The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Resurrection refers to various means of bringing people back from the dead. Films where treatments of theme fall into large groupings have been given their own entries – see https://www.moriareviews.com/theme/frankenstein-films, Zombies, Vampires and Mummies. This topic deals with every other form of return from the dead that does not fall into these categories.
There are numerous methods proposed for the resurrection of the dead from the miraculous to the scientific, from formulas to magic potions, Voodoo and black magic to Indian burial grounds. Mad Scientists were frequently engaged in resurrection experiments invariably with catastrophic results.
Individuals from time to time spontaneously (or by divine or unexplained) purpose return from the dead, usually to exact Supernatural Retribution or sometimes with comic purpose. Persons who return from the dead in non-corporeal form are ghosts and are discussed under Hauntings and Ghost Stories and Ghosts in Light Fantasy.
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
Parasite director Bong Joon Ho makes an ambitious SF film where Robert Pattinson as a clone(s) on a planetary colonisation expedition who becomes embroiled in trying to save an alien species
Classic Halloween tv special. As with most of its ilk, it places the focus on a light-hearted treatment where the monsters are no more serious than Halloween revelers
Tim Burton used to be the great hope of fantastic cinema but his efforts since 2000 have been greeted with general disappointment. This Young Adult adaptation plays out like a fantasy version of the X-Men
The Frankenstein film, which deals with grave robbing and hideously scarred corpses, seems an unlikely choice for adult movie treatment. This is one of the offerings
Folk Horror about the discovery of a witch’s body in a bog, this is a slow burn film that falls together with great subtlety
Video-released compilation of above average horror short films all set around the titular website
Based on a videogame, a film set at a morgue where a new assistant has to fight off supernatural forces and complete a series of rituals to prevent herself from becoming possessed
The Adams Family have become one of the most impressive genre talents in recent years. It has been fascinating watching them explore a dark version of American folk horror – this takes them into the darkest places they have visited yet
Nominal remake of the Boris Karloff The Mummy, which has now been inflated into a big budget Indiana Jones adventure. Stephen Sommers lets the film overspill with CGI spectacle but the exercise is deflated by a jokey, unserious attitude
The reboot of the Mummy series emerges as a wannabe Michael Bay film where even star Tom Cruise plays second banana to the CGI eye candy. Equally, an attempt to jumpstart a shared universe out of Universal’s Famous Monsters with the inclusion of Dr Jekyll seems awkward
After their enormously successful revival of Dracula and Frankenstein, Hammer Films and Terence Fisher turned to revive the mummy film, all with the bold, vivid effect of their early films
Low-budget film that would very much like it if we mistook it for one of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films
Sequel to the 1999 The Mummy. Here Stephen Sommers amplifies everything in that film by a factor of ten where the constant bombardment by the spectacular reaches an point of absurd overkill
The third of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films that feels like it has no point other than to steal $10 from your hand and give you a bucket of content free mental popcorn in return
This was the fourth and final of Universal’s Mummy films starring Lon Chaney Jr. However, by this point the series had become trapped in a series of repetitive plot moves
This was the fourth and second to last of Universal’s Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr in the role of Kharis. By now the series has been reduced to a well-worn formula
The first and best of Universal’s Mummy sequels with Tom Tyler in the role, this achieves modest atmosphere
The third of Universal’s Mummy films where Lon Chaney Jr inherits the role of Kharis
Rather silly and not particularly funny Disney comedy in which a teenager returns from the dead as a zombie and nobody seems to notice any difference. Does contain a number of before-they-were-famous names
Anthology of three H.P. Lovecraft tales from directors Christophe Gans, Brian Yuzna and Shusuke Kaneko. For claiming such a quintessentially Lovecraftian title as this, you feel that it should have been more than it is
Ridiculous cheap 1980s video release about a witch burned at the stake returned as a New Wave punkette to claims souls
The second film from the director of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead about demon hunters. A great deal has been expanded on the creature effects and in building the film’s mythology.
One of the better films from Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions set amid voodoo rites in the American South and creating an atmosphere of exotic/erotic mystery
A very strange film where widow Adrienne Barbeau finds an amnesiac Keir Dullea on a Greek island who shows mysterious abilities and may have come from the future
Teen horror variant on the zombie film. Scott Grimes gets a job at his uncle’s morgue only for a lightning bolt to revive his school bullies as zombies.
