The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A bizarre directorial debut from actor Steve Oram that takes place in an alternate world of sorts that operates on pre-verbal grunts and ape-like displays of dominance behaviour
A film that creates a genuinely haunted mood, something that is aided immensely by an amazing location and some fine, well developed characterisation between the two principals
Aimed at the same audiences as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Blake Lively is a woman who hasn’t aged since the 1930s. This comes with the nostalgic weepiness and solemn self-importance of a work pitched to Academy Awards voters
This comes with a great premise – two men are woken from cryogenic suspension only to find one of their cryo-tubes broken and they discover their purpose there may not be what they were told
A strong and effective reworking of the psycho Santa slasher film. This conducts a well-oiled rehearsal of all the slasher tropes and delivers exactly what we expect of it
A French-Spanish film in which a group of troubled youths escaped from a reform centre only to discover that all the adults around them have become zombies
The end of Western civilisation is surely upon us that studios have devoted multi-million dollar resources to making four of these films and that audiences flock to them despite universally terribly reviews. Ok so maybe I hated this one marginally less than the preceding three
Tired of the bombast of Marvel/DC Comics superheroics overunning screens? This is a superhero film for you – one welcomely brought down to Earth set in working class neighbouhoods and with a focus on real-life problems. The results are surprising and refreshing
One out of some thirty odd films using the Amityville name. This concerns a girl who inherits a haunted theatre in the town of Amityville
Lush, beautifully produced version of the Agatha Christie murder mystery from the BBC to celebrate Christie’s 125th anniversary. The story is a chamber mystery with guests in an isolated house being bumped off – sort of Big Brother with dead bodies
A group of people whose memories have been blanked wake up in a mysterious labyrinth and have to survive death traps and each other. A promising mix of Cube and The Hunger Games killed by clumsy storytelling
While there is little doubt that Edgar Wright would have made a much better film, this emerges with an engaging likeability. Less epic superheroics, this plays out more as a caper comedy where a good ensemble and comedic playing carry the show
Sweet and tender anime about a young girl who has a curse placed on her that causes her to lose her voice and how this actually allows everyone around her to voice things they don’t say.
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
This seems a generic ghost story. The second half has the protagonist’s dead girlfriend trying to stop him seeing another woman and becomes a descent into obsession that works rather well
A drifter who likes killing tattooed girls and a girl who enjoys eating the flesh of victims meet and love blossoms. Where you expect this to go in the direction of something like Natural Born Killers, it fizzles out
Animated film that takes place in a Steampunk alternate history. This brims over with an extraordinary degree of visual invention from the amazingly detailed vistas of the world to a script tossing in quirky twists and wacky inventions
This is not an adaptation of the Arabian Nights but the title has been appropriated for a collection of quasi-fantastical tales and even documentaries about the Portuguese Austerity Crisis over six hours in length
Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli’s second film – a gripping Found Footage film about a group breaking into Area 51 in search of evidence of the alien visitors that the US government is holding
The live-action adaptation of a popular manga series, this comes with a completely WTF premise about humanity defending itself from an invasion by a horde of misshapen giants that like to bite people’s heads off
Sequel the demented Attack of Titan with its wild images of humanity under attack from mindless giants that bite their heads off, which was shot back-to-back and released a few months later
The rarity of a really good Found Footage film. Designed to look like lost footage from 1970s psychic experiments, this concerns a scientific team who discover they are dealing with a woman who is demonically possessed
The Asylum’s response to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not having their own superheroes, they have ingeniously created an adventure involving various fairytale princesses – a great idea that befalls miserable execution
This is the British equivalent of a Backwoods Brutality film in which Tony Curran is a towtruck driver who traps and kills motorists to salvage their belongings
Fan-produced documentary about the making of the Back to the Future trilogy. The filmmakers get face time with almost everybody involved. Far less interesting are the scenes dealing with DeLorean restoration
Marcus Nispel is a director most associated with remakes of other films. In original material here, he is still rehashing moves from other films – an abandoned asylum and every shock effect in the possession/exorcism playbook
Beautifully made Australian ghost story that creates a strong sense of eerie disquiet as psychologist Adrien Brody realises that all of his patients are dead and is prompted to go on a journey to uncover forgotten things from his past
