The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Films about androids and artificial intelligence have taken off in the 2010s. This comes produced by Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner, the defining classic on the theme; on the other hand, it ends up in the hands of a director who specialises in relationship dramas
There have been some clever and witty deconstructions and parodies of the slasher film in recent years. This starts in with an immediately captivating hook where the title phrase is turned around on the protagonist
High-profile adaptation of the classic children’s work by Madeline L’Engle that has been entirely wrenched out of shape by its director to become a heavy-handed message about diversity. It is SF made by people who think the genre is just eye candy and absurdly over-the-top costumes
Don’t be fooled by the witch part of the title, this is actually a South Korean film about psychic powers. This follows the path of a standard psychic powers film about the gifted on the run a la The Fury and Firestarter before an ending that turns the genre on its head
Imagine a version of The Craft with a few dashes of The Breakfast Club – all shot as a Found Footage film. This is far more entertaining than one expects it to be
A beautifully subtle and ambiguous film about a pioneer woman alone in a cabin on the American Frontier where she is haunted by demons of the prairies that may all be in her mind
Winchester House with its eccentric designs and strange history is reputedly one of America’s most haunted locales. From Australia’s Spierig Brothers who made the likes of Daybreakers and Predestination, this attempts to tell its story but emerges as far less than it could have been
Bel Powley gives a great performance as a wild child introduced to civilisation for the first time before it is discovered she is a wildling creature
Colin Minihan is an up and rising genre directors well worth keeping an eye. Here he makes a taut and effective survival story where a woman is hunted by her wife who turns psychopathic after a getaway to a cabin in the woods
A strong and imaginative horror/Western hybrid set aboard a train before the realisation that it is travelling to Hell. Deft characterisations and some tight, electric confrontations make this work well
Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame makes a film of the true-life story of Mark Hogancamp who recovered from a brutal assault by building a fantasy village of dolls. The results are bizarre where Zemeckis seems more interested in making a Sucker Punch-like fantasy where the dolls come to life
BBC tv mini-series remake of the classic Richard Adams novel about talking rabbits on a quest. To get it over with, the animation is not the high-end quality that we have been spoiled with by Pixar et al. On the other hand, what remains is an excellent faithfully told version of the story
Full marks for an attention-grabbing exploitation title, this is a horror film that takes place on a horror film set where film being shot and sinister characters on the sideline blur in a rubber reality
Anything with the Marvel Comics name on it is box-office gold. This spins a standalone film off from one of the main villains of the Spider-Man comic-book. This is watchable by several showstopping effects set-pieces.
Inspired by an autoccorrect error, this is deliberately ridiculous film about a priest who transforms into a dinosaur to fight evil, A film made with a full awareness of its own absurdities where the ineptitude of the shoestring effects adds to the charm.
Leigh Whannell, James Wan’s BFF and co-writer on the Saw and
Steven Soderbergh shoots a film on an iPhone. Claire Foy is wrongly incarcerated in an asylum only to be followed by a stalker posing as an orderly where her pleas for help taken as evidence of delusion
Unfriended had a unique novelty approach – everything took place in one take where the film screen was a computer screen. You wonder what a sequel can add to this. The surprise is that we get a film even better than the original
An SF film where a remote probe lands to Mars uncovers a mysterious artefact of possible alien origin on the Martian surface. And then things start getting weird.