Alien body snatchers comedy that feels less like a film than an extended fanboy in-joke
Entry in the 00s zombie revival fad from the early days of The Asylum, this is the most gore-drenched zombie film ever made. Overlooked but a better film than you think
Sequel to a film that few people remember, this is all campy one-liners and gory set-pieces conducted with a silliness that boggles the mind
Film concerning a warlock resurrected in the body of a scarecrow seeking revenge. This is conceived around a series of novelty makeup effects but director Jeff Burr treats the material seriously and with reasonable results
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
The best Clive Barker film that Clive Barker never made. A girl hooks up with a guy only to find that his dead ex-girlfriend insists on joining them in bed during sex and won’t leave. Similar to the recent disappointingly tame Burying the Ex but this pushes the concept to soul-baring extremes
One of the most extraordinary of all anime films – apparently a favourite of The Wachowskis (you can see they’ve borrowed moves from it), concerning ninja facing supernaturally empowered assassins demonic forces, directed with an extraordinary visual stylism
Likeable film made by fans about a ninja team formed to deal with a zombie onslaught
Visually stunning Russian film with a clairvoyant and a police inspector teaming up to solve a series of occult murders in 19th Century St Petersburg
This holds the distinction of being the world’s first gonzo zombie film – oh and the first zombie musical too. Not many zombies (or nude bodies), the song lyrics are occasionally amusing but the film’s humour is schoolboyish, and the effort amateurish on the whole
Singaporean film that offers an assemblage of cliches elements from various horror films in a mishmash of hauntings, possession, occult happenings and ominous Biblical portents that make little sense in terms of explanatory rationale
Comic-book adaptation about a cop that is resurrected from the dead to take on the toughest assignments. Feels like a throwback to an 80s film like Maniac Cop or Dead Heat where the film is killed by the tiresomely cliched appropriation of the faux grindhouse aesthetic
Another of the films with sinister-sounding adjectives that sprung up in the wake of Insidious, this is a cut price copy of The Omen about a child resurrected from the dead who causes a series of deaths
Carl Dreyer, the Danish director of Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, is one of the least well-known great directors. This, his second-to-last film, concerns itself with the nature of religion and miracles. A very weighty Bergman-esque piece, it arrives at an astonishing ending
From Johannes Roberts, the director of 47 Meters Down and other works, an undeniably spooky variant on Pet Sematary set in Mumbai as a mother unwittingly resurrects her late son’s spirit
J.J. Abrams’ produced film about soldiers encountering Nazi mad science experiments during WWII. Despite a decent budget thrown at it, this was a box-office failure. It may be that in a genre where we have gravitated to films about Nazi zombies and Nazi moonbases, this was just too tame
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
This sequel is marginally better than the first film (largely due to Chris Columbus no longer being in the director’s chair), being more dramatically engaged and with effects that feel less like random eye candy. That still doesn’t disguise the fact that the Percy Jackson series is no more than a lightweight and forgettable Harry Potter knockoff
Remake of the Stephen King novel that opened to very divided reaction. The surprise about the film is bar one central aspect it is surprisingly faithful to the book. On the other hand, the changes make the crucial difference
A sequel, or more correctly, prequel to the recent remake of the Stephen King novel. This has some legitimacy in that it is adapted from a story recounted in the book
An okay Stephen King adaptation that does nothing particularly wrong but lacks the impact that has caused people to regard the novel as one of the best of King’s works
Sequel to the 1989 Pet Sematary that reverses the sympathies of the original – now it is a child that resurrects a parent – but this never quite finds the same effectiveness
Cult film from Don Coscarelli that takes place in a funereal twilight world and is filled with images of wild surrealism. Not a lot makes sense but the film is meant to operate on the logic of a dream. Several sequels followed.
The first and best of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm sequels, one that creates an eerie twilight zone ambience that sits between dream and reality
The third of Don Soscarelli’s Phantasm films reunites many of the regulars and goes some way towards offering explanations for everything
Phantasm was a cult hit with its eerie otherworldly dream horrors. It spawned four sequels of which this is probably the last given that Angus Scrimm died earlier this year. The series peaked a couple of films ago and here the regulars pander to a comfortable familiarity without adding anything new to the mix
Film contained in the single location of a house as a team of four scientists struggle to perfect a process that will resurrect the dead. Normally, you would expect this is to come out as a horror film but the approach here is more akin to a film like Primer
The second of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Johnny Depp and all the principals are back and much of the eccentric humour is present but the action has undergone budget bloat
This has become legendary as the Worst Film Ever Made. Maybe it is but the audience that celebrates its technical gaffes, the purple prose and bizarre bheind-the-scenes stories has contrarily made it one of cultish fascination
Cult Italian horror director Mario Bava makes an SF film where explorers find an alien planet where aliens possess the dead (not vampires despite the title). In many ways a precursor of Alien
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone conduct a revisionist take on the Frankenstein film. This ended up a critical favourite at most of the 2023 awards with Emma winning the show in an hilarious performance
Chick Flick with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as two sisters from a family of witches. The film never really settles on a consistent tone between comedy, thriller or romance and veers all over the place
Swashbuckling fairytale that treads a fine line between deconstruction and parody, while reveling in a script where the dialogue positively dances. Perfectly cast – a film that few do not come out enjoying its ebullient fantasy
Stunning work of fantasy from Hayao Miyazaki. Made on an epic-sized story canvas and with a breathtaking beauty, this is one of the few original screen works to capture something of the nature and scale of written epic fantasy
The third of the Prophecy films with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel. This time the wry humour and interplay of ideas of the other films feels more thinly drawn
Standout film about angels warring on Earth that dispenses with any cutsie depiction of angels. Several sequels followed.
