The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The musical is a form of entertainment where a dramatic story is interwoven with songs. Characters on screen frequently burst out into song, which is almost always accompanied by dance. The songs are usually an expression of their feelings or a celebration. As opposed to opera, which does the same, the musical uses songs in a more popular as opposed to classical idiom.
The musical film was drawn from the popularity of the form on Broadway and other venues – the earliest musicals of the sound era were simply taken direct from Broadway shows. The genre’s peak was from the beginning of the sound era though the 1950s but it had largely died away by the end of the 1960s, although musicals are still made. The musical is still alive and flourishing in Bollywood Cinema that manages to wind songs and dance routines into almost every film made.
The musical is an inherently fantastical form, although there are surprisingly few examples that intersect with genre material. Usually when they do, it is usually an eccentric and offbeat experiment – the most popular example of this is probably The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Bollywood film that is a blatant copy of Back to the Future with the young hero going back in time to prevent his parents from divorcing. Lame comedy routines but some extremely colourful song and dance numbers
The first film from South Park‘s creator Trey Parker, a willfully absurd musical based on the story of a true-life cannibal. Amateurish but worth seeing by completists
From Irwin Allen, the creator of Lost in Space etc, a tv version of Alice in Wonderland, conceived as an all-star musical that comes out as ponderous and leaden in Allen’s hands
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a rock musical about a war between a gaudily exotic Heaven and Hell. A full-length expansion of Bousman’s earlier short film
Genre-bending film that mixes B movie space opera cliches with rock’n’roll and a David Lynch-ian sense of surrealism. Interesting but the film left me scratching my head trying to get a handle on it
This claims to be the first zombie musical. Surprisingly enough, it isn’t. A cute idea but you have the sense the only musical the filmmakers had seen beforehand was High School Musical
As a follow-up to Holy Motors, Leos Carax returns with of all things a musical. As might be expected of Carax, this is a wildly surrealistic film, not the least of which is one of the characters is a singing puppet
A genre-melding oddity that starts as an earnest recreation of a 1950s rock‘n’roll movie, before introducing a series of bizarre mutations and some fascinating mid-film twists
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings
Highly enjoyable Canadian-made parody of bad 1950s B movies that throws in everything from alien invaders to zombies and splatter. And is a musical to boot!
The film adaptation of a hit musical from Alan Jay Lerner and Fredreick Loewe in which Gene Kelly discovers love in a village that exists outside of time in the Scottish highlands
The first film from the great Alan Parker, a 1920s gangster film but where the entire show is played out with kids, which include a young Jodie Foster. Regarded as a classic by many, this is a one-gimmick film dependent on kids (not) being able to play a complex range of adult emotions
This was Hollywood’s first film featuring an all-Black cast, a musical in which enjoys from both Heaven and Hell come down to engage in a war over a man’s soul
The Arthurian legends become the basis of this filmed version of a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. On screen with a name cast, the film is slow and stodgy
A Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that has gained a classic status. On the other hand, it doesn’t resonate so well today in its story about the redemption of a wife-beater.
The film version of the smash Andrew Lloyd Webber musical phenomenon was widely ridiculed. Seen, it is a colourful and absorbing entity and by no means as bad as its rap gives it
Adaptation of a children’s book by James Bond creator Ian Fleming concerning a magical flying car. This is clearly trying to be another Mary Poppins and has been mounted as a lavish musical
TV movie version of the oft-filmed Charles Dickens tale featuring Kelsey Grammer as a very theatrical Scrooge. This tells the story as a musical but also manages to be surprisingly faithful to the original
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
Musical where an ordinary guy sells his soul to become a star baseball player. Choreographed with exuberance by the great Bob Fosse, including a seduction number that proved controversial for the era
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
An indescribable, completely insane Southern road movie about soul collectors. Somewhere between The Dukes of Hazzard as redone by Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino and the Southern blues film Crossroads
Darren Lynn Bousman, the director best known for the Saw sequels, makes a musical about a circus set in Hell through which three damned souls pass, enacting updated versions of various of Aesop’s Fables
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
This gets the nonsensical absurdity of the original Doctor Dolittle stories far more than the Eddie Murphy version. On the other hand, this was the era of Mary Poppins and this is made as a lumbering musical
Guy Maddin’s reinterpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a ballet and silent movie is an extraordinarily creative work while remaining far more faithful to the original story than many other film versions do
Wackily funny SF musical with Jeff Goldblum, Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey as aliens who land in the San Fernando Valley. Directed by Julien Temple with a giddily effervescent silliness
