The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Luigi Cozzi’s return to screens after 26 years, a head-scratchingly bizarre effort overloaded with ideas about parallel worlds, cosmic journeys and homage to the early cinema of Georges Melies and others
Blumhouse’s Ouija didn’t get many good reviews but they proceeded with a prequel here. This is automatically the better film from the outset by employing Mike Flanagan, behind amazing works like Absentia, Hush and The Haunting of Hill House, as director, even if it comes out as one of Flanagan’s lesser works
This is like an online version of 13 Sins about an internet site that pushes people to take increasingly more outrageous and eventually deadly dares. One of the new thrillers centred around social media that seeks to adopt its visual look, this is slickly polished and aimed direct to the teenage demographic
From the director of The Last Exorcism Part II, a title that does nothing to suggest a horror film. All we get is a ghost story that does an M. Night Shyamalan shift into an improbably contrived fugue state drama
A Backwoods Brutality film that becomes quite gore-drenched. Written by its leading man Paul Logan who casts himself as a perfect action hero wading in to kick hillbilly ass
This comes with a captivating tagline “Before The Ripper, fear had another name” and misleadingly suggests it is based on another true-life Victorian serial killer. This refuses to be the police procedural you expect
The James Wan produced (as opposed to directed) film is a dubious prospect. You cannot deny that this film about creatures in the dark does make an audience jump but I felt that I’d seen everything before
Chinese film in which a dead wife comes back to inhabit the body of her son to get her husband to move a tree before their village is redeveloped
Australian film about a couple that abduct and imprison a teenage girl. This received some very good notices in theatrical release but as a horror film, it soft pedals and seems to avoid most of its horror element
Like a version of David Fincher’s The Game rewritten for the mobile user generation where a slacker is forced through a series of scenarios that mess with his sense of reality
H.P. Lovecraft is a cult horror writer whose work brims over with a sense of cosmic dread. One of the most bizarre Lovecraft film adaptations is this work of children’s animation featuring a young Lovecraft
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
Mickey Keating makes a Backwoods Brutality film that has borrowed a good deal from The Most Dangerous Game about a woman abducted and forced to make a survival run through the desert with her bare hands
Modest film about a man who becomes involved with a woman who increasingly appears to be responsible for a series of murders. The director and lead actress create a sense of mystery and fascination about what is happening
In the same vein as Grindhouse, an anthology that consists of two longer stories set around the gimmick of a tv horror host playing a double-bill, along with several mocked-up parody trailers
Actor Thomas Dekker directs a film in which Rory Culkin travels home for a funeral and finds disturbing revelations about his past. This circles around weird happenings without going anywhere
British lad culture take on the zombie film. Think a version of Shaun of the Dead inhabited by guys around the age of 20 whose only real concerns is getting laid and wasted. The constant vulgarity becomes tiresome
Ever since The Exorcist, filmmakers have been recycling the same cliches for the last forty years. This slings the cliches together with the dream incursion concept from Inception, which makes things somewhat interesting
This seems to be shaping up to be another entry in the over-saturated low-budget haunted house film. While never straying too far from this, this does throw in some interestingly strange twists
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to Independence Day: Resurgence, a rehash of Independence Day on a cheaper budget. The desire to copy the title has forced some plotting oddities onto the film
The Kung Fu Panda series are films for couch potatoes – martial arts films with a hero who proclaims the virtues of laziness, overeating and goes into combat with an self-inflated sense of his own awesomeness
A reality bending film about a man held in an automated prison where he must outsmart the prison’s A.I. in order to affect an escape
The 2007 Inside in which a pregnant mother is pursued by a woman with a pair of scissors was one of the most brutal viewing experiences amid the French Extremism fad. This is the English-language remake
Bizarre Japanese copy of Battle Royale by way of American Idol where a group of schoolgirls from a singing competition are trapped on an island where they must play a deadly card game
