The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Psychic Powers (also referred to as Psi Powers) refers to a variety of mental abilities. These range from the ability to communicate between minds (Telepathy) or the ability to move objects with the power of the mind (Telekinesis or Psychokinesis). Also popular is the ability to create fires with the power of the mind (Pyrokinesis) and Psychometry (the ability to read the history of an object by touching it).
Genre depictions range from stories about those with psychic powers run dangerously amok to those in which psychics are persecuted by society and hunted by government agents. Aliens often display a range of psychic abilities. There are also a number of superheroes whose abilities derive from psychic powers.
This feels like a copy of the Harry Potter films set at a school for trainee superheroes. Alas after the set-up of its premise, the film appears at a loss of what to do and falls back on insipid cliches
Dean R. Koontz adapted mini-series about plane crash survivors and psychic powers that comes with a series of wild twists that the script fails to offer adequate explanation for
A romantic comedy in which Amanda Pays has a curse that gives her the ability to read thoughts
Mini-series that was a popular hit in its day, which largely steals its premise of a human and alien cop hunting a body-hopping alien from The Hidden. What makes the show work past its rather ordinary story, is the two leads and their wittily sparring Lethal Weapon-type relationship
One of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s film, this features a totally demented plot involving a man who develops psychic powers and his encounters with witches and LSD trips
A 1980s film that was sold around a single air bladder makeup effects scene where a man swells up and explodes from a snakebite. That and the entirely risible premise of Oliver Reed as a billionaire who has a psychic link with a giant snake
Before the likes of Defendor, Kick-Ass and Super, there was this, one of the best comedies about superheroes with no powers. The film loves screwing with its audience and comes with a series of mind-bending flips between drug hallucination and subjective view of the superpowers in action
Slick and rather silly copy of Alien that conceptually cross-hatches it to emerge as essentially Basic Instinct with tentacles
The start of Tobe Hooper’s decline wherein he borrows the basics of Firestarter in a really bad film with a madly overacting Brad Dourif as a pyrokinetic
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
One of the greatest of all SF films from Andrei Tarkovsky about a mysterious zone filled with enigmatic alien phenomena at the centre of which exists a room that can grant one’s heart’s desire
William Shatner tries to emulate the success had by Leonard Nimoy in directing a Star Trek film but falls on his face, badly overstressing the comedy elements and delivering the worst of the Classic Trek films
The single most influential science-fiction film of all time, one that created a massive industry of sequels and spinoffs, not to mention copycats, and changed the way that people thought of science-fiction
George Lucas’s return to the Star Wars series after a sixteen year absence and a build-up rivaled only by the Second Coming. Instead most audiences went away disappointed. Lucas has used the interim to push the technology to its heights but the story and characters are lacking
The second of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels is no particular improvement. The romance is stiff and awkward, badly written while the effects sequences seem to be running out of new things to do and so just up the scale of what has happened before with so much going on it reaches a point of visual overload
The last of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy and the last opportunity for him to get it right, which he generally does. The effects are expert but are not allowed to dominate as much as they did previously and the focus has come back onto the story and Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader
George Lucas’s first sequel to Star Wars and a work that holds up every bit as well as its predecessor, in many places betters it. The story darkens the mythos and introduces new characters, while the special effects sequences are the peak of the series
A disappointing end to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. The script lazily wraps up loose ends while sidelining the new characters introduced the last time, and the climax rehashes the climaxes of the two other films
It’s not another Empire Strikes Back but it makes up for the prequels. A good part fanservice to the original – if overly reliant on rehashing elements from Star Wars – this also does many things right
I’m not one of the haters on this. It’s the first Star Wars sequel since the 1980s to invigorate the series with fresh action sequences and place more focus on the characters instead of the action
The concluding chapter of the third trilogy of Star Wars films. After the critically divided The Last Jedi, J.J. Abrams opts for a return to the safety of familiarity and nostalgia
Theatrical spinoff from the Star Wars prequels, released to introduce the popular animated series. This shows it is time for George Lucas to move beyond recycling something that was successful three decades ago
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Passable video-released Starship Troopers sequel the heads more in the direction of a body snatchers film. Directed by Phil Tippett
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Akiva Goldsman is the single worst screenwriter in Hollywood with a line of genre atrocities to his name. In his second directorial outing, blow me down if Goldsman doesn’t make a halfway decent film, a cryptic film about a young girl facing unseen monsters amid a possible invasion
The very first film from David Cronenberg. An incredibly experimental work even today, which consists of people wandering the halls of a university and the soundtrack of voices discussing psychic powers experiments in a dryly funny parody of an academic paper. Fascinatingly oblique
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
Serial killer thriller with Aaron Eckhart on the trail of an ambiguous Ben Kingsley. This offers some interesting twists but fails in the core issue of developing it into an absorbing thriller plot
TV mini-series in ten two-hour parts that deals with UFOs, covering several generations from the 1940s to the present. An interesting take on UFO encounters with the benefit of some phenomenal performances
A very nicely animated French Steampunk film about an expedition aboard a steam airship to explore the secret entrance to an underground world in the Antarctic. A computer animated film all made by one person.
Third of the German thrillers of the 1960s featuring the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, a remake of the 1933 film where Mabuse continues his criminal schemes via mind control despite being confined to an asylum
Essentially a Norwegian version of Carrie. The ingenious spin it places on the Carrie story is to tell it as an LGBT story and have the psychically empowered heroine not bullied and tormented but struggling against a lesbian attraction to another girl.