For the most part a standard variant on the staple of people being stalked through the backwoods. Things are buoyed up by an effective twist but that fails to excuse the fact that almost nothing happens
Balls-to-the-wall horror from Turkey. It is not clear what is going on for much of the film about police investigating a house filled with Devil worshippers but you cannot deny that it pulls out all stops
An animated Batman film that is essentially an extended commercial based on a line of toys wherein Batman fights super-villains that have an animal motif
Second in the trilogy of animated films dealing with Bruce Wayne’s son Damian who becomes the new Robin – this also adapts the massive Court of Owls crossover event, which provides a fascinating new nemesis for Batman
Despite the title, this is a horror film that takes place in a mine (albeit one where the former inmates of an asylum lurk). This plays out fairly well by a set of familiar genre tropes and delivers a solid degree of tension
Fascinatingly cryptic debut film from Osgood Perkins. Perkins avoids cliche jumpshocks and proves a master of the slow burn film, focusing on small detail before throwing in something wild and outre
Comedy that resembles something of tv’s The Office where Fran Kranz discovers that management is turning his co-workers into vampires as an efficiency measure
This is like a Western version of The Hills Have Eyes. Exceptionally written – slow, sombre and character-driven, containing one of Kurt Russell’s best performances, before emerging into a brutal horror survival story
From the generic title, this seems no more than another film about a girl seeking revenge for years of captivity a la I Spit on Your Grave. On the other hand, things are quickly turned on their head in unexpected ways
Not to be confused with the more profile film of the same name around the same time, this is a standout work about a psychopathic child. A real slow burn film that comes so understated that it can leave you gasping
If Hayao Miyazaki ever follows through on his threat to retire, the one most likely inheritor would be Mamoru Hosoda. This is a perfectly enjoyably film that is sort of The Karate Kid by way of Disney’s The Jungle Book
A cougar version of Fatal Attraction with Jennifer Lopez stalked by a teenage boy. On every level this invites ridicule, from J-Lo sleepwalking through her performance to a director who has never made a good film to a script detached from human psychology
A wickedly irreverent and even occasionally blasphemous comedy in which God is a scruffy, bad-tempered man living in Brussels who spends all his time devising ways to make humans miserable
A low-budget independent vampire film set around a group of vampire hunters trying to bring down the master vampire – the local Catholic priest
A revival of the Nazi zombie fad, which essentially becomes a First Person Shooter film as someone wearing a GoPro camera runs through a bunker dispatching zombies
Outrageous Finnish splatter comedy about a giant rampaging bunny creature. A film that in its better moments captures something of the sensibilities of early Peter Jackson films
Interesting and well-made variant on the plague outbreak drama set aboard an airliner as a handful of people flee a pandemic sweeping the world only to have to deal with infection on board and the need to land to refuel
Critical favourite that he is, I find Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s have some incredibly eerie, haunted moments. But these sit alongside banal, uneventful happenings that never seem to intersect in a plot
Neill Blomkamp’s film about A.I. turns into Short Circuit dropped into the militarised future of RoboCop. Of all the rich possibilities in the idea, all we get is a goofy comedy with a pimped-out carjacking robot
There is potential to the premise here – a dark horror riff of sorts on The Little Mermaid in a 1930s Depression era setting – but it is squandered by an unimaginative script and direction
From David Keating who made Wake Wood, this falls into the Folk Horror genre and becomes a well-made variant on Rosemary’s Baby as a schoolgirl accepts a Devil’s Deal to save her father
This offers one of the most fascinating settings for a detective story – the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinist oppression – and borrows the story of true-life Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo
Arthur C. Clarke’s book is one of the all-time SF classics; this mini-series adaptation counts as one of the biggest book-to-film abortions in the SF genre handled by people who know nothing about SF
An anthology that offers a quartet of Christmas horror stories, including ones of zombified elves and a Krampus monster. Hosted by William Shatner who plays a radio talkshow host in the wraparound
Live-action remake of the Disney animated film. This varies little from the well-worn elements of the story to the point of over-familiarity but director Kenneth Branagh manages a lush and beautifully staged effort
A variant on the plague outbreak drama with a difference. It begins with a man waking to go about his workday only to find he has been glued into his apartment and the film logically expands out from there
Contracted was a modestly effective film that depicted its heroine’s progressive meltdown due to a deadly infection. This is a sequel so sub-par you doubt it would even been released without connection to the first film
