity that hits in with a manic delirium
Based on an old Joss Whedon script about two people who discover they can see through the other’s eyes and talk mentally. A low-key film that acts as a bare stage allowing the two characters to interact
A rather effective effort about a Mysterious Stranger locked in a cell who proceeds to expose the dark secrets of everybody around him, before a completely whacked ending
Brad Anderson adapts an Edgar Allan Poe story about an asylum where the inmates are posing as the staff. This is lush period piece with an amazing cast line-up – the only surprise is that it did no box-office
A witty parody of the giallo film from members of Canada’s Astron-6 collective who are proving themselves the masters of a certain type of movie spoof
Live-action adaptation of a manga about the war between body-snatching parasites that are capable of rearranging their host’s bodies. This plays out as a madcap version of The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school
Billed as a ‘zom-rom-com’, Dane DeHaan deals with girlfriend Aubrey Plaza who has returned from the dead. The film has a quirky appeal even if it is never quite as funny as it promises to be
The most sustained film Takashi Miike has made in some time. In this case, he adapts Yotsuya Kaidan, the most famous of all Japanese ghost stories, which has been filmed multiple times, but rather than offer a straight telling also adds a layer where the story comes to replay itself among the actors in the play
This Nacho Vigalondo film prefigured Unfriended with everything taking place on a computer screen. A far more adventurous film with a wildly entertaining plot about celebrity stalking
Adam Wingard thriller about a sinister stranger who inveigles his way into a household. This does well playing off the handsomely polished charms of Dan Stevens, less well when it turns into an a left field action film
A smart and boundary pushing Found Footage film in which a regular joe wins a competition and is selected as an actor on a porn film only to be pushed to snapping point
Going by the title you could easily dismiss this as an indie relationship drama (as I initially did) but what we instead get is a fascinatingly cryptic doppelganger film where a couple go on a retreat only to encounter idealised versions of themselves who seem intent on stealing their lives
Intensely mysterious film that resembles something of Stalker. This consists of a man venturing into a deserted Tasmania that has been taken over by spirit beings in search of his missing brother
Luc Besson makes a preposterously entertaining work where drug mule Scarlett Johansson develops superhuman mental capabilities – sort of if you imagine Limitless reconceived as an action film
A strong and tightly wound police procedural, not unreminiscent of the first season of True Detective. What makes the plot stand out is the beautifully desolate setting of the remote Spanish marshlands
A newlywed couple head to a cabin in the woods for their honeymoon. This seems to be a traditional backwoods horror but instead travels into an increasingly unnerving and way out territory
A documentary about Cannon Films and legendary producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. This one was authorised by Golan and Globus and makes interesting comparison to Electric Boogaloo
One of the better among the current fad for Young Adult dystopian SF works post-The Hunger Games. This dispenses with dystopian Coming of Age stories and gives us a fascinating conceptual mystery even if the answers prove underwhelming
Zombies and soccer! Ok? From co-director of the ferocious French zombie film The Horde, a rather entertaining effort that resembles something of Shaun of the Dead in its comedy approach
A surprisingly good effort to emerge from the arena of fan-made Kickstarter funded filmmaking. Essentially, a group of fans have brought their mutual love of playing Dungeons and Dragons to life but the film, while low-budgeted, places a great deal of care into the characters and building of the world
There is an irresistible appeal to this film – Katie Holmes as a perfect, sweetly smiling Miss Manners dressed in Sunday Best who, in between correcting people’s manners and punctuation, is also a gun-toting vigilante in the best tradition of Charles Bronson
At last a good film spun off from the Halo videogame (and produced Ridley Scott!). A harsh story of planetary survival as stranded soldiers fight to escape aboard a two-person ship
It is mind-boggling to think how you could combine zombies with Fight Club, the classic anti-capitalist manifesto about brawling clubs and split personality … Such an idea proves too challenging for this Taiwanese effort but we do get a solid zombie version of The Raid
While the title sounds like a cheesy faux B movie, this a surprisingly serious work. Taking undeniable influence from tv’s The Tripods , it is a YA work about the fight to free Earth following a machine invasion that proves far more entertaining than anything one expects of it
A ghost story from Studio Ghibli – although rather than any Western equivalent that sets out to scare the pants off us, this is a sweetly tender story of friendship between two girls. The result more than capably approaches some of Hayao Miyazaki’s best
A perfect example of a film carried by the ingenuity of its concept – a camera that takes photos 24 hours into the future – told with a superb tightness of economy – two sets and mostly three actors (largely unknowns) – and some wonderfully contorted twists
Not a remake but a sequel to the cult true-crime film The Town That Dreaded Sundown with a series of copycat killings influenced by the film occurring in the present-day. Directed with a bravura stylishness that makes you jump out of your seat in joy
From Laika, a stop-motion animated work about misunderstood creatures who wear boxes as shells and are perceived as monsters by polite society. An enormous degree of creativity has gone into this
