The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Scientific Experiments Amok refers to scientific experiments that take place outside mainstream science. Mad Scientist cinema is littered with these – scientists of dubious sanity or ruthless morality who operate in isolation in mansions or Gothic castles, creating experiments that almost always have catastrophic results, producing monsters or mutations that inevitably go amok.
Mad Science cinema died away by the mid-1950s as movie scientists became the engineers of the Space Age and the heroes fighting Atomic Monsters. Thereafter, Mad Science Cinema continued in a different form, what we might call Illicit Science cinema.
Amok and Illicit Science Cinema usually achieves the same results as Mad Scientist films do but is conducted with less Gothic focus. It offers the approximation of real scientific process (if not exactly anything that could be considered peer-reviewed) and takes place in modern laboratories. The threat is less the scientist’s sanity than unforeseen side effects and accidents made by well-intentioned individuals or due to the ruthlessness of corporate or military overlords.
It should also be noted that many Superhero and Super-Villain origin stories also result from illicit scientific experiments or accidents.
Outside of animation, there has never been a decent genre film about cute dogs. This film about a robot dog is no exception. The surprise is that this is produced by the normally respectable David S. Goyer
A modestly effective Jurassic Park copy from The Asylum with genetically-revived dinosaurs loose in L.A. and featuring better than usual effects
The film that created the cult of anime in the West. Essentially a Cyberpunk version of The Fury, this has been construed as a series of climaxes that get progressively larger in scale until they almost reach a point of sensory overload
The fourth of the Alien films. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet comes on board and delivers a comic-bookish run through of a Joss Whedon script that overspills with too many ideas
B movie with Beverly Garland venturing into the swamps in search of her missing husband to find a scientist has transformed him into an alligator hybrid
Ken Russell’s big studio-backed film about drug trips, the meaning of life and William Hurt reverting to a caveman is a glorious madcap and visually stunning work that reaches for the same cosmological grandeur that 2001: A Space Odyssey does
One of the last directorial outings from cult director Larry Cohen. Comic-book artist Eric Roberts is wound up in trying to trace a mysterious ambulance that is abducting women into illicit experiments
Extremely satisfying German medical thriller about a secret society that conducts illicit experiments. The film comes with a torturous suspense and goes way out on a limb in the gore department
A far less effective sequel to the hit German medical thriller that neglects both the tortuous suspense and grisly horror that made the first film into a stand out
This has cult midnight hit written over it. It’s a loopy trip into people doing drugs, alien impregnation and government conspiracy that should have been quirky and funny but sort of goes asleep at the wheel
Antisocial, a horror film about zombies created by social media, proved a reasonable hit. This is a sequel that skips on a few years after the collapse of civilisation
Fascinating tv mini-series set around the notion of a generation ship – the show explores the scenario in interesting ways then proceeds to put some wild spins on what we think is happening
Despite the possibilities set up by the title, this features no vampires nor atomic monsters but is an Italian film influenced by Eyes Without a Face about a mad surgeon trying to restore a woman’s disfigured face
B budget director Jim Wynorski makes another of his bimbo films, a parody of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman where a cam girl is turned giant size after eating GMO food
Seemingly another ridiculously titled zombie movie but in actuality this is no more than a regular zombie film played straight that has been slapped with a gonzo title as a selling point
The rarity of a really good Found Footage film. Designed to look like lost footage from 1970s psychic experiments, this concerns a scientific team who discover they are dealing with a woman who is demonically possessed
A unique and effective catastrophe film in which the whole world suddenly loses the ability to sleep, this follows a mother and her children as they travel through the chaos
Greg (Wolf Creek) McLean directs from a script by James Gunn. The Office by way of Battle Royale as 80 employees are locked in an office building with orders to eliminate one another
Tatty British film that feels like an attempt to crossbreed A Nightmare on Em Street with The Silence of the Lambs. Star Elizabeth Hurley sued to prevent the film’s release.