A zombie film produced by The Asylum that appropriates the name of the Val Lewton classic (and Arnold Bocklin’s painting) but is actually a low-budget copy of Resident Evil
This feels as though the director, frustrated with lack of financing, grabbed a camera and shot a film around his home. This generates a modest creepiness but falls apart at a credibiity-stretching ending
From the acclaimed Simon Rumley comes this true crime drama about the execution of an innocent man and the supposed curse he placed on all who condemned him
This had me watched on the basis of the title alone. An Asylum production, this is less a twisted take on the fairytale than one that turns Little Red Riding Hood into a werewolf hunter
A girl sets out to solve the Jack the Ripper killings to free her innocently convicted brother. This is no more, no less factual than any other version but conducts a fine period recreation of Victorian England
Although effort is made to sell this as a horror film and there are some ghosts, this is far more of a missing woman thriller. A directing/writing debut for Guisela Moro who plays the abducted woman
Jaimie Alexander has an affair with barman Wes Bentley whereafter he stalks her and throws her wedding plans awry. Wes Bentley plays with a darkly magnetic intensity but the film slides into the tamely PG-rated Fatal Attraction cliches
There is a certain appeal to the premise – nanny is expected to tend a doll that everyone pretends is real only to discover it might be alive. Director William Brent Bell but he redeems himself in terms of creepy atmosphere only to blow it with a lame twist ending
Adaption of a Young Adult series of books – this is essentially Twilight but with angels instead of vampires. Another YA effort where we never saw successive chapters due to its box-office flop
A blatant copy of Misery where Erika Christensen is a popular singer who is abducted and made a prisoner by deranged fan Bethany Lauren James who wants her to write more songs in the style she used to
Film about Japan’s legendary Suicide Forest that comes rich in a sense of original mythology. All possibilities are wrung out by incredibly tepid direction that fails to deliver anything remotely scary
From Arrowstorm Entertainment, a low-budget company that make highly professional films. Here they have even roped Danny Trejo into playing a role in a passable attempt to replicate a 1990s Albert Pyun post-holocaust cyborg film
This offers the promising idea of Sleeping Beauty reworked as a horror film (and set in the modern day). Never as interesting as it sounds in synopsis, this becomes more a Sleeping Beauty-themed haunted house ride
For the most part, this plays out as a mundane drama about someone with a terrible deformity – similar to The Elephant Man or Mask – but who also has daydreams in which he is a giant
From Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, a film about a sinister health sanatorium. A beautiful looking film but it is a long time before we ever find out what is going on
A modern remake of an old play filmed twice before about a magical cottage that allows plain and disfigured lovers who stay there to see the other one as beautiful
A Canadian-made micro-budgeted Found Footage film about a couple filming themselves as they plan out a murder for the thrill of it – only to fall out in the midst of doing so
A.I. film directed by Ridley Scott’s son. The set-up seems awfully similar to Ex Machina – unfortunately, this sidesteps any of that fascinating questions about A.I. that film dealt in, while the latter half just becomes The Terminator before reaching a frankly unbelievable twist ending that sinks the film
A remake of Eli Roth’s first film? Why, given that the original only came out 14 years ago, is anybody’s guess. This literally recycles the original’s script but is deaf to its sarcastic humour of the original
For a long time, this effort about a girl experiencing nightmare visions on her family farm doesn’t seem to be doing anything – then gets interesting as it switches to a parallel reality where what happens is mirrored slightly different
Despite being a huge box-office and critical success and being nominated for an Academy Award, I am in a minority in disliking this. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that it appropriates the culture from my neck of the woods and only spins it out as a series of glib jokes and one-liners
Matt Damon helps defend the Great Wall of China against invading monsters. Directed by Zhang Yimou, this should be seen for its breathtaking visuals – vast battle scenes, lavish costumes – but you wish there had been more than that
This has the interesting idea of a group of people selected to take place in a live-action videogame only to find themselves trapped in a The Belko Experiment scenario.
