The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Revenge is a frequent motivating factor in genre cinema. Here an individual sets out to achieve a sense of personal justice for wrongs and injuries that they believe were done to them. It should be noted that this is a motivation that can be used for both heroes and villains.
Horror films are rife with villains who will often concoct elaborate revenge schemes, usually to eliminate those who have harmed them and often in ways that achieve an ironic just desserts. With Super-Villains, revenge will often be the cause of a psychic split that causes them to enact a crusade against all types of people associated. In some cases, this come about as a result of something that has resulted in Deformity and Disfigurement.
In many cases, the coin will be flipped and the person on such a vengeance trail will be regarded as the hero. There are a number of films where characters track down and eliminate those responsible, even superheroes who become revenge-obsessed crusaders such as Batman and The Punisher.
Another less pleasant variant is the Rape Revenge Film, which depicts women who have been raped taking up arms and bloodily eliminating all men responsible for their assault.
For films where revenge is enacted supernaturally or from beyond the grave see Supernatural Retribution.
Disappointing George Romero film about a paraplegic man’s psychic link with his monkey that then comes to enact his suppressed anger. A fine idea drowns in shrill moral characterisations.
Mad scientist film in which George Zucco transplants an executed man’s brain into a gorilla’s body whereupon the ape-man proceeds to exact revenge against those who wrongly convicted him
An early film from Ron Bonk misleadingly sold with connection to the notorious Italian cannibal film, concerning the tenants of an apartment building under siege by a mysterious cult
Sean S. Cunningham, director of Friday the 13th, transplants a 70s revenge exploitation film into a high school setting. Featuring a dynamic performance from a young James Spader
An effective slow burn film that settles in with the promise of being a standard entry with a babysitter being stalked on Halloween night. However, this proves to turn all your expectations on their head
The Bollywood horror film is a rare and strange beast – what other horror film would you see that comes with song and dance numbers? This is a Bollywood possession film where, despite the use of local colour and custom, it is surprisingly still drawn from the cliches created by The Exorcist
Robert Eggers, the director who made The Witch and The Lighthouse, makes a violent, primal Viking film steeped in Norse mythology
Film in the faux grindhouse style created by Tarantino and Rodriguez made as homage to the so-called nunsploitation genre. While operating on a low-budget, this has a great pulp energy that delivers in aces on all three title promises
Psycho-thriller with Lisa Zane as a nurse seeking vengeance for the death of her father
Electrifyingly ultra-violent film from Park Chan-wook who ably borrows from Takashi Miike. The film equally becomes a conceptual twister as the protagonist is forced to go on a reality-bending quest through his own life.
Spike Lee’s English-language remake of Oldboy is an abortion. Where Park Chan-Wook directed the original with an insane energy, whereas Lee only delivers a formula action film and fumbles the ending
After his crass remake of King Kong, Dino de Laurentiis went on to make this blatant copy of Jaws, which was widely ridiculed. Contrarily, i rather liked it – a Moby Dick by way of Jaws, it comes with some visually fantastic moments
British vigilante film that strains at issues of social relevance but only ends up parroting Death Wish cliches
Superlatively moody and well written film that winds a young Edgar Allan Poe into an occult murder mystery
Mel Gibson produced film where a Hollywood actor becomes fed up with paparazzi and begins eliminating them
Patrick was a modest Australian film about a bedridden coma patient exhibiting physic powers. This is an unofficial Italian-made sequel made way back before anyone coined the term mockbuster. This has no compunctions about aiming for the completely trashy – and all the more entertainingly for it
Quite the most insane film I have seen in recent memory. The rivalry between two classical music students reminds of Black Swan albeit wound up to the histrionic level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, all added to the most pleasingly twisty mess-with-your assumptions script
Sequel to the Lifetime channel adaptation of Virginia C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. Andrews’ prolific output of Gothic melodramas are really the horror equivalent of daytime soap operas. Though marginally better, this drowns in the same stultifying blandness as its predecessor
This amusingly updates the story of The Phantom of the Opera to have the Phantom lurking in a modern mall. Cheesily entertaining 1980s horror coasting by on the coattails of the massive success of the musical adaptation where the most amusement comes in the gorily over-the-top despatches
