The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The world we live in exists in three-dimensions – the x and y axes on a flat surface make up the first two dimensions, while depth adds a third. Time is commonly referred to as a fourth dimension. Mathematics describe the possibility of far more dimensions than that. Fantastic cinema has run with that and created the idea of other dimensions as some kind of alternate reality.
Quite what other dimensions are in genre cinema is never clearly defined. As in Rod Serling’s classic opening narration for The Twilight Zone (1959-63), the fifth dimension appears to be simply a place where strange, unexplained things occur and no more details are offered than that.
Other dimensions can be places that experiments open up to unleash aliens or Lovecraftian entities. There can be strange Alternate Realities or simply different worlds and planets where people become trapped or venture into for adventures. Occasionally they can be other dimensions in the mathematical sense – places that have strange geometric and topographical landscapes.
An object lesson in how to create an instant cult film – exceedingly eccentric, a commercial failure at the box-office, it instantly receiving a fan clique – all without it ever being a particularly great film
Following on from his reworking of The Wizard of Oz in Tin Man, this is a tv mini-series where Nick Willing rather fascinatingly reinterprets Alice in Wonderland in SF terms
A banal David De Coteau directed kid’s film about two teens who find an arsenal of alien equipment and put the suits on to become superheroes
An interestingly odd film where a videographer looking for a story investigates homeless man Joe Manganiello’s claims to being a superhero, which may or may not be true
A fascinating word-of-mouth hit based on a YouTube series about the exploration of a labyrinth of extra-dimensional office rooms built on an eerily alien design scheme
Disney animation and Marvel Comics come together; Marvel loses and most of the comic-book is tossed out the window and this becomes a simple story about a boy and his robot story before settling into familiar sueprheroics
Rodrigo Gudiño, editor of Rue Morgue magazine, directs a horror film with strong Lovecraftian overtones about a portal opened at a mysterious cabin in the woods
Ben Wheatley has gained a cult following in recent years with films like Kill List and High Rise. Here he sets out to make a deliberately low-tech multiverse film that becomes a real head-scratcher
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
Adaptation of the Dr Seuss book made following the success of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The book is dragged down into noisy slapstick chaos, capped by a badly unrestrained Mike Myers as The Cat
Studio Ghibli anime in which a girl saves the life of a cat only to be drawn into a world of cats where a cat prince decides she will be his bride
Animator Ralph Bakshi jumps aboard the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? bandwagon with a toon film in which a Jessica Rabbit-like cartoon character is dragged into the real world whereupon she is played by Kim Basinger
The first sequel to Vincenzo Natali’s fine conceptual puzzlebox film. This expands out on the idea, having a cube that bends through time and space, and has a certain fascination if not as much as the original did
A no expectation adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams of the Witch-House from a director down the low-budget end of the spectrum that does some surprisingly modest things
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman gives us an utterly mangled version of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series that has little resemblance to the books, yet makes little sense if you haven’t read them
Anime where a mysterious other-dimensional stranger aids future rebels. This has a wonderfully ornate Gothic feel but an entirely confusing plot
Timur Bekmambetov’s sequel to Night Watch comes with a much better budget and the same wild visuals, although is slightly the lesser film
Halfway reasonable Stephen King adapted tv mini-series. This has been placed in the directorial hands of King’s worst adapter Mick Garris who at least holds his worst tendencies in check
Would be quirky, surrealistic indie film with lovers on the run in Las Vegas. Quentin Tarantino appears as the spirit of chance from an interdimensional swimming pool
Solid offering from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason that takes more than a few leaves from Hellraiser with a ghostsbusting team investigating occult happenings in an abandoned asylum
The first film from Mamoru Hosoda based on a tv series that was a blatant attempt to copy the Pokemon phenomenon and concerning cute creatures that live on the internet
One of the better films from Charles Band – an uncredited homage to Marvel’s Dr Strange. The film captures a wonderful atmosphere of esotericism and Jeffrey Combs is perfect as the sorcerer superhero
Forgotten, unsold tv pilot based on the Marvel Comics sorceror superhero. Unlike other Marvel tv properties of this era, this has an imaginativeness in its reach for esoteric spaces that favourably compares to the comic-book original
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
One among a handful of animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this conducts a passable telling of the origin story of the Sorcerer Supreme
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
Multi-director anthology about a series of mysterious portals that appear around the world, this creates a sense of something genuinely alien and otherworldly
A conceptually wild film about the use of a device that can contact the dead that winds in the use of Thomas Edison’s spirit phone, modern physics and multiverse theory in something uniquely different
Despite all the hate this received, I am maybe the only person out there that liked it. It is three-quarters of a good film that strips the Four of costumes and tells a character-driven story about people dealing with powers
Film spun out from a web series. Robert Englund as a mad psychiatrist who creates a machine that helps people confront their phobias that somehow opens a doorway to creatures from another dimension
Passable film about the accidental opening of a portal that transports a laboratory to an alien world teeming with monstrous creatures
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
After the cult success of Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon, Jeffrey Combs and most of the principals returned with a further H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. More outrageously over-the-top splatter effects but this is somewhat the lesser
An anthology of short anime pieces from five different directors. Episodes range from traditional anime and Cyberpunk to mind-expanding surrealism
From Bill Rebane, a film about a rampaging giant spider (having emerged from a black hole we are told). This has a bad movie reputation, although on most accounts it emerges as strictly average
