The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Inside Out, set around the personified emotions in a girl’s head, was one of the breaths of fresh air among Pixar’s slip into terminal sequelitis during the 2010s. Now it gets its own sequel
Low-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth about a town where the locals have become mutant fish people, which has been weirdly mashed up with a girls boarding school story
A horror film in which billionaire Bob Gunton traps his children in his mansion with him in the belief that something is trying to kill him as it slowly eliminates their numbers
A uniquely original film. Almost an arthouse take on a slasher film where we are placed in the hulking killer’s shoes and the rest of the show takes place in abstract brushstrokes
A horror film where Sydney Sweeney stars as a virginal nun who appears to be experiencing an immaculate conception. This is only a slightly better version of The Nun
A largely routine Blumhouse film where a woman’s return to her childhood home ends up awakening her imaginary companion who has now turned sinister
Ryan Reynolds and director John Krasinski combine to make a film about imaginary companions, an appealingly quirky effort where a young girl befriends a large furry invisible creature
An almost unclassifiably strange film about fandom for a weird 1990s tv show, this seems to be heading for David Lynch territory and becomes an allegory for trans identity
An amateur-looking film set after the robot apocalypse concerning a girl and her friendly robot who must make a journey across the wasteland. This at least boasts some well-integrated robot effects
David Cronenberg’s daughter Caitlin makes her directorial debut with a film set around a family dinner in a future where the world has decided to euthanize the world population by twenty percent
A Japanese entry in the Gonzo Killer Shark film fad, an entertainingly demented effort with sharks invading a hot springs and emerging out of hot tubs. This has been greeted as a new cult movie
A slasher film that certainly grabs your attention with a sensationalistic title. While not without occasional amusements, this is mostly amateurish
This has quite a few similarities to the underrated The Wind with Sarah Paulson as a mother in the 1930s Dustbowl seeing possible supernatural figures amid the dust storms, which could just as easily be fraying sanity
Standout film with a very creepy Hugh Grant making two Mormon missionary girls a prisoner in his home. The script for this is so playful and audaciously challenging in its ideas that it blows you away.
A unique experimental film from Robert Zemeckis where the camera sits in a single spot in a room and tells is story, covers across history from the dinosaurs to the present day. Based on an acclaimed graphic novel
After a disastrous reboot of the Hellboy franchise, Millennium Media get it right, employing the comic’s creator on script, taking the series into wild directions with Hellboy up against Appalachian folk horrors
The Adams Family have been one of the most interesting creative talents in recent years – a family who perform all the functions on their films. Here they reinvent the Alien-inspired monster movie with highly entertaining results
A film adapted from a book by the writer of Let the Right One In concerning the resurrected dead, this goes some way to divorce itself from the zombie film and develops its horrors with striking slow burn effect
A new film based on the epic legend of Siegfried, which gives it a grounded historical realism and tells it in terms of the mud, moral ambiguity and backstabbing in-politicking of tv’s Game of Thrones
Another low-budget film that appropriates H.P. Lovecraft’s name above its title. From low-budget director Chad Ferrin who previously ventured into Lovecraft with The Deep Ones
Another in the spate of horror versions of fairytales and children’s stories, this is essentially The Strangers played out with people terrorised by a group dressed as Goldilocks and the Three Bears
A follow-up to Godzilla vs Kong, this tries to offer more of the same but suffers another ridiculous script. This ended up being overshadowed by the acclaim that the Japanese-made Godzilla: Minus One received
A thriller that comes with an identical premise to the earlier Trunk about a girl who is abducted and locked inside the trunk of a car from where she tries to affect an escape from her abductor
Follow-up to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, reuniting that film’s mix of new and classic cast. However, this becomes a plotting juggle that is often straining to find somewhere to include everyone
45 years on, George Miller returns with a fifth entry in his Mad Max saga, a prequel to Fury Road. As to be expected from Miller, this an exhilarating action piece and makes a welcome return to his post-apocalyptic junkyard world
An Australian thriller about a girl who takes an editing job because she needs the money only to realise that what she is asked to work on are snuff movies. The film follows her descent into a dark and disturbed state of mind
Makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski has become a fine director in recent years. Here he makes a Gremlins-styled film about a 1-900 number that unleashes a mischievous goblin
One of the spate of Frankenstein films to emerge in the 2023-4 period, this conducts an ambitious period-set follow-up to the original Mary Shelley story on a low budget
A delightful animated film from Latvia made entirely without dialogue, following a group of animals fleeing as their territory is flooded. The winner for my top film of 2024.
Did the world ask for a prequel to the events of The Omen, explaining how Damien was born etc? It’s not an issue that has given me sleepless night, but it is a question the film sets out to answer anyway
The Soska Sisters made a splash on the genre scene a few years ago. Here they make a tribute/follow-up to Night of the Living Dead but produce an utterly safe work that is the antithesis of the edginess that gained them a name
Joshua John Miller, the son of The Exorcist’s star Jason Miller, makes a film where an actor cast as the priest in a remake of The Exorcist becomes possessed. A witty and clever blend of meta reference and autobiography
A completely wild South Korean film set among the rituals of Confucian shamanism during the attempts to relocate a coffin and exorcise a troublesome spirit
Quite a good variant on A Quiet Place where humanity is in hiding from monsters that exist below eight thousand feet altitude. This develops some fine seat-edge tension
There have been a growing number of Easter horror films in recent years. This is perhaps the worst of them all. It concerns a killer Easter bunny and is a film that appears to have been entirely ad libbed in a hotel room
An Easter horror film about a small town overrun by a killer jackalope, this plants tongue in cheek and hits a highly amusing horror comedy stride. Leading lady/director Diane Foster should be a future horror heroine
Earth Abides is a classic novel that essentially defined the theme of survival in the aftermath of the collapse of civilisation. This is a TV mini-series adaptation of the book but badly fumbles it
The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic SF novel Dune, this delves more deeply into the world of the Fremen, although starts to diverge more from the book
A black comedy that comes in a very broad tone concerning an ordinary man trying to record an album who accidentally kills people around him only for them to refuse to stay dead
More from the world’s cuddliest super-villain and those manic ritalin-deprived kids that are the Minions. Is there are life and creativity left in a franchise that has been milked for six films now?
Supposedly based on a true story, a possession and exorcism film from filmmaker Lee Daniels about an African-American family undergoing a supernatural assault
A film from low-budget producer/director Charles Band about a trio of horror podcasters who come across a vampire that livestreams its kills on the internet, only for their attention to bring it after them
In his third cinematic outing, Deadpool gets into the multiverse game, creating a hilarious team-up with Wolverine and a crossover with an assortment of other cancelled Marvel franchises
A dragon fantasy where Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown plays the damsel who sets out to save herself. A fantasy film made for people who don’t like fantasy films
The original The Crow is a cult classic. This long-planned remake from the perpetually terrible Rupert Sanders was an ill-advised move from every angle that gets just about everything from the mood to the conception of its character wrong
This is another of the low-budget films that take their inspiration from Cocaine Bear with a drug-addicted raccoon amok. This sits right between bad movie stakes and passable amusement
Director Neil Marshall once had great promise but his recent work has become fairly tatty. Here he and lead actress, the controversy-laden Charlotte Kirk, have fun making a throwback to the 1990s erotic thriller
The Canadian-made Code 8 was one of the few non-comic book adapted superhero films of recent years. This is a sequel where a bigger budget has been afforded to the superheroics
Cocaine Bear seems to have given birth to a mini-genre of films about drug-addicted animals amok. Here regular Z-budget Mark Polonia gives us a cocaine-snorting werewolf
This starts out as a seeming improv piece about several couples gathered for a weekend where the bickering becomes increasingly darker, all before it reaches an SF twist
Alex Garland is one of the most interesting creative names out there in the genre at the moment. Here he offers a frightening depiction of a near future USA collapsed into civil war
A horror version of Cinderella where she gets to stab people with the glass slipper. This also features several modernisms where instead of a pumpkin coach, the fairy godmother conjures up Elon Musk to drive Cinderella to the ball in a Tesla
