The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Magical Artefacts are objects of power that can produce or are empowered by Magic. Magical Artefacts can be rings, swords, orbs, scrolls, staffs, lenses, crystals, scrolls, keys, lamps, books, knives, boxes, doorways, mirrors, flying carpets, coins, items of clothing (often ones that may have been worn by a Magician) or jewellery, and assorted others.
These can variously wield magic and power, open Portals, conduct transformations, offer wishes, extend one’s life, conjure entities, control minds, divine the future and many other purposes. Use of such objects can sometimes require arcane knowledge or solving puzzles. In some cases, the usage will affect a price on the user. Artefacts that have malevolent purpose are discussed under Cursed Objects.
Rarely is it ever depicted how such an artefact comes into being, they are usually items that are just discovered. Frequently they are hidden where Adventure Films often concern quests to discover their whereabouts, or else they can be unassuming items found in the everyday.
The most famous Magical Artefacts on screen might be King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, Aladdin’s lamp, Dorothy’s Red Slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings and Thor’s hammer.
Yet another adaptation of a series of Young Adult fantasy books that failed to fly. The idea of an Indiana Jones-type adventure set in Victorian England holds promise but the film only sporadically manages to let the adventure fly
A twelve-chapter serial based on the comic-book superhero who these days is known as Shazam. Often regarded as one of the best of all serials, this has some decent action scenes and cliffhangers
Sequel to the bad movie classic of Cannon Films’ Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno and only a marginally less terrible film that its predecessor
Following on from his reworking of The Wizard of Oz in Tin Man, this is a tv mini-series where Nick Willing rather fascinatingly reinterprets Alice in Wonderland in SF terms
A South Korean SF film that comes with a wide canvas involving alien invasion, time hopping between two eras and some epic action in possibly one of the most head-scratching plots seen in some time
The second part of the Korean time-hopping/alien invasion film where many of the plot strands from the extremely confusing first film are at least wrapped up
A few years ago Aquaman was regarded as a joke among superheroes. James Wan dispels any notion of Aquaman’s wimpiness in a series of jaw-dropping effects sequences that propel this ahead of anything the MCU is doing at the moment
This tries hard to be another The Thief of Bagdad but is never too much more than a run through the cliches of the Arabian Nights adventure rewritten for the post-Star Wars era
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of the classic tales has been granted a decent budget that allows the stories to emerge with lavish spectacle and the fantasy to fly with exceptional regard
Adaptation of the popular Young Adult series about a twelve-year-old super-villain and his adventures with assorted magical creatures. Audiences hated this but I though it overspilled with a madcap creativity
Adaptation of the popular videogame that is lumbered with the game’s inherently uncinematic premise where people only sit around and watch what has already happened in the past
Another shabby Disney video-released sequel, in this case to Atlantis the Lost Empire. The result looks like three episodes of an unsold tv series slapped together to sell as a film
The Asylum’s response to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not having their own superheroes, they have ingeniously created an adventure involving various fairytale princesses – a great idea that befalls miserable execution
Marvel’s third Avengers film, uniting almost every superhero under their roof, resulting in some thirty characters on screen and a plot that becomes a blur of changing locations and superheroic punch-ups
Next to Hayao Miyazaki, Michel Ocelot is the greatest animators of all time but one of the least widely recognised. Here he conducts a beautifully made Arabian fairytale
An inane French/Canadian-made children’s film about three cute creatures that come to help a boy stop the resurrection of the Tower of Babel on the eve of the millennium
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
The second of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as the title character in the popular Brothers Grimm fairytale, which has been considerably embellished. This suffers the glassy plasticity of the early Mainframe films
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
An oddity among the animated Batman films. This seems less another Batman film – Bruce Wayne gets more screen time than Batman, for instance – than it does a homage to the 1970s martial arts film
Forgotten Disney animated film that was not a success at the time it came out. It seeks to tell an epic fantasy tale in the J.R.R. Tolkien vein but ends up falling too much in the shadow of Star Wars
Another Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptation, this feels slung together from vampire film and sword and sorcery cliches. Among the badly mismatched casting, the most eyebrow raising is Ben Kingsley as the vampire villain
