The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Plantlife refers to plants – ranging from trees and flowers, vines and pods, to fruit and vegetables, as well as seeds and pollens – and the way they are depicted in fantastic cinema.
Beginning with the influential John Wyndham novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) and various film adaptations of it, the killer plant has been a regular part of the Monster Movie, while the seed pod featured prominently in the Body Snatchers film. The Environmentalist and the Nature’s Revenge films showed plants, amid the rest of nature, often taking revenge against humanity principally for pollution of the environment.
Science-Fiction and Fantasy feature various plant-based species of different degrees of sentience, most notedly the Ents in The Lord of the Rings. Assorted superhero films feature plant-based characters such as Groot or those that can control plants such as Swamp Thing and Poison Ivy.
Director Freddie Francis had had great success making several of the Amicus horror anthologies then went independent to made another Amicus-styled anthology here with mixed results
Not a time travel film as the title leads you to expect but a Chinese copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark where you expect they were trying to call it ‘tomb raiders’. The director is also the production designer leading to a gorgeously designed film but also one of constant action postures almost entirely lacking in substance
One of the strangest film homages one has come across – an almost complete scene-for-scene remake of Jaws but with the shark substituted by a killer tree being hunted through a park by rangers
Low-budget Charles Band produced film that has entertainment value for its cheesily absurd creature effects and an amazing cast line-up
Acclaimed as one of the worst films ever made, this has a legendary bizarreness that has made it a cult film, everything from the ridiculousness of its dialogue and effects to the cast that seems made up of unskilled amateurs
Forgotten and not terribly interesting B movie about an expedition to the Caribbean in search of a missing explorer encountering a mad scientist engaged in experiments involving native sacrifices and local fungi
Visually extraordinary film set in an environmentally devastated future, this place enormous creativity into depicting a strange, very alien world
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet
One of the most intensive and exciting action films of recent with humanity engaged in a furious battle with plants and killer robots
Behind the lurid title, this concerns a mad scientist sacrificing women to a plant in his basement … This came out the same year as Hammer Films burst onto the English horror scene and by comparison is a plodding affair with no greater ambition than being a 1940s Bela Lugosi cheapie