From the people behind the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey films, a horror version of Cinderella. And yes, the glass slipper is used to stab people
A documentary that interviews five people, including Stephen King and Takashi Miike, about the influence that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had on their lives. The results are fascinating and illuminating
A rather hilarious live-action manga adaptation that depicts the inner workings of the human body in terms of a series of talking blood cells. Not dissimilar to the US-made Osmosis Jones
This takes the award for bizarre concepts – a phone app that turns users into werewolves
Film set in a harsh future as people struggle to survive in a world where oxygen supplies have been reduced to near zero. An okay film that suffers from an implausible premise
Eli Roth adapts the popular videogame and corrals a surprisingly high-profile cast in a knockabout planetary adventure. Alas, that met a very mixed reception and was widely regarded as a bad movie
A psycho-sexual thriller that is being heralded as a throwback to the 1990s erotic thriller a la Basic Instinct but suffers from an utter tameness that would have been ridiculed in the 1990s heyday
From the extraordinary and underrated Scooter McCrae, a dark and very disturbing film about the development of a sex robot for men who like to beat and abuse women
This comes with a head-scratching premise – a biopic of pop star Robbie Williams but where Robbie is portrayed as a CGI ape. Essentially, the rock star biopic by way of one of the Planet of the Apes reboot films
After 36 years and several abortive attempts, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder reunite to make a sequel to Beetlejuice, but the essentials that fired up the young Burton now feel as they come by the numbers
This is a werewolf film with a difference. Everything comes with an ambiguity that is seen through the eyes of a young child trying to make sense of what is happening to her father
Colm McCarthy, who previously directed the standout The Girl With All the Gifts, returns with a film about a man being haunted by a boogeyman out of his childhood that snatches children in a bag
A film that takes place with no dialogue set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have forsaken speech as Samara Weaving is pursued by a cult
The idea of Jennifer Lopez in a transformer suit kicking robot ass has an outlandishness to it. The surprise is that this is a really good, well written SF film of planetary survival
An hilariously black, deadpan film set in a future as a couple undergo assessment for whether they are fit to be parents. This involves Alicia Vikander moving into the house and play-acting being a child with absolutely chaotic effect
A low-budget film about a venture into the Hollow Earth in search of a missing person and encounters with creatures there. So low budget the underground caves seem shot in a darkened room
A post-apocalyptic film that seems a conceptual merging of I Am Legend and A Quiet Place where Nicolas Cage and sons are at siege from monsters that surround their farmhouse every night
Big-budgeted Spanish-made zombie film based on a best-selling book. Very much a post-Covid depiction of the zombie apocalypse, this rehashes the familiar basics capably well
Did we need a prequel to the events of Rosemary’s Baby? The original one of the defining classics of the horror genre. Under producer Michael Bay Apartment 7A is just more IP churn
A satiric film based on Spike Lee’s idea of the Magical Negro, an African American who exists to deliver wisdom or magical influence to white people. This gets in some deftly amusing punches at US race relations
A modern girl pining for the perfect man is transported back into the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where she ends up disrupting the story
The second part of the Korean time-hopping/alien invasion film where many of the plot strands from the extremely confusing first film are at least wrapped up
Despite a director that has spent a career making bad sequels to other people’s franchises, you have to admit this is an Alien sequel emerges better than you expect it to do
The first film to come out following the advent of generative A.I. From American Pie director Chris Weitz, an evil A.I. film that arrives with all the hysteria of villagers with burring torches in a Frankenstein film
From the duo behind the Scream reboot films, a thriller about the kidnap of a young girl in the vein of From Dusk Till Dawn that abruptly pivots to become a vampire film