Comedy with a head-scratching premise where a couple discover a teapot that produces money whenever they hurt themselves. Such a loopy premise could work as a black comedy but this plays itself as a frothy light fantasy
Set in an alternate version of the present where fantasy creatures – orcs, elves, fairies – live alongside humans, this comes with a cleverness, while being played as a buddy cop drama that anchors it with a realism
Painfully derivative US-made attempt to jump aboard the popularity of Wu Xia following The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are talented people involved who should have known better
Eddie Murphy – one of the funniest talents of the 1980s – has been largely absent for much of the 2010s. He returns here with a Christmas comedy in which he is the recipient of a curse given to him by an evil Santa elf
A cheaply made Arabian Nights fantasy adventure that came out seeking to copy ride the coattails of the success of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
The second of the BBC’s tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the slightest of the works where the story is reduced to two half-hour episode
The second of the Narnia films. Director Andrew Adamson seems so intent on copying Peter Jackson that the film becomes all epic fantasy flourishes and battle scenes to the exclusion of all else – even much of C.S. Lewis’s book
This was one of the earliest films from Charles Band who has since gone on to become a prolific producer/director of low-budget films. Here Band offers a very adult take on the Cinderella fairytale
This revival of Conan the Barbarian is a dismal effort that gets little of what made the character work, while Jason Momoa gives little impression he is taking proceedings seriously
This sequel to Conan the Barbarian makes the mistake of watering the primal brutalism down to a PG rating and what results ends up being a pedestrian comic-book adventure
Lucio Fulci departs from the splatter genre to make a venture into the Italian sword and sorcery film of the era. As with any Fulci film, this is expectedly plotless and incoherent but with occasional moments of imagination
Billed as the Chinese Lord of the Rings, this is an historically-based fantasy film that tries to out-Hollywood Hollywood in terms of effects, design and costuming and looks stunningly epic in scale
A copy of The Expendables (albeit with the addition of fantasy elements) that brings together a line-up of B-action movie actors as a team. While some of the actors shine, the feel is of a cheaper effort earnestly trying to copy its betters
Third of the Cross films, a more fantastical variant on The Expendables, bringing 90s action actors back out of mothballs to form a team as they face various super-villains in present-day L.A.
Cross was a low-budget attempt to copy The Expendables, featuring a C-list team of action stars (plus some fantasy elements). This is a sequel you doubt many people were burning to see
Sensational hit that introduced most of the West to the Wu Xia film. Directed with elan by Ang Lee, there comes a sublimely graceful poetry in the film’s imagery of sword combatants dancing up walls and flying through the air
A massive letdown of the year. A sequel that brings back several of the original cast and gives it to Yuen Wo-Ping to direct but is merely slickly paced, uninspired action that substitutes CGI for the graceful wirework of the original
The film that Jim Henson chose to make as successor to The Muppets. An astonishing technical leap beyond Muppetry to create an entire fantasy world in living, breathing detail all only inhabited by puppets
This has an appealing premise – the children of all the Disney villains have grown up and go to school together. This is promptly killed by the awfulness of the film itself, which is essentially High School Musical set in the Disney universe
Sequel to the painfully bad Disney Channel film that copied the success of High School Musical and featured the teenage children of classic Disney animated villains. This is just as empty-headed and unwatchable
The third of Tsui Hark’s films based on the historical figure of De Renjie/Detective Dee. While the other films were rooted in a relative realism, Tsui lets all restraints loose here and goes way over the top
A TV mini-series based on the popular illustrated books by James Gurney about the discovery of a lost land where dinosaurs have evolved into their own civilisation
The movie parodies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, which consist of crude, witless gags run over replication of scenes from films of the last twelve months, are painfully unfunny. This doesn’t even spoof the disaster movie
Enchanted in which Amy Adams played an animated fairytale princess entering the real world was a reasonable hit. This is the long-planned sequel that reunites the principals but feels like a joke that belabours in the retelling
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
Disappointing adaptation of the arcade videogame. The game is premised on mindless martial arts action but the film pitches everything down to pre-teen audiences and make the two brother protagonists into dorks
A medium-budget Dracula film that draws much on its cinematic predecessors and comes filled with Underworld-like brooding Gothic poses. Plus the oddity of a blonde Dracula
Disastrous and miscalculated live-action Hollywood version of the anime series. which turns the characters into just regular teenagers. Nobody involved seems to be making any effort.
