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.
Film somewhere between Counterstrike and The Running Man where convicts are controlled as avatars inside a live-action videogame. A difficult to believe premise that is pumped up with hyper-adrenalised action visuals
The film that inspired The Terminator! Michael Rennie plays a cyborg who travels back in time to prevent a machine-dominated future coming about, while being hunted by two killer androids sent back to stop him
Typical 1990s video release with mad scientist John Saxon creating zombie experiments amid entertainingly gooey meltdowns and a title intended to make you think this is a Hellraiser film
Pixar’s venture into sequels has resulted in works playing off past successes that are lesser than their originals. This came with much anticipation but it too must be counted as another disappointment
B-budget director Fred Olen Ray makes a Women in Prison film set in space. Known under several different names, this is another of Olen Ray’s bimbo pictures where he plants tongue well in cheek
One of several cheap Italian copies that were made after the success of Star Wars starring Richard Kiel as a peaceful intergalactic police inspector who is mutated into a killer humanoid
The eight and last of the films recut from episodes of tv’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. This starts to show the strain of trying to make what were originally designed as tv episodes work as feature films
A French film about a teenager who buys a demonic cellphone and is able to use it to enact comeuppances against the people in his life. A 976-Evil for the cellular era
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
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
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
Rowan Atkinson is a very funny man but try as I might I cannot get into these Johnny English films – they seem at best lame Austin Powers castoffs with gags designed for the single digit age range
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
This has the interesting idea of mind-controlled people being used as shooters in a live-action videogame. However, the rest of the film is a routine low-budget action film
A sequel to the teen spy comedy. This moves the action to England but amplifies everything else into inanely loud and noisy slapstick action
Luigi Cozzi directed quickie designed to copy the success of Alien. As with many Italian films of this era, it has largely been conceived around plentiful provision of gore and little else
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
Unsold tv pilot that was clearly made as a quick cash-in on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Produced by Quinn Martin, responsible for many classic 70s tv shows, who has simply rehashed his The Invaders
Sequel to The Asylum’s spendidly grotesque Hansel & Gretel, this pits the two characters against one another for contrived reasons to justify its title but is just cheaply made
The first of two cheap Universal Soldier sequels made in Canada with Matt Battaglia inheriting Jean-Claude Van Damme’s role
A cheesily bad alien invader film from the 1950s that seems to be trying to throw every element in SF of the era into the mix from mind controlling aliens to atomic monsters
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
Another of the low-budget films Bruce Willis made before his retirement, this has a plot about body-hopping assassins that has surprising similarities to Possessor
Divergent, the first entry in this Young Adult dystopian series, a poor man’s Hunger Games, failed the “I can’t hold any suspension of disbelief” test. This offers more of the same, plus lots of random effects sequences
Alien invasion tv movie that mostly consists of cliches borrowed from the then success of tv’s The X Files
Batman’s first screen appearance in a fifteen-chapter serial. This is a dull, impoverished adaptation, which sees Batman and Robin rewritten in the service of the US government fighting a Japanese invasion force
Tim Burton’s superlative duo of Batman films were wrecked after Joel Schumacher took up the director’s chair and turned the films into giant camp fests. Here he allows a madly overacting Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones loose as the villains
A remake of the work that has been cited as the first slasher film. This is less a horror film than a horror film that has been hijacked by a political agenda, delivered with a relentlessly loud and damning misandrist tone
Bruce Lee popularised the kung fu genre but then died. Welcome to the Brucespolitation phenomenon where for several years we had Bruce lookalikes appearing in copycat works. Several Bruce imitators appear here as his clones
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
The second version of the multiply filmed novel by Curt Siodmak about a malevolent brain in a tank. Its greatest distinction is featuring later to be First Lady Nancy Davis Reagan as the heroine
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
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
A low-budget film wherein a teenager falls under the influence of a mad scientist who drills open heads to implant mind control chips. This makes a beeline for gory splatter effects
The second of the theatrically released Doctor Who films intended to highlight the popularity of The Daleks, this is an improvement in that it dispenses with the first film’s buffoonish comedy elements
Another of Albert Pyun’s cyborg films set around a kickboxing competition where Pyun seems to have cut costs by using real competition footage with dramatically dull results
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
This was the third of the Cube films but has nothing new to add to the mix except a focus on the technicians monitoring the operation and the addition of gore effects
A mindless action film made for video as a copy of Universal Soldier in which FBI agent Bryan Genesse comes up against soldiers turned into programmed killers via implanted chips
Low-budget director Ulli Lommel makes a film about a teen who befriends an artificially intelligent rogue military helicopter in what becomes E.T. by way of Blue Thunder
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
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 completely ridiculous film that throws in an incomprehensible mix of an amok A.I.’s that takes over a stealth plane, UFOs, mind control and military conspiracy and proves badly made on every single count
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 real Grade Z film. A mind-boggling stew involving John Carradine conducting mad science experiments, technical gaffes aplenty, spy capers featuring Tura Satana and even M.A.S.H.‘s Wayne Rogers on script
This was the seventh of the 1960s Gamera films and one of the worst of the series. By now, the film is pitched entirely to juvenile audiences, while the effects are pitiful
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.
In the 1950s Bert I. Gordon specialised in cheap giant insect films. Here he takes H.G. Wells’ name in vain and jumps aboard the 1970s Animals Amok cycle but still makes another shoddy film about giant ants
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
One of Stephen King’s best books is given a new film workover by Blumhouse. Keith Thomas made a standout directorial debut with The Vigil, but this is a disaster, one of the worst of all King adaptations
Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero is hands down the funniest science-fiction book of all time; it is painful watching it rendered in the hands of Alex Cox who has only the budget and resources of an amateur film