The concluding chapter in the trilogy of Godzilla anime films. This reintroduces two familiar monsters but takes a long time to build to the monster bash we have come to see
Low-budget film about a woman who inherits a British country estate to find someone has opened a portal to unleash entities. One of several low-budget films of late to appropriate Lovecraft’s name
A festival of H.P. Lovecraft short films held in Vancouver, which display a quality and faithfulness to the original texts that far outstrips the professional efforts being made elsewhere
The film that put the name of Clive Barker on the map. A work of considerable imagination where Barker delves into forbidden pleasures and fuses the film with S&M imagery for the memorable creations of the Cenobites
A valiant attempt to remake Clive Barker’s glistening and brilliant original that only emerges as a better made version of one of the sequels. This has a disappointing tameness that would never have inspired a series of sequels
The ninth of the
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
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences
The third of the trilogy of animated films from Arcana Studios based around the adventures of a young H.P. Lovecraft
A film with Lovecraftian overtones about a group at the Miskatonic University doing research into time travel that proceeds to go wrong, while unleashing mysterious monsters
Phantasm series director Don Coscarelli makes a mind-expanding effort that seems a conceptual collision between Donnie Darko, Limitless, a slacker version of Supernatural and Dr Strange
Dutch film involving action between this and a parallel Earth. Much of this is shot First Person Shooter perspective, while the director provides an accomplished level of mass destruction CGI effects all by himself
A David DeCoteau film about a giant alien eyeball that causes people to become erotically aroused. The chessiness of the premise is hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
Big screen revival of the children’s lost world tv series that is now a loud and excruciating Will Ferrell vehicle that reduces the original into lowbrow farce. A majorly unfunny bomb on every level
Following the success of The Lego Movie, where he was a scene-stealing supporting character, Batman gets a whole Lego film to himself. Less a Batman film than it is a parody of Batman
A Found Footage film that has fun uniting wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning
One of the best children’s films from Charles Band, an utterly bizarre effort about a world through a magic mirror ruled by talking ducks
Sequel to the delightfully madcap Magic in the Mirror set in a world of talking ducks
The one moment of triumph from director William Girdler who takes a work that sits just on the threshold of schlock and transforms into something incredibly eerie with an injection of H.P. Lovecraft and American Indian mysticism
This feels like a reworking of late 70s/early 80s sf films like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the film is based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failure as science-fiction is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
Frank Darabont delivers one of the best Stephen King adaptations where the story of people at siege in a supermarket from unseen creatures in a mystery fog outside becomes a study in fear and prejudice. With one of the great unforgettable endings
Resident Evil series director Paul W.S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich return with an adaptation of another popular videogame series
This was the fourth animated film from Pixar and is a winning and delightful Maurice Sendakian tale about the monsters in the closet and their friendship with a young girl
Pixar’s creative decline has been the point they started making these sequels to their hits. This is a disappointing prequel to Monsters, Inc. that largely recycles the cliches of the Revenge of the Nerds films and seems lacking in any of the wacky humour or moments of cuteness we expect of a Pixar film
A Young Adult fantasy adaptation that fells a Harry Potter wannabe repackaged with the brooding teen romanticism of the Twilight series, all under a director whose indifferent handling fails to animate any of the material
This film adaptation of the videogame is a lot of fun. The plot is a rehash of Enter the Dragon but the film offers up wall-to-wall action and exotic creatures. A directorial debut for Paul W.S. Anderson
A reboot of the film series adapted from the popular videogame. Produced by James Wan, this emerges as a kinetic and enjoyable effort that has clearly designed to introduce an ongoing franchise
Sequel to the Mortal Kombat film. While the first film was fun, here anything resembling plot has been stripped away to concentrate on fight scenes such that the film blurs into a single shapeless action sequence
The second of the Mortal Kombat animated films, this continues into another tournament, introducing a bewildering array of characters from the games amid a high degree of violence and bloodshed
A sequel to the 2021 revival of the film series based on the videogame and a much more satisfying film than its predecessor. The first film was all origin story, but this plunges us into the actual kombat itself
An animated film revival of the Mortal Kombat videogame franchise. This does a quite reasonable reworking of the basics, while leaving you blown away with the ultra-violent excesses of the action
In a seeming competition for the most ridiculous killer shark of all time, Z budget director Mark Polonia gives us a film about a mummy shark revived from an Egyptian pyramid
A very strange film where widow Adrienne Barbeau finds an amnesiac Keir Dullea on a Greek island who shows mysterious abilities and may have come from the future
An amazing breakout hit from Russia, a film that is busy to the point of overcrowding with ideas and its’ director’s visual excess but delivers the goods in ways that make your jaw drop
TV mini-series that adapts eight Stephen King short stories. As with any anthology, the stories vary in quality but are generally quite reasonable
Quirky and wittily clever film from Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube, where two characters wish themselves into a blank white void filled with literally nothing
Giant mecha robots beating the crap out of giant monsters – what’s not to like? In comparison to the Transformers films, Guillermo Del Toro looks to find the soul of the robot jock – in essence, Transformers for grown-ups
Pacific Rim wasn’t Guillermo Del Toro’s best film but it was a fun attempt to imagine giant Japanese mecha robots battling giant monsters. This is a sequel but without Del Toro it is reduced to no more than one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films
Cult film from Don Coscarelli that takes place in a funereal twilight world and is filled with images of wild surrealism. Not a lot makes sense but the film is meant to operate on the logic of a dream. Several sequels followed.
