The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Considerable return to form for animator Don Bluth even if the story of the Russian Royals he is telling is based on a hoax and manages to entirely excise any mention of the Communist Revolution
Mel Gibson seems to love directing historical spectacles with an emphasis on bloody brutality. Here he creates a bloodthirsty adventure set among the Mayan peoples
Lushly made retelling of the Countess Bathory story, one that tries to make an interesting if historically questionable case that she was kind to servants and a misunderstood victim
Sofia Coppola’s remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film. The original was a work of brooding Southern Gothic of repressed sexual tensions; Sofia seems more interested in making a costume drama that is a stretch to call a horror story any longer
Made not long after the success of The Witchfinder General, a film based on the notorious historical figure of Judge Jeffreys. In the hands of exploitation director Jess Franco, the historical account is sidetracked by sado-sexual scenes
Narrated by Death, this story of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany comes with the self-importance of awards consideration bait. One of the great crimes of modern history (The Holocaust) is reduced to picture postcard sentiments
One of several film versions of the story of the 19th Century grave robbers Burke and Hare, made at the height of the Anglo-horror cycle. While reasonably accurate to the facts, the story is sidetracked by softcore happenings at a brothel
Early Anglo-horror film that seems to be trying to push a story about a 19th century doctor (Boris Karloff)’s discovery of anaesthetic gas out of shape and make it into a horror story.
Actress Julie Delpy directs/stars in an adaptation of the Countess Bathory story. In trying to pitch itself as a work of historical feminism and having sympathy for Bathory, this downplays the considerable horror element of the story
A Marquis de Sade biopic that was problem ridden behind the scenes. The result is an incoherent mess on screen that feels as though it is being handled by several different directors, each with a different idea about what is happening
Little seen Merchant Ivory film directed by Nicholas Meyer set during the British Raj in India with Pierce Brosnan as a British officer who goes undercover to investigate the Thuggee cults
Ken Russell makes an historical work about the Catholic Church’s persecution of a supposed outbreak of possession at a convent in 17th Century France. As to be expected of Russell, this is shocking and outrageous. Oliver Reed gives one of his best performance
Federico Fellini conducts his version of the life of the great lover but turns it into a fantastical film of gorgeously surreal excess, filled with extravagant sets and costuming
The finest screen adaptation of Victor Hugo’s oft-filmed historical novel. This is visually stunning and featuring an awards-worthy performance from Charles Laughton as the malformed Quasimodo
Largely overlooked, this is the first version of the story in colour and has a lavishness that the previous versions lacked. On the minus side, Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo is no more than a simpleton lacking in pathos
The second film from Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk who made Atanarjuat about a Danish anthropologist charting the lives of the Inuit as they are in the process of assimilation by Westerners
Don Bluth conducts animated remake of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical memorably incarnated with Yul Brynner. Now the story comes with the addition of fantasy elements
A big-budget version of the Arthurian legends that makes dubious claim about being rooted in historical fact. The fantasy elements are stripped out and what we have is more of an historical spectacle
Christopher Smith is an underrated genre director but his first venture into tv is disappointing cross-historical quest for the Holy Grail story that reads like warmed over Da Vinci Code
Another film about Countess Bathory, although this returns to the historical record rather than makes her as a vampire. Killed by being told through the eyes of two kids and a ridiculously tame account of Bathory’s activities
A not uninteresting historical epic from Dino de Laurentiis that merges the tale of the deposed last emperor of Rome into the beginnings of the Arthurian legends
A biopic of the Marquis de Sade that is not uninteresting but suffers from being produced by Roger Corman on one of his usual B-budgets
Stark and effective film based on a true-life historical figure, this sets out to depict the barbarism of the 17th century witch hunts. Vincent Price plays seriously and the film is all the more effective as a result
Luc Besson takes on the Joan of Arc story with then wife Milla Jovovich in the title role but in Besson’s hands it becomes a crazed historical action film that unquestioningly accepts Joan’s visions as real
A ridiculously melodramatic Catholic historical drama wherein a statue of the Virgin Mary comes to life to take the place of a nun so she can run off and woo a young Roger Moore … A lushly made canvas but otherwise absurdly overwrought piety
The Monk is a sordid classic of 18th Century Gothic literature, filled with crazed lusts and Catholic guilt and damnation. However, in the hands of French director Dominik Moll, all the tortured sexuality has been watered down and the story stuffed as a costume drama
A biopic of Paula Maxa, the real-life star of Paris’s Grand Guignol Theatre. The Grand Guignol specialised in plays depicting gory on-stage deaths and she was killed on stage an estimated 10,000 times during her career. Here the biopic elements are blended with a mystery in which she is targeted by a serial killer
Robert Eggers, the director who made The Witch and The Lighthouse, makes a violent, primal Viking film steeped in Norse mythology
Biopic of the so-called prophet Nostradamus, although this seems more interested in depicting him as a progressive thinker of his era than as a prophet. Directed by Roger Christian who next went on to make Battlefield Earth
One of the better among the cheap video-released sequels to their animated films Disney released during the 1990s/2000s, this actually works better than the original
Very nicely made French animated film based around the daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaton
Philip Kaufman conducts a biopic of the Marquis de Sade (played by a manic Geoffrey Rush) and how he continued to publish despite being confined to an asylum. This then becomes a debate about modern censorship
Hammer Films turn the historical story of Rasputin and his influence over the Russian throne into a horror film. Although they treat history liberally, this is a vivid film with an intense performance from Christopher Lee
Vincent Ward is one of the directors who should be granted more opportunities to make films. This is his least satisfying work, a troubled behind-the-scenes epic set during New Zealand’s Maori Wars with some Magical Realist touches
Extraordinarily ambitious film all shot in a single take at the former St Petersburg Winter Palace where the camera drifts dream-like from room to room and in and out of periods of Russian history. More n illustrated art and history program than a dramatic film but beautiful to watch.
Michael Crichton was hot as a result of Jurassic Park. Although mostly seen as an historical spectacle, this is an adaptation of his novel that attempts to retell the legend of Beowulf with Vikings against Neanderthals
This is essentially Shakespeare’s Richard III mounted as a horror film. Roger Corman and Vincent Price take time away in the midst of their Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to turn the same style to matters historical
Adaptation of the legendary historical romance was considered a box-office flop but emerges as a better film than one expected it would
Romanian-made film about the real-life historical tyrant Vlad Tepes who loaned his name to Bram Stoker’s Dracula
A film based on the historic tyrant that gave the world the name Dracula. This ends up being too sympathetic and loses all credibility when it tries to tie in vampire mythology
Russell Crowe turns director and, as is the case with actors turned director, feels the need to take up an epic historical subject – the aftermath of World War I (albeit with some Magical Realist elements). Crowe wields all the epic flourish and polish, even if the film never truly moves one
A classic of the silent German Expressionist era, telling three tales throughout history – about the Caliph of Baghdad, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper – all set around the locale of a wax museum
One of Kathryn Bigelow’s less successful films, an adaptation of an Anita Shreve historical murder mystery that tells a story in two different time periods
A fascinatingly different and original work. A scrupulous effort is made – from the dialogue and clothing – to place us inside a 17th Century setting dominated by insanely legalistic religious superstitions and fears, at contrast to which there lie a series of phantasmagoric visions of witches