A fascinating Chinese version of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanted from a Parisian opera house of the 19th Century to a film being shot in an abandoned theatre in the 1930s. On the other hand, this version makes the most radical changes to the story of any of the Phantom films
Raw and undeniable brutal film in which a plus-size teenage girl forms a relationship with a serial killer after he abducts her tormentors
A well made tribute to the 1980s slasher film with characterisations and performances that make much rounded characters than usual
Animated film from Denmark about a man who goes on an ultra-violent crusade against the porn industry over the loss of innocence of his young niece
Dolph Lundgren’s The Punisher is minus his trademark t-shirt and the film takes considerable liberties with the source material but this is a hugely entertaining action comic-book of a film with hilariously tongue-in-cheek dialogue
Amid the huge surge of Marvel Comics adaptations in the early 2000s, there came this version of The Punisher. Cast with Thomas Jane, the film is tepid and singularly lacking in the grim, dark avenging violence of the comic-book
The Punisher (2004) with Thomas Jane was a dud among the 2000s Marvel Comics adaptations. Here the role is recast with Ray Stevenson and director Lexi Alexander gets the dark, violent tone of the comic-book right
Another woman seeks vengeance film, sort of a female version of The Crow where the heroine wears PVC catsuit, fishnets and cat ears. A film made with a cod-grindhouse aesthetic hoping to get by on a certain trash movie sensibility
This starts as a standard Japanese high school drama but takes a turn for the twisted where it doesn’t exactly venture into Saw territory but certainly somewhere that has taken inspiration from it. Alas, everything gets lost in a second half that is burdened by an excessively complicated and non-linear plot
This directorial outing from actor George C. Scott is an interesting if not wholly successful film about one man’s anger over the military cover-up of a biospill
Misguided attempt to make a sequel to Carrie, this reduces that film’s cry of the downtrodden to petty teen bitcheries, while the psychic eruptions are absurd, the complete antithesis of anything Brian De Palma directed
An entertainingly madcap screen pairing of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi with the latter as a Poe-obsessed surgeon who has built a house of Poe-inspired torture devices
A disturbingly effective film that starts as a character study of people on the edge before eventually segueing into a savage revenge drama. The film astonishes you with its bared rawness, its uniquely condensed narrative and eventually the harrowing brutality of its ending
A strong and intelligent multiverse film filled with some great twists where a woman travels across multiple worlds to track down and kill different versions of the man who murdered her daughter
Another woman takes revenge against men film. You would think that this being directed by a woman would be less exploitative than usual but oh boy this one goes off the rails into the demented
Alex Cox, director of the cult Repo Man , was once a name of some promise but he has instead spent more than two decades making increasingly obscure and amateurish films. His adaptation of a Jacobean revenge drama into a near-future setting improves this none despite a great cast line-up
This rehashes Cape Fear, remade by Martin Scorsese the same year, with Denzel Washington as an upstanding lawyer whose life is torn apart by vengeful ex-con John Lithgow. A frequently ludicrous script is made worse by Russell Mulcahy’s overwrought direction
Mamoru Hosoda conducts the bizarre notion of an anime version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a Hamlet that Shakespeare would barely recognise, following a heroine as she makes a journey across the afterlife
This starts out as a socially conscious drama about East European sex slavery. As directed by a makeup effects artist, the film seems to tepidly avoid the raw and brutal impact the material holds, before finally revealing its true nature as an imprisonment and revenge horror
Toho Films of the 1960s are best known for the Godzilla films and assorted monster bashes. This is one of their non-monster films, part of a spate of mutant supervillain films concerning a villain who has invented a teleportation machine and is using it to exact revenge
A classic attention-grabbing title from the heyday of the exploitation film … After receiving a severed arm in the mail, a group of friends realise that a former friend has come seeking revenge for when they were trapped down a mine and agreed to cut off his arm because they had nothing to eat
A horror film made as homage to the classic Freaks, this is a fascinatingly sordid work set during the vanished era of the carnival sideshow