A new film based on the role-playing game. The first film several years ago is poorly regarded. This is an attempt to reboot a film series but suffers badly from being handed to two comedy directors and their flip treatment
The third film based on the roleplaying game. The previous two films were forgettable but this is surprisingly good, taking a far darker tone than the usual sword-and-sorcery adventure and adding considerable moral complexity
A Hong Kong Wu Xia film from Jeffrey Lau that is near plotless and made at a madcap level of slapstick comedy that is frequently exhausting.
The definitive film version of the Arthurian legends. John Boorman gives us a magnificent and soaring work of beautiful impassioned imagery that delves deep into the rich mythology of the cycle
Low-budget ingenue effort with pretensions to being more, this produces some occasionally nifty effects that quickly weary and only seem to hold up a thoroughly hackneyed B horror movie plot
Terry Gilliam’s finest moment, a modernised knightly quest where radio dj Jeff Bridges is dragged into helping homeless man Robin Williams find the Holy Grail. A film made by its performances and warm and eventually soaring characterisations
Guy Ritchie makes an adventure film that pays homage to Indiana Jones and a host of other works concerning the quest for the Fountain of Youth. A superficial film killed by its constantly distracting flip banter
Possibly THE worst film ever made. Tony Watt throws an mash-up of exploitation elements together in an incomprehensible plot. A film that made me want to hammer a nail through my eyeball rather than keep watching
The fourth film version of the Disney comedy about a mother and daughter who swap bodies for one day. This was made for the Disney Channel and comes as a grating teen musical
Live-action adaptation of the popular manga and anime series. Despite having a reasonable budget thrown at it and treating the source material with fathfulness, this looks awkward on the screen
The concluding chapter of the trilogy of live-action Fullmetal Alchemist films, this follows the manga’s storyline closely and brings the series to an epic conclusion
The first of two sequels to the live-action Fullmetal Alchemist. The first felt uninspired but this and the third film expand the saga and its storyline out with considerable depth
Film spinoff from the popular anime tv series that seems caught between a film and a tv episode. While the film reaches for epic scale, the usual run of power blasts, there is nothing that we haven’t seen before
Undeniably entertaining Filipino action film that tries to throw in everything including time travel, post-holocaust action, adventure quests, magical artifacts, lost worlds, Nazis and dwarves
An extraordinary reworking of the Japanese kaiju series with stunning CGI effects sequences. This set a new standard and is among the best of the modern Japanese monster movies
This advertises itself as the first live-action Steampunk film. What we get is like a Victorian version of The Librarians with two adventurers hunting mythical artifacts while armed with steam weapons
Amid the 2010s spate of multi-director horror anthologies a la The ABCs of Death, V/H/S etc, this is a trio of tales from all German directors, the most well known of which is Jörg Buttgereit of Nekromantik infamy
One of fantastic cinema’s great titles bouts is a spectacular effects show. At the same time, it also has one of the single most ridiculous script I have ever come across in the entire time I have been running this site
The attempt to create another Lord of the Rings went astray with this adaptation of Philip Pulllman’s fantasy series, which cut many of the core elements of the books so as not to offend religious conservatives
The penultimate chapter in the Harry Potter series surprisingly strips out most of the effects and is much slower, more character driven, while moving the saga towards an epic conclusion
Sixth of the Harry Potter films, this feels like a step back from what its predecessor built up. The film suffers from trying to cram all of J.K. Rowling’s book into its running time and ends up being frustratingly mannered
The first of the Harry Potter films. The first is the weakest and lumbers due to being placed in the hands of the perpetually banal Chris Columbus who allows visual effects wow and simplistic emotional cues to dominate
British-made sword and sorcery adventure in the early 80s fantasy cycle. This suffers from a cheap and impoverished budget that makes everything look tatty
