The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Invisible and Imaginary Companions are characters that accompany usually the protagonist of a story and cannot be seen by others. This can be some entity such as an angel or a ghost, even a large invisible rabbit who are invisibly aiding the protagonist (or just as equally causing mischief). There are also a number of films about children’s imaginary companions, which run the gamut from annoying comedic figures to sinister ones in horror.
The other use of Imaginary Companions concerns companions that appear inside the individual’s head. One version of this is as a narrative device where the companion rson is the literalisation of someone with whom the protagonist is imagining conversing. The other use is where the figure is revealed to be a delusionary one inside someone’s mentally ill mind.
Psycho-thriller that should have gotten better notice than it did. Katie Holmes plays an A-student at an Ivy League college who is stalked by a missing ex. Slick and coolly written, before arriving at an effective twist ending
Ingenue slasher film from Sage Bannick about a teacher finding his pupils are being killed, this eventually settles down as an old hat evil twin plot
This comes with a great premise – two men are woken from cryogenic suspension only to find one of their cryo-tubes broken and they discover their purpose there may not be what they were told
One of Steven Spielberg’s more overlooked and quieter films, a remake of the 1940s guardian angel fantasy A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg never much ignites the love story but the film has some magical moments and a scene-stealing John Goodman
Not long after the success of Paranormal Activity, The Asylum tried the bandwagon with the novelty of repackaging The Amityville Horror as a Found Footage film
This seems a generic ghost story. The second half has the protagonist’s dead girlfriend trying to stop him seeing another woman and becomes a descent into obsession that works rather well
The rapper turned filmmaker Flying Lotus directs a copy of Alien with an amnesiac crewmember of a ship landed on a hostile planet where the crew are hunted by an alien nasty
Pål Sletaune is a Norwegian director who deserves more attention for his reality-bending surrealism. Here mother Noomi Rapace moves into new apartment where ghostly screams come through the baby monitor and she soon finds that she cannot be sure what is real
Mini-series that reconstructs the old Battlestar Galactica into smart and intelligent SF with strong characters, a gritty realism and sensational effects. A tv series followed and became one of the best SF shows of the 2000s
Low-budget film where a couple move into her family home and she is haunted by childhood imaginary companion that may or not be real
Stephen King’s version of I Spit on Your Grave. What kills the film is the plot device that involves the heroine having imaginary conversations with dead bodies and her GPS
Bird Box was a hit on Netflix and this is a sequel. The talented Pastor Brothers take the basics of the original and actually make a much better film out of them filled with fine tension
Award-winning Darren Aronofsky film about the rivalry between two ballerinas. At heart though, this is no more than a Brian De Palma psycho-thriller with pretensions
Disney live-action comedy with Peter Ustinov as the ghost of a resurrected pirate who comes to the aid of an ailing collage track team
Oddball Australian Backwoods Brutality film with a man imprisoned by a strange family in Finland who intend to feed him to their hulking son
Sweetly likeable Norman Jewison film in which Whoopi Goldberg receives guardianship of young Haley Joel Osment only to find he has an invisible companion in Gerard Depardieu
A film where you are struggling to find any easy labelling. What it is is an hilariously ultra-violent and over-the-top parody of an action movie that will have your sides splitting
Vincent Gallo’s muchly ridiculed directorial effort is an unbelievably indulgent film consisting of long, tedium-inducing scenes where nothing happens. It does arrive at a a surprise left field ending that travels into genre territory
A film about a scientist trying to perfect a genetic engineering process. This turns into a strange SF reworking of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw
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.
A live-action adaptation of the Winnie the Pooh characters. This is a mix of Hook with Christopher grown up and having forgotten about the animals and the Paddington films with the animals conducting slapstick chaos in London
A laidback slacker comedy where a man is befriended by the ghost of a school friend who proves annoyingly needy and won’t go away
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
Henry Thomas, then riding on the success of E.T., is cast as a kid with a love of spy games who, accompanied by his imaginary companion, is plunged into the midst of a real spy caper.
A cross-historical epic from The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. An uneven film driven more by its determination we view it as an epic. Surely a studio publicist’s nightmare, it grasps at the meaning of it all yet eludes telling audiences what it is about
This is a surprisingly good film that generates quite a degree of spooky eeriness concerning a child on the autism spectrum and the sinister entity inside his tablet that just wants to be his friend
Hideo Nakata will always be known as the director of the original Ring. Here he revisits the kaidan eiga in the story of a haunted apartment but the show falls apart after a confusing Sixth Sense-type twist mid-film
An interestingly strange and undeniably different film where two teens break into a house at Christmas time to find a mother who keeps her daughter confined lest the creature inside her get free
Controversial William Friedkin film in which Al Pacino plays a straight cop who must go undercover in New York’s gay leather and S&M community to hunt a serial killer. This holds back little in its portrayal of the scene.