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
The third of Don Soscarelli’s Phantasm films reunites many of the regulars and goes some way towards offering explanations for everything
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
One of the less successful, nevertheless underrated John Carpenter films where he pays tribute to Nigel Kneale in a conceptually mind-boggling mix of deviltry and quantum physics
As part of the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films, Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s unfathomable but undeniably creepy internet horror is reworked as a standard teen film
This was the first of two sequels to the Wes Craven scripted Pulse, the English language version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intensely spooky film about ghosts from the internet
Charles Band returns to H.P. Lovecraft and conducts a low-budget remake of From Beyond, which he had memorably overseen back in the 80s with Stuart Gordon
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are resurrected in a new animated film that feels like a watered-down fix designed for Ritalin-deprived youth
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
The Marvel onslaught continues with this resurrection of a martial artist superhero character from the 1970s. Amid the mostly ho-hum MCU offerings of the 2020s, this becomes an energised action vehicle
One of the best of all filmed videogame adaptations. Christophe Gans creates a creepy and unworldly atmosphere, along with a series of genuinely outlandish creature effects
Dull and unimaginative Silent Hill sequel that only revisits what went before. The first film had an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere but the sequel reduces everything to no more than pop-up Clive Barker
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have become must-watch directors in the last decade. This film, which was shot in their apartment during Covid lockdown, becomes the ultimate conspiracy theory rabbit hole
Film that seems to be trying to cram in as many exploitation elements as possible from UFOs to spree killers, zombies, Women in Prison and rock’n’roll
The title and the description of a space station crew dealing with a mutating runner duck gives the expectation of something wacky – what we get is more like a variant on Dark Star, a comedy set around the boredom of life on a space station and a 1970s era episode of Doctor Who
The animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved an unexpected success. This sequel builds on that ups the artistic quality of the original to something quite extraordinary
Sony, the holders of the Spider-Man copyright, squeeze more out of the property with a madcap animated offering that mixes up a host of alternate takes on Spider-Man in what visually resembles an explosion at a pop art exhibition
Sony’s Spider-Man franchise ingeniously competes with Marvel’s shared universe by bringing all their previous incarnations of Spider-Man together
The first film to be adapted from a videogame and inauspiciously one of the worst. This is a film made on a decent budget that seems to have set out to be as stupid and brainless as possible
The Christopher Reeve Superman films started superbly but became wrecked by the producers’ insistence on the insertion of comedy element. Here they turn their attentions to Superman’s cousin Kara whose screen debut is derailed by a horrendously overacting Faye Dunaway
Shot back-to-back with the first Christopher Reeve film, this then became a mess behind the scenes. The end result emerges fairly well with the show dominated by the magnificent Phantom Zones villains and giving depth to the Superman-Lois relationship
The original version of Superman II became mired in problems over the firing of director Richard Donner. After the rediscovery of the original footage, Donner was able to go offer up a restored version. Seeing the storylines the way they were meant to be and Marlon Brando’s original scenes as Jor-el make for a work that is superior in every way
This is where the modern comic-book superhero began on screen. A film that is almost completely successful in banishing campy silliness and taking itself seriously, allowing Superman to fly with magnificent effects. Christopher Reeve shines as the ultimate boy scout
James Gunn’s almost completely successful reboot of the cinematic Superman, the first film perhaps that comes with a total confidence in the comic-book source and where Gunn is not afraid to be goofy
Spinoff of the 1990s animated Superman tv series, made as tie in for Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns Some good action, negligible use of the characters unlike the DC Universe Animated Original Movies that began the following year, at best a routine episode of the tv series
This adapts What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?, the highly acclaimed graphic novel that was written as a response to 9/11. Unfortunately, I am not sure condensing the story into a 76 animated film fully does justice to the complex debate of the original