Positively the most insane, offensive and over-the-top film I have seen in some time. A bride finds she has a vagina possessed by Satan and uses it to go all I Spit on Your Grave on the gang who ate her husband on her wedding night, resulting in an outrageous splatter bloodbath
Troubled teenager is sent to a reform camp only to find he has raised a force that is exacting brutal vengeance against his bullies. This feels like one of the underdog gets supernatural comeuppance films that we had after Carrie but is rather well made on all fronts
From the 1970s Animals Attack genre, a blatant copy of Willard where a downtrodden man befriends rattlesnakes and uses them to take revenge
A killer android/cyborg film from the genre’s 1990s heyday with a tasteless concept where a raped woman kills herself and is then resurrected as an avenging cyborg. A bizarre melding of killer cyborg film and I Spit on Your Grave
The unique idea of an anthology made up of five different slasher tales. Unfortunately, the film’s only raison d’etre is serving up serial gore scenes, which have the effect taken out of them because they are all conducted digitally and look biologically preposterous
Another version of the Sweeney Todd legend. Rather than a musical, this is a straight horror version, produced on low-budget. Here we learn that Sweeney is on a mission to kill off members of the aristocracy
Tim Burton takes on the film version of the Stephen Sondhiem musical about a murderous barber, featuring Johnny Depp in the title role. But disappointingly, Burton still makes the same film he always does
Film spinoff from the Tales from the Darkside tv series, this is an anthology of three horror tales, the result is a surprisingly slick and well made film
Feels like an early 80s copy of Carrie about a bullied teenage girl taking supernatural revenge – that and the plot of I Know What You Did Last Summer … A slick but largely superficial effort with little legs beyond its teen audience, although Jenna Dewan injects some sizzle into the role of the nerd girl turned bad girl
Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the classics of the original slasher film fad. This is a remake
Eli Roth’s homage to the slasher film that comes with a dark sense of humour and a series of novelty deaths that rival the best of the 80s slasher heyday
Following on from the success of the Dr Phibes films, Vincent Price is cast as a mad Shakespearean actor who employs comically grotesque deaths from Shakespeare’s plays to kill his critics
One of the erotic thrillers made after Basic Instinct, essentially an ripoff of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle where a vengeful Kari Wuhrer becomes a nanny seeking vengeance for the death of her husband
Imagine Baise-Moi or Thelma and Louise by way of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – a film that hits a perfect note in terms of tongue-in-cheek spirit
The film that launched the name of Troma Films. The world’s first superhero splatter film, this readily dives into bad taste just to see what kind of offence it can get away with
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
From writers of several Saw films and The Collector, a film about teens under attack in the woods where it is unclear what is going on oe who they are facing for most of the film
Leigh Whannell, James Wan’s BFF and co-writer on the Saw and
Following the revival of the slasher film with the success of Scream, this was a slick but forgettable studio copycat set around a Valentine’s Day motif
The fifth film of the Found Footage horror anthology series, including one episode that is among the best of the series so far
One of the classic works from Ingmar Bergman, uncreditedly remade by Wes Craven as The Last House on the Left, with Max Von Sydow as a virtuous farmer who is driven to vengeance after three youths rape and kill his daughter
Serial killer thriller that eventually emerges as I Spit on Your Grave reimagined as a police procedural. Much effort is made to portray a grim urban environment but little to engage as a thriller, although Selma Blair owns the show as the avenged woman in the latter third
Tough brutal British film where a group of youth offenders are hunted while on a wilderness survival course on an island
Fine little tale of an introverted man who befriends a horde of rats and uses these to gain comeuppance. A hit that presaged a host of Animals Attack films throughout the 1970s.
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the duo behind Final Destination, remake the 1971 film about a man and his rats. However, this is set in a stylised 1940s world with a caricatured performance from Crispin Glover that causes the film to lack any credibility
Becky was a modest effort with Lulu Wilson as a thirteen year-old violently fighting off home invaders. This is a sequel with her up against white supremacists
Steven Spielberg produced film about an adolescent Sherlock Holmes often feels like it is Holmes being pitched as an Indiana Jones adventure but comes with some beautifully made touches
A blatant Bollywood copy of Oldboy, often scene-for-scene