One of the classic horror films from producer Val Lewton. The studio gave Lewton orders to make a sequel to his first hit Cat People but he confounded this by making an entirely different film about invisible playmates that has no cat people
A horror film that delves into pleasingly dark places as a man finds that his life is being taken over by his childhood imaginary companion that he realises wants to possess his body
Low-budget UFO/alien abduction film that mostly this just retreads familiar material, although it does evince a certain interesting state of rubber reality about what is happening
Greg McLean has made an impressive name with the Wolf Creek films and Rogue. In his first US film, he delivers a disappointing and utterly generic haunted suburban house film
Psycho-thriller with Gregory Hines as a radio talkback host dealing with a psychopathic caller who plays a series of taunting games with him
One of Shane Meadows’ harsh depictions of life in the English Midlands with Paddy Considine as a former soldier turned vigilante eliminating bullies who killed his intellectually handicapped brother
Uniquely original Japanese horror film adapted from a manga concerning a book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. This has spawned several sequels and an American remake. The show is stolen by the supremely weird Kenichi Matsuyama
The English-language remake of the popular Japanese franchise from Adam Wingard. This essentially remakes the first film and is adequate in its own right but no patch on either of the original Japanese films
The second of the Japanese Death Note films, released almost back-to-back with the first. This is an even better film than its predecessor, delighting in the twists and turns in the games as Light and his nemesis L outwit each other
Blumhouse film that stars Topher Grace as an asylum detainee who is released to home detention and may or may not be hallucinating seeing figures inside the house
An uncredited remake of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer, this is the single worst film I have seen in the last few years. It is surely the horror equivalent of The Room
A hit Brazilian film with Sonia Braga as a widow who remarries only for her wayward late husband to reappear as a ghost after she finds she is missing his passion. Charming and whimsical
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
Maybe one of the worst cases of a trailer ruining the film by giving away the big mid-film surprise. The film itself is an absurdly contrived Shutter Island copy that has nothing else up its sleeve beyond its big surprise
Sort of Harvey remade by way of Beetlejuice wherein Phoebe Cates’s childhood imaginary companion returns to wreak havoc. A film that makes a beeline for mud-pie throwing and general anarchy
A completely indescribable film about a young girl who befriends a hitman and asks him to protect her from an imaginary monster. The result falls somewhere between Leon/The Professional and a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film
One of the great tv series of the 1980s, a powerful and incisive snapshot of Thatcherite England, the backroom politics of the nuclear power industry and the environmentalist movement. A brilliantly written show featuring great performances
This Canadian film is a mishmash of hauntings, psychic powers, ghost hunters, possibly imaginary friends and End of the World prophecies that fails to make the slightest sense
Dull and routine film with Kane Hodder as a psycho backwoods gas station owner. The film miscasts the hulking Hodder in trying to make him look like an ordinary guy
A strange thriller in the Basic Instinct-mold with surveillance expert Ewan McGregor obsessed with tracking serial killer Ashley Judd, while haunted by the imaginary companion of his daughter
David Fincher tackles Chuck Palahniuk’s novel about secret brawling clubs. Maybe the only major studio film with an openly anarchist manifesto. Brilliant, incendiary, all over the map plotwise and thoroughly unique
A fascinating series of interwoven stories, one of which is set in a religion-dominated dystopian future. An intriguing puzzle that arrives at a surprise left field ending
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
Mike Flanagan tackles one of the most difficult Stephen King books from a logistics perspective – the book has only one character who is handcuffed naked to a bed for the duration – but pulls it off with great faithfulness
One of the most beautiful of all 1940s light fantasy films about the sweet and tender relationship between widow Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison as the ghost of the sea captain in the house she moves into
For a reasonable part of the runtime, this plays as a wilderness survival drama about a woman abandoned in the woods. Somewhat directionless before being redeemed by its twist ending
Effective and disturbing work about two boys who begin to think that someone else might have taken their mother’s place after she returns in bandages. The film reaches a particularly chill and nasty climax
A popular Hong Kong hit in its day where a schoolgirl gains a ghostly scholar as an invisible companion, resulting in a series of slapstick sequences. Several sequels followed
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
Sequel to A Haunted House where writer/star Marlon Wayans conducted a riff on the Scary Movie films. This is marginally more amusing than its predecessor
Likeable light fantasy comedy where Robert Downey Jr is possessed by four disembodies souls and sets out to help them achieve their purpose. Filled with some great performances.
Light fantasy oddity with Bob Hoskins as a racist slob of a cop who receives a heart transplant and suddenly gets a deceased Denzel Washington as a ghostly companion
Lightweight fantasy film with Lewis Smith as a 1950s rocker who is sent back from the afterlife to act as a guardian angel to help a nerdy Jason Gedrick stand up for himself
A variant on the sinister child’s invisible companion theme. A fine cast has been assembled but the film goes and kills itself with a lame twist ending
A non-fiction film about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. The script does a great job nailing the psychological undertows and the parts are brought to life with several tour-de-force performances
A strange film about parents who become concerned when their young daughter insists she has an imaginary fish man companion. This arrives at a head-scratchingly WTF ending
A shot during the Covid lockdown film. An amiable comedy set on the last day of the world where Zoe Lister-Jones and her imaginary younger self Cailee Spaeny walk across L.A. to find closure with the people in her life
John Cusack leads a star cast line-up in what appears to be a slasher where a group of people gathered at a motel are being killed by someone among their number. Big conceptual twists then ensue
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
Nicely made seasonal tv movie where cynical Ally Walker has her life turned around by the appearance of her childhood self (Hayden Panettiere)
Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending, head-scratcher about road trips, weird dinner conversations and shifting identity blurrings as what we assume become increasingly more surreal as the film goes on
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
Eddie Murphy in another of the lame flops that marked his career in the 2000s where he plays a stockbroker who gets stock tips from his daughter’s imaginary companion
There are few fantastic themes more tired than the clairvoyant thriller – a standard murder mystery where the detective just intuits all their deductions psychically. Apart from a couple of interesting twists, this is no different
Christopher Nolan’s The Matrix. Concerning an action theme that invade people’s dreams, this is a bold, brilliantly original SF film driven by ideas – a film that succeeds beautifully on all levels
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
Pixar have slumped into terminal sequelitis during the 2010s – this was only the second original work they have made during that time. While not perfect, it goes regains the creative heights from five years earlier
This has an intriguingly original concept where milquetoast Tim Blake Nelson wakes up to find he has faded away and become invisible to other people – and then finds a secret world of other similar Invisibles
Ten different filmmakers from around the world combine to make an anthology of eight horror stories set during the Covid lockdown
Having been promised for a long time, this is the third of Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers films. Filled with some unworldly jumps, this is also the slightest of the Jeepers Creepers trilogy
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
This origin story of Batman’s Joker is less epic superheroics than a mundanely grounded work about one individual’s rage against modern life and alienation that comes closest to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver
Anime about the oddball friendship between a teenage girl and three goblins. Reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro, it is a film about a girl’s feelings for her parents that eventually becomes greatly affecting
A Mike Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King story, this received a great deal of acclaim, but comes with a very peculiar story structure that opens out into a series of unfolding revelations
Fourth version of the tale about a family who believe their boarder might be Jack the Ripper. This is updated to the present and abandons most of the story for a mind-bending pretzel of identity speculations
Quite the maddest Hong Kong film once has ever seen featuring a detective who can see people’s inner personalities. No film in recent memory has led such a delirious dance with an audience
A bizarrely ridiculous erotic film with pretensions to being a relationship drama that features appearances from angels and smartass talking seagulls. An aging Mickey Rooney is the heavenly supervisor
After overseeing a growing list of worthless sequels and spinoffs, James Wan is back in the director’s chair and goes batshit crazy with this film where Annabelle Wallis is taken over by an evil twin
Among the fad for biopics about writers and the origins of famous stories, this, about Charles Dickens and the creation of A Christmas Carol, is the most lunatic – and that’s not counting the blatant lie of the title
Film about a psychiatrist dealing with a boy who appears to be able to cause things to happen. All before things get really weird
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that messes with almost everything we take for granted
Director Ruth Platt creates a beautifully subtle and delicate ghost story
Quirky, hilarious Australian claymation film about the mail correspondence between a young girl and a lonely middle-aged man
A comedy in which Griffin Dunne’s penis begins talking to him. Contrary to expectation, most of the film is PG-13 but some of the films attitudes and unfunny routines are fairly mind-boggling
Lightweight French bodyswap comedy where aging rocker Alain Chabat and mousy bureaucrat Daniel Auteuil end up sharing the same body
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
Mamoru Hosoda film nominated for the Best Animated Film at Academy Awards. A young boy jealous at the arrival of a baby sister is visited by her future self and travels through time to meet his family at different periods
There is an irresistible appeal to this film – Katie Holmes as a perfect, sweetly smiling Miss Manners dressed in Sunday Best who, in between correcting people’s manners and punctuation, is also a gun-toting vigilante in the best tradition of Charles Bronson
An eight-episode tv mini-series based on true-life necrophile/grave robber Ed Gein. This expands the story out and considerably embellishes the facts but is one of the most outrageously out there pieces of tv watching you will ever come across
Ridiculous backwoods slasher film featuring a no-name cast that frequently collapses into the laughable
Overlooked effort where Kevin Costner, in a surprisingly dark and undeniably effective turn, plays an everyday man who has a dark side as a serial killer. A very impressively outing on all levels