This comes with the undeniable influence of the then recent Minority Report in its story about a telepath recruited by law enforcement
This live-action film version of the cult Gerry Anderson puppet series is a disaster. Great effort is made to replicate the look of the original but the film is killed by the choice to rewrite everything as a modern formula kid’s movie
Rene Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet, collaborates with cult fantasy artist Moebius and the result is a planetary adventure filled with trippily exotic backgrounds and creatures
Cinema’s first cuddly, friendly robot that is programmed according to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, predating Forbidden Planet’s Robbie the Robot. A modest overlooked film of the 1950s SF era
An early Charles Band film with Chuck Connors psychically bringing a collection mannequins to life. A fine little film that develops a eerie strangeness all of its own
Thriller starring Jennifer Beals as an FBI agent who receives clairvoyant visions during the hunt for an abducted girl
Before the teen idol phenomenon took over, the original in the massively popular Young Adult series works as an earnest romance where all involved are clearly making an effort to play with a conviction
Low-budget SF film about a ship at sea carrying a cargo of convicts, toxic waste, a deadly virus and a killer android
Interest in UFO phenomena peaked in the 1970s with numerous books seriously studying it and twice as many crackpot ones. While there had been various flying saucers in 1950s alien invasion cinema, this obscure and rather dull oddity was the first fictional film investigating the phenomena
Big screen version of a classic New Zealand children’s story, directed by Jonathan King with an emphasis on gooey creature effects
One has zero enthusiasm for this, which has been sold as Twilight meets Harry Potter. Defying expectation, it is written with a sarcastic amusement puncturing its own seriousness and has a great performance from its leading lady, if in the end it is too weighted down by story exposition needed to set up its sequels to ever open up dramatically
Psychic powers comedy made in the aftermath of Ghostbusters where Jeff Goldblum is upstaged by a kooky Cyndi Lauper
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
Not one of the Doug McClure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations but by the same people and in the same vein. Thanks to a particularly inventive script this is the best of these lost world adventures
Russell Crowe turns director and, as is the case with actors turned director, feels the need to take up an epic historical subject – the aftermath of World War I (albeit with some Magical Realist elements). Crowe wields all the epic flourish and polish, even if the film never truly moves one
Modestly made alien contact film that came out not long after Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
A gender-swapped remake of What Women Want in which Taraji P. Henson gets the ability to read men’s thoughts. Henson displays no talent for comedy and this is a spectacularly unfunny film
Amiable romantic comedy in which Mel Gibson comes round after an accident in the shower to find he now has the ability to read women’s thoughts.
Chinese remake of the romcom where Mel Gibson was suddenly able to hear women’s thoughts. A second time over, the premise seems slight while the film crucially fails to create much passion between its two stars
Eccentric Coming of Age story set during the 1970s punk era where, among the usual other funny travails, the protagonist’s father starts demonstrating psychic abilities
Quirkily eccentric comedy written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan about two feuding brothers with pyrokinetic abilities
Star Wars meets Top Gun – a concept it is surprising no one has thought of before – but alas this film adaptation of the popular videogame only regurgitates the cliches of either film
Don’t be fooled by the witch part of the title, this is actually a South Korean film about psychic powers. This follows the path of a standard psychic powers film about the gifted on the run a la The Fury and Firestarter before an ending that turns the genre on its head
The Witch: Part 1 – Subversion was an impressive South Korean psychic powers film. This is Part 2
Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to the hilariously culty Rubber, an absurdist film about a man setting out to find his missing dog. You keep expecting something as mind-bendingly hilarious as Rubber but this is more of a mild amusement in the David Lynch-ian deadpan surrealist vein
Australian zombie film that comes with a hyperactive fierceness and energy that reminds of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. On the minus side, the zombie genre is now so creatively strip-mined that the film never offers anything original
An X-Men origin story that serves as the occasion to recast the series with younger actors. This works far better than the previous two films, integrating the characters in a strong story, although is quiet at the superheroic action
Bryan Singer’s dynamic and exciting adaptation of the Marvel Comic title fairly much kicked off the massive fad for Marvel superheroes in the 00s/10s. This was also the film that mad Hugh Jackman into an international superstar.
The seventh X-Men chapter arrives with a certain ennui. Bryan Singer creates some epic scenes but the sprawling ensemble and the series’ ragged continuity makes it hard to invest in the characters, while the new villain looks like a B movie wizard and the mass destruction climax comes surprisingly by the book
Despite the bad press surroundings this, I failed to find it as bad as other reviewers. It’s a solid if not standout entry in the series with some fine superheroic action sequences
It is nice to see Bryan Singer regain his form after several years lull. The plot is nothing world-shattering but it is nice to see a character-driven X-Men, while Singer delivers the superheroics with a cheer-out loud elan that most of the sequels missed by a wide margin
After the disaster of X-Men: The Last Stand, the decision was made to give a whole film over to the series’s most popular character, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and to go with a prequel that told his origin story. Largely a film that exists as a series of superheroic action scenes
Brett Ratner inherits the X-Men franchise from Bryan Singer for the third film in the series and promptly killed it off (after this point everything became prequels featuring Young X-Men). Ratner’s handling of the superheroic action lacks Singer’s exhilaration or any affinity for the characters
Bryan Singer’s immediate sequel to X-Men, this ups the number of new mutant characters, although only sporadically manages to kick in with the spectacular superheroic action sequences the first film had
A psychic powers film like Carrie having been reduced to the crass high school comedy of something like Porky’s
A sequel to the teen psychic powers comedy Zapped! that takes things even more crass and vulgar
Most science-fiction films lack worthy ideas, this is one that contrarily suffers from too many and collapses under the weight of its pretensions to profundity
The title gives the impression this is intended as a zombie film take on the action film Olympus Has Fallen. The confusion you have in watching is that this is actually a film about a girl with psychic powers on the run. Brief zombie scenes turn up later in the show to justify the title but feel that they have strayed in from another film.
Family-friendly superhero film that places more focus on slapstick than superheroics and contains an embarrassing return to the screen for Chevy Chase