The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
In fantastic cinema, portals are doorways that lead to somewhere else. A portal need not be a literal doorway – it can be a gate, a window, a cave, a hole in the ground, a Time or Space Warp, or else a stargate, even a cupboard as in the Narnia films. Stories are rarely about the portal in itself but almost always about the adventure that can be found on the other side. In horror films, they can be doorways that let something else into this world.
Often portals are hidden and the key to open them or the map to their whereabouts is something that is greatly sought. Or else they can simply be discovered forgotten or unnoticed amid some corner of the everyday.
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
A horror anthology with a mordant sense of humour with Clancy Brown doing a great turn as an octogenarian mortuary attendant who tells several stories of the bodies he has tended
Drawing very clear influence from Clive Barker and Saw, this is a delve down into perverse fetish, gateways to Hell and bizarre hallucinations. After watching the film through twice, I still remain confused to what it was all about
Following Tin Man and Alice, another of Nick Willing’s ingenious rewritings and rationalisations of classic children’s tales in science-fiction terms. Here the essentials of Peter Pan are transported to another planet
This is a horror film that comes with one of the most captivating and original build-ups of any film seen of recent. A man is hired to simply watch a locked doorway – only to then finding things moving
An Asylum mockbuster released at the same time as Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., this involves time travel mission into the prehistoric past that accidentally brings a dinosaur back to the present
Jean Cocteau’s beautiful modernisation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice updated to post-War France
This sets out to offer a dark take on Alice in Wonderland but leaves you scratching you head. At most the Wonderland characters take a lot of drugs, along with a haphazard mix of scenes from the book cheaply shot
Variation on the Groundhog Day timeloop theme, this has two people trapped on the same day at a wedding. Of all the copies, this is a delight that has a really hilariously madcap creativity
From Isaac Ezban in his English-language debut, a cleverly and pleasingly contorted film where a group of friends discover a mirror that leads to a parallel timeline
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Strange Canadian children’s film about a boy who goes bald and is then given a peanut butter solution that causes wild uncontrolled hair growth
Chuck Jones, the director of numerous Warner Brothers cartoons, adapts a popular children’s book that comes with a dizzying array of surreal visuals and puns
Australian animation about a boy’s adventure on an island amid pirates, inventors and magic creatures that in its better moments suggests a collision between Peter Pan and Pufnstuf. Unfortunately, the film is made with a budget that must have been well within four figures
Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that doesn’t always make sense but pulls its effects off flawlessly
It has become an overused phrase in this site’s critical arsenal to say “yet another 70s/80s remake that is inferior to the original”. The 1982 Poltergeist was one of the great ghost stories of the era; this hits all the beats and with bigger effects but fails to find any of the haunted mood of the original
A story about an apprentice at a mysterious company that deals with magic, this could well serve as a fix for those wanting something more of the Harry Potter franchise
Produced by Bloody Disgusting, an anthology from different directors about a series of mysterious alien portals that appear around the world
An Argentinean film where the four members of a girl rock band are forced to deal with a zombie outbreak
A film about a possessed refrigerator!
