The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Gonzo refers to a style of cinema that is deliberately ridiculous, eccentric or offbeat. Gonzo films frequently deal with material that is bizarre, surreal or nonsensical in nature. They also feature non-sequitur humour presented in deadpan or wilful absurdity.
This is very similar to the works covered in Surrealist Films – one can perhaps most easily summarise Gonzo as surrealism presented with a sense of humour and/or quirky individualistic eccentricity.
Wes Anderson makes a delightful detour into stop-motion animation in this Roald Dahl adaptation, a droll caper comedy enacted by talking animals who are all characterised with typical Anderson eccentricities
In attempting to capture the surreal, paranoiac drug haze of Hunter S. Thompson’s counter-culture classic, Terry Gilliam’s adaptation becomes a rambling, self-indulgent mess of tripped-out visions that go on and on
A black comedy from Alex de la Iglesia about murder and rivalry in a department store, where the killer becomes advised by the ghost of those he has killed
Eccentric and unclassifiable British film that takes place in some kind of gonzo alternate reality aboard a submarine converted into a hotel. The nearest equivalent one can think of in comparison is Delicatessen
Live-action film from a Dr Seuss script about children imprisoned by a mad piano teacher. As to be expected from Seuss, this is gloriously madcap with extravagantly surreal set designs and nonsense choreogrphy
The first in what later became a fad for replicating cartoon tv series as big-budget live-action films, this does an exacting live-action version of the Hanna-Barbera series
Sequel to the live-action The Flintstones film. Whether we asked for it or not, this offers up a Flintstones origin story where we see familiar elements of the series fall into place
Hilarious Stephen Chow directed/starring film where he plays an agent of the emperor in a series of gonzo exploits that go crazily over-the-top, including breaking the fourth wall
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
Frank Henenlotter of Basket Case fame modernises the Frankenstein film Here Frankenstein creates a body out of parts from Time Square hookers. Amusing but eventually a film where the humour is too broad
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
Wonderfully nonsensical film directed by Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame about the lives of a group of mutant freaks. Amazing makeup effects, a bizarre sense of humour and several well-known actors spoofing themselves
György Pálfi, the Hungarian director of the wonderfully twisted Taxidermia, returns with a series of Buñuel-esque vignettes that sometimes hit a darkly absurdist note
The first X-rated animated film. Ralph Bakshi’s first film, taken from Robert Crumb’s cartoons, this is hilariously raunchy as the titular talking cat takes a strung-out but often sharply politicised journey through 1960s counter-culture
Satiric Roger Corman film in which a gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. Corman indulges his droll and surreal sense of humour in what amounts to a parody of his own films
Likeable live-action adaptation of the animated series, which was construed as a parody of Tarzan. The sight gags work well and the creature effects are accomplished
An early Brian De Palma film, a wonderfully nonsensical work in an absurdist vein where Tom Smothers drops out of the corporate world to become a tap dancing magician under the tutelage of Orson Welles
A beautifully shot b/w homage to exploitation films that feels like a 1950s rock‘n’roll musical injected with a host of gonzo elements including aliens, UFOs and the resurrected dead
Another in the spate of gonzo Japanese splatter films. A cartoony OTT vigilante film with a Gothic schoolgirl avenger, featuring ridiculous action and splatter set-pieces
The most likely response to this is going to be “WHAT THE $%@^* AM I WATCHING?” – a film so far removed from the average experience, so located in its own unique, utterly eccentric universe it has instant cult classic written all over it
A far less successful sequel to the mega-hit of Gremlins where director Joe Dante brings the gremlins to Manhattan and allows the silliness to go completely over-the-top and into orbit, even breaking the fourth wall
Aramis Sartorio (aka porn actor Tommy Pistol) directs/stars in this anthology, a trio of Hollywood horror tales where everything is aimed at the farcical bad taste level of a Troma film
A gonzo comedy about an alien invasion that takes place during a getaway at a remote cabin by assorted comically dysfunctional characters including a man who is accompanied by a talking handkerchief
Completely madcap film from Takashi Miike, a black comedy about a family who run a guesthouse where the guests keep dying. This comes replete with musical numbers and Claymation sequences
Ferociously entertaining Japanese film about a cyborg-enhanced heroine on a revenge trail. Mostly a series of ridiculously over-the-top action moves combined with copious degrees of blood
Full-length follow-up to Hard Revenge, Milly and the same mix of ferocious action and over-the-top splatter. Despite a large budget, this is marginally the lesser in sheer entertainment
Wonderfully charming classic with James Stewart who has an invisible 6’3″ rabbit companion. The film proves absolutely winning with its standing up in favour of the right to be eccentric
Animated film directed by Rob Zombie that feels like an episode of Ren & Stimpy made by someone with an unhealthy obsession with horror and exploitation movies and stripper bars
A clear winner for the Worst Film of 2016. Made by people who have given up any attempt to make a good film and have instead inserted a wilful inanity that is agonisingly unfunny
Madcap film that offers a wacky take on the post-apocalyptic action film with Roddy Piper as one of the last fertile men in a world that has been overrun by mutant frogs
A mind-bogglingly wacky entry in the gonzo Japanese splatter film featuring a crazed bloodbath as Japan is overrun by zombies. This goes frequently nuts featuring vehicles and plans made up of zombie bodies