An okay sequel to the angel wars film The Prophecy, the first of several. As in the previous film, a returning Christopher Walken steals the show and gets all the best lines
Hard to find Anglo-horror effort that has been long considered an item of must-see fascination for its premise of an undead biker gang, including the central image of the gang leader erupting from the grave on his motorcycle. The film unfortunately has a prosaic dullness that belies such imaginative wildness
This was one of the classic 1980s splatter films. Stuart Gordon throws most of H.P. Lovecraft’s tone out the window and goes for hilariously black comedy served up with outrageously over-the-top effects
Horror comedy about an attack by the zombies of resurrected former US Presidents
Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon was intended as a two-part space opera saga. This first half emerged watchably and this is Part Two
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
Forgotten 1980s horror where Meg Tilly accepts a dare to spend a night in a mausoleum as a powerful psychic returns to life
Alien scripter Dan O’Bannon jumps aboard the 80s/early 90s fad for H.P. Lovecraft adaptations is this directorial outing that eventually develops quite reasonable effect
This has a fascinating premise where the Catholic Church develops a resurrection process, before one priest starts to see a darker conspiracy beneath. Shot in the Screenlife process where the film screen becomes a computer screen
Supernatural retribution film with school counselor Mischa Barton dealing with a murdered teen maybe returned from the dead to kill the bullies responsible
Not a sequel to Doctor X despite the title, The main footnote this has is that it stars Humphrey Bogart as a vampire lab assistant. Halfway reasonable despite a bad reputation.
Not to be confused with the high-profile Leonardo DiCaprio film, this is a rather amusing film about a soldier who returns home as undead. Rather than the usual zombie/vampire film one would expect, this develops a wonderfully sustained sarcastic tone to expand out as a kind of undead Boondock Saints
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
From the brothers who made the classic White Zombie, a similar film about an expedition to Cambodia to find the secret of creating zombies
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
This feels like someone has simply copied the idea of a secretive law enforcement agency from
Interestingly mysterious film about the investigation into a zone affected by an alien meteorite
The first adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s series of novels where every person who ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet is given an abysmal treatment as a tv movie that ditches and rewrites major aspects of the books
The second tv mini-series of Philip Jose Farmer’s classic SF novels trashes the books just as badly as the first attempt. The premise and characters are indifferently rewritten, while the show is churned out by a director with a tatty indifference to what he is making
Another of the films from the Mexican wrestling superhero Santo where he and his friend Blue Demon encounter assorted Famous Monsters raised by a mad scientist
Uneven New Zealand-made film where a girl meets a mystery man who claims that he is Jesus Christ
An overlooked effort from the direct-to-VHS era concerning itself with a field of undead scarecrows. Amid the numerous zombie and splatter effects efforts of the day that were being churned out, this settles in with an unusual atmosphere that is often hard to shake
The best of an otherwise lightweight, throwaway series. Roel Reiné directs some good action scenes, even if the hackneyed plotting never lets the show rise to anything more than average
Uwe Boll ventures into Torture Porn territory with this tale of a brutish serial killer who returns from the electric chair on a trail of vengeance against his condemners
One of the classic films from cult stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen, an Arabian Nights fantasy adventure where Harryhausen’s creations prove to be quite wondrous
The last film of gimmick master William Castle, a head-scratching oddity where mime artist Marcel Marceau plays a puppeteer who gains the ability to bring people back to life and control them like puppets
A film that deserves a cult reputation, this is possibly the most unique and original take on the zombie film I have ever come across
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
Spookily effective Japanese ghost story about a mother’s pilgrimage around a series of shrines to raise her daughter’s spirit from the dead
Wes Craven’s attempt to top his A Nightmare on Elm Street and the phenomenon that Freddy Krueger subsequently became was this remarkably silly film with Mitch Pileggi as a serial killer returned from the electric chair
Another film from Charles Band’s Full Moon Production centred around dolls – in this case, three murdered youths who are resurrected as flying shrunken heads. A film that never quite lives up to the outlandishness of its premise
The third in the Christmas slasher series where the killer’s brother is resurrected like a Frankenstein monster and develops an obsession with a blind girl. Played with far more seriousness than it deserves
A Chuck Norris horror film! One of his earlier films where Chuck is pitted against a psycho who is resurrected from the dead and becomes a near-invincible killing machine
The third of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, this came out the same year as Star Wars and Harryhauden’s stop-motion animated creatures look much more flat in comparison
Clearly influenced by A Nightmare on Elm Street, this is a film about an executed killer who returns as a dream boogeyman who transforms from a flow of sand
Tim Burton adapts the classic Washington Irving ghost story, although throws most of it out, to make his own beautifully designed period piece spearheaded by another eccentric Johnny Depp performance
Rapper Snoog Dogg fails badly at branding himself as a horror anthology host, while the stories prove nothing to write home about either
Beautifully made and very adult version of the fairytale, which seems determined to play up the terror aspect of the title, resulting in a work that seems a long way away from Disney