The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
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 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
While the title leads you to expect a plague outbreak film, you soon discover this is a zombie film. What it is is a Found Footage film mounted as a First Person Shooter film at which you have to admit that it launches into action with considerable gusto and ferocity
Steven Seagal makes an SF film. Even more bizarrely, Seagal plays the villain for one of the few times in his career, namely the dictator of a dystopian future. An overweight and aging Seagal has a handful of scenes philosophising, while the bulk of the film is a super-soldier plot carried by others
There have been a surprising number of films in recent years offering up the combination of zombies and strippers. Although what we have is never quite specified as zombies, this offers up strippers kicking zombie ass with a great deal of gore-drenched relish
Pee-Wee Herman is a deliberately annoying character that is either adored or intensely loathed by audiences. This third film closely follows the structure of the first film with Pee-Wee in a series of nonsense adventures on a cross-country journey
The gratifying pleasure of a solid conceptually-driven science-fiction film – all based around the premise of “what if a cryogenic sleeper woke up halfway through a deep space voyage?” and the moral choices he must make. Strong, intelligent character-driven science-fiction and possibly the best designed film of the year
This reverses the sympathies of films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Rather than having people tortured by backwoods hicks, one man is forced to survive on a brutal run for his life through the more disreputable parts of L.A. while hunted by homeless.
There have been some ingenious time paradox films in recent years, this is a modest low-budget offering in which a scientist travels one hour into the future only to find everybody at the lab has been killed. Returning in time, he tries to stop everything from happening.
This comes with a premise that holds interest – it many years after the collapse of civlisation where three youth are taken into the woods on a rite of passage only to encounter someone from another tribe fleeing with an object that makes the possessor a god – a handgun
A surprisingly amiable entry in the gonzo killer shark genre from director Misty Talley who seems to be making this her own genre niche
This seems to be shaping up to be a modern variant on The Collector in which Dominic Monaghan abducts the object of his desire and locks her in a cage beneath the dog shelter where he works. From there the film starts to twist expectations on their head
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 sets out to offer a dark take on Alice in Wonderland but leaves you scratching you head. At most the Wonderland characters take a lot of drugs, along with a haphazard mix of scenes from the book cheaply shot
From Johannes Roberts, the director of 47 Meters Down and other works, an undeniably spooky variant on Pet Sematary set in Mumbai as a mother unwittingly resurrects her late son’s spirit
This takes the old conspiracy theory about the Moon Landing being faked by tv and rather hilariously is a Found Footage film being shot by two filmmakers who have been tasked with fabricating the Moon Landing
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
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
Olivier Assayas’s high-profile but wildly critically divided work feels as though it has several competing plots circling around Kristen Stewart – a ghost story, one about a mystery texter and briefly a murder mystery – which feel incomplete and unfinished and only maybe intersecting with one another
Another Disney remake that hardly resemble its source – the original was light slapstick with a big cartoon dragon, this is a sober wild child story where the dragon is now an endangered species
The Bollywood horror film is a rare and strange beast – what other horror film would you see that comes with song and dance numbers? This is a Bollywood possession film where, despite the use of local colour and custom, it is surprisingly still drawn from the cliches created by The Exorcist
For some reason, The Exorcist is hugely popular in Bollywood horror – this is the fourth in a series of otherwise unrelated films about possession. The film conducts its borrowings not unentertainingly and is boosted by a script that turns what we think is happening on its head with quite a degree of dexterity
Surprisingly good animated revival of Robert E. Howard’s warrior woman with a script by comic-book writer Gail Simone that gets the character just right