A homage to 1970s SF cinema, full of trippy journeys through transcendental space and white antisceptic corridors. In aiming for this look, the film also forgot a small thing like a plot or coherent explanation of what is happening
Blumhouse film in which an initial plot about a man suffering amnesia undergoes a twist to become a body theft story
Of all the concepts in physics, the wildest of these is the black hole. It seems highly disappointing that this set out to be a film about a black hole but all we get is a film about an electrical monster amok
The original 1958 The Blob gets a full makeover via some sensational state-of-the-art animatronics and makeup effects with impressive results. A much superior work to the original in all ways
You don’t think the mix of cartoonishly over-the-top action and a Groundhog Day timeloop scenario would work but this proves your assumptions wrong in highly entertaining ways
Big-budget thrillers with Nazi villains were popular in the 70s. This pits acting legends Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck on opposite sides in a conceptually ingenious plot about the attempts to clone Hitler
William Castle production about the discovery of a species of insects that can start fires. Easily dismissable as a schlock film but it has an intelligence and eerie insect photography that make it more than that
Ben Wheatley has gained a cult following in recent years with films like Kill List and High Rise. Here he sets out to make a deliberately low-tech multiverse film that becomes a real head-scratcher
People are locked in a facility and undergoing biological meltdowns. A film that is driven by a series of wild effects at regular intervals but falls down when it comes to its poorly constructed mystery
Ostensibly about occultist Aleister Crowley reincarnating in the present, this overflows with mad ideas involving quantum physics, VR, alternate worlds and a heap of classic references – and moreover, is written by the lead singer of Iron Maiden
A film about a scientist trying to perfect a genetic engineering process. This turns into a strange SF reworking of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw
The first sequel to the Troma hit and with all of the usual bad taste and moron humour you associate with a Troma film, but also better produced then most their films
One of the very first films dealing with cloning. This starts off well with a man’s discovery that a double has stolen his identity but thereafter becomes a long drawn-out pursuit thriller
Phil Lord and Chris Miller, later directors of The Lego Movie, create an animated film that is a delight with its nonsensical visions of a town inundated by weather phenomena made of food
The original film was a good deal of fun; this sequel feels like it is simply a repeat of the same but slightly different. Still there is a good deal of creativity to the visual puns and living food creatures
The third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
1970s television produced some remarkable genre works. One of the best was this – a work of eerie tension as scientists conducting experiments at a remote laboratory find something unseen is toying with them
TV mini-series remake of the Michael Crichton medical thriller that pointlessly changes and over-extrudes a tight and effective original, while director Mikael Salomon adds absurd red herrings and keys away major surprises well in advance
An extraordinary Russian film that takes place in a uniquely designed dreamworld shared by people in comas. This has an imagination and conceptual grasp that rivals Inception
The time paradox film has always been one of the most ingenious and conceptually challenging SF films in recent years with the likes of Timecrimes and Predestination. This is a B-budgeted variant
Australian effort that seems to follow the path of Aliens/Resident Evil with soldiers venturing into a laboratory of amok monsters before a Philip K. Dick-ian twist on what we think is happening
This has an intriguing premise where a group awake from cryogenic suspension with their memories blank as someone among their number now begins killing them
The second sequel to the original The Fly, which does feature more teleporter accidents and mutations but for some reason no fly hybrids this time
This offers the novelty of being the world’s first Ukrainian zombie film. Being made in the midst the Russian invasion, this lays into Soviet Russia and its failings with a scathing regard
A very atypical Hammer film. US director Joseph Losey makes a stark and effective contemporary set film about the discovery of children that have been left radioactively mutated by an experiment
A typical 80s film with a mad doctor resurrecting the dead in the abandoned wing of an asylum amid gory makeup effects. The first film from Brett Leonard who next went on to make The Lawnmower Man
For some reason, nineteen years years later, someone has decided to produce a sequel to Renny Harlin’s unintentionally funny killer shark film only to give it a pitiful budget that causes it to sink well into bad movie stakes
An enterprising B-budget copy of Alien from prolific director Fred Olen Ray, this amusingly transfers the basics of Alien down to Earth and replaces the crew of the Nostromo with Charles Napier as a tough, grizzled LAPD cop
