The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The film that created the cult of anime in the West. Essentially a Cyberpunk version of The Fury, this has been construed as a series of climaxes that get progressively larger in scale until they almost reach a point of sensory overload
A modest and quite well written children’s film about a gifted twelve year-old (Martha Byrne) who gradually discovers that she is a clone
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
Fascinating tv mini-series set around the notion of a generation ship – the show explores the scenario in interesting ways then proceeds to put some wild spins on what we think is happening
An overlooked Mike Flanagan film about a kid with the ability to bring his dreams to life, this reads like a cross between an A Nightmare on Elm Street copy and the Joe Dante Twilight Zone – The Movie episode
VHS era horror about a demon that appears out of a young boy’s closet and kills all who threaten him. Mostly this is an excuse to serve up novelty deaths
Arthur C. Clarke’s book is one of the all-time SF classics; this mini-series adaptation counts as one of the biggest book-to-film abortions in the SF genre handled by people who know nothing about SF
The sequel to Village of the Damned, this makes the mistake of humanising the cold alienness of the children and taking their side against humanity, losing much of the stark effect of the original
Mini-series adaptation of a novel by John Wyndham, best known for The Day of the Triffids, concerning a young boy who develops an invisible alien companion. Imagine a version of Harvey retold by way of E.T.
The first sequel to Chocky, the classic mini-series about a boy with an alien invisible companion, this expands the concept out with the introduction of other children
In her first English-language debut, French director/writer/actress Marina de Van delivers a variant on Carrie, albeit rewritten as a tale about child abuse. Oblique, quiet but undeniably effective when de Van pulls her punches
One of a series of films that borrow their titles from old 1950s films, this abandons any connection to the original end of the world film and concerns a boy who may be causing an alien monster to appear
Mike Flanagan, one of the most exciting genre names in recent years, takes on Stephen King’s book sequel to The Shining, managing the daunting balancing act of both adapting the book and turning it into a sequel to the Stanley Kubrick film
Disney live-action film with two psi-powered kids on the run. A popular hit that seems to have been mostly construed around a series of novelty effects set-pieces
The adaptation of the Stephen King novel with Drew Barrymore giving a fantastic performance as a young girl with pyrokinetic powers on the run as she is hunted by a sinister government agency
One of Stephen King’s best books is given a new film workover by Blumhouse. Keith Thomas made a standout directorial debut with The Vigil, but this is a disaster, one of the worst of all King adaptations
One of the early films from Anglo-horror director John Gilling, this takes place in a fictional Soviet republic and features experiments to create a race of super-children
The zombie film has become a creatively exhausted genre in recent years. This is an effort that completely changes the game with fiercely original effect, anchored by one of the best child performances in some time
A film about a genetically tinkered teenage girl assassin that never lives up to its potential. Saoirse Ronan is great in the title role but director Joe Wright never gives the action scenes the kick they need
Robert Rodriguez makes a film with Ben Affleck as a detective dealing with a man who can control others’ minds. However, this develops into a mind twister of considerable reality bending proportions
Chuck Norris’s son Mike directs a laughably ridiculous faith-based film where a miraculous child appears, come to heal the people of an impoverished, drought-ridden town
One of the most extraordinary films ever made about psychic powers concerning a group of children who discover remarkable talents to move objects but then that one among their number has used the power to kill
Adaptation of a classic SF short story about children’s toys from the future that give them expanded mental powers. Much of the story has been dropped in favour of banal New Age thinking
While the title suggests a series of malicious games, this is an SF film about participants in an augmented reality experiment who are locked in a facility with strangely alien children
Roland Emmerich’s second film, a confused oddity that seems to be trying to model itself as a Spielberg film about a kid who gains psychic powers and whose toys come to life
Danny DeVito directs an adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel with Mara Wilson as a mentally gifted child. In DeVito’s hands, Roald Dahl’s black bite overbalances into broad farce
This feels like a reworking of late 70s/early 80s sf films like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the film is based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failure as science-fiction is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
French animated film about a group of kids with psychic powers going amok. Is okay at what it does but had much of its thunder stolen by the more recent and more spectacular Chronicle
An excellent film about a psychologist sent in to assess a child who reveals phenomenal intelligence and psychic powers
Revival of the Disney Witch Mountain films of the 1970s. Now the films have been dragged into the post-X Files era and flashy effects added to negligible result
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
A modest effort that has studied well at the Ridley Scott school of people being stalked in the dark. The film produces a genuinely unearthly and alien creation. The main problem is that the film is severely underwritten and fails to do much after coming up with such an original creature
Adaptation of Susan Cooper’s popular fantasy series handled by people who have no interest in the material and badly rewrite/mangle it in order try to turn it into a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings knockoff
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel throws much of the book out but has duly become a classic. Jack Nicholson goes grandly mad amid Kubrick’s stupendous production and unsettling set-pieces
Stephen King expressed dissatisfaction with the way Stanley Kubrick handled his novel and here remakes it as a tv mini-series that adheres more closely to the book. While Kubrick’s film is far better, this is not bad where even the perpetually awful Mick Garris subdues his tendency to overdo everything towards some subtlety
South Korean tv mini-series about the investigation of a moonbase with illicit experiments and something possibly alien unleashed
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
George Lucas’s return to the Star Wars series after a sixteen year absence and a build-up rivaled only by the Second Coming. Instead most audiences went away disappointed. Lucas has used the interim to push the technology to its heights but the story and characters are lacking
TV mini-series in ten two-hour parts that deals with UFOs, covering several generations from the 1940s to the present. An interesting take on UFO encounters with the benefit of some phenomenal performances
Big screen version of a classic New Zealand children’s story, directed by Jonathan King with an emphasis on gooey creature effects
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
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