Forget everything you think you know about Bollywood cinema and watch this – none of the regular cliches apply here. What we have is a beautifully made and frequently quite unearthly work about a man conducting a hair-raising venture down into a pit inhabited by a demon to obtain a fortune in gold coins
Jeff Wadlow made the smart Cry Wolf, a slasher film about a campus game turned deadly. In this Blumhouse production, he has simply remade that with a different game where the killer is now a demonic curse
A mockbuster from The Asylum that was designed to capitalise on the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, this is a low-budget CGI dinosaur film that is slightly better than most
Solidly effective thriller where four friends’ getaway at a luxury home turns into murder followed by a brutal home invasion
For an original that was only a modest box-office hit, it is surprising how long the Tremors series has kept going – five sequels, plus a tv series. This is the sixth film in the series and despite a limited and repetitive premise, characters running about hunting underground-burrowing monsters, it pulls off another enjoyable entry and fails to set a foot wrong
This reboot of the film series based on the videogame franchise is a mixed affair. Certainly, the perpetually non-acting Angelina Jolie is replaced by Alicia Vikander who gives Lara Croft living, breathing emotions
The Asylum’s mockbuster response to the theatrical reboot of Tomb Raider. This is cut-priced and features globe-spanning adventures that never travel outside of California
Conceptually highly ambitious SF film about humans being biologically modified in order to be able to live on Saturn’s moon Titan. After a highly promising beginning, the film falls apart in a badly cliched unethical scientist and lab experiment amok ending
Film spinoff from the animated tv series Teen Titans Go! This hits in with an hilairous barrage of one-liners wickedly spoofing the superhero genre and jokes at DC Comics canon
This comes with an intriguing central premise – a woman is imprisoned in the house of a mad tech genius where her only hope of escape is befriending his home security A.I. that is hungry for input about the world. An interesting idea alas doesn’t carry it past an ill-informed idea of how an A.I. would behave
Tales from the Hood was the novelty of an African-American made horror anthology. 23 years later the principal talents (including producer Spike Lee) reunite for a sequel
Dario Argento’s original Suspiria was an almost entirely narrative-free work set around a series of extravagantly arty deaths; this remake could not be a more different film. Not to say it is uninteresting in what it does
The title suggests a work about film fans facing the end of the world but this is actually a documentary about the cult film phenomenon
Lowell Dean, director of WolfCop, makes what feels like a revival of the low-budget Mad Max film – an action film set in a socially collapsed future
The second film from the trio that made Turbo Kid. This taps 80s nostalgia focusing on a group of kids who believe a neighbour may be a serial killer but was overshadowed by tv’s very similar Stranger Things
A DC Universe Original Animated Movie given over to Suicide Squad. Clearly inspired by the live-action film, this goes overboard on the super-villains present, having three entire teams running around to general confusion, while striking a very odd tone in its pitch for an R-rating
An Indian horror film about a folk tale of a witch spirit the Stree, this was a popular success that was then built out into an Indian version of The Conjuring Universe
The Strangers has been cited as one of the best horror films of the 2000s. This sequel emerges as a by-the-numbers entry that plays out no differently than a generic teen slasher film
Light fantasy comedy in which a teenager gets a magical cellphone that causes whatever he types into his status update to come true
Sony, the holders of the Spider-Man copyright, squeeze more out of the property with a madcap animated offering that mixes up a host of alternate takes on Spider-Man in what visually resembles an explosion at a pop art exhibition
This directorial debut for rapper Boots Riley is a very funny satire on telemarketing that becomes increasingly more surreal as it goes on. Imagine something like Spike Lee around the point of Do the Right Thing mixed with the absurdist humour of Kurt Vonnegut
A film where a violinist is drawn in to the mystery of a piece of classical music with occult properties, this is a classy and well-made production above the mill of the average horror film
The second of the Stars Wars spinoff films tells a Han Solo origin story. After a change of directors, it emerges in the hands of Ron Howard who has spent four decades being the world’s most ploddingly sedate director
In the vein of realistic space films like Gravity and The Martian, this is a lower-budgeted effort about a man in an escape pod on a collision course with the sun and the attempts to rescue him
A werewolf comedy that takes place on the set of a zombie film. Comes with much in the way of homage to An American Werewolf in London
As with numerous examples in the zombie and killer shark film of recent, the idea has been to parody an existing title with the addition of a monster and a pun on the original’s title. Essentially what we have is a Scary Movie-like parody of the true-life rapper tale Straight Outta Compton but with the addition of a giant snake
Slender Man is the fascinating idea of an internet meme that has crossed over to become an urban legend in the real world; this is the film version. This held the potential to be something very uncanny but chooses to play everything incredibly safe and middle-of-the-road
A trio of alt girls do urban exploring and walk into a war between a grumpy, retired Santa and Krampus
Simon Pegg produces/stars in a comedy spoofing the British boarding school tradition – but with the addition of monsters running around
The Asylum’s Multi-Headed Shark Attack series hasn’t quite hit the sense of delirious absurdism that their Sharknado films did – the only gimmick the series has is to keep adding heads to the shark. On the other hand, a scene where where the shark emerges onto land walking on two of its heads will have you rolling on the floor in laughter
Sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet, which retold Shakespeare with garden gnomes. This for some reason adds a garden gnome Sherlock Holmes to the mix. The high speed whirring you hear is probably Arthur Conan Doyle rotating in his grave,
The selfie is such a concept of the moment that I suppose someone had to make the first selfie horror film. The film suffers conceptual confusions and what starts out akin to something like Ring slides into more of a variant on The Den with sinister strangers stalking the heroine online
The Scorpion King films are such a low expectation series that it is hard to drum up enthusiasm for a fifth entry. The rehashes stock sword and sorcery cliches and passes its time forgettably
This looked promising but is no more than an unoriginal rehash of the cliches of the Mad Max film – at heart a Western with only token effort made to rewrite the elements in SF terms – and no greater ambition beyond being cable filler
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a film set at a convent for unwed mothers in the 1950s. Is there any chance this might be a work about institutional cruelty or the plight of unwed mothers in the era? Hardly, all it really is is Bousman inflicting a series of tortures on the girls
A copy of The Blair Witch Project with a trio of filmmakers trekking into the woods with cameras in search of The Wood Devil
Jumping aboard the contemporary fad for companies like Uber, this concerns a psychopathic driver who sarcastically ridicules his customer before proceeding to kill them. Pleasingly dark and twisted and decidedly u-PC at times
This BBC tv mini-series starts out seeming a mystery about the disappearance of a child as the investigating heroine makes the jolt realisation that she is the missing child, before the show edges over into occult conspiracy. Very nicely written and beautifully directed with a line-up of standout performances
Whatever you want to say about his acting ability, Keanu Reeves represents a cool and has smarts in the projects he takes on. So when he takes a producing role as here, you feel it is a project you should pay attention to. Instead, the cloning film that he makes is absolutely laughable and should contend for an award for the SF film with the least plausible science in it
Mind-bogglingly surreal, almost indescribable film from Joel Potrykus as a slacker attempts to complete a videogame sitting on a couch as assorted things including the Y2K apocalypse happen around him
An action film about soldiers on an expedition into a zombie-filled quarantine zone. This comes with a furious pace that feels more as though you are watching a videogame than a film
Steven Spielberg adapted Ernest Cline’s book about a massive virtual treasure hunt through 1980s pop culture trivia. The film winds up the pop culture references by a factor of ten, but misses the book’s compulsive readability
Slasher film with a diabolically funny sense of humour as a psychopathic park ranger stalks a group of partying punks
The idea of Dwayne Johnson facing a giant gorilla in an adaptation of a 1980s arcade game doesn’t exactly shout out Academy Award material; on the other hand, appreciated as a zero expectation cartoon of a film and the mindless mass destruction spectacle it is, this works in a goofily entertaining way
An uncommonly effective film that takes place in the aftermath of an invasion by creatures with ultra-sensitive hearing where the survivors must maintain an existence that requires not making the slightest sound. Director (also lead actor) John Krasinski uses the set-up to create unbearable tension
From the director of Train to Busan, this starts out as a psychic powers film before becoming a South Korean superhero film. Made with a nicely grounded realism that makes refreshing contrast to the bombast of the MCU et al.
I can’t say the premise of this – a gold prospecting story located in space – did much for me. Contrary to expectation, this is a surprisingly good planetary adventure that does a fine job creating an alien world with minimalist effect and telling a strong character-driven story
Strong and effective Bigfoot horror film from makeup effects artist Patrick Magee. The film is never better than when Magee is in his element, creating a uniquely designed Bigfoot that is capable of blending into its surroundings unnoticed
Shane Black, a writer-director with a reasonable cult following, makes the sixth Predator film (he also appeared as an actor in the original). Black shakes the series up, introduces a number of new ideas and makes an okay entry
Gonzo killer shark film that gets full marks for an entertainingly ridiculous title but is real bad movie material on all accounts
British horror film that develops a sense of uncanniness that resembles an Eraserhead at times with a man haunted by a puppet and giant spiders. The mood is unsettling, least of all that we are never sure what is real or taking place in the character’s head
Grippingly intense thriller with a couple trapped in an empty swimming pool along with a hungry crocodile
An interestingly strange film with Mia Wasikowska as a disturbed hooker and Christopher Abbott as a man who plans to kill her
The Picnic at Hanging Rock with its hauntingly unsolved mystery is considered one of the greatest Australian films of all time; this mini-series in six one-hour parts drags every beat of the story out and pads the slim original with so many other character mini-dramas and backstories that the mystery is drowned out
Beatrix Potter wrote genteel stories of talking animals in the English countryside. This is a film so astonishingly awful in its treatment of the source material – it feels like someone drunkenly urinating on Beatrix Potter’s gravestone for lulz. The No 1 contender for Worst Film of 2018
Quite the most insane film I have seen in recent memory. The rivalry between two classical music students reminds of Black Swan albeit wound up to the histrionic level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, all added to the most pleasingly twisty mess-with-your assumptions script
Thriller in which a girl is abducted and imprisoned by a mad tattooist who wants to use her body as a work of art
Former Doctor Who Matt Smith is absurdly miscast as someone who can speak the language of zombies. The film does nothing to make the premise believable.
