The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Rationalised Fantasy concerns stories that are ostensibly fantasy, horror or supernatural but where the elements of the fantastic are reveled to be have a mundane explanation. This can refer to stories in which elements such as hauntings (most commonly), reincarnation, possession, mediums, UFOs and such like are revealed in an end twist to have more rational explanations than what we had been led to believe (sometimes in absurdly contrived ways).
This also refers to works of fantasy, myth and fairytale that are retold in modern terms.
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of the 1947 film noir tale about a fake clairvoyant is an exquisite piece of mood and design
This has an interesting set-up about a woman pursued by a boogeyman figure from her nightmares where others cannot be sure whether she is delusional at the same time as the figure starts eliminating them – but the film’s low-budget gets in the way of adequate treatment
The Coen Brothers hilariously adapt The Odyssey into the Depression Era with George Clooney leading a trio of escaped convicts as he tries to return to his wife
Brian De Palma with Paul Schrader on script make a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Cliff Robertson wandering Venice believing he has found the reincarnation of his late wife
Lush Magical Realist adaptation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book about demonic possession that takes the view that it is no more than Church superstition
Neil Jordan directs a beautifully earthy Irish fairytale in which Colin Farrell fishes up a possible selkie woman
Jean Cocteau’s beautiful modernisation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice updated to post-War France
Retelling of the epic legend of Beowulf in SF terms where Grendel becomes an alien monster
Sam Raimi’s prequel to The Wizard of Oz is now; the story of how a conman fools an entire land rather than of an innocent girl just trying to find her way home. The reconceptualisation of Oz comes with a colourful sweep
This has the intriguing idea of two Demi Moore’s living on either side of the world, each dreaming that they are the other but the premise pans out as no more than a routine Chick Flick
From the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a horror version of Peter Pan. And boy, does this go dark with Peter as a child abductor and Tinkerbell who shoots up ‘fairy dust’ through a needle
A rare Indian venture into the horror film, this is a haunted house film of modest effect that suddenly becomes a whole lot more watchable when it pulls a major M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist on us
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
The third and in the opinion of many the best of Hammer’s Quatermass films in which Nigel Kneale introduces a conceptually wild array of ideas about Martians, race memory, psychic powers and The Devil
One of the most bizarre of 1950s Communist Fear films in which humanity begins to receive radio message from God on Mars. The film’s politics are hysterical today.
Kevin Smith discovers a newfound maturity in this work about a religious cult. Smith subdues his adolescent humour in a series of darkly laced dramatic twists, while the show is capped by some great performances
Fourth entry in the eminently forgettable sword-and-sorcery series, this heads down into bad movie stakes by writing a series of grating quips over everything, while the action scenes exist in the realm of unbelievability that show that nobody is treating anything with the slightest seriousness
Adam Wingard’s regular scriptwriter Simon Barrett directs a revival of the girls’ boarding school ghost story. I had very high expectations of this
Standout thriller with Kim Stanley as a medium who fakes a child kidnapping with husband Richard Attelborough to prove her powers
An Old Dark House film from the silent era. Haxan director Benjamin Christensen turns the mansion into a fantastical netherworld and creates a compulsive atmosphere of weird and fascinating happenings that is is only marred only by a contrived mundane ending
I went to see this on the description that called it a horror film about premonitions of disaster but far less interestingly it is a fictional attempt to analyse people’s attempts to grieve over the Fukushima Disaster – not uninteresting but with little interest in being a fantastic film
Guy Ritchie’s reinvention of Sherlock Holmes seemed a miscalculated disaster in the offing. It doesn’t radically reinvent the basics but emerges passably well
This is essentially Candyman rewritten for the internet generation about a boogeyman that appears to kill the person on the other end if you type a phrase three times
A work of brooding Italian Gothic, a loose sequel to The Terror of Dr Hichcock. Featuring oodles of atmosphere and the genre’s indisputable queen Barbara Steele as a wife haunted by a dead husband
The East Side Kids, a popular comedy group during the 1940s/50s, conduct a variant on the Old Dark House film featuring a sinisterly lurking Bela Lugosi … The East Side Kids’ films were made on impoverished budgets – this one of their better but still aimlessly circles around creaky and dated gags
