The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The first and still the best version of the story. Made when The Phantom was a horror story rather than a weepie romance, everything from Lon Chaney’s performance to the amazing Gothic design and directorial set-pieces is classic
The best animated film Disney ever made, created as a work of art with animation set to classical music. The segments vary between abstraction, comic eccentricity and evocations of nightmare. The results are magical.
A screwball comedy with Jack Benny as a trumpeter send down from Heaven to Earth to blow the Last Trumpet who ends up getting distracted by a series of comic mishaps
The second film version of the story, lavishly remaking the classic 1925 Lon Chaney version in sound and colour. Alas, all this serves to do is stuff and mount the story. With the addition of a sympathetic backstory and cast with a wimpily diminutive Claude Rains, Chaney’s magnificently mad Phantom comes across like an indignant fox terrier
Made to exploit leftover sets from the 1943 Phantom of the Opera, this is a magnificent colour production that has Boris Karloff as an obsessive surgeon who fixates on a beautiful young opera singer
Big man Laird Cregar gained a sudden fame as the killer in The Lodger and was quickly repackaged as another psychopathic killer in this vehicle where he plays a mentally disturbed composer
This was a semi-sequel to Here Comes Mr Jordan featuring Rita Hayworth as the goddess Terpsichore descended to Earth to inspire a Broadway producer
A minor British ghost story about a composer who looks in and sees the lives of the inhabitants of a haunted house replayed. This comes with some modest effect
Live-action film from a Dr Seuss script about children imprisoned by a mad piano teacher. As to be expected from Seuss, this is gloriously madcap with extravagantly surreal set designs and nonsense choreogrphy
Hammer Films’ attempt to update the classic story went astray – the Paris opera becomes a dreary English repertory house and Terence Fisher misses the tale’s grandeur
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 first of Amicus’s horror anthologies. The stories are rehashes of five popular horror tropes, all united by Peter Cushing as the title doctor telling the fortunes of five passengers on a train carriage
Peter Watkins is the most underrated director of the 1960s – his films are fiercely anti-establishment attacks that come with an extraordinary incendiary charge. This mockumentary depiction of a near future where the government uses a rock star to manipulate the public rings even more true today
Following the success of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, this was the second of Amicus’s trademark horror anthologies with Burgess Meredith as a carnival barker showing people their fates
A film of legendarily bad proportions where a group of Country and Western singers end up in a haunted house. Despite casting some famous horror actors, this is more interested in its excruciating country performances
The third of The Beatles films, in this case an animated work that features likenesses of The Fab Four as they trip through some amazing nonsensical psychedelic visuals
Mind-spinning film spinoff of the tv series H.R. Pufnstuf, this plays out like The Wizard of Oz on hallucinogens
Film that feels construed to blend 60s rock films post The Beatles and an intergalactic trippiness post 2001: A Space Odyssey where alien try to abduct a rock band. From the producer of the James Bond films and the man who created The Monkees
The first dark adult fairytale. Before this, fairytales on film had been in the realm of Disney. This roots the familiar tale in an historical reality surrounded by the Black Death, The Inquisition and Anti-Semitism
Predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brian De Palma conducts a very funny parody of The Phantom of the Opera (and several other horror films) as a glitter rock musical
Animated film based on the original Belgian Smurfs comics made prior to the hit of the Hanna-Barbera series.
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
Steven Spielberg’s film about alien contact was every bit as big as Star Wars in 1977. The whole film is the equivalent of sitting gazing up at a starry sky wondering if we are alone and built up to the wondrous climactic appearance of the UFOs
One of the original genre parodies, a very silly and amateurish film that also manages to be occasionally quite funny. Three sequels and an animated tv series followed
A Hanna-Barbera film based around 70s rock group Kiss where they are cast as superheroes fighting a mad scientist who operates from an amusement park with an army of android duplicates
A real what-were-they-thinking turkey where someone had the idea of turning the Beatles’ album into a disco-era film starring The Bee Gees … In trying to contrive a plot around the songs and their surreally psychedelic lyrics, the film frequently makes no sense
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
Musician Neil Young directs a science-fiction film! I was hoping this would be another Repo Man, instead we get an incoherent mess that throws in a jumble of sf concepts and feels like it was made without a script
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
TV mini-series remake of The Phantom of the Opera starring Jane Seymour that rewrites and rearranges much of the story to negligible effect
Promisingly ambitious animated SF film that tries to catch some of the trippy qualities of Heavy Metal where the impressive quality of animation is let down by a juvenile story about a rock band in a post-holocaust future
Lightweight, rather silly effort where Lenny Von Dohlen’s home computer becomes sentient and the two compete for the love of neighbour Virginia Madsen
The first in a cluster of mostly terrible 80s films that tried to incorporate horror and rock music, this concerns a rock star sent to the electric chair after a killing spree who now appears to return from the dead
Forgotten 1980s obscurity about aliens come to Earth in search of rock music that feels like someone attempted to conduct a version of Grease for the Star Wars crowd. Filled with utterly excruciating slapstick humour and bland songs from bands that nobody has heard from again