Everything indicates this should have been a hit – an impressive star line-up, big polished action sequences – only it tanked. Much has been assembled in the service of a hackneyed idea where the memories of an FBI agent are implanted into criminal Kevin Costner
Stephen Chow has proven himself a comic genius in his directorial works of the 90s/00s. Unfortunately, as he has gained mainstream acclaim, his films have started to disappear under their big-budgets. This is sort of a version of Splash! by way of the fad for madcap Hong Kong slapstick
The time paradox film has always been one of the most ingenious and conceptually challenging SF films in recent years with the likes of Timecrimes and Predestination. This is a B-budgeted variant
This calls itself a horror comedy and is set in a hardware store on Christmas Eve as the staff fall to murderous squabbling after the discovery of a dead body and large sum of money
There feels like there should be something tongue-in-cheek about the idea of a killer crocodile film set in the British lakelands. Surprisingly, this plays itself seriously
Roland Emmerich returns with more of the same. The problem is how to top the first film and here everything is so big and with so much happening that it cannot be taken in and slips into tedium
Children’s film with the promising idea of kids finding a bunch of toys from the future that grant them amazing abilities unaware they have world-destroying potential.; The idea is alas watered down to the blandness of family formula and the limited conceptual horizons of a low budget
I don’t dislike the Tyler Perry film – the performances are skillfully accomplished. Here however Perry attempts to make a Halloween comedy while displaying almost zero interest in any of the genre elements
Greg McLean has made an impressive name with the Wolf Creek films and Rogue. In his first US film, he delivers a disappointing and utterly generic haunted suburban house film
An undistinguished low-budget haunted house effort that was quickly retitled to jump aboard the bandwagon of James Wan’s The Conjuring films
There is a certain genus of films based around coming up with deliberately ridiculous titles. The filmmakers sell you instantly on the film from the title alone but have lavished little care or budget on the actual film
Mike Mendez film about a heist on a safety deposit company. Henry Rollins proves extremely entertaining as a serial killer come to retrieve his collection of eyeballs in the vault and caught in the midst
Completely ridiculous killer clown film with a theatre haunted by clowns where nothing makes any sense. Even more absurdly, it becomes a preachy diatribe in favour of the right to gun ownership
This has a great premise – a camera crew revisiting the site of a cult mass suicide stir up the ghosts of the cult members – and a director who I always maintained had much untapped potential. Alas, the finished result seems to slip by his hands
A Chinese-made attempt to make a disaster movie with a crosscut of characters aboard a luxury airliner. What causes the film to plummet down into the ridiculous is the addition of a horde of mutant cats
An ill-conceived attempt to compete amid the high stakes box-office superheroics enjoyed by Marvel and belatedly DC, this had one of the most disastrous box-office showings of 2016 … Based on a popular line of action toys, this gets nothing right – it’s hard to tell it is meant to be a superhero film for half the show
Hard Target was one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s better films, featuring an on-fire John Woo as director. While most have forgotten it, we get a sequel here that copycats Woo’s moves to a point of tedium
In between the hugely successful Young Adult adaptations of the 00s/10s there has been another trail of YA adaptations that never made it beyond one film. Adapted from a YA series by crime writer James Patterson about a group of kids with wings, this is an exceedingly lacklustre production
Syfy Channel disaster movie where Earth is suddenly transported into another Solar System amid cheap effects and an improbable time travel solution is sought to reverse this
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
Lavalantula with Steve Guttenberg facing giant fire-breathing spiders was a modestly enjoyable creature feature. This sequel feels like a Sharknado wannabe with shittier effects and an unfunny sense of humour
A massive letdown of the year. A sequel that brings back several of the original cast and gives it to Yuen Wo-Ping to direct but is merely slickly paced, uninspired action that substitutes CGI for the graceful wirework of the original
I am at a loss to understand who the audience for the Underworld films is – they are films devoid of minimal requirements like plotting and seem to only exist as a series of forgettable action sequences and interchangeable Gothic poses by characters in black leather – and yet we keep getting more of them
A Hungarian-made Found Footage horror film with vague claims to being about the Mothman. This only goes where The Blair Witch Project trod before, although subverts it in a twist ending (8)
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
A modernisation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale cast as a hipster romance where the mermaid becomes a stripper, all shot with the gauzy soft focus of a feminine hygiene products commercial
Blood Feast was the world’s first splatter film. This is a remake with a better budget but suffers a tameness that fails to come anywhere near the go-for-broke rawness of the original
