The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
One has seen just a few too many wacky titled zombie comedies and this Austrian film seems another wannabe until the climactic scenes where it redeems itself with a completely demented bloodbath
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
From Walter Hill, one of the legendary action directors, comes what is either the most edgy or tasteless concepts for a revenge film – Michelle Rodriguez is a hitman who seeks revenge after having gender reassignment surgery forced on him
Adaptation of the popular videogame that is lumbered with the game’s inherently uncinematic premise where people only sit around and watch what has already happened in the past
Most SF films gloss over the issue of communication with aliens, having them either speaking English or with devices like Universal Translators. This is a superbly intelligent film that grapples with how to communicate with something different
Another variant on the Groundhog Day theme with characters trapped in a timeloop. This come with an SF rationale and contains the plot in a single location while spinning each repeat through some smart twists
Horror film about a couple camping in the woods who are menaced by something lurking outside their tent. A solid film that develops some passable suspense and eventually enters Folk Horror territory
This comes with the clear influence of The Martian, telling a similar but more low-key story of a lone astronaut having problems on the way to Mars. This is less about science ingenuity that his fracturing mental state
This has cult midnight hit written over it. It’s a loopy trip into people doing drugs, alien impregnation and government conspiracy that should have been quirky and funny but sort of goes asleep at the wheel
Comedy about a man with ghosts in his home who invites in a so-called ‘ghost assassin’ before it becomes increasingly apparent he is completely nuts. Less a horror comedy than an eccentric bromance gone wrong
A film based on a mobile app surely counts as a world first. Mostly this is the equivalent of switching one’s brain off and spending an hour-and-a-half watching cartoons for the single digit age group
Chuck Norris’s son directs spectacularly bad film that acts as a fantasy for every lunatic right wing conspiracy where the UN wants to overthrow the US government and confiscate everybody’s guns
An undistinguished low-budget haunted house effort that was quickly retitled to jump aboard the bandwagon of James Wan’s The Conjuring films
Another venture into the sleep paralysis theme. A film that has an amateurism on every level and looks as though it made by people who failed the first year of a film school program
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a rock musical about a war between a gaudily exotic Heaven and Hell. A full-length expansion of Bousman’s earlier short film
The Divergent series is a fundamentally implausible scenario for people that think horoscopes are a profound insight into human nature. This is the most interesting of the films and gives us an imaginative future world
Sequel to one of the few original (ie. non comic-book) superhero films of the 2010s. this takes the interesting route of telling it as a investigative tv report into someone killing off all the superheroes
This takes its title literally – it is made by a woman director and there are no men on screen. The result is somewhere between The Descent and The Blair Witch Project with an undeniably surprise twist ending
An alien invasion film with a more character driven focus than most, telling the story through the eyes of a husband and wife separated across different states as he tries to get back home
Sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. This has even less in common with Lewis Carroll’s book sequel than its predecessor did – a total of two scenes. The sets and effects are just pretty eye candy
A micro-budgeted production shot in a trailer in the woods with a cast of two that sits in a fascinatingly ambiguous place about whether the central character has sold his soul or gone off his psychiatric meds
A low-budget but nevertheless at times quite funny version of an exorcism film, one that throws out all the tired clichés of the genre
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
The vampire film is looking rather anemic in the post-Twilight era. This is one decent effort about a father trying to save his son who has received a blood transfusion from a vampire