A completely insane film that reads as a disco version of The Karate Kid via the 1970s Blaxploitation fad with the addition of mystical martial arts and played so over-the-top it defies belief
Deranged entry in the 80s fad for heavy metal horror films where a band are resurrected from the dead to play an all-important concert, while fighting off conservative townspeople and a very much alive Adolf Hitler
Film about a heavy metal star resurrected from the dead. This sets out spoofing fundamentalist paranoias about backwards masking but soon ends up all over the place and fails to take itself serously
One of Walter Hill’s finest films that sets out in search of the soul of blues music, featuring a superlative performance from Joe Seneca as an aging bluesman who wants back the soul he traded to The Devil for success
The world’s first Islamic horror film? A film filled with a constant profusion of weird imagery but otherwise baffllingly incomprehensible
Modest horror film of the 1980s where kids inadvertently open a demonic gateway. Like a juvenile version of Poltergeist, this comes with the bonus of some fairly good effects
A bad movie classic. A vanity project for Canadian heavy metal star/bodybuilder Jon-Mikl Thor who plays a heavy metal star who takes frequently his shirt off to pose while his band are killed by demonic forces (represented by the screen’s maybe worst ever puppet effects) as they try to record an album
An inanely awful film based on the Sheb Wooley song. This is a really lame copy of E.T. in which a young Neil Patrick Harris forms a band with the title alien
A collection of Michael Jackson short pieces, leading up to the 25 minute Smooth Criminal segment where he transforms into a godlike being. Fascinating in its bizarreness, largely a Michael Jackson ego trip
Completely obscure, this is fairly terrible on almost every level – an effort about a rock singer given the gift by an alien woman of a special frequency that creates peace when he sings. This would be a guaranteed bad movie classic if anybody else had ever heard about it
On the back of popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the Elm Street films, Robert Englund was cast in this version where the emphasis is on the slasher element, which works far better than you might think
A quirky hit that jumped aboard the 1980s popularity of time travel themes and laid into them with an appealingly offbeat eccentricity. The film that propelled Keanu Reeves onto become a star
Painfully unfunny vampire comedy from Cannon Films about a vampire teenager who becomes a rock star. This has one of the least credible premises I’ve ever seen in a film. Mostly it seems to have been conceived around placing various musicians of the day in acting roles with bizarre results
A majorly unfunny film about the arrival of aliens in Hawaiian shirts that do bad stand-up comedy routines and tell everybody’s embarrassing secrets
Lush tv mini-series with Charles Dance as the Phantom, this stands too much in the shadow of the then recent Lloyd Webber musical and its making The Phantom into a romantic figure as opposed to a horror icon
The sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where the first film’s humour gets lost amid repetition and blown up by a big-budget. William Sadler’s Death however proves a scene-stealer
The worst of Don Bluth’s animated films in which a young boy is sent on a quest to find a rooster that does Elvis impersonations
The first film from the inimitable Bill Plympton, a work of bizarre surrealist animation and strange satiric transformations as a man sets out on a journey to find the final line for a tune
Head-scratching Australian oddity in which a middle-aged man becomes possessed and suddenly able to sing with the voice of Billie Holliday
Tim Burton makes a film based on the old Topps bubblegum card series about Martian invaders, which becomes an affectionately goofy tribute to 1950s alien invasion cinema
An adaptation of the fairytale from Martin Gates, a largely unknown British animator. This embellishes the traditional telling of the story considerably
The Spice Girls conduct their own version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, a largely plotless film with them clowning around. Including appearances from aliens.
John Landis and Dan Aykroyd minus the late John Belushi revisit their cult classic but the reunion exercise smacks of poor judgement and emerges as a haphazard arrangement made only to exploit the appeal of the original
A reasonable arthouse hit, this tells the story of a cursed violin through five different periods of history
Dario Argento takes on The Phantom and welcomely rescues it from musical romance and returns it to being a horror film. Despite a beautifully mounted production, Julian Sands’ Phantom is too weak and wimpy
Gonzo comedy set in alternate world where a samurai-sword wielding Buddy Holly wanders through a post-apocalyptic present
Disney’s sequel to Fantasia comes weighted with a sense of its own self-importance – the first theatrical release of the new millennium. However, it fails to produce much that has the stature of the original
The Coen Brothers hilariously adapt The Odyssey into the Depression Era with George Clooney leading a trio of escaped convicts as he tries to return to his wife
Wacky offbeat film about a group that set out across post-apocalyptic terrain in search of a pirate radio signal
Fifth film in the series starring Warwick Davis as a malevolent leprechaun dispatching bizarre novelty deaths. In a bizarre novelty twist, this sets the leprechaun loose in the world of rap
Luc Besson produced film set among drum and bass dance culture in New York that follows an aspiring mute dancer (Mia Frye) who is asked to test a new technology that translates dance to music
One of the worst films ever made – a parody of The Blair Witch Project that mostly consists of various rappers (including Eminem and Vanilla Ice) incoherently improvising a series of monologues about said witch
A live-action film based on the animated tv series about a girl rock band who originally appeared in Archie comics, this gets buried under its own efforts to be cutely ironic
Animated film based on a book by Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White about a trumpet-playing swan
Another film spun off from a Disneyland attraction, this hardly inspiring effort features a Country and Western band made up of talking bears and follows them as they set out on a reunion tour.