An The Exorcist copy made as a tv movie – where The Exorcist shocked audiences with barf bag theatrics and obscenities, this merely has Karen Black shucking her staid fashion sense and buying a sexy red dress. Rather peculiarly, this becomes a possession story as women’s self-actualisation drama
The only film ever directed by actor Roddy McDowall. Based on a folktale, it is the story of two lovers trying to escape when one is in thrall to the Queen of the Fairies. McDowall creates a lush film that is oddly ponderous and non-fantastical but what a cast he assembles
Paul Mazursky conducts a contemporary version of the Shakespeare play set in the Greek islands, which serves to give the original a potent resonance
Influential if possibly overrated work in the Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s. There’s the haunted figure of Barbara Steele and rich atmosphere, even if the plot doesn’t make much sense
One of the Hammer Films wannabes of the 1960s that even employs Christopher Lee in a horror film set around the historical Grand Guignol Theatre
Modest Australian film where Chantal Contouri is introduced to a secret vampire society that keeps human beings as cattle
One of the films from gimmick master William Castle, a more routine ghost story that eventually opts for a mundane ending and was sold with the gimmick of Ghost Viewer glasses. Later remade as Thir13en Ghosts
Michael Crichton was hot as a result of Jurassic Park. Although mostly seen as an historical spectacle, this is an adaptation of his novel that attempts to retell the legend of Beowulf with Vikings against Neanderthals
The film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ The Mighty Thor is placed in the hands of Kenneth Branagh who delivers an okay film, if one where he never quite seems at home with the superheroic action
The third film about the title criminal mastermind from Fritz Lang. Here Lang returns to a radically different Germany to the one he fled in the 1930s, the West Germany of the Cold War, to deliver a creepily paranoid work about the surveillance society
The Three Investigators books were an essential part of my youth. This does a fair job of remaining faithful to the stories, albeit with the addition of some grating modernisations, and creates reasonable atmosphere as they investigate a seemingly spooky mansion
Ambiguous ghost story in which Peter Gallagher sees and talks to his late wife Michelle Pfeiffer. Written by hit tv producer David E. Kelley (The Practice), this frequently disappears into its own self-congratulatory dialogue
Adaptation of the legendary historical romance was considered a box-office flop but emerges as a better film than one expected it would
No relation to the disastrous Chevy Chase film, a French romantic comedy that has modernised retellings of various fairytales wound into the plot, often being deflated or turned on their head
One of the first films about a medically rationalised vampire concerning a doctor who discovers pills that turn him into a vampire monster
Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, this is a study in obsession and features a reincarnation plot. What works more so than the contrived plot twists is Hitchcock’s expert direction, all thunderously brooding mood and lush Technicolor dreaminess
M. Night Shyamalan creates three-quarters of a tense and eerie film about a 19th Century village under siege from mysterious creatures only for it to fall apart when he produces a damp squib of a twist ending
Russian-made adaptation of a classic horror story that takes place as an exquisitely stylised 19th Century Gothic fantasy world but is a head-scratchingly incoherent mishmash on a plotting level
Pedro Almodovar film in which two daughters try to deal with their mother’s seeming return from the dead
An incredibly spooky film about two woman on an Australian outback farm that believe they are haunted by a dead body in the well
Director Benh Zeitlin made an extraordinary debut with Beasts of the Southern Wild. In his follow-up, he does striking things in making a modernised Peter Pan and transplanting the story to Louisiana
From the director of The Devil Inside comes a werewolf film that wants to convince us it might not be a werewolf and a Found Footage film that is only pretending to be a Found Footage film. The result is a crappily photographed film that takes a long time to ever unleash its werewolf
TV movie that comes with a great opening hook – a family receive phone calls from a brother who died 15 years earlier
An indisputable classic fantasy … a gorgeous sparkling fantasy that made full use of Technicolor in an era dominated by black-and-white and is told in such bold and earnestly heartfelt tones that it becomes the nearest we have to a piece of genuine American mythology
A film directed by actor Jim Cummings about a small Utah town that is facing a series of werewolf attacks. This works surprisingly well due to a series of witty and well-rounded characterisations
Old Dark House comedy set around the antics of big band leader Kay Kyser. Starring several horror names of the day – Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre