The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Mad Scientists refers to scientists who are depicted as defying ethical standards and engaged in horrific experiments. The mad part of the title refers less to their sanity and more to their willingness to defy social taboos and engage in experiments of ethical dubiousness.
Mad scientists are frequently engaged in experiments to resurrect the dead, transfer minds/brains into other people’s or animal bodies, transforms animals into humans, create artificial life and such like. Their experiments were always seen as a threat to the social order and doomed or likely to run out of control, where the best solution was setting their laboratories alight by villagers with burning torches.
The heyday of the mad scientist film was between the 1930s and 40s. With the popularisation of the scientist during the Space Age, scientists of the 1950s and beyond became more heroic and friendly. There have still been a plentiful supply of mad scientists since then in assorted B movies. In more modern works, the mad scientist is treated as a comic figure and there have been a number of mad scientists who appear in children’s films.
Tim Burton and Henry Selick combine on this stop-motion animated fantasy made in Burton’s characteristcially eccentric style, a beautifully stylised and dark fantasy in which assorted Halloween denizens invade Christmas
Universal’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel that becomes a droll masterpiece in the hands of James Whale and with effects that still hold up today. Followed by a series of sequels
A classic of 1950s SF that creates one of the most well remembered screen robots. An uncredited adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there are few other films that devote so much attention to creating a sense of wonder
The third and most undervalued of George Romero’s original trilogy of zombie films, an explosively bared to the bone series of apocalyptic confrontations containing some of the best performances and writing in any of his films
This was one of the classic 1980s splatter films. Stuart Gordon throws most of H.P. Lovecraft’s tone out the window and goes for hilariously black comedy served up with outrageously over-the-top effects
The first and best screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr Moreau. Wells was not happy but Charles Laughton is a great Moreau and the film develops a remarkable sexual undertow
Superlative film that recreates an imagined world of 1930s retro sf filled with flyer heroes, giant robots and stunning Art Deco designs.
Woody Allen film that takes the title of the best-selling sex manual and spins it out as the basis of a series of hilarious sex-themed skits. Contains the famous episode with the giant breast run amok
Fritz Lang’s visionary work was something way ahead of it time and is one of the few silent films still screened today. The film’s politics are naive but Lang’s visions of the city of the future and the first screen robot are vivid.
The No 1 cult film of all time, more a phenomenon than a film, a demented glitter rock homage to mad science cinema and 50s sf films run through with celebration of a gender-bender joie de vivre
The first sequel to the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein, which many prefer to the original. Director James Whale comes into his element and provides a whole other level of droll humour that the first film did not have
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone conduct a revisionist take on the Frankenstein film. This ended up a critical favourite at most of the 2023 awards with Emma winning the show in an hilarious performance
The definitive version of the Jekyll/Hyde story in this author’s opinion, winning a Best Actor Oscar for Fredric March. Rouben Mamoulian uses some unique directorial effects and laces the show with a strong undercurrent of repressed sexuality
From the people behind King Kong, a film in which a mad scientist shrinks a group of people to a few inches tall. Some excellent effects for the era, making this one of the best films on the theme of miniaturisation
The very first alien invader film of the 1950s. Maybe or maybe not directed by Howard Hawks, this has a dramatic urgency and tight tension that makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the films that came after
One of the classics of mad scientist cinema. A wonderful potboiler of elements with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill on the track of a cannibal killer who has created an artificial flesh. From the director of Casablanca, no less
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
The Hollywood remake of The Hands of Orlac, a classic with Colin Clive as a pianist who believes he is possessed after receiving hands transplanted from a killer. With a fascinatingly demented performance from Peter Lorre
Excellent tv movie adaptation of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring John Hannah. This is mounted with exquisite period detail and brings new depths and interpretations of an oft-told tale
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
This and The Horror of Dracula the following year set Hammer Films on the map. A remake of Frankenstein very different to the 1931 version that comes in vibrant colour and places Peter Cushing’s ruthlessly amoral Baron at the centre of the show
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and quite memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
Danny Boyle’s stage adaptation, broadcast live on movie screens, wrings up some unique changes on the classic tale. The role of Frankenstein and creation alternated between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller
Guillermo Del Toro tackles his long-planned adaptation of Frankenstein. An exquisitely designed and costumed film that is a feast for the eyes where Del Toro determines to wring out new angles on an oft told tale
The fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and the absolute pinnacle of the series. Terence Fisher is on the peak of his form and turns in a series of directorial set pieces that are quite masterful
The classic version of Mary Shelley’s tale that left the indelible image of Boris Karloff as the dull monster with bolts in its neck. Director James Whale draws on German Expressionist designs to create one of the landmark classics of the genre
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
Mel Brooks’ finest moment, a witty stylistic homage to and spoof of the Universal Frankenstein films. A great cast are on perfect form all around.
The almost indescribable second film from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, a Dicekensian street urchin fantasy that takes place in a stunningly designed almost-familiar world filled with eccentric characters
This throws out all of the Edgar Allan Poe story except for the title and the ape and instead makes a Bela Lugosi mad scientist film. An entertainingly lurid affair strongly influenced by German Expressionism
Hammer’s seventh and final Frankenstein film and the last great film that the studio would make. Everyone is back on top form – Peter Cushing at his icily arrogant best and director Terence Fisher delivering a stirring show
Rather enjoyable latter day Hammer Film, which plays its title pun surprisingly seriously. Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick are perfectly matched as the gender-changing Dr Jekyll
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.
The ‘true story’ bit is contentious but this tv mini-series was the first production to take the Frankenstein story back to the way Mary Shelley told it. Lavishly produced and with a fantastic cast
Completely insane Japanese film that wades in gore while playing everything up at a level of demented cartoonish absurdity. Possibly the most delirious movie-watching fun it is possible to have
Another of Guy Maddin’s silent movie pastiches, all shot in a deadpan style throwing together a hilariously convoluted madcap plot involving child detectives, mad scientists and spy capers
One has difficulty with the notion of a Found Footage Frankenstein film, although the film does credibly justify this. That said, the film offers up a series of genuinely phantasmagoric and out of this world creations
Hands down the best film ever produced by The Asylum. How could one not like an entertainingly madcap concoction that features mad scientists, zombie stormtroopers, Nazi UFOs and Adolf Hitler preserved as a head in a jar attached to a robot body?
This has the novelty of being shot guerilla-style at Disneyland and Disney World without permission. Nothing prepares you for the amazingly dark work you get, a surreal hallucinatory drift through the park’s underbelly
Great Roger Corman film in which Ray Milland is a scientist who invents a serum that allows him x-ray vision with disastrous consequences
The third of Universal’s Frankenstein films, the last to feature Boris Karloff as the monster and the last good entry before the sequels became formulaic. Shot with the clear influence of German Expressionism, this is filled with memorable characters and some great performances
A legendary cinematic train wreck filled with behind the scenes stories of fired directors and star egos. Despite all of this, this remake of the H.G. Wells novel emerges as a well made and watchable film
James Gunn takes over the Suicide Squad franchise and welcomely rescues it from the dud first screen outing, giving it his characteristically irreverent sense of humour
From Larry Blamire, a deliberately ridiculous spoof of the 1950s alien invasion film. Blamire’s dialogue and the deadpan with which everybody plays is frequently hilarious
A highly entertaining Herman Cohen production where Michael Gough plays a mad crime writer who employs a series of cruel sensationalistic deaths for his victims
Fascinating silent German serial undeniably influenced by the Frankenstein story about an artificial being who proves soulless, swears vengeance against his creator and becomes a dictator
Classic silent version of the Jekyll and Hyde story. A reasonable if not truly standout version, dominated by John Barrymore’s highly melodramatic performance in the title roles
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
An overlooked latter day Universal monster movie with Lionel Atwill on wonderfully demented form as a mad scientist who turns Lon Chaney, Jr. into an electrified human dynamo
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
The fourth and last of Universal’s Invisible Man sequels (aside from their outing with Abbott and Costello). Like the preceding ones, this is likeably good humoured and with decent effects for the era
The first screen version of Donovan’s Brain about a brain in a jar exerting mental control over a man’s will. This has been considerably changed to become one of the era’s mad scientist films
The title and names are changed, otherwise this is an extremely faithful adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring Christopher Lee. Not very successful at the time, this interestingly opens the story out with Freudian psychology
Producer Herman Cohen had a huge hit with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and quick on its tail released this companion piece, an enjoyably tongue-in-cheek film concerning a Frankenstein descendant turning a teen into a monster
Likeable Disney animated film about a young misfit Hawaiian girl who befriends an unruly alien creature. This has a good deal of oddball energy and humour that makes it rather appealing
Toho Films obtained the rights to King Kong to pit him against Godzilla in King Kong Vs Godzilla and then made this entertainingly silly sequel where Kong fights a robot copy of himself
This was a hit in its dayo by tapping the burgeoning teenage market who had just realised they were misunderstood thanks to James Dean. Not a particularly great film but it is one that carries a great deal of primal ferocity
The sixth and last of the Josh Kirby time-travelling juvenile adventures produced by Charles Band and the best of the series, which takes a trip into Josh’s past
One of the more enjoyable films from Charles Band’s Empire Productions, a comic-book of a film that assembles an action team of various abilities on an adventure up against a mad scientist
An obscure tv movie version of Mary Shelley made by producer Dan Curtis. This suffers cheap production values but is the most faithful version of the book up to that point
This is a standout serial based on the famous comic-book detective, featuring some of the best of all serial cliffhangers and action set-pieces, not to mention wonderfully creative super-science inventions
A true-bred exploitation film with castaways arriving on an island where they encounter a Nazi mad scientist breeding flesh eating slugs. This has been cited as the first gore film
The second of Universal’s Invisible Man films with Vincent Price inheriting the title role. Not quite as sublimely droll as James Whale’s original, this still has some amusing comic moment and good effects
Surprisingly good 1950s film in which scientist Robert Lansing invents a process that allows him to become insubstantial and walk through walls. The effects are very good and this attains some eerie effect
Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi pairing from the heyday of mad science cinema. The science is portrayed with a fascinating and fearful Gothic awe, which leads to some captivatingly directed scenes
Classic Boris Karloff mad scientist effort in which he plays a scientist who invents a device that allows him to swap minds into different bodies. All the usual Gothic fear-filled view of science from this era, but rather well made and with Karloff on fine form
A version of the H.G. Wells novel conducted as a mini-series of six half-hour episodes from the BBC. This is the most faithful adaptation of the book so far
An early film from Jess Franco in which an exotic dancer is turned into a mind-controlled assassin who lures and kills victims with her six-inch long fingernails as part of a revenge scheme
One of the more enjoyable films from Charles Band with Tim Thomerson giving a highly entertaining performance as a hard-boiled detective travelled back from the future
Tod Browning film in which Lionel Barrymore is an escaped convict who disguises himself as an old woman where he takes revenge using people shrunken to the size of dolls
An obscure effort from the early days of the Anglo-horror cycle. A medical vampire effort and a Hammer imitator with lavish production values and memorable characters that easily sits up alongside Hammer’s better work
Modestly effective film in which teens in a small town go berserk and begin killing people as a result of experiments being conducted at the university psychology department
A spinoff from Full Moon’s Puppetmaster film series, this stirs killer dolls, mad scientists, psychics and Nazi zombies together in an undeniably entertaining mix
Them! had created the 1950s fad for giant atomically enlarged insects. Here Jack Arnold, one of the most celebrated genre directors of the 1950s, makes a giant spider film and much better than most of the era’s other giant bug films
Jean Renoir is considered one of the greatest of all film directors – this is his only venture into genre material, a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Though Renoir seems disinterested in making a horror film, he offers up the most faithful interpretation of the story on screen to date
Ray Milland is a dying white racist millionaire who has hit head transplanted onto the shoulders of a Black man. A film that sees the absurdities of its premise and plants tongue in cheek.
The second sequel to the cult splatter hit Re-Animator is a superior effort to its predecessor, getting the original’s sense of black humour down pat and arriving at a memorably apocalyptic climax
Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray star in a film about a mad scientist conducting a series of vampire bat killings. A minor but watchable entry in the Golden Age of Horror.
The Bowery Boys were a poor man’s Abbott and Costello; here in one of their most entertaining outings they try to compete with Abbott and Costello’s monster bashes
The Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s had an amazing visual flair – this is where it started. This is more a 1940s mad scientist film but comes with all the decaying castles and beautifully moody b&w lighting
In his follow-up to Manborg, Steven Kostanski abandons the affectionate homages to 1980s video-released genre films he has specialised in so far. A homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this should be seen for the utterly wild and outlandish makeup effects that Kostanski delivers
Not to be confused with the hit tv series, this features Boris Karloff as a wrongly executed man come back from the dead to exact justice
Likeable puppet animated film about a time-travelling boy and his monkey companion
An outrageous gore-drenched version of the Frankenstein story that frequently ventures into bad taste. Despite his name in the title, Andy Warhol had nothing to do with the film
Witty and quite charming low-budget SF film with Don Opper as a gawky android on a space station trying to understand the human condition amid the arrival of escaped convicts
Sequel to the cult Australian zombie film, this refines the first film and exists as even more of a visual comic-book – all that seems missing is dialogue that comes in comic balloons
The reasoning behind rebooting the Spider-Man franchise after ten years and only three films is a puzzle. That said, this offers an edgier origin story than Sam Raimi’s take and Andrew Garfield makes for a fine Spider-Man
Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre make an unexpectedly great comic pairing in this mad scientist screwball comedy that comes with an exhaustingly madcap pace
Unrelated to the Michael Myers saga, John Carpenter tried to use the Halloween name to launch an original horror series. The plot is a baffling mix of Celtic magic and hi-tech but Tommy Lee Wallace creates some way out effects scenes
Another of the films from the Mexican wrestling superhero Santo where he and his friend Blue Demon encounter assorted Famous Monsters raised by a mad scientist
Rob Zombie conducts a big-screen remake of The Munsters and surprisingly enough makes his best film yet
Fascinatingly torrid US-Japan production about a man who develops a second head on his shoulder that takes over his personality
Film about a monster hunter from the 1940s thawed out in the present-day. This appears to have been made as a tv pilot
Amiable Swiss Claymation effort that makes for inevitable comparison to the output from Aardman Studios
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
The Asylum conduct a monster bash – a crossover between the Famous Monsters – and actually do a modest and quite enjoyable job that pays affectionate homage to the characters
Cutley appealing DreamWorks animated film that brings together a bunch of oddball creatures clearly intended as an affectionate homage to various 1950s sf films
Classic Z budget film about a severed head in a laboratory that has plenty to place it in the bad movie category but is made with such a perverse panache that it is hard to dislike
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.
That rarity of rarities – a quite good Troma film. The zombies are not up to much but the titular girl motorcycle gang are surprisingly well rounded characters