A rare Bollywood venture into science-fiction – a completely madcap android intelligence/amok film that features some wildly imaginative action scenes, all set amid typical Bollywood song and dance/romance numbers
Woody Allen makes a musical. It is Allen in a much lighter mood than he was in the early 1990s and the film comes with some appealingly eccentric and often downright surreal touches
A witty musical satire set in a future USA that is under a fundamentalist dystopia concerning a revolution led by assorted leftist activists, drag performers and artists
This film version of the massively popular Broadway musical was a miserable flop. The musical is a minimalist one but the film has replaced all of that with literalisations that kill the effect
One of Francis Ford Coppola’s earliest films as director, a musical where Fred Astaire procures a pot of gold and makes a deal with a leprechaun
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
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
A beautifully shot b/w homage to exploitation films that feels like a 1950s rock‘n’roll musical injected with a host of gonzo elements including aliens, UFOs and the resurrected dead
The second of the Muppet films made when Jim Henson was alive and one of the best, this bubbles with a double level of sly grown-up humour that many of the later post Henson entries miss
Completely madcap film from Takashi Miike, a black comedy about a family who run a guesthouse where the guests keep dying. This comes replete with musical numbers and Claymation sequences
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
A film based on the album by Finnish symphonic metal group Nightwish that takes place inside the allegorical mental terrain of a dying rock star. This collapses into the over-inflated amateur symbolism of a music video
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
This is possibly the most bizarre entry in the history of the cinematic Superman – a filmed adaptation of Superman Broadway musical. This has to be seen to be believed
Bollywood SF film that is like a version of Shyamalan’s aliens film Signs with a few dashes of The Mouse That Roared, all played as a comic farce with much singing and dancing
Joker was a huge hit with Joaquin Phoenix winning an Academy Award for his role. This sequel emerged to very mixed reception, partly due to its rejection of the first film and then heading off to become a musical
This was one of the first US films to depict the future. It is essentially Metropolis having been remade as a Broadway musical with an emphasis on comedy
Don Bluth conducts animated remake of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical memorably incarnated with Yul Brynner. Now the story comes with the addition of fantasy elements
This is the Bollywood version of E.T.. That is if one can imagine an E.T. with singing, dancing and romantic scenes. A simplistic but popular hit that spawned several sequels
A colorful and entertainingly absurd musical adaptation of Al Capp’s popular satirically absurd comic-strip set in a parody of backwoods USA. Filled with some inspired nonsense
Disney’s original The Little Mermaid was an enormously fresh film. This is the live-action remake that came out amid much controversy and is inevitably a lesser shadow of the original.
Director Stanley Donen conducts a star-studded musical adaptation of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s children story about an innocent alien prince come to Earth but with ponderous results
Roger Corman’s no-budget comedy about a killer plant is remade as a multi-million dollar musical with top-drawer effects. Missing is the original’s black comedy but this has many appealingly eccentric delights of its own
Film based on the true-life Suffolk Strangler. The filmmakers have uniquely interviewed the residents of the community affected and composed these into a musical, not to mention a quasi-mockumentary
Stodgy, bloated musical remake of the 1937 classic about the discovery of a lost valley in the Himalayas. The film dies an ungainly death with a cast awkward in ill-fitting costumery
Very strange Polish film about two mermaid sisters who become a novelty stripper act. Director Agnieszka Smoczynska gives the film a provocative charge, along with a series of surreal musical numbers
Disney classic that is mostly a series of dance and effects sequences strung together without any real plot nevertheless is conducted with a dizzying absurdism and perfect charm that never wears out its welcome
Mary Poppins was one of the greatest of all Disney live-action films, made with nonsensical charm and has become a much loved favourite. As part of the ongoing firesale that involves resurrecting almost all of their properties, this is a sequel. Its an exacting replication/homage to the original but that is the problem – it is a recapturing rather than seems to create its own sparkle
The first and best of the Muppet films where Jim Henson spins them off onto the big screen with charm and sly humour
Surprisingly fun revival of the Muppets that reboots the series after the insipid entries of the last few years and succeeds by going back to recapture the sly double-level of humour that Jim Henson patented
The Muppets were successfully revived in The Muppets; this is a lesser follow-up that leaves us with a feeling that the creative team used their best ammunition first time around
The third Muppets film, the last Jim Henson would be involved with, this shows them putting on a Broadway show
This holds the distinction of being the world’s first gonzo zombie film – oh and the first zombie musical too. Not many zombies (or nude bodies), the song lyrics are occasionally amusing but the film’s humour is schoolboyish, and the effort amateurish on the whole
Romantic musical in Barbra Steisand discovers psychic powers and her reincarnated past lives. Despite being a flop, this is a film of oddball charms and features an effervescent Stresiand
