The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Very similar to A Quiet Place from several months earlier where here people cannot look outdoors and must remain blindfolded. Hindered by a frustrating lack of any explanations as to what is happening
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
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
The third of Tsui Hark’s films based on the historical figure of De Renjie/Detective Dee. While the other films were rooted in a relative realism, Tsui lets all restraints loose here and goes way over the top
Solidly effective thriller where four friends’ getaway at a luxury home turns into murder followed by a brutal home invasion
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
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
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
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
While the title makes this sound like a family-friendly film about Santa’s wife, this is actually a Christmas slasher film
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
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
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
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
South Korean attempt to make a Wu Xia film with swordsmen up against a hulking monster
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
An interestingly strange film with Mia Wasikowska as a disturbed hooker and Christopher Abbott as a man who plans to kill her
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
From the director of Attack of the Lederehosen Zombies, a slasher film set at a rave event
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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 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.
Thriller in which a girl is abducted and imprisoned by a mad tattooist who wants to use her body as a work of art
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
Not the Disney film, but a live-action film only loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Not much more than a nicely made average film but one conducted with evident care
An action film set aboard the International Space Station, which has been converted into a prison to house terrorists, who proceed to hijack it, turning the station into a suicide missile headed towards Earth
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 third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
Horror film from the rising name of Anthony DiBlasi set around an extreme haunt, a Halloween horror show that pushes everything beyond people’s limits
At first glance, this seems a routine alien invasion film. However, this becomes a whole lot more watchable with a mid-film twist that turns what is going on on its head
A film where four girls on a weekend getaway undergo a home invasion. It soon becomes apparent that this is a film homaging I Spit on Your Grave
Claymation film from Aardman Animations that is in effect a prehistoric comedy like The Flintstones or The Croods mixed up with a sports film, but is Aardman’s slightest work so far
Rodrigo Cortes, who made the fine Buried, directs a Young Adult horror, which is produced by no less than Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, concerning supernatural happenings at a girl’s boarding school.
Irish made Found Footage film where the investigation into a seeming miracle at a Catholic orphanage uncovers a case of possession and assorted deviltry taking place
Blumhouse film that stars Topher Grace as an asylum detainee who is released to home detention and may or may not be hallucinating seeing figures inside the house
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
The third sequel to Death Race and the most interesting of the series. This sets up an Escape from New York scenario and has fun with bad-ass posturing in depicting the interior of the prison as a open air biker bar
A mockbuster copy of Death Wish that gains its novelty from the casting of Robert Kovacs, an actor who could be a dead ringer for the late Charles Bronson, who is naturally cast as a lone man with a gun cleaning up the streets of scumbags
A low-budget film about a group of soldiers crashed on another planet where they find themselves hunted by an alien. This channels the basics of Predator
Adapted from a series of Young Adult books concerning a group of children with psychic powers on the run in a dystopian future, this failed to find the audience it sought
This is a British-made fantasy film in the vein of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones but conducted on a B-budget where it does seem to be making an effort
Film about a tough guy detective settling into the destined role of a monster hunter. With lots of dark streetwise urgency and Corey Feldman proving unexpectedly entertaining in drag as the lead vampire
Director Jon Knautz and actress Alexis Kendra made the quite impressive Goddess of Love and reteam for this film where Alexis befriends the disturbed, disfigured cleaning lady of the title
Sequel to Mimesis, which had people trapped in a simulation of Night of the Living Dead, where this time people are trapped in a recreation of Nosferatu
Marvel’s third Avengers film, uniting almost every superhero under their roof, resulting in some thirty characters on screen and a plot that becomes a blur of changing locations and superheroic punch-ups
Sequel to the hit Korean film Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds about a journey of redemption through the afterlife. This is a much better polished effort than its predecessor
Ant-Man was a lightweight but perfectly enjoyable entry in the horde of Marvel Comics adaptations. This sequel has amplified the comedy element, seemingly with the intent of being the joker among the MCU pack
A CGI animated film based on the popular comic-book character Asterix. After numerous other adaptations, this was the first of the Asterix films to be written directly for the screen
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
A crew of reality tv paranormal investigators are hired to investigate a haunted abandoned asylum. This sort of film has been done numerous time before.