After the success of The Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, The Fab Four were quickly packaged in this follow-up. The free-wheeling amiability of that film has become a surreal plotless absurdity where nothing seems too silly
The Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film offers a wild array of splatter, bio-transformations and an obsession with schoolgirls’ panties. This is a low-budget entry that offers something akin to a zombie-hunting equivalent of Buffy
Director Bruce McDonald and writer/star Don McKellar make an hilariously eccentric road movie as McKellar takes a trip down the title route with a dead body while pursued by The Devil
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences
Another of the Grindhouse mock trailers gets it own film. This hits in with a wonderfully enthusiastic B movie energy and buckets of gore that remind of early Peter Jackson
Construed by prolific B movie hack Fred Olen Ray around its two stars – Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface, and Scream Queen Linnea Quigley, this hits a perfect note between bimbos, tongue-in-cheek and cheap gore
An outrageously demented low-budget film guaranteed to offend nearly everybody. This takes inspiration from Hobo With a Shotgun with a Catholic priest wielding a gun seeking revenge
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
Very strange Japanese ghost story that has been rediscovered as a cult classic. It resembles a film like Willy Wonka turned into a haunted house film where the intention seems to have been to be a bizarre and wacky as possible
The gonzo killer shark film has gained its own genre in recent years, popularised by Sharknado. This concerns a shark that emerges out of toilets and prowls around suburban living rooms
A World War II comedy from Richard Lester that heads into a wild absurdism, a film that is both brilliant and numbingly noisy. Most did not get the surreal blacker-than-black tone and the film was not a success
Madcap slapstick caper comedy with Bruce Willis as a cat burglar. This was a massive box-office flop at the time but remains a lunatically out-of-control mess that is frequently hilarious
One of the Coen Brothers’ strangest films – imagine a homage to a 1940s Howard Hawks film conducted on giant oversized sets like something out of Brazil with a blacker-than-black sense of humour and angels in the mix
Musician Neil Young directs a science-fiction film! I was hoping this would be another Repo Man, instead we get an incoherent mess that throws in a jumble of sf concepts and feels like it was made without a script
A completely madcap gonzo comedy that all takes place without dialogue, the live-action equivalent of a Looney Tunes cartoon. One of the most unique and creative films I have seen in some time
A quite indescribable animated film from the great Bill Pympton, this largely consists of a series of bizarre and surreal, often outrageous, transformations and juxtapositions
Another of Bill Pympton’s unique animated films, all stylised artwork and surreal juxtapositions. This is a dialogueless film about a mean-spirited man who suddenly gains a set of angel wings
After the ultra-violent Oldboy, Park Chan-wook puzzled everyone by next making this frothily surreal comedy about a girl in an asylum who believes she is a cyborg
This wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn’t cursed by bad luck – the death of star Heath Ledger. It’s the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s gonzo, surreal comedies where a married couple buy a house and find it has a portal that takes them twelve hours into the future, while making them younger
A live-action adaptation of the popular animated series, one of the spate of such films made after the live-action The Flintstones. Amiably silly and frequently slapstick fun that proves to be exactly what one expects of it
A video-released sequel to the live-action Matthew Broderick film starring French Stewart. This is played as much more of a cartoon and amped to a maximum level of slapstick inanity
W.C. Fields starring screwball comedy set at a hotel around a series of variety sketches and featuring an early prediction of television
Wacky South Korean comedy that seems like Species played with the sensibilities of My Stepmother is an Alien – the whole film plays out as a nonsensically charming seduction
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
This was the first solo directorial outing from Terry Gilliam outside of Monty Python, a fantasy film that is a dark and frenetic skewering of the cinematic portrayal of the Middle Ages
This is one of the great wacky titles of all time. The film has its deliberately ridiculous amusements but soon fails to provide an interesting enough show to live up to its title
This gets full marks for an attention-grabbing title. Beyond that, it is is otherwise a very strange and surrealistic film about spy shenanigans in Virtual Reality
A bizarrely off-the-wall film in which Jerry O’Connell obtains a cheap apartment in New York City only to then find that he is sharing it with singing cockroaches
Phantasm series director Don Coscarelli makes a mind-expanding effort that seems a conceptual collision between Donnie Darko, Limitless, a slacker version of Supernatural and Dr Strange
The story of a young Nazi boy who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary companion gained awards acclaim but swings between Hogan’s Heroes slapstick and a tender story about overcoming racial prejudice
A demented Jeffrey Lau comedy that seems to have no limits on how silly it is willing to be, while parodying just about every other film made around the same time
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
Beyond the wilfully ridiculous title, this is a surprisingly entertaining and funny film that lampoons monster movies in general concerning a monstrous condom on the attack.
Killer clown film directed by the Chiodo Brothers best known for their makeup effects who come up with an appealing arsenal of sinister clown figures. On the other hand, the film is a one-note joke
Fourth and final of the Killer Tomatoes films by which time the slight appeal of the original concept has been well and truly worn out
This was the third of the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes films. This hits an appealingly silly and wilfully ridiculous note that makes it the best of the sequels.