Another in the spate of social media horror films, this is a blatant copy of Unfriended, albeit mashed up with Ring to create the idea of a cursed newsfeed. This is also the lamest of the bunch
The killer crocodile/alligator film has not had a great track record (with only a couple of exceptions). This is not one of those exceptions and quickly sinks into risibility
Comic-book adaptation about a cop that is resurrected from the dead to take on the toughest assignments. Feels like a throwback to an 80s film like Maniac Cop or Dead Heat where the film is killed by the tiresomely cliched appropriation of the faux grindhouse aesthetic
Singaporean film that offers an assemblage of cliches elements from various horror films in a mishmash of hauntings, possession, occult happenings and ominous Biblical portents that make little sense in terms of explanatory rationale
A throwback to the 1980s/90s psycho-thriller that came out after Fatal Attraction featuring a surrogate mother who develops a stalkerish fixation on a husband. The crucial difference is that this is played with an all-Black cast but in a way that sends out weirdly uncomfortable racial messages
Post-holocaust film made by and starring Canadian First Nations people. While the film uses the aftermath of a civilisation as a setting, it never seems that interested in exploring it. The film peters out in an uninteresting resoution and features some appallingly pretentious dialogue
Wannabe in the fad for Young Adult films. An alien invasion story that takes place without drama or engagement in anything that happens. This seems more interested in its teen love triangle than combatting the alien threat
As animated films go, there are few that feel like a constructor set of pieces copied from every other film than this. Audiences found the adventures of a twerking polar bear lacking too and it made a record for the lowest weekend gross for an animated film ever
The haunted house film is a genre that has been mined to a point of almost complete creative exhaustion. This Kate Beckinsale starring effort is about as formulaic, by the book and forgettable as the genre gets
This exploits the topical fascination with the darknet in a story ostensibly about making snuff videos for sale there. In actuality, this telescopes down to being no more a variant on The Most Dangerous Game
The possession and exorcism genre has been recycling the same cliches ever since The Exorcist. Even this film’s bogus claim to be filmed in the house where the true-life event that inspired The Exorcist took place fails to make this stand out
Another variant on the Young Adult dystopia a la The Hunger Games and Divergent films, concerning a future where that who fail standardised school tests are executed to keep the population down. The blandness of approach utterly feels to grapple with the ideas at play
This imagines a future where people have become so absorbed in online communication that they live in isolated cubicles. An interesting idea that the film does zero to make believable
An adaptation of Jasper Fforde, one of the cleverest of modern humorous fantasy writers. Alas, the finished result is one that understands nothing about the book and is one of the worst ever screen adaptations
Charlie Charlie was supposedly an oracular game that made headlines when a satiric site claimed that teenagers were being killed playing it and some news sites took this seriously. This is a pathetic and feeble film made exploiting the game’s five minutes of notoriety
A film directed by actor Zack Ward – his best known role was probably as Postal Dude in Uwe Boll’s Postal. Not a terribly interesting film – it starts as a ghost story before this proves to be a red herring and then meanders around without much direction
This low-budget British effort seems to be making a good start as a film that deals with space travel realistically only to bog down in one of the most incomprehensible plots one has ever sat through
Documentary about the comic-book that ends up trying to address everything and being so hopelessly watered down it feels like an attempt to explain everything to someone who has never read a comic-book before
The third film based on Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books. This is essentially the same plot as The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks following clues to a deadly virus hidden in classic artworks around Europe
There have been the various adaptations of the Left Behind books about the Biblical Rapture; this is an attempt to spin the same off for Young Adult audiences and is not very good
There is a good idea for a film in here somewhere where a fan joins Scream Queen Tiffany Shepis playing a Scream Queen tracking down the print of her werewolf movie before finding she is a real werewolf. But the presentation is an utterly confused mishmash
Group of backpackers at a chateau find an old VCR that mashes up genres and sucks them inside. There’s a good idea for a horror film somewhere here but it ends up with terrible execution
The bad movie hit of Sharknado was a surprise to everyone and spawned sequels. By this point, creativity appears to have dried up – essentially, the Sharknado series has jumped the shark
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
This has the interesting idea of mind-controlled people being used as shooters in a live-action videogame. However, the rest of the film is a routine low-budget action film
Darren Lynn Bousman is the director most associated with the Saw sequels and its Torture Porn excesses. His other films have been lacking. This comes with one of the most off the wall premises one has seen