This has an interesting set-up concerning mysterious happenings in a hospital where it is gradually revealed the characters exist in a limbo caught between Heaven and Hell even if it never does the idea justice
Despite the disappointment that it is not a Western but set modern-day. This enlivens a formula plot quite well and provides dinosaur effects that range between the surprisingly good and the occasionally ropy
Guillermo Del Toro takes on the Victorian ghost story. What we get is the most gorgeously designed and costumed haunted house film ever but where the excess scenography actually distracts from producing any boo moment
Forget Mad Max et al, this Ethiopian film is a fascinatingly different take on the post-holocaust film – set after the collapse of civilisation where the junk culture of today has developed a mythology of its own
Harsh and brutal work written by Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame wherein a group of jocks harass and tear apart the life of Bella Heathcote after she accidentally blinds the leader’s eye in the process of rejecting his advances
This sold itself as the first Iraqi horror film, which it isn’t quite (more accurately a film made by an expatriate), although it is rooted in the mythology of the region
Another variant on the containment thriller a la Buried, this has Julianne Hough trapped at the bottom of a cliff in an overturned SUV while being taunted by a serial killer
This comes with an original idea where a troubled girl starts drawing a graphic novel that mirrors her own life only for the characters to emerge into the real world. Less horror than a dark allegorical fantasy
Director Paul Solet made an incredibly creepy debut film Grace. His follow-up has Keir Gilchrist imprisoned on home detention with an ankle bracelet only to find the house is haunted
An ambitious low-budget variant on 28 Days Later featuring some excellent effects, where a man wakes up with amnesia to find zombies have overrun society
One of the films from the most promising Mickey Keating. Darling owes a great deal of debt to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion but Keating very effectively drags us into a disturbed mental space
Brian De Palma is one of the most stylish directors in the world. In this documentary, he candidly reflects on his career, wryly accepts his flops and recounts the witty anecdotes from behind the scenes
Dead Rising was another zombie survival horror videogame from the creators of Resident Evil. Although nowhere near the popularity of the Milla Jovovich films, this was the first of two films based on the game
New Zealand-made film about a trio of parapsychologists investigating a reputedly haunted farmhouse. This treads very familiar ground and ultimately suffers from a sedate approach
Fascinating documentary examining the proposed Superman Lives film from Tim Burton starring Nicolas Cage that never ended up going ahead. The competing personalities make for compulsive watching
Outrageous New Zealand-made effort that fondly recalls the 1980s splatter comedies of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson et al. This often feels like former teen metalheads looking back and puncturing the pretensions of their youth
A weird and twisted film about a failed artist who develops a relationship with a hole in a wall. Imagine something that falls between Barton Fink and the Radiator Girl sequences from Eraserhead
This starts as a Death Wish-styled vigilante film of interesting ambiguities, before abruptly turning into a psycho film. The latter half generates some undeniable tension but the film feels it needed more than that
A unique and original Polish film that throws out all the possession cliches and is instead about a man possessed by a Jewish dybbuk – the spirit of a girl killed during the Holocaust – on his wedding night
James Wan has an exemplary track record in one’s opinion, you think this would extend to anything he produces. Here all we get are series of tired haunted house cliches before a twist ending that makes no real sense
This has an appealing premise – the children of all the Disney villains have grown up and go to school together. This is promptly killed by the awfulness of the film itself, which is essentially High School Musical set in the Disney universe
Yet another effort about teens running around the backwoods being stalked by a madman. This does better than most with the psycho of the show being an original character, given an intense, domineering performance from Gonzalo Menendez
Alfonso Cuaron’s son Jonas makes a film about Mexican illegal immigrants being hunted by a white vigilante in a Most Dangerous Game scenario. The film came out just after Trump’s famous wall campaign speech
From Australian director Sean Byrne who made the splendidly twisted The Loved Ones, this starts out a heavy metal horror film that broods with occult imagery and a sense of bad things about to explode
The bizarre story of a man who believes his young daughter is the reincarnation of a NASA astronaut. The film makes great claim that it is based on a true story but fails to make a compelling argument for its case
This gives all appearance to being another copy of Insidious – a ghost story with an evil-sounding adjective for a title. The film settles in in predictable ways; then throws the ghost story angle on its head with a surprise SF twist
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
Spanish film that prefigures the subsequent A Quiet Place concerning an island where anybody who makes a noise is killed. This fails to use its premise in any interesting way.