Dance music duo Daft Punk collaborate with anime directors to create an animated space opera based on their album Discovery about an intergalactic rock band and their fight to save the galaxy
The best budgeted of Guy Maddin’s films, a renaissance of his familiar kitsch surrealism and silent movie homages
The long-planned film adaptation of The Phantom musical emerges as disaster under Joel Schumacher. The Phantom’s presence has all been watered down and the film exists as no more than a series of scenographic poses
TV mini-series that adapts eight Stephen King short stories. As with any anthology, the stories vary in quality but are generally quite reasonable
Film spinoff of the rock parody act headed by Jack Black. This emerges like i>The Blues Brothers recast with Cheech and Chong and delivers some occasionally surreal and amusing gags
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a motion-capture animated film about a young penguin who sets out to fulfill his dream of tap-dancing. This ends up being a film of unexpectedly winning charms
Full-length film made by the French electronic music duo Daft Punk based around the robot guises the band adopts. Resembles an extended student film and feels exactly like an SF version of The Brown Bunny
Rapper Snoog Dogg fails badly at branding himself as a horror anthology host, while the stories prove nothing to write home about either
The squeaky helium-voiced Chipmunks are brought to life via CGI in this live-action film, featuring the chipmunks causing chaos, cracking smart-ass one-liners and lots of pee and poop jokes. The results are excrutiating
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
An anthology of short anime pieces from five different directors. Episodes range from traditional anime and Cyberpunk to mind-expanding surrealism
One among the series of cheap video-released sequels to their classic animated films made during the 1990s/2000s, this is a prequel that offers up a Little Mermaid origin story
The first of the sequels to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Marginally less grating than the first film but that’s being relative – all the things that one hated the first time are back
Another South Korean copy of Ring with haunted pop songs instead of tv broadcasts. This offers interesting insight into the K-pop phenomenon but nothing particularly standout in the way of scares
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
George Miller had a charming and delightful hit with his dancing penguin film Happy Feet. He returns to make a sequel here that merely tries to repeat the same
An impressively designed Quebecois sf film where it is it is sad to see so much artistry lavished on something completely nonsensical and utterly woolly-headed in terms of its ideas
Aliens come to Earth and form a bluegrass band! The basic idea holds an undeniable appeal but the film seems caught between wanting to be a B-movie parody and an indie film that takes itself seriously
Fifth in a popular series of satiric Hong Kong animated films. Kicks in with an amusingly sarcastic bite that resembles a Beavis and Butt-Head in its story of a talking animal children’s choir but alas by about the halfway point takes itself seriously and starts to get mawkish and sentimental
Essentially a classical music version of Phone Booth with Elijah Wood trapped at a grand piano in front of a concert audience by a sniper. The results prove quite gripping
This has a winning concept – live-action roleplayers are forced to face a demon they accidentally conjure. Only it becomes a one-joke film with characters delivering mock mediaeval dialogue in falsettos
Fan parody/homage of H.P. Lovecraft that comes waist-deep in references and jokes. The film is an amateur effort made with a painful cheapness in some areas; nevertheless it is clear that the team are really into making it and their enthusiasm carries the film
An animated film produced by Guillermo Del Toro that draws on his Mexican heritage and Day of the Dead mythology. An amazingly colourful and happy film with one of the most unique design schemes ever
Outrageous New Zealand-made effort that fondly recalls the 1980s splatter comedies of Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson et al. This often feels like former teen metalheads looking back and puncturing the pretensions of their youth
The end of Western civilisation is surely upon us that studios have devoted multi-million dollar resources to making four of these films and that audiences flock to them despite universally terribly reviews. Ok so maybe I hated this one marginally less than the preceding three
A Korean retelling of the fairytale The Pied Piper of Hamelin that in mid-film suddenly morphs from a standard telling into an incredibly grim horror film. The results are really quite striking, not to mention pulled off with considerable assurance
Sweet and tender anime about a young girl who has a curse placed on her that causes her to lose her voice and how this actually allows everyone around her to voice things they don’t say.
The original animated series was one of the pop oddities of the 80s – part teen pop fantasy, part superheroics and secret identities. This live-action remake is an object lesson in how to strip all the fun elements out a series
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. This takes a big bite and tells an epic adventure. The only flaw is that the stop-motion is so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
Four guys on a stag night encounter a mysterious nightclub that features a woman with a mesmerising and unearthly song. The feature length expansion of the V/H/S segment Amateur Night, this is a film that is rather pleasingly driven by a series of wild and outlandish images
An appealingly charming anime about the friendship between a lonely boy and a mermaid. She gains legs whenever music is playing and they form a pop band together