Reboot of the Hellboy series promisingly comes from Neil Marshall but is also made by Millennium Films who have a habit of buying up previously successful properties and churning out cheaper spinoffs
The first of two animated Hellboy spinoffs with the live-action actors returning to voice their parts. This is the better of the two animated films, developing a weirdness as it takes Hellboy inside a Japanese spirit realm
In the second and the best of his two Hellboy films, Guillermo Del Toro expands the first out with an amazing menagerie of eccentric and offbeat creatures, while Ron Perlman is again on winning form in the title role
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
After two bloated and over-padded Hobbit films, Peter Jackson finally gets it together and produces what everyone was expecting him to deliver, even if it means dragging one battle scene out to last an entire film
Peter Jackson returns to J.R.R. Tolkien and epic-sized adventure in the first of his Hobbit films. The visual sweep is there but the film feels over-extruded and over-burdened by its own self-importance.
Generally overlooked animated adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien book made for tv by Rankin-Bass. This keeps to the text very faithfully – more so than Peter Jackson – and is only let down by some limited animation
The Hobbit became Peter Jackson’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels and this is the weakest work he has produced under the J.R.R. Tolkien banner. Five picaresque chapters of the book are extruded into bloated set-pieces
The first sequel to House, this is largely unrelated to its predecessor and plays itself with a sense of humour to emerge as the superior film. Now a skull opens doorways in the house into different eras
Eli Roth is a director associated with the Torture Porn cycle and one does a double-take at him making a family-friendly film. The results emerge somewhere between Harry Potter and a Goosebumps film
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
The premise of a group of adventurers seeking artifacts from fairytales has mild possibilities but is given zero conviction by anybody involved. A sub-Indiana Jones adventure that was made as a tv pilot
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
An enormously entertaining Hong Kong variation on Highlander in which two rival swordsmen are frozen in a glacier and then awakened in the modern day
A Uwe Boll film that feels as though he didn’t cared about what he was making. You’d have to go back to the Italian sword-and-sorcery films of the 1980s to find a more shoddy work of epic fantasy
The very first ever team-up between Marvel Comics characters on the screen in which Bill Bixby’s Hulk meets Thor. The film has a camp reputation because of its Thor who resembles a Swedish bodybuilder
A quite delightful film from former Muppeteer Frank Oz in which a boy receives the gift of a magic cabinet that brings his toy Indian and any other toy that is placed inside it
At age 80, Harrison Ford returns for what looks like being the last ever Indiana Jones film. It’s not perfect but when you compare to all the other contemporary franchises, this still has the good old adventure spirit
Third of the Indiana Jones films. This comes with all the breakneck action sequences and Sean Connery doing a fine comic turn as Indiana’s irascible father but also plays to a much greater slapstick emphasis
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s first sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark is like a single 118 minute rollercoaster ride without let-up in terms of action, although is far less polished in the scripting department
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
One of the handful of animated Marvel Comics films. This confusingly presents a different origin story to the live-action Iorn Man film, while the major villain of The Mandarin is completely mishandled
Sequel to the Russian-made horror film Viy, this is an historical fantasy with a big budget that mounts spectacular effects sequence and provides name stars, even if the results are utterly bizarre
TV mini-series co-produced by Hallmark Entertainment and The Jim Henson Company that offers an intriguing deconstruction of the fairytale that reverses the traditional sympathies
Bryan Singer was once the hope of fanboy cinema but this attempt to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into an epic fantasy feels exactly like formula studio product that could have been made by any hired director