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.
Doctor Strange was one of the better MCU films. Here Sam Raimi takes over in the director’s chair. This readily delves into multiverse themes but requires a major crash course in a plethora of Marvel tv series to follow
The second of the Narnia films. Director Andrew Adamson seems so intent on copying Peter Jackson that the film becomes all epic fantasy flourishes and battle scenes to the exclusion of all else – even much of C.S. Lewis’s book
A new film based on the role-playing game. The first film several years ago is poorly regarded. This is an attempt to reboot a film series but suffers badly from being handed to two comedy directors and their flip treatment
SF film with Stephen Moyer as a spaceship survivor who boards a ship with the crew mysteriously dead and becomes caught up in interplanetary politicking
A homemade New Zealand film that attempts to pull an ambitious time travel story that takes place in multiple era with temporal police intervening after a scientist invents a time portal
A low-budget film about a university hazing in a haunted house that goes wrong. This overspills with genre tropes to eventually arrive at an appealing ridiculousness
One of the key films in the cult of Lucio Fulci, a zombie film driven by a series of gore-drenched set-pieces. On the other hand, there is the complete lack of a plot holding everything together
The trailer tries to build this up as a venture into a fantasy world. In reality, all that the film is is a documenting of several of Cirque du Soleil’s acts connected by a thin-to-non-existent story
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
Another lacklustre entry in the banal Lord of the Rings Lite franchise from C.S. Lewis’s books, a plodding run of the mill fantasy adventure for the most part. The mediocre reception killed off interest in the series
The third of the trilogy of animated films from Arcana Studios based around the adventures of a young H.P. Lovecraft
The film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s book sought to appeal to audiences for the Lord of the Rings films but between Lewis’s heavy-handed Christian allegories and Andrew Adamson’s inexperience as a director fails to fly
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
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
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s gonzo, surreal comedies where a married couple buy a house and find it has a portal that takes them twelve hours into the future, while making them younger
The action film has largely died off in the 2010s. This is very much a throwback with a set-up reminiscent of Predator about an action team fighting an alien in the jungle
An entry from the classic 1980s era of the zombie film about zombies that emerge from a cursed tv set
Fantasy film set in a magical otherworld defended by martial arts wielding kangaroos
Directorial outing from Robert Englund who makes the horror equivalent of a frat comedy where three guys rent a palatial home and throw a party as a portal to Hell opens in the basement
Irish horror about a couple who inherit a house with faerie creatures at the end of the garden
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
The Disney live-action remake machine continues with this version of the hit 2002 animated film about a cuddly malevolent alien creature. As with most of the Disney remake, the original looks flat in live-action
Earlier less well known adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book made for tv. This is faithful to the book but is badly hampered by primitive animation and an exceedingly simplistic rendering of the story
Sequel to the delightfully madcap Magic in the Mirror set in a world of talking ducks
Palm Springs was one of the funniest and most delightful variants on the Groundhog Day timeloop theme. This is a French language remake that relocates the story to the Moroccan desert
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
The Brothers Dowdle made the standout The Poughkeepsie Tapes but this is a sub-Da Vinci Code archaeological mystery that is little more than a Halloween haunted house attraction in the Paris catacombs
A reboot of Masters of the Universe, this fully embraces the mythology of the animated series and gives them great life. But is also a work that is constantly deflating any chance you are taking it seriously
A live-action film based on the popular
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
A film that comes with an interesting sounding premise where a woman ventures through a doorway into a labyrinth world of interconnected rooms and ends up in a fight against the ruling theocracy
A largely routine Blumhouse film where a woman’s return to her childhood home ends up awakening her imaginary companion who has now turned sinister
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
The Asylum’s mockbuster answer to the Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow, which has very little to do with it other than both featuring an alien invasion. A film created with more ambition than budget to convey it
Greg McLean has made an impressive name with the Wolf Creek films and Rogue. In his first US film, he delivers a disappointing and utterly generic haunted suburban house film
Obscure animated children’s movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that commits the sin of modernising and Americanizing Alice
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
Sequel to Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork, which ups the number of horror homages but suffers a low budget
An adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story. While more faithful to the story than the earlier 1969 adaptation, the film is very cheaply made and collapses into the frequently ridiculous
This has distinct overtones of 2001: Space Odyssey and Event Horizon about an expedition to Mars to investigate a mysterious black sphere – only to find that it offers a gateway to Heaven
Bizarre family film in which Russian princess Anastasia travels through time to the present day and discovers mall culture
Uwe Boll strikes again! Sequel to his passable earlier epic fantasy, which is dragged down by a lack of action and the need to provide star Dolph Lundgren with a series of excrutiating witticims
Syfy Channel disaster movie where Earth is suddenly transported into another Solar System amid cheap effects and an improbable time travel solution is sought to reverse this
Released at the same time as Avengers: Infinity War, this was a mockbuster from The Asylum involving a team-up between fairytale characters. The third in their Avengers Grimm series
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 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are resurrected in a new animated film that feels like a watered-down fix designed for Ritalin-deprived youth
A variant on the horror anthology film that manages to let the potential in its three stories fall through its hands. Narrated by Rod Serling, creator of tv’s classic anthology series The Twilight Zone, who must’ve needed the money
Not as you might assume an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine but another cheap and tatty Syfy Channel production that grafts Wells’ Morlocks onto the formula for their typical monster movie
Resident Evil series director Paul W.S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich return with an adaptation of another popular videogame series
One of a spate of films of the 90s/00s that adapted animated tv series in live-action – in this case Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Here all we get is the animated characters emerging into the real world for slapstick inanity
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
Directed by low-budget actress Marlene Mc’Cohen, this is both an alien invasion and a zombie apocalypse film. A film where the skill gap and budget falls well short of what is needed to make a film work
A thorough embarrassment on Christopher Lee’s resume – an early Charles Band film in which Lee is a stranded alien inhabiting the cloned body of priest in a convent of nuns
One of the earliest films from Charles Band. In the years following, Band went onto produce and occasionally direct a great many often enterprisingly cheap low-budget genre films – this is not one of them
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
A Uwe Boll film that feels as though he didn’t cared about what he was making. You’d have to go back to the Italian sword-and-sorcery films of the 1980s to find a more shoddy work of epic fantasy
The Asylum’s response to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not having their own superheroes, they have ingeniously created an adventure involving various fairytale princesses – a great idea that befalls miserable execution
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
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
This ended up being the lowest rated of all MCU films. One wondered whether this was just fannish hyperbole but no what we end up with is the Batman & Robin of The MCU, the single worst film that franchise has produced
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
Excruciating sequel to The Beastmaster that transports Marc Singer’s Dar to contemporary L.A. The whole film is wrecked by an attitude that seems unable to take the proceedings seriously.
A cabin in the woods horror made with an ineptitude of execution. This sets out to rip off The Evil Dead but becomes one shock effect after another that runs into an incomprehensible mass like a bad nightmare