A film that starts with the premise of teenage girls looking for a party and then going in search of a missing cellphone doesn’t do much to enthuse me. On the other hand, things pick up when the search leads them to a strange house
Strong and worthwhile film about the first man woken from cryogenic suspension in the future. A film from Alejandro Amenabar’s regular co-writer, the writer of Open Your Eyes
Undeniably shocking French film about a vegetarian girl who is required to eat raw animal meat during a university hazing ritual and thereafter becomes obsessed with eating human flesh
Animated film based on the popular computer game. On screen, this emerges as essentially an instantly forgettable variant on one of the Star Wars prequels retooled for the Under Tens with the emphasis all on frenetic slapstick and visual eye candy
This is a crowdourced film made by military veterans who set out with the idea of creating better military characterisations in films. Bizarrely enough, they turn to the zombie comedy to do so and the result is the crassest, most willfully offensive zombie film ever made
Everyone has a certain idea of what Bollywood cinema is – romantic interludes and elaborate song and dance numbers no matter the genre. This is one Bollywood film that defies convention – based on a true-life Mumbai serial killer, it comes with a harsh realism and features an electrifying central performance
The Purge was a routine film that caught on with audiences but the premise lacks the legs to be a franchise – for one, it is based on a future scenario that has zero plausibility. This makes paper-thin stabs in terms of social issues but all interest evaporates when the guns start blazing
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
Based on the book that led a publishing phenomenon in which literary classics are mashed up with monsters, this has the difficult balancing act – that of making Jane Austen’s Regency romance sit alongside zombies – nevertheless manages to play both with an impeccably straight-face
Directed by and starring actress Alice Lowe, this comes in a blackly funny vein. Lowe plays a pregnant woman driven by the voice of her baby as she starts dispatching everything from sleazy men to those who annoy her
This is one of a plethora of hard-to-differentiate apart ghost stories that have littered the dvd shelves in recent years, frequently copying Insidious in appropriating a sinister-seeming adjective as title. There is not a single directorial or musical cue, sound effect or line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a cliche
The second in a trilogy of slasher films about people being staked by a maniac at a backwoods cabin while everything is secretly being filmed by tv cameras
Another gonzo killer shark from from The Asylum who made the Sharknado films. Played somewhat more seriously than other entries, this has been conceived as Waterworld with killer sharks
Part of the gonzo shark film’s ongoing quest for the most ridiculous title mash-up, this involves a horde of genetically engineered shark-piranha hybrids loose in New York City
A fascinating Chinese version of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanted from a Parisian opera house of the 19th Century to a film being shot in an abandoned theatre in the 1930s. On the other hand, this version makes the most radical changes to the story of any of the Phantom films
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
Film about a zombie-creating sexually transmitted disease that feels like it was made by a bunch of drunken adolescents trying to out-gross each other after an all-weekend beer party. A film that is readily ventures into bad taste and is prepared to offend
Your mind struggles to process the premise of Nine Lives – where Kevin Spacey finds himself in the body of a cat. It seems a variation on the earlier Oh Heavenly Dog in which Chevy Chase was reincarnated as Benji. Some cute effects but what a lightweight effort for an actor of Spacey’s calibre
From Cody Calahan who made Antisocial, a reasonable modernisation of the Jekyll and Hyde story with a girl at war for ownership of her own body with an evil alter ego
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
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
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
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
While the title suggests a series of malicious games, this is an SF film about participants in an augmented reality experiment who are locked in a facility with strangely alien children
A reasonable attempt to revive Tarzan. Tthis could almost be a sequel to Greystoke with more of an emphasis on adventure. Alexander Skarsgård broods his way through the title role.