The police procedural has vanished from cinema screens this side of the 00s, although this is one Belgian example. This ventures into some very dark territory in its story of a detective who ventures into underground paedophile rings in search of a child-abducting serial killer
A film from Quentin Dupieux that comes in a series of quirky intersecting stories where the dreams and films different characters are watching/making keeping blurring together in mind-boggling ways
A surprisingly good conceptual SF film concerning a man trying to deal with a series of increasingly more surreal jumps in which he finds his body is being hijacked
One of the most unique films in some time – everything takes place across social media (chat sessions, video calls) where the cinema screen is the computer screen. A fairly average supernatural retribution story that generates reasonable tension
Belgian Backwoods Brutality effort concerning a boy scout troupe who run afoul of a mysterious feral child and hunter in the woods near their campsite. Defying many of the expectation of the genre, this provides a series of often unearthly images
Shinji Aramaki returns to the Appleseed franchise for a third time with this prequel. Though it abandons the Cyberpunk milieu, Aramaki crafts action scenes with a stunning realism
The peculiar story of a man who gains super-strength and various other powers whenever he is in water, this essentially plays out as a superhero film but in a more low key way without any costumes. Quirky, charming and rather likeably appealing
Beautifully low key Danish werewolf film (even if the term is never mentioned throughout) that takes place in a tiny seaside village as a girl tries to understand her transformations, the film is quiet and often takes place in silences rather than dialogue, its horror understated with striking effect
Fascinating tv mini-series set around the notion of a generation ship – the show explores the scenario in interesting ways then proceeds to put some wild spins on what we think is happening
The second film from The Pact director Nicholas McCarthy. What is happening is kept deliberately vague and elliptical – as you are trying to piece everything together, McCarthy manages to pull some incredibly eerie jolts
This is more of a Suicide Squad than a Batman film. Based on the popular Arkham videogames, this a Justice League-type adventure but with super-villains where the emphasis is on dark humor and gleeful mayhem
Modest serial killer thriller – imagine one of the numerous Silence of the Lambs copies crossbred with Fargo. The film’s quiet pace soon segues into an absorbing thriller plot, while Christopher Heyerdahl gives a fine performance as the killer
The first occasion I have had to review a horror film from Peru – a thriller about a young woman imprisoned and forced to bear a child. This is never a work that particularly reinvents the wheel, just turns out a solid and suspenseful imprisonment thriller
A genre-melding oddity that starts as an earnest recreation of a 1950s rock‘n’roll movie, before introducing a series of bizarre mutations and some fascinating mid-film twists
The underrated Victor Salva, director of Jeepers Creepers, takes on the deviltry and occult film where with his ability to conjure eerie jumps and outlandish images produces something original and out of this world
Documentary about the popularity of zombie films, this covers the history of the genre in reasonable depth, even examines the historical origins and provides an amusing glimpse into the zombie’s pervasion of popular culture
A low key but modestly effective film where an amnesiac man comes to the gradual realisation that he is a clone
The story of the true-life killers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, most famously adapted into The Honeymoon Killers, gets a retelling from Fabrice du Welz with a modern updating
I have to admit despite all the bad feeling for this, I liked it. While what went on in terms of the man inside the machine was cut and dried in the original, this has been shifted to give us a “the soul of Robocop” story . Moreover, the original’s biting satire of 1980s corporations and politics has been smartly updated to tackle some big 2010s issues
This starts out seeming like a non-fantastic drama about explorers in 19th Century Argentina. However, the film seems to disregard this and heads towards a bafflingly surreal and undeniably fascinating ending
The Dead was one of the better modern zombie films, depicting the African continent as it succumbed to the zombie apocalypse. This offers nearly the same story but moves the locale to India
It is nice to see Bryan Singer regain his form after several years lull. The plot is nothing world-shattering but it is nice to see a character-driven X-Men, while Singer delivers the superheroics with a cheer-out loud elan that most of the sequels missed by a wide margin
Michael Polish is one of the underrated American directors. Here an amnesiac Wes Bentley wakes up a prisoner of a wonderfully chilling Kate Bosworth who insists that she is his wife
A film ostensibly about alien abductees that has rather pleasurably been construed as a series of wild head-spinning twists that are constantly pulling everything we think we know is going on from under the audience, even if it eventually provides more questions than it ever does answers
An improvisational project shot between actor Mark Duplass and friend Patrick Brice, a two person handheld-shot film where videographer Brice is hired by an over-friendly Duplass who becomes increasingly disturbed
Another of the DC Universe Original Animated Movies, this devoted to the character of Batman’s son Damian. Solid action, a well moving plot that makes good use of its characters, adding to a decent entry even if it is not up among the best of these animated DC films
A slasher musical??? The mind does a double takes trying to process the incongruity of the genre mash-ups. That said, this works exceedingly well – neither compromising on the slasher aspects, yet equally delivering some clever and witty musical numbers