The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This revival of the classic children’s character who can speak to animals took a critical battering but I kind of liked it. It has a completely madcap slapstick tone and more crucially returns to the stories and banishes any bad memory of Eddie Murphy
BBC mini-series retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that deconstructs and widely expands on sections of the book to create something relentlessly modernistic, sometimes in ways that take you aback
Low-budget film directed by a former soldier about a troupe of mercenaries sent into the woods to round up vagrants who find they are fighting against a dragon
Quite why the largely forgotten DragonHeart has produced four sequels is beyond me. Where does such a loyal fanbase come from that they keep churning out more of these films?
Modestly well made low-budget planetary survival film about a pilot crashlanded on a hostile world. An entire space opera that was shot in the director’s apartment during the Covid-19 lockdown
Blumhouse film where a Westernised Indian girl rejects her traditional mother’s fears about her new boyfriend being a bad man reincarnated only for them to come true
Another multi-director horror anthology – in this case a quartet of horror stories from Bollywood directors that comes with one standout episode in particular
The Ghost Story is a genre has felt overused and its clichés churned to a point of exhaustion. All of that said, this Swedish film delivers the goods and conjures an extremely spooky mood
A possession film set on an airplane. This sets out to parody exorcism movie cliches but makes a beeline for outrageous bad taste humour. It does include a great cast of genre regulars
The worst exorcism film ever made. A ridiculous Christian evangelical film about a God-loving American family under attack by malevolent spirits emerged from a book on witchcraft! Supposedly based on a true story
The big screen remake of the popular 70s/80s tv series about an island that makes guests fantasies come true. In the hands of Blumhouse, this has now been turned into a horror film
Another zombie film that comes with a deliberately ridiculous title, even if the title ends up being a misnomer. This site’s choice for the worst film of 2020
A film that received great acclaim at awards season. Anthony Hopkins is a dementia-ridden senior and we experience his state of mind subjectively in a constantly shifting sense of what is real
Amusingly dark Christmas film where a kid hires a hitman to kill Santa after receiving a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking. Featuring Mel Gibson as a grumpy Santa struggling with modern economic realities
A slasher film with a novelty (gimmicky?) premise where the Final Girl and the hulking killer of the show end up swapping bodies. Essentially a conceptual mash-between a slasher film and Freaky Friday
A South African variant on a film like Starman where a man is inhabited by an alien and stumbles through a series of encounters on the seedier side of life
SF film with Stephen Moyer as a spaceship survivor who boards a ship with the crew mysteriously dead and becomes caught up in interplanetary politicking
David Koepp has an impressive resume as a screenwriter, even better as a director. Here he makes a film where Kevin Bacon rents a sinister holiday home that has shifting topography
Animated film about a talking and singing monkey from Cuba that travels to the US on a quest
The first major genre film made during the Covid lockdown, a modestly effective work that borrows the basics of Unfriended for a story about a séance being held over a Zoom call