A giddy madcap, frequently over-the-top and entirely ridiculous Spanish film in which Melinda Clarke’s tongue is possessed by an alien whereupon the tongue starts killing people
Stephen Chow excels himself in this comic take on the martial arts film. Sensational over-the-top fight sequences sit alongside Chow’s frequently sidesplitting comic hand.
Bill Cosby was massive on tv during the 1980s but when he tried to move to film it resulted in this bizarre flop of a gonzo spy comedy starring Cosby as a retired agent forced to return to the field
The death of Graham Chapman put paid to a Monty Python reunion. Undeterred, Chapman’s autobiography is bought to life as an animated film in the gonzo Python style with the remaining Pythons providing voice work
Danny Boyle eccentricity with Ewan McGregor as an inept kidnapper and Cameron Diaz as his more astute abductee. A head-scratching comedy that also throws gun-toting angels into the mix
A film where makeup effects artist Tom Burman takes the director’s in this head-scratchingly strange film about a family set in a bizarre future world
An appealingly nonsensical film adaptation of Al Capp’s comic-strip set in a parody of nowhere hicksville USA. The first films version, although is overshadowed by the more popular 1959 musical
A colorful and entertainingly absurd musical adaptation of Al Capp’s popular satirically absurd comic-strip set in a parody of backwoods USA. Filled with some inspired nonsense
Director Stanley Donen conducts a star-studded musical adaptation of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s children story about an innocent alien prince come to Earth but with ponderous results
A head scractchingly strange Sam Raimi produced film in which Raimi’s brother Ted plays a man suffering from hallucinations who tries to come to the aid of the girl of his dreams
Very strange Polish film about two mermaid sisters who become a novelty stripper act. Director Agnieszka Smoczynska gives the film a provocative charge, along with a series of surreal musical numbers
Robert Rodriguez turns his earlier action film into an insanely creative comic-book overflowing with SF devices (and homages). The casting alone is side-splitting and Rodriguez’s visual absurdism wins the day
Another highly entertaining entry in the Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film about a schoolgirl who seeks revenge with her arm stump replaced by a Gatling gun
The famous Swiss children’s character gets a sarcastic puncturing in this amusingly gonzo OTT exploitation take where she becomes an armed revolutionary against a cruel dictator
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s bizarrely surreal deadpan comedies in which two amiable idiots discover a fly that is about the size of a dog and believe they could tame it
Comic-book adaptation featuring a ballistically OTT Jim Carrey who becomes a zany figure of chaos whenever he puts on a mask. The film has been designed to emulate cartoon physics but its lack of any grounding reality proves annoying
Amiable Swiss Claymation effort that makes for inevitable comparison to the output from Aardman Studios
Almost unclassifiable work from Lucky McKee that plays out as a gonzo love and rejection story featuring an alienated Angela Bettis before an end that tips over into horror
In the late 2000s, Japan has produced a series of films drenched in gore, featuring absurd creature effects and action moves; this was the first of them – a wonderfully cartoonish film with rival bio-mechanoid creatures fighting
A sequel to Meatball Machine, the film that started the gonzo Japanese splatter genre, filled with wild mutations, over-the-top splatter, a surreal sense of humour and an obsession with schoolgirls in panties
Peter Jackson‘s second film, what might be called The Muppet Show by way of John Waters, an inspired work of puppet depravity that makes a beeline for bad taste
Henry Selick’s first venture into live-action in which Brendan Fraser becomes trapped in a bizarre afterlife while a mischievous monkey steals his body
The first of the Monty Python films, a wickedly funny, willfully nonsensical take on King Arthur and the knightly quest. Contains many classic Python gags
The Monty Python team’s finest hour, a wickedly irreverent spoof on Christianity that contains some of their most side-splitting gags
The third and last of the Monty Python films, a variety of skits that are variously outrageous and frequently leave behind all good taste
After the disastrous misstep of The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry returns to the surreal whimsy of The Science of Sleep. A film where Gondry delights in scene after scene of visual nonsense and serving up all the appealingly capricious silliness he can muster – creativity for creativity’s sake alone
The third and final film to date directed, written by and starring Yahoo Serious where he plays an accident prone man obsessed with alien life
The gonzo Japanese splatter film is one of the insanely demented corners of genre cinema today. This is a prime example, filled with mind-bogglingly perverse anatomical rearrangements and attachments, the screen is awash with blood and everything directed with a mad cartoonish energy
Completely insane 1980s spy film – a madcap mahsup of elements including James Bond gadgetry, mad scientists, action and splatter served up with not a shred of realism. The crowning glory is a completely OTT Gene Simmons as a cross-dressing super-villain
Film about a zombie-creating sexually transmitted disease that feels like it was made by a bunch of drunken adolescents trying to out-gross each other after an all-weekend beer party. A film that is readily ventures into bad taste and is prepared to offend
This holds the distinction of being the world’s first gonzo zombie film – oh and the first zombie musical too. Not many zombies (or nude bodies), the song lyrics are occasionally amusing but the film’s humour is schoolboyish, and the effort amateurish on the whole