The 1994 film version of The Fantastic Four is the stuff of legend – made for $1 million budget solely to secure a copyright and never intended to be released. This is a documentary about its making
Not to be confused with Neil Marshall’s Doomsday. This is a surprisingly good, low-budget British SF film that serves up the essential plot of The Terminator but with a number of clever touches of its own
Sequel to a largely forgotten fantasy series. While never transcending formula, this fares somewhat better than the previous sequel largely because CGI effects have advanced since the original
This sets out to parody the Lord of the Rings fantasy. Or at least you think that is what it is trying to do. All suspension of disbelief is killed by a series of grating and anachronistic quips
A documentary devoted to the extras and bit players who appeared in Star Wars. Gently affectionate, it tells the story of people who never much else notable and how being part of such a cultural landmark impacted their lives
An often hauntingly made film set in a world where the populace is affected by periodic amnesia and memory resets. Memento in effect recast as an apocalyptic story
Fascinatingly original anime set in an alternate history Steampunk version of Victorian England that has developed a technology based on Frankenstein’s corpse resurrection experiments
Found Footage film about various people in the woods in the aftermath of a UFO crash. Essentially The Blair Witch Project with UFOs instead of a backwoods haunting
A comedy in which office staff working overtime gradually realise their efforts are in preparation for the end of the world. This needed more of a dark bite to fully work but has occasional amusement
The Enfield Haunting is a supposedly true-life haunting that most audiences are familiar with from The Conjuring 2; this is an earlier tv mini-series treatment that offers a more realistically grounded telling
Dystopian film about a future where emotion is forbidden – this owes much to George Lucas’s THX 1138, right down to the blinding white-on-white look. The film is also hobbled by a non-acting Kristen Stewart
An amnesiac girl returns home to a large estate in the English countryside only to be made prisoner by her family. Reminiscent of one of the 1960s Hammer psycho-thriller, this is well-made and builds out a fine sense of alienation
The field has been open for one work to come and set the benchmark for A.I. films. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina arrives at that work. Rather than flashy effects, this resides in a series of beautifully cool debates and sharply intelligent twists
A strong portrait of disturbed psychology – imagine a mash-up between The Neon Demon and its delve into the dark side of the modeling world and Single White Female about a woman and her disturbed roommate
Friends on Springbreak break down after taking a detour where they encounter creepy towtruck driver Tom Sizemore and drunkenly summon the spirit of a murdered woman
An anthology of Edgar Allan Poe tales narrated by Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi and others. Each episode is in a different style, where the succinctness allows the stories to be told as written
Despite all the hate this received, I am maybe the only person out there that liked it. It is three-quarters of a good film that strips the Four of costumes and tells a character-driven story about people dealing with powers
Film spun out from a web series. Robert Englund as a mad psychiatrist who creates a machine that helps people confront their phobias that somehow opens a doorway to creatures from another dimension