Disastrous tv movie version of the classic musical based on The Princess and the Pea
Dennis Potter was the greatest writer to ever work in televisio. This mini-series is one of his most celebrated works, featuring characters bursting out into lip-synched Golden Oldie songs, making biting contrast to their downbeaten lives
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
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
Widely rididculed attempt to market Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as a teen pop film by way of The Blue Lagoon. A mind-spinning film that seems to have no limit on how silly it is prepared to be, including numerous anachronistic contemporary pop culture in-jokes and fourth-wall breaking gags
Troma film that has maybe the silliest movie title ever. This sets out to be so persistently moronic and wilfully offensive that it eventually attains a delirious absurdity
The final film from the great Robert Altman set backstage at a radio variety show as an angel of death wanders through
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman conducts a futuristic Gothic rock opera. A film of constant posturings where Bousman demonstrates remarkably little affinity for either music or sf … a musical that feels made by people who are tone deaf
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
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
Musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring Albert Finney as Scrooge, this is made on a big budget, leading to an extravagant and often over-produced film
A light whimsical short story about a daydreamer is turned into a bloated and ponderous vehicle for the musical and comedy set-pieces of the perpetually wet-eared Danny Kaye
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
A not uninteresting sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this has widely divided reactions among fans
Sing had the cute idea of American Idol-like competition conducted with talking animals. This equally likeable sequel expands the scale of things and takes the show to the talking animal equivalent of Las Vegas
I have lowered expectations of animated films these days but was surprised what an effortlessly engaging film this is. Essentially a version of American Idol but recast with talking/singing animals, it is a film that bursts with confidence and its own natural energy from every pore
One of the most extraordinary works ever made for tv. From the pen of Dennis Potter, a mini-series that blends film noir, meta-fiction and autobiography
A musical adaptation of Cinderella from the Sherman Brothers, behind the hit of Mary Poppins
The live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White comes surrounded by controversy on every side and served to make it a critical and box-office flop that left doubt over the future of the Disney remake industry
Bizarre musical monster bash with singer Harry Nilsson as Dracula’s son and Ringo Starr as Merlin. A film that seems to have no real clue what it is doing beyond friends having a good time. Nilsson makes surely the screen’s least threatening Dracula, while this is the worst film from the usually great Freddie Francis
Imagine A Christmas Carol retold as a bromance where Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present abandon hauntings and become besties
A slasher musical??? The mind does a double takes trying to process the incongruity of the genre mash-ups. That said, this works exceedingly well – neither compromising on the slasher aspects, yet equally delivering some clever and witty musical numbers
French animated film that is about as far from children’s entertainment as it is possible to get – a mordantly dark comedy that operates in similar territory to The Addams Family in its tale of a family that operates a shop selling items of despatch to the suicidally minded
Tim Burton takes on the film version of the Stephen Sondhiem musical about a murderous barber, featuring Johnny Depp in the title role. But disappointingly, Burton still makes the same film he always does
Shion Sono is a director who has gained cult acclaim in recent years. This astonishes with the brashness of his approach, set among the street gang warfare of the near future where all of the dialogue is delivered in rap. On the other hand, the film lacks the budget to sustain such energy
Ken Russell’s adaptation of The Who’s hit album is filled with gloriously mad, glitter rock excess and wildly over the top acting in the ways that only Russell ever managed
Animated film about a talking and singing monkey from Cuba that travels to the US on a quest
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
The second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. This essentially operates as Wizard of Oz fanfiction and substantially wrenches the characters and backstories from the 1939 film out of shape to write its own story
The first half of a two-part adaptation of the hit Broadway musical that is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, showing The Wicked Witch’s origin story
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life
An indisputable classic fantasy … a gorgeous sparkling fantasy that made full use of Technicolor in an era dominated by black-and-white and is told in such bold and earnestly heartfelt tones that it becomes the nearest we have to a piece of genuine American mythology
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a cult classic. This offers a Willy Wonka origin story but seems to be far too nice a work that is missing the dark bite of the original
Bizarre disco fantasy that could have only been conceived out of 80s cocaine madness. Olivia Newton-John is a Greek muse come to Earth to inspire the building of a roller disco. Frequently cited as a bad movie classic, this has mind-boggling scenes that have to be seen to be believed