From the director of Attack of the Lederehosen Zombies, a slasher film set at a rave event
From Isaac Ezban in his English-language debut, a cleverly and pleasingly contorted film where a group of friends discover a mirror that leads to a parallel timeline
Pacific Rim wasn’t Guillermo Del Toro’s best film but it was a fun attempt to imagine giant Japanese mecha robots battling giant monsters. This is a sequel but without Del Toro it is reduced to no more than one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films
J.J. Abrams’ produced film about soldiers encountering Nazi mad science experiments during WWII. Despite a decent budget thrown at it, this was a box-office failure. It may be that in a genre where we have gravitated to films about Nazi zombies and Nazi moonbases, this was just too tame
Big, no-expense-spared Disney production of the fairytale. The film is stunning to look at it in terms of design and costuming but has a simplicity that leaves little for adults to engage with
Another spinoff from The Conjuring films. James Wan is one of the finest horror directors of the 2010s but has had difficulty imparting his skills to the directors of the films he has produced. This feels like a fairground haunted house show of tedious and repetitive pop-up shocks that runs free of any connection to a plot
Another in the fad for horror films about escape rooms we have had in the last few years, this concerns a possibly haunted venue and reaches an interestingly odd ending
A above average entry in the recent trend of horror anthologies featuring episodes from different directors, including Joe Dante and Mick Garris, featuring at least a couple of standout entries
The zombie genre has become creatively overused and exhausted in recent years but this French entry plays with an appealing originality, sort of like a low-key version of Dawn of the Dead where a man builds a Parisian apartment building into his own paradise
The second film from the director of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead about demon hunters. A great deal has been expanded on the creature effects and in building the film’s mythology.
A modestly effective film about a group of deserting soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars who enter a haunted forest
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to the J.J. Abrams’ produced Overlord concerning GIs on a mission behind enemy lines encountering Nazi mad science. Passably well made for the most part
Duncan Jones has become a director of promise in the last few years. Here he appropriates the Blade Runner look to make a futuristic neo-noir but the result never quite works. The noir plot never sufficiently keys in, while the derivative future setting is of no real relevance to the story
While the title makes this sound like a family-friendly film about Santa’s wife, this is actually a Christmas slasher film
This Andy Serkis directed version of The Jungle Book with motion capture animated animals had its thunder stolen by the more high-profile Disney remake of 2016 but is a far superior film
A strong contender for the worst Blair Witch copy AND the worst Amityville film ever made. This has the feel of a home movie made by a husband and wife and is laughably ridiculous in its failings
A biopic of Paula Maxa, the real-life star of Paris’s Grand Guignol Theatre. The Grand Guignol specialised in plays depicting gory on-stage deaths and she was killed on stage an estimated 10,000 times during her career. Here the biopic elements are blended with a mystery in which she is targeted by a serial killer
Peter Jackson written-produced film that creates a fascinatingly original world. As always with a Jackson film, all the fun is in the massively scaled effects sequences and the design of the world. Alas, Jackson is not as well attuned in the story department, which often drags up corny cliched scenes
South Korean attempt to make a Wu Xia film with swordsmen up against a hulking monster
This has an interesting premise where a trio of house burglars break into a mansion during a dinner party only to stumble into a support group for serial killers
Sequel to Monster Hunt, an audience pleasing comedy about a couple and a cute monster that became the biggest hit in Chinese box-office history. This offers more of the same
The Monkey King films are a series of extraordinary works that exists somewhere between CGI and live-action and have a lushness of design. That is balanced against a dated plot that basically rehashes Cat Women of the Moon
The sixth of the Mission: Impossible films. Not the best of the series but Tom Cruise and associates have everything polished to an expertly honed formula by now and the film is a kinetic ride of intensive and often jaw-dropping action sequences