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum switched US seaboards to make Atlantic Rim. With the release of the Pacific Rim sequel, The Asylum followed in kind
Roland Emmerich’s former writer Dean Devlin makes a film where a burglar discovers that David Tennant is a serial killer holding a girl prisoner and sets out to rescue her. Tennant does an entertaining turn as a bad guy
A documentary made about Clark Ashton Smith, a largely unknown but greatly acclaimed author of weird fiction. Smith was a contemporary of and influence on H.P. Lovecraft
The 1956 The Bad Seed is the original evil child film. All other psycho children films draw themselves from here. This is a remake directed by actor Rob Lowe who also plays the father. McKenna Grace gives a superbly chill performance as the child
The live-action adaptation of a manga about a teenager who inherits the powers of Soul Reaper and is thrust into a battle against monstrous supernatural entities
This comes with the intriguingly original premise where Madeline Brewer is a camgirl performer on an adult site who finds that her life has been hijacked by a doppelganger
A film about a scientist trying to perfect a genetic engineering process. This turns into a strange SF reworking of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw
A live-action adaptation of the Winnie the Pooh characters. This is a mix of Hook with Christopher grown up and having forgotten about the animals and the Paddington films with the animals conducting slapstick chaos in London
The first of China Mieville’s works to be adapted to the screen, a detective story set in two cities that exist in the same geographic space but where each act as their own country. This misses as much as it succeeds
A modern day vampire film that comes with the amusing idea of James Ransone as a vampire who lurks around AA meetings to find his prey
The first Fantastic Beasts was a welcome opening up of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and offered something fresh in the series. This is a more mixed bag where it feels like it is back to business as usual for Rowling
A superpowers rather than a superhero film with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman with abilities on the run who is forced to seek refuge with her estranged family
Based on an acclaimed book, once to be directed by David Cronenberg. This opened to bad reviews but is not uninteresting. A near future setting, precognitive dreams and Amber Heard as a sizzling femme fatale
Rowan Atkinson in his third outing as the inept spy. Atkinson is a talented comic but these Johnny English films, which are like less sophisticated versions of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Closeau, are the least of his comedy incarnations
Fifth of the Jurassic Park films. Industrial Light and Magic do their usual excellent job but this time the film is just recycling the same thing as before with minimal change
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
The sixth of the Sharknado films, this has the usual crew fighting sharknados throughout history. With this comes the recognition there is nowhere more ridiculous and over-the-top for the series to go
Leprechaun was a hit of the VHS era. This, the eighth of the films, was made to celebrate the series’ 25th anniversary and contains many tributes to the original
A modern-day vampire film set at a time when vampires have revealed themselves to the world. This is shot as Found Footage film as a tv crew go to interview a brood of vampires
Another film with a sinister adjectives for titles we have had since Insidious. This concerns a pregnant woman finding that the fetus she is carrying has been replaced by an evil spirit.
James Franco co-directed effort about an android on a quest across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Franco draws on cliches established by the Mad Max films and only makes an Albert Pyun film with pretensions
Full marks for one of the great deliberately ridiculous titles of all time. The film itself is an oddity that almost seems intended to confound your expectations of it
Nicolas Cage goes all Death Wish and slaughters a cult that murdered his wife. A regular revenge film is transformed by director Panos Cosmatos into something bizarrely primal
Olga Kurylenko deals with a demon that appears to those affected by sleep paralysis. Another sleep paralysis horror film that only tepidly dips into the subject
Mary Poppins was one of the greatest of all Disney live-action films, made with nonsensical charm and has become a much loved favourite. As part of the ongoing firesale that involves resurrecting almost all of their properties, this is a sequel. Its an exacting replication/homage to the original but that is the problem – it is a recapturing rather than seems to create its own sparkle
Indonesia’s Timo Tjahjanto has emerged as a Must Watch director on the basis of his jaw-dropping brutal action films plus assorted ventures into horror. Here he pays homage to the 1980s horror films in particular to The Evil Dead
The Asylum’s low-budget mockbuster copy of The Meg, which is an irony in that The Meg was really an Asylum killer shark film with an A-budget. Two sequels followed.
After two fairly good initial entries, the Insidious series began its downward slide. Here new director Adam Robitel’s clumsy jumpshocks are a far cry from the eerie effects James Wan pulled off
Pixar’s venture into sequels has resulted in works playing off past successes that are lesser than their originals. This came with much anticipation but it too must be counted as another disappointment
The anime Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade was a fascinating play of metaphors that mixed terrorism and Little Red Riding Rood. This is a live-action remake from South Korea
Set in the aftermath of an unspecified apocalypse, this is a film about the oddball friendship that grows between misanthropic Peter Dinklage and pixie-ish Elle Fanning
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
Apparently the first in a projected trilogy. The ambitiousness of this aside, the film only trades in unoriginal cliches of post-apocalyptic survival and android self-awareness