The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Mind Control is the ability to take control of the minds of other people and direct them to do one’s bidding.
The most common form of mind control is Hypnotism where a skilled adept (a hypnotist) can place a subject into a sleep-like trance and command them to do their will. Mind Control can also be a Psychic Power and is frequently the ability of some Super-Villains.
Mad Scientists and Spy Films frequently devise devices that can control the behaviour of others. Alien Invaders often seek to control individuals or sections of the populace to do their bidding, sometimes with the use of implants.
There is also the real-world fascination with Brainwashing where an individual is subject to a series of sensory deprivations and other techniques to make them pliant and programmable to suggestion. Other methods deal with the use advertising and mass media to influence minds.
TV movies of the 1970s can be this unexplored treasure trove of sophisticated and intelligent genre treatments. Case in point being this effort, a variant on a 1950s body snatchers film in which a man with a steel plate in his head discovers that the people of a small town are being taken over at night by aliens
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. tv series was construed as lighter take on the James Bond films. This, the third theatrical film recut from tv episodes, is one of the most entertaining, creating a memorable super-villain and almost entirely consisting of over-the-top death traps and action set-pieces
A mini-series based on the classic comic-book masked hero but the attempts to modernise The Phantom for the post-Dark Knight era seem bizarrely awkward
B-budget dircetor Fred Olen Ray has taken the plot of Gremlins and thrown it together with one of his sofctore erotic films in which a mind-controlling goblin creature forces people to have sex
French animated film about a group of kids with psychic powers going amok. Is okay at what it does but had much of its thunder stolen by the more recent and more spectacular Chronicle
Gimmick master William Castle makes an SF films about scientists engaged in simulations and mental probing to obtain secrets from a man’s mind
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
A positively ingenious film about psychic powers that comes with an enormous conceptual joy in seeing the ways the various powers can be combined
A film that comes with a lame premise about aliens distributing a video of a 1950s SF film that turns people into mind-controlled killers all as prelude to an invasion
Four films in and clear evidence that the Resident Evil series needs to be retired. This consists of tediously borrowed action moves now presented in 3D and a plot of random dead ends that make little sense
Another unnecessary entry in a creativity-handicapped series, the continuing popularity of which is baffles. This shuffles through the familiar moves, brings back several familiar characters but only leaves me asking why I have invested some nine hours of time following this series
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
The second of the films made about the Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu, the first made in sound. This is where the film series started to find itself, turning in some superlative thrills and a wonderful battle of wits between hero and villain. Pulp thrills at their best
The first of five West German-made sequels featuring Fritz Lang’s great criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, who this time is masterminding a plot to create mind controlled zombies
The Mexican masked wrestler superhero Santo faces Frankenstein’s daughter who wants his blood to perfect her rejuvenation serum in this entertainingly madcap outing
A wonderfully cool film about malevolent twins with psychic abilities. that is an astonishingly assured effort where the various set-pieces come with the confidence of a director who has been working in the genre for years
Beautifully produced film version of the old radio superhero where director Russell Mulcahy does a wonderful job with the period design and adventure
A reboot of the classic Japanese tv series about a superhero who goes into action on a motorcycle using a suit to transform into a grasshopper being
An incredibly bad Italian-made Sinbad adventure starring Lou Ferrigno that is laughable in its dialogue and acting and incredibly tatty in its budget pinching
A Spanish film that comes with overtones of I Walked with a Zombie and Patrick where a comatose wife starts to take control of the mind of the nurse who is tending her
Dean R. Koontz adapted mini-series about plane crash survivors and psychic powers that comes with a series of wild twists that the script fails to offer adequate explanation for
Bulldog Drummond was a gentleman adventurer hero popular in books and films of the 1930s/40s. Here he is reincarnated as a playboy spy amid the spate of James Bond inspired spy films of the 1960s, battling a super-villain outfitted with an army of women with robot brains
The first big screen incarnation of the Marvel Comics character, the theatrically released pilot for a dreary tv series starring Nicholas Hammond that stripped Spider-Man down to being no more than a superpowered detective in a tv cop show
From Joseph Kosinski, then riding high as the director of Top Gun: Maverick, Chris Hemsworth is cast in an interestingly ambiguous role as a scientist conducting illicit experiments with behaviour altering drugs
Spongebob Squarepants was a sleeper hit on the Nickelodeon Channel that crossed over to find an adult following; this is the first of the film spinoffs. The film comes with a zanily surreal sense of humour that ran through the series that is frequently downright hilarious
Second of the Star Trek films, usually regarded as the fan favourite because of its often moving character focus on themes of life, death and aging. Ricardo Montalban makes a grandly theatrical villain and the film gets some great suspense out of space war sequences
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Frank Oz conducts a remake of The Stepford Wives, which becomes a broad comedy take on the gender wars in the modern world
A film that has been sold on the basis of its deliberately ridiculous title concept – that of alien invaders attempting to take over the airwaves by posing as televangelists
Ian Ziering stars in a B-budget ripoff of The Stepford Wives where he discovers that a computer company is encoding brainwashing messages in a videogame
Steven Seagal submarine action where he tackles a terrorist who has perfected mind control techniques
Japanese horror film that launched the name of Shion Sono and is attention grabbing but proves an unfathomable mix of mass suicides, mysterious websites that predict deaths and a pop band seemingly controlling it all
James Gunn takes over the Suicide Squad franchise and welcomely rescues it from the dud first screen outing
A very different take on the Superman story that asks What if Superman had grown up in the Soviet Union rather than in the US and become a paragon of Communist virtue
Alien invasion tv movie that mostly consists of cliches borrowed from the then success of tv’s The X Files
The second of Fritz Lang;s films about the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, which was banned under the Nazi regime and forced Lang to flee the country. Not quite the equal of its predecessor, Lang is still on fine form and makes an exciting crime melodrama
Third of the German thrillers of the 1960s featuring the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, a remake of the 1933 film where Mabuse continues his criminal schemes via mind control despite being confined to an asylum
A serial based on Chandu the Magician, a popular radio superhero who wielded magical and mystical powers. Featuring Bela Lugosi in the title role
A wonderfully paranoid film where drug dealer John Boyega discovers illicit mind control experiments are being conducted on a ghetto neighbourhood and that he is one in a series of clones
The Asylum conduct their cheap version of the Jules Verne novel, so cheap it doesn’t even look like they went to sea or underwater to film. Here the oft-filmed Verne story has been modernised
Classic tv mini-series about rebellion in a future where Earth is controlled by giant alien tripod machines, this still holds up as something great today
The first of two cheap Universal Soldier sequels made in Canada with Matt Battaglia inheriting Jean-Claude Van Damme’s role
he second of two cheap video-released sequels to the Jean-Claude Van Damme film. This has the novelty of featuring Burt Reynolds as the bad guy
The first studio film from Roland Emmerich, a loud, noisy action featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as Vietnam Vets resurrected as super-soldiers
The fifth of the Universal Soldier films reuniting both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, while being given a tough, brutal action punch by director John Hyams
Sequel to Roland Emmerich’s Universal Soldier, this brings back Jean-Claude Van Damme but otherwise substitutes a brain dead plot that has him facing an evil A.I.
The third film version of Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, this abandons much of the book. Not a terribly interesting effort, mostly noted as the directorial debut of Anglo-horror regular Freddie Francis
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Captivating and original film from Zach Cregger about a town that is affected by the mysterious disappearance of a class of children. One film where you definitely can’t predict where things are going