The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The island is a self-contained land mass. There are plenty of these in the real world. In fiction, islands have specific applications where their self-containment and isolation holds unique potential for stories. Ever since Robinson Crusoe (1719), there has been the popular fantasy of the desert island survival story wherein an individual constructs most of the basics of life with their own hands.
In genre cinema, islands have also been places where mad scientist conduct experiments in isolation; where super-villains build their bases; and where monsters roam and pockets of prehistoric life remain alive. There have also been a variety of magical islands.
The infamous miscalculated Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong where the stop-motion is replaced by Rick Baker in an ape suit, while the fairytale romance is replaced by Jessica Lange as a flower child who cracks jokes
Franck Khalfoun, a former Alexandre Aja associate, who has made the quite reasonable likes of P2 and the remake of Maniac, directs a desert island survival story where the jungle lurks with horrors
Videogame adaptation that emerges as a conceptual combination of Charlie’s Angels (2000) – a trio of girls, in kickass poses and jaw-droppingly scanty costumery – and Mortal Kombat
The live-action film version of the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series. Despite James Gunn on script, this is not very good, a one-dimensional, no-brain film trying to look like a one-dimensional, no-brain cartoon
Sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth, a supposed adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island and a consistently silly, nonsensical film that operates at the level of a children’s cartoon
Not to be confused with the Joss Whedon film, this starts out seeming like a weepy romantic drama before pulling one of the most absurd M. Night Shyamaalan-esque conceptual twists ever put on screen on us
One of the worst of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. This consists of action sequences slung together with random indifference and badly mismatched casting
A belated Italian-made attempt to jump aboard the bandwagon and copy Jaws with a giant alligator hunting people on an island
The tenth Godzilla film and a low point of the series with the focus now going on the slapstick pratfalls of Godzilla’s son. Many special effects scenes are recycled from previous entries.
The sixth Godzilla film and the point where the series started to become silly and juvenile in its focus. A weak entry featuring some of the shabbiest effects of this era.
Spanish film that prefigures the subsequent A Quiet Place concerning an island where anybody who makes a noise is killed. This fails to use its premise in any interesting way.
This TV mini-series adaptation of the Ursula Le Guin books is an insult. This was quickly mounted on the back of the success of The Lord of the Rings films but feels like tv filler that has zero affinity for Le Guin’s richly cultured world
A variation on The Most Dangerous Game that comes with a nasty feminist agenda where women are hunted by men who feel a disappearing sense of entitlement
South African-shot film that pretends to be set in The Philippines. Utterly generic on every level, the film seems to be about Filipino vampire monsters but everything is vaguely sketched
The use of a designer drug causes a small island to descend into mass insanity – this is essentially The Crazies repackaged as a slick empty-headed thriller for teen audiences. The various scenes of madness are frequently laughable and the film arrives at possibly the most ridiculous twist ending one has ever seen
It may say how doomed the Western world is that people have paid to watch three films so far all centred around these annoyingly cutsie helium-voiced chipmunks. This is marginally less annoying that the preceding two
One of the most extreme films among the early 1980s fad for Italian zombie films, which it also manages to merge with the Italian cannibal film. Beyond the provision of gore effects, there is not much else to the film
One of the worst among the 2000s fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. John Carpenter’s 1980 original has been transformed into a teen horror film where the spookiness collapses into frequently ridiculous shock effects
Supposedly an adaptation of Jules Verns’s Mysterious Island from low-budget Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon, one that gives the impression nobody actually read the book
A forgotten curiosity from the 1980s VHS era where shipwreck survivors wash up on an island where they are attacked by malevolent dolls. A film deservous of a no star rating if there ever was one
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
The most ridiculous work to bear Kong’s name – an animated film with songs where Kong has two buddies who says “dude” and “bro” a lot and Kong fights the lizard people from Atlantis
A bad movie classic. Plenty of hysterically funny dialogue and one of the most ridiculous looking movie monsters of all time – a possessed tree (where the film also manages to wind in the 1950s obsession with atomic monsters)
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
The second of the film spinoffs from tv’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. More inane silliness played with shrieking OTT excess
Jerry Warren was surely a rival of Edward D. Wood Jr as a bad filmmaker although less well-known. This, which was his last film, is possibly the worst Frankenstein film ever made