The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Blumhouse production from J.D. Dillard who made a modest splash with the street magician film Sleight, this features Kiersey Clemons as a survivor stranded on a desert island facing a monster that comes out at night
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have become one of the most underrated indie genre voices. Here they make a film where Anthony Mackie discovers a drug that causes people to travel through time
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
The sixth Terminator film that boasts the return of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the franchise. After the troughs of Terminator: Genisys, this makes one forget about the last three sequels
Found Footage film where filmmakers find they are being stalked by other people with cameras. Essentially a Found Footage version of The Strangers
Spacegoing film that follows the crew aboard a space station as they survive the destruction of the Earth
Rob Zombie is back,, making the third in his trilogy of Firefly films following House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. It is all fairly much the same as before where Zombie’s sympathies are cleanly with the family of psychopaths and their murderous rampage.
Animated film that is gore-drenched and certainly not for children. Imagine The Belko Experiment conceived as a videogame where the heroine has to survive an office of people trying to kill her while aliens bet on the outcome
Biopic of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings. This covers many of the key areas of Tolkien’s early life but you also cannot help but notice what it leaves out
Dark, sardonic comedy where Amanda Crew rents a house to get away for a weekend only to face a murderous Robert Patrick. The humour is barbed and quite hilarious
Pixar sequelise their very first film for a third time but the surprise is a film that creates a range of eccentric characters and finds the wit and warmth that has been missing through their last few films
Belgian zombie film about a military unit assigned to travel through zombie-infested territory to rescue a girl who has an immunity
In an era where horror has become safe and mainstream, where content is specifically marketed to PG-audiences, this film about a killer that strikes on Halloween comes with a ferocious gore-drenched enthusiasm
Modest and well-made low-budget anthology of Christmas horror tales from three Canadian filmmakers
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to the massive hit of Get Out. This is a doppelganger film where the metaphors that Peele is trying to make are not entirely clear but what you cannot deny is that he demonstrates considerable assurance as a genre director
Indie film about UFOs and alien abductions in a small 1950s town. This comes with undeniably eerie effect that heralds a strong new directorial voice. It also has a perfectly realised sense of retro period detail.
This gets full marks for an eye-catching title, even if it is one that has next to no relevancy in the film. The film itself is set in the world of art dealership and concerns a series of cursed paintings that kill all who seek to acquire them
Joe Begos makes an ultra-violent homage to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 with a group of war veterans in a bar at siege against a horde of crazed drug addicts outside
Standout film set among the Orthodox Jewish community where a man sitting an all-night vigil with a corpse finds it possessed by a demonic force that starts toying with him
A film with a wonderfully eccentric and offbeat sense of humour where Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe are inept criminals fleeing after a robbery who end up prisoners of a psychopathic couple
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can’t leave. Then things start to get really strange.
Chinese attempt to make a Roland Emmerich-type mass destruction spectacle about the moving of the Earth. Much effects spectacle but the film suffers from plain absurd science
BBC mini-series that sets out to restore the H.G. Wells novel to the era it was written. This it does, as well as restores many aspects that other films change. At the same time, it also introduces some radical changes that make it the most variant of the adaptations to date
Justin Long goes on a bender and takes some drugs that bend reality and leave him moving through time. Sort of like a version of Scorsese’s After Hours that dives into drug culture, this wants to be edgy but ends up in surprisingly traditional places.
A film that feels as though it is written by someone who is a fan of 80s heavy metal bands and was there during the day. This throws Satanic ritual sacrifice into the equation and rather enjoyably turns everything we think is going on on its head
From Makoto Shinkai who made Your Name., a lovely anime about a girl who can control the weather. An odd premise about orphans that soon develops unusual and unexpected depths
A gender-swapped remake of What Women Want in which Taraji P. Henson gets the ability to read men’s thoughts. Henson displays no talent for comedy and this is a spectacularly unfunny film
Not to be confused with the Jack Nicholson film, this is a fine low-budget film about a group of centurions during the Roman occupation of Britain encountering werewolves on an expedition north of Hadrian’s Wall
The second of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies made as a standalone entry for Wonder Woman, clearly building on the success of the Gal Gadot film
Iranian director Babak Anvari impressed with Under the Shadows. This is his follow-up where barman Armie Hammer’s life is turned upside down after he picks up a sinister cellphone
The biggest box-office hit six weeks in a row in 2020, albeit during Corona lockdown. This gets some extremely creepy effects in that managed to work on a jaded viewer
Despite the bad press surroundings this, I failed to find it as bad as other reviewers. It’s a solid if not standout entry in the series with some fine superheroic action sequences
Exceptionally written UK mini-series from Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies following a diverse family throughout the 2020s that become a projection of current trends turned nightmarish
Feelgood Danny Boyle film that most audiences missed was also an alternate history film set in a world where The Beatles never existed and one sideslipped singer is able to claim their songs as his own
Belgian film that starts out as a blackly funny work about a cut-price East European hospital before seguing into a zombie film
An extraordinary French film that has nothing at all to do with flesh-eating zombies but delves into voodoo religion that expands out to makes contrasts with French colonialism with striking results
A rather charming South Korean comedy about a family who try to exploit the commercial aspects of having a tame zombie
Ian Ziering and the director of the Sharknado films reunite in an effort to repeat the same kind of deliberately ridiculous success with a gonzo zombie film
Zombieland has been elevated to the status of a classic of the zombie genre; I found it enjoyable but probably overrated by people who haven’t seen enough other works in the genre. The question going into this sequel is whether it can strikes the same notes.
Zoombies, based around the idea of zombified versions of zoo animals, was a modest hit for The Asylum. While announcing itself as a sequel, this actually acts as a prequel explaining the origin of the zoombie outbreak