Larry Fessenden has become a horror director who has made some fine work that remain under the commercial radar. This is his modernised take on the Frankenstein story
A film about a bunch of boorish lads gleefully eliminating zombie women. A comedy this may well be but doesn’t disguise the fact the film’s sympathies are clearly with the guys making crude innuendos and feeling downtrodden by women
This was the second film based based on the Doom game and actually does a far better job of getting the essence of the game and paying fanservice to its elements than the earlier 2005 film did
The original The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a classic of silent German Expressionist cinema; this loose remake feels like Eraserhead reconceived with absurd Day-Glo disco decor
The first of two sequels to Dracula 2000. This is based around the idea of trying to scientifically examine a vampire’s body, sort of a vampire film by way of CSI
Cryptic and baffling French art science-fiction film involving strange happenings at a laboratory where we never get any explanations about what is going on
A conceptually wild film about the use of a device that can contact the dead that winds in the use of Thomas Edison’s spirit phone, modern physics and multiverse theory in something uniquely different
The very first dreamscape film, prefiguring many other films that have taken up the theme, most notably Inception. By contrast this is a dull affair that lets most of the possibilities slip through its hands.
Scientist Rock Hudson brings an unborn embryo to life as beautiful emotionless Barbara Carrera. Though it uses the trappings of modern science, this still has its feet in the creaky old mad scientist film
This gave the impression that is was going to venture deep inside Cronenbergian territory but instead, we have a darkly fascinating work set in the world of scientific research
An impoverished sf disaster mini-series about a dark matter experiment going amok that manages to tediously drag out four hours of soap opera dramatics and control room doubletalk
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
An undeniably imaginative SF film in which scientist Sasha Roiz to invent a device to view memory only for things to go wrong and become trapped in someone else’s memories
Solid and effective thriller in the vein of Coma where ER doctor Hugh Grant finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy involving illicit medical experiments at the hospital where he works
Modestly creepy film about a group of subjects locked in a hospital as part of a drug trial that proceeds to go wrong as some of the group have an adverse reaction and turn crazed
This is a B-budget film about genetically engineered killer bats where the usual is boosted by a sense of humour and a line-up of eccentric characters
Despite all the hate this received, I am maybe the only person out there that liked it. It is three-quarters of a good film that strips the Four of costumes and tells a character-driven story about people dealing with powers
One of the worst of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. This consists of action sequences slung together with random indifference and badly mismatched casting
A modest and quite good low-budget adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, which adheres more faithfully to the Wells novel than the recent high-profile film
Passable film about the accidental opening of a portal that transports a laboratory to an alien world teeming with monstrous creatures
Classic SF film where Marshall Thompson faces an invasion of hopping brains – pure thought monsters that have been unleashed by an atomic scientist dabbling in telekinesis
A Syfy Channel disaster movie that follows the formula with little variation about a geo-engineering project to tap clean energy from the Earth that goes amok creating firequakes
The adaptation of the Stephen King novel with Drew Barrymore giving a fantastic performance as a young girl with pyrokinetic powers on the run as she is hunted by a sinister government agency
One of Stephen King’s best books is given a new film workover by Blumhouse. Keith Thomas made a standout directorial debut with The Vigil, but this is a disaster, one of the worst of all King adaptations
TV mini-series sequel to Stephen King’s Firestarter that now sees Charlie McGee in her twenties played by Marguerite Moreau. The story feels under-plotted and over-padded
A film about med students stopping their hearts so as to explore the afterlife. This aims for big ideas but befalls director Joel Schumacher who delivers pretty visuals but finds nothing any more profound than a figurative group hug
Another remake we never asked for. Considering that this had the entire CGI revolution to conceive of the afterlife journey and merely has to top Joel Schumacher, it is amazing how dull and uninteresting this emerges as
A teleporter accident causes a scientist to swap head and arm with a fly. This requires you to suspend believability but is otherwise one of the classic monster movies of the era. Several sequels and a remake followed.