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
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
A Chinese fantasy film that leaves anything Western fantastic cinema has made recently for dead, including epical battle scenes and a lavish sumptuousness of costuming that leaves your jaw on the floor
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
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
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
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
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
One of the best and most original ghost stories in some time, a mini-series for the BBC set in the 1890s, this does remarkable things in entirely turning the genre on its head
Beguiling work about a modern witch that becomes a heady swim of provocative ideas about gender issues that is never less than captivating and the most gorgeously colour coordinated films you will ever see
The haunted house genre is one that has become thoroughly exhausted by overuse in recent years. This puts the elements together with a professional assemblage but is essentially no different to the 347 other haunted house films that this site has seen in the last twelve months
The story of the relationship between a giant monster and a boy whose mother is dying of cancer, this is perhaps the darkest children’s film ever made. Adapted from an award-winning illustrated book
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
Nicolas Winding Refn makes a horror film set in the L.A. modelling world. A film of hypnotic surfaces that glitter with a troubling undertow, the result is like Valley of the Dolls as remade by Dario Argento
This was the fourth in the surprisingly good Mythica series of low-budget epic fantasy films funded via Kickstarter. This proves to be the best of the series yet
The fifth of the surprisingly good Mythica fan-produced series that has consistently made a strong, rousing variant on the Epic Fantasy tropes on a low budget
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)
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
You can almost see the process in the scriptwriters head “What if we had Monster Truck rallies where the trucks were actual monsters?”. Way more entertaining than you ever expect it to be
A monster movie that consists of a mother and daughter cowering in a crashed car on a remote stretch of road. The effectiveness of the film comes in the incredibly raw emotional groundwork laid in the first half
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
Sequel to the earlier The Monkey King, which was fun but this is altogether a better film. While the first film was more prelude to Journey to the West, this sets out on the journey and tells one of its stories. Directed with an immensely assured command of the live-action and CGi elements
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
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
Adaptation of the Shakespeare play about fairy enchantments by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies. Davies goes with a standard interpretation alongside radical reinvention – Athens as a fascist dictatorship
This feels like a reworking of late 70s/early 80s sf films like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the film is based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failure as science-fiction is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
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
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
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
Studio Ghibli’s first ever international co-production. A desert island castaway fantasy, this makes interesting comparison to the recent Robinson Crusoe/The Wild Life, even if both films are poles apart in style. This is dialogueless, spare and contained with a minimalism of plot and drama
The Resident Evil films are designed for people who were introduced to drama via the Xbox, action sequences that can be assembled in random order and where it doesn’t matter what happens. I watched this, the sixth and final entry, with next-to-no enthusiasm but then quite unexpectedly it starts to work
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. This takes a big bite and tells an epic adventure. The only flaw is that the stop-motion is so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
Not a time travel film as the title leads you to expect but a Chinese copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark where you expect they were trying to call it ‘tomb raiders’. The director is also the production designer leading to a gorgeously designed film but also one of constant action postures almost entirely lacking in substance
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
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
A perfect example of all the things I hate about modern animation. Based around the popular Troll dolls, this is vapidly designed, content-free product based solely around simplistic storylines, manic slapstick sequences, song and dance numbers, and inane contemporary pop culture in-jokes
The vampire film is looking a little anemic in the post-Twilight era. Here is what is easily one of the best vampire films of the 2010s, a combination of Martin and the relationship in Let the Right One In (sort of), all transplanted into a harsh inner city environment
The zombie film has become an overworked vein in the last few years. This South Korean film does nothing to reinvent it, just contains the drama aboard a train but manages to create a grippingly intense epic of the genre
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
South Korean film that borrows the premise of the film Frequency in having two characters separated across twenty years have clairvoyant dreams of the other’s life and combining forces to stop a killer
Rob Zombie featuring people abducted and forced to play in a deathsport game. This is largely a re-run of House of 1000 Corpses, while both films in turn draw heavily on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As always, Rob Zombie has a following but also switches large swathes of his audience off
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
Director Daniel E. Falicki’s Alien Implant made my Worst of 2017 list. This is one of his earlier, equally terrible films about a boardgame that possess its players
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
The Found Footage genre has become fairly much strip-mined of all possibilities and I felt little enthusiasm for yet another. That said, this film about a reality tv crew in a heavily superstitious East European village, proves surprisingly well made and entirely wins you over with a bravura climax
A variation on the killer clown film that does rack up quite a degree of tension and pushes the material for something edgy. A popular hit that has produced two sequels.
Takashi Miike delivers a completely madcap film about evolved cockroaches on Mars being fought by astronauts who take doses of mutagenic serum to give them insect-based super-powers
Sequel in name only to Cloverfield, this takes place in a survival shelter where an unspecified catastrophe has happened outside but we cannot be certain what or even if anything at all. Okay but films like Take Shelter and The Divide did this much better
Nobody has good things to say about the 2014 reboot of the Turtles. This sequel is stuck with its legacy – giant over-sized Turtles that lacked the cuteness of the originals; bitchy non-acting Megan Fox – but comes out winningly by doing one thing – emulating the spirit of the original cartoon series