Second half of the two-part animated adaptation of The Death of Superman, which depicts the aftermath where Metropolis is puzzled over the appearance of four impostors all claiming to be the real Superman
A sequel to R.I.P.D. that tells an origin story of how the sheriff character played by Jeff Bridges in the original became an afterlife enforcement officer
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are resurrected in a new animated film that feels like a watered-down fix designed for Ritalin-deprived youth
Amnesiac persons wake up in a bunker filled with monstrosities. Sort of H.P. Lovecraft served up as a low-budget variant on Resident Evil
An animated film revival of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? This also makes an misguided attempt to build a shared universe among assorted Hanna-Barbera characters
A kid makes the discovery that his father is a superhero and he and his friends amuse themselves with the cool gadgetry in his secret headquarters, before being required to defend it against a villain
Michael Winner directs a film about a sinister apartment building but his typical crude and heavy-handed style fails to conjure anything remotely scary
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
Adaptation of the superhero comic is played for comedy, making it very different in emphasis to the other films in the DCEU. The boy into man transformation is played up as essentially Big with superpowers – with appealing results
Spookily effective Japanese ghost story about a mother’s pilgrimage around a series of shrines to raise her daughter’s spirit from the dead
An anthology of short anime pieces from various directors, including creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the cult creator of Akira. The four episodes vary from historical to fantasy to futuristic warfare and, as with any anthology, vary in quality from the okay to the watchable
Action film made at the height of the popularity of tv’s The X Files with Jack Scalia fighting off the Men in Black
Live-action adaptation of the one of the great early comic-strips Little Nemo in Slumberland, a work that was ground-breaking for its experimental innovation
The first film was vaguely passable but this is an agonising piece of commercial product that has reduced everything to lazy slapstick sequences, cutsie laughs and smartass lines played for the single-digit age groups
Live-action version of the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. In its favour, it is at least slickly polished and comes with far less in the way of irritating smartass humour that one expected
An animated revival of The Smurfs. This was greeted with a very negative reception. With a massive celebrity voice line-up packed into almost any corner of the film the casting director can manage
Sequel to the hit videogame adaptation, this offers up fairly much the same mix of elements as before – a cutely anthrompomorphic creature and Jim Carrey going to rafter-rattling excess
Third of the Sonic the Hedgehog films and surprisingly far more entertaining than you expect from such a lightweight formulaic film
After a disastrous fan reception of its initial trailer, the film of the videogame arrives on screen. The surprise is that for such a zero expectation film and one that defies the engagement of any of your braincells it is as much fun as it is.
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
The first of Roland Emmerich’s special effects epics. Emmerich rehashes Erich von Daniken’s Ancient Astronauts theories but casts it as a planetary adventure on an epic canvas with surprisingly entertaining results
James Gunn’s almost completely successful reboot of the cinematic Superman, the first film that comes with a total confidence in the comic-book source and where Gunn is not afraid to be goofy
Beautifully made anime from Makoto Shinkai about a young girl and a three-legged chair on a quest to close a series of portals across Japan and prevent unimaginable chaos emerging
Film spinoff from the animated tv series Teen Titans Go! This hits in with an hilairous barrage of one-liners wickedly spoofing the superhero genre and jokes at DC Comics canon
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
A low-budget mockbuster from The Asylum designed to jump aboard the bandwagon of Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder
Highly enjoyable Terry Gilliam film about a young boy who joins a group of dwarves on a series of adventures though time
Modest B-budget SF film with scientists opening a time portal and becoming caught up in a future war between humanity and mutants
Indie film that seems a mix of A Field in England and The Picnic at Hanging Rock. The first half contains some very realistic scenes of people getting wasted on drugs but the second as characters set out along a path in the woods that leads to Hell proves frustratingly elusive
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
Australian film in which Kodi Smit-McPhee heads through a time portal to save a polluted world resulting in a time paradox that ties back to his childhood. This had promise but badly lets down on its premise
Irish horror about a couple who inherit a house with faerie creatures at the end of the garden
Low-budget independently made film that manages to effectively use a singe warehouse location to suggest a gateway to Hell
The third of the Venom films, which has become one of the worst of the modern Marvel spinoffs. By this point any pretence that the films are taking themselves seriously has been long forgotten
The directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura. A film premised on the idea of mashing the John Woo-styled gangster film up with the gore-drenched George Romero zombie film.
Third of the V/H/S films, all horror anthologies in the Found Footage style. While the other two were fairly hit and miss, this is extremely good. Each of the four stories sits among the very best episodes among the current crop of multi-director horror anthologies
An entry from the classic 1980s era of the zombie film about zombies that emerge from a cursed tv set
Sequel to The Asylum mockbuster version. Sequelising H.G. Wells is a daunting prospect and not too surprisingly this throws much of Wells out and creates its own film, which is undercut by a typical Asylum low budget
Adapted from the videogame, this is a third hand rehash of the basics of Tolkien. Secondly, it looks like a giant CGI cartoon where almost anything interesting about the world has been sidelined in favour of fantasy action
Luc Besson written/produced effort where a videogamer kid is transported to Ancient China. A blatant copy of The Forbidden Kingdom that manages to be fundamentally implausible on every level and one of the worst attempts to pander to the Chinese box-office
Fantasy film set in a magical otherworld defended by martial arts wielding kangaroos
Sequel to Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork, which ups the number of horror homages but suffers a low budget
An H.P. Lovecraft adaptation that makes exacting effort to get the mood and period setting right