The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Organ Harvesting refers to the illicit appropriation of human organs for donor purposes on the black market. While in the real world organs are regularly harvested from the dead for transplant surgery, supplies of some organs are limited. There is the Urban Legend that this is practiced on live persons in some Third World countries with stories of tourists drugged and waking up missing organs.
Horror and SF cinema is filled with various stories of such illicit schemes conducted in secrecy at hospitals or secret facilities. There are also various SF films that depict futures where such is commonplace or where people are grown as Clone copies for the purposes of being harvested.
For the most part a standard variant on the staple of people being stalked through the backwoods. Things are buoyed up by an effective twist but that fails to excuse the fact that almost nothing happens
Action film with Thomas Ian Griffith tracking the killers of his brother to Poland and uncovering an organ harvesting scheme run by Rutger Hauer
Film from low-budget director Rene Perez where a hitman who wears a beaten steel mask is pitted up against a hulking backwoods killer
Flush from the success of The Andromeda Strain and Westworld, Michael Crichton directed this medical conspiracy thriller, which returns to the fear of science themes that runs throughout his work
TV mini-series remake of the Michael Crichton medical thriller that pointlessly changes and over-extrudes a tight and effective original, while director Mikael Salomon adds absurd red herrings and keys away major surprises well in advance
A Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle set in a prison that becomes an interestingly stylised realm in a wild plot featuring serial killers and organ harvesting schemes
A Japanese horror film that winds a convoluted plot involving stolen corpses, a blackmarket in organ harvesting, split personality, twins and religious cults
Emilio Estevez is snatched into the future and pursued for his body by bounty hunter Mick Jagger in an SF film that makes no sense at all. A film more worth watching for some bizarrely awful performances
Cheap Cyberpunk action film that borrows the basics of Cyborg with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as android bounty hunter engaged in stopping corporate skulduggery
An ‘illustrated film’ – essentially comic-book panels with voiceover narration. The story about gods inhabiting a burned-out future is far more ambitious than can be crammed into the film
What should have been a modest conceptual SF story about people coming to discover the true nature of the world they live in is killed by being turned into an loud and over-inflated Michael Bay action vehicle
The third and last of the Monty Python films, a variety of skits that are variously outrageous and frequently leave behind all good taste
This has a similar scenario to Michael Bay’s The Island but also at 180 degree remove – where Bay was loud and bludgeoning, this approaches the idea as a subtle British childhood pastoral
Italian-made film centred around a haunted lake that sits just between earnest amateurism and promising ambition. Features a range of mysterious happenings that you leave you for some time wondering what is going on before these are pulled together in a surprise ending
Bailee Madison takes a drug that fakes death and wakes up at the morgue – only to discover that coroner Jerry O’Connell is running an organ harvesting operation
This has the flavour of From Dusk Till Dawn, a getaway thriller that does a mid-film morph into full horror territory as a gang of fleeing petty criminals stray into the lair of mad surgeon
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
This has the distinction of being the first film to depict cloning. An edgy conspiracy thriller where Senator Bradford Dillman wakes in a secret medical facility that clones important people
A German thriller about a newlywed couple in the US where the husband is abducted and the wife’s attempts to find him take her into the midst of an illicit organ harvesting operation
A Found Footage film where a group on a party weekend to Las Vegas call a brothel that promises to do anything – only to enter into full Hostel territory
This is supposedly an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Tell-Tale Heart but it throws out all semblance to the story and instead tells a possessed transplant limb tale
A blatant copy of Hostel featuring tourists caught aboard a train in Ukraine that runs an organ-harvesting operation
Gripping German thriller with a woman abducted and imprisoned in a car trunk. Like Buried, this takes place entirely inside the trunk with her using her phone to try to get help
A blatant copy of Hostel about tourists in Brazil being abducted into an organ harvesting scheme. Director John Stockwell seems distracted by filming diving scenes
Sequel fairly much in name only to Urban Legend and barely at all about urban legends, this has the amusing idea of taking place at a film school and features a number of sly asides. This alas befalls routine direction
The second theatrical spinoff from The X Files, a dismally dull entry where one wonders how the people who created one of the great tv shows of the 1990s got it all wrong