David Cronenberg remakes the 1958 film, transforming its improbable scenario into a fascinating study of biological transformation with Jeff Goldblum genetically mutating into a fly hybrid. Kafka’s Metamorphosis with a lot more slime.
One of the numerous copies of Alien. This was produced by Roger Corman, which means more of an exploitation emphasis – the alien is three times the size, there is more of a T&A emphasis and the effects are cannibalised from his other films
An early effort from Hammer Films and director Terence Fisher. Rather than the florid Gothic that Hammer and Fisher would discover four years later, this is a film with one foot in the mad science genre of the 1940s about the invention of a matter duplication machine
The greatly underrated Sean Tretta makes a Frankenstein film – a modernised one that place in a research laboratory where the monster is resurrected with expanded mental abilities
The parallel worlds/alternate timelines theme is one rich in possibilities but this Australian film is one of the least imaginative treatments, serving up only tired good/bad double plots
Fine spooky Thai film about two doctors who set out to scientifically prove the existence of ghosts in a series of experiments that venture waaay over ethical boundaries
An incredibly bad Canadian-made sequel to Food of the Gods about a scientist who devises a growth hormone that accidentally creates a horde of giant rats
Scott Derrickson film with a captivatingly original premise – a sniper is assigned to a guardhouse overlooking a gorge filled with mysterious monsters and ends up in a forbidden relationship with his counterpart across the divide
A surprisingly good little film about a group of friends being infected by parasites escaped from a laboratory. Confidant assured horror filmmaking with some way out effects.
A Russian attempt to create their own equivalent of an Avengers film. The results emerge surprisingly better than you expect and with some standout effects
Adam Wingard thriller about a sinister stranger who inveigles his way into a household. This does well playing off the handsomely polished charms of Dan Stevens, less well when it turns into an a left field action film
Australian film that is a romantic comedy take on The Quiet Earth, the classic work about three people who awake in an entirely deserted world
Happy Death Day seemed a gimmicky marriage between Groundhog Day and a slasher film. This sequel is a far better film that places some funny and quite clever spins on the previous film
Typical 1990s video release with mad scientist John Saxon creating zombie experiments amid entertainingly gooey meltdowns and a title intended to make you think this is a Hellraiser film
The Gonzo Japanese Splatter Film offers a wild array of splatter, bio-transformations and an obsession with schoolgirls’ panties. This is a low-budget entry that offers something akin to a zombie-hunting equivalent of Buffy
This comes with an interesting idea about an infection that links all the infectees together into a gestalt of shared memories even if the delivery is uneven
A low-budget film about a homeless man who has been turned into a serial killer by a series of experiments designed to create urban mayhem
The first sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which far less effectively reverses the scenario and has Rick Moranis accidentally enlarging his child to giant size
An early entry among the pre-MCU surge of Marvel Comics films in the early 2000s sees Ang Lee taking on The Incredible Hulk. Not Lee’s best film, this was slighted at the time but is worth reconsideration
Godzilla creator Ishiro Honda makes a film about a meek man who gains the ability to transform into a mist and promptly becomes a bank-robbing super-villain
Monster movie featuring mutant fish monsters come onto land to breed with women. Absurdly entertaining, this at least brings the interspecies lust in films like The Creature from the Black Lagoon out into the open
A Young Adult film that comes with a highly original premise concerning the aftermath of a catastrophe that has left ghostly figures trapped in timeloops repeating the same moves
Scottish director Lawrie Brewster, a promising newcomer on the genre horizon, has obtained the rights to revive the Amicus Films name and conducts a strong homage to the studio’s signature anthology film
The theatrically released pilot film for the 1970s/80s tv series based on the Marvel Comic that tells the Hulk’s origin story. This is one of the better episodes of the otherwise banal series
An interesting film shot during Covid lockdown, all filmed on an IPhone, about a woman caught in a timeloop where she keeps repeating through various scenarios