The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Sex (in the context of this page) refers to the process of attraction and reproduction in human and other species. For films that tells stories about attraction between people see Romance and Romantic Comedies. For horror films set around pregnancy and birthing see Pregnancy Horrors. For films designed for the purposes of titillation see Erotica and Pornography. For more specific discussions about sexuality see LGBT Themes and Sexual Fetishism in Fantastic Cinema. All other discussions are found here.
Treatments of sex in fantastic cinema can range from futures where love is free to those where sex is banned, regarded as obsolete or where humanity has been rendered sterile. Other films deal with ways in which Virtual Reality may transform the nature of sexuality.
There is also some depictions of how aliens might reproduce. In 1950s science-fiction, aliens came to Earth to find women or else male astronauts would encounter all-women planets and introduce them to some good lovin’. As with Captain Kirk’s intergalactic romances on Star Trek (1966-9), it is usually assumed there will be attraction between human and human-like aliens.
We even have several films about robots and computers desiring to have sex. Not to mention that various monsters from King Kong (1933) onwards have a habit of carrying away the heroine of the show. Demons also desire to breed with humans. The most notably different form of alien breeding comes with the title creature in Alien (1979) and sequels, which uses human beings to lay its eggs in.
The horror film has usually had a negative relationship with sex from Norman Bates killing the women who aroused him in Psycho (1960) to the death of the promiscuous and survival of the virginal Final Girl in the Slasher Film to the unhealthy relationship of eroticism and psychopathology in the psycho-sexual thrillers from Basic Instinct (1992) onwards. There are several horror films about deadly infections that can be transmitted sexually.
One of the most influential films on this site, producing a host of sequels and making the careers of all involved. At heart, a simple monster on a spaceship film, it is made into a classic through Ridley Scott’s relentless suspense and H.R. Giger’s design work
Work of softcore erotica that gives the old 1950s B movie plot of astronauts encountering a planet inhabited only by women an Adults Only workover. Aside from the obvious reasons to watch this, the SF content is entirely negligible
Stunning tv mini-series adaptation of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play about the impact of the AIDS crisis on gay culture in the 1980s, which becomes a surreal fantasy filled with appearances of angels and ghosts
The long-awaited return of Frank Henenlotter, the cult director of Basket Case fame, with a film about people with mutant genitalia – a work that proves extraordinary in its mind-bogglingly perverse imagery
Sometimes you shake your head and wonder how a film got greenlit. In this case, we have a comedy where Cam Gigandet’s penis gains a separate life of its own, resulting in a Jekyll/Hyde film of sorts
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
Following the success of The Blair Witch Project, this was an excruciatingly lame softcore parody with a group of girls tramping in the woods finding almost any excuse to undress and conduct sex-related takes on Blair Witch
This slick eroticised thriller was a huge success and made the career of Sharon Stone. The absurd plot bears no resemblance to human motivation but Paul Verhoeven makes an undeniably provocative and entertaining package
Sequel to Basic Instinct made fourteen years later. Sharon Stone vamps her way across the screen but the heated sexuality of the original has been watered down to a lukewarm whimper
From the extraordinary and underrated Scooter McCrae, a dark and very disturbing film about the development of a sex robot for men who like to beat and abuse women
A Basic Instinct-inspired erotic thriller where Shannen Doherty gets into light bondage and attracts the attentions of a killer. A hypocritical film that is predicated on erotic tease then condemns it as disturbed behaviour
This blatantly copies the plot of Basic Instinct with detective David Bradley being seduced by bisexual blonde Anna Thomson who is also the suspect in a murder investigation
All over New York City, virgins are being molested by aliens that lurk in the subway tunnels and seek them for breeding purposes. One of the worst genre films of the 1980s
An adult film that gained a critical respectability when it came out, an avant garde work set in a future where the populace has become impotent and the handful unaffected perform sex in clubs for paying audiences
A bad movie classic. Ewa Aulin is an alien innocent who passes through a series of sexual encounters. Based on a satirical novel, this mostly serves as the opportunity for several name stars to give embarrassingly bad performances
The remake of Cat People. In the hands of Paul Schrader, all the ambiguity is made overt and the film becomes one of Schrader’s allegories for tormented sexuality. On its own terms, this is an often smoulderingly sensual work
Witty and rather funny slasher film in which the killer targets virgins in a community. The genre’s usual tropes about the chaste girl surviving are turned on their head in rather hilarious ways
In the same vein as Grindhouse, four filmmakers have come together to make an anthology of spoof horror films that homage the drive-in tradition. Good taste is left well behind and the results are both outrageous and funny
Rather funny film that parodies the Hong Kong fad for lush erotic films that popped up in the 1990s. It even manages to wind in a parody of A Chinese Ghost Story
Team-up between Ken Russell and Anthony Perkins with both in full-on lunacy mode. Kathleen Turner gives her best performance ever as a fashion designer moonlighting as a hooker who is stalked by Perkins as a psycho priest
One of Sylvester Stallone’s better films, a satirically funny work where he plays a contemporary police officer unfrozen in a future overrun by Political Correctness to chase down criminal Wesley Snipes
Adaptation of an early Dean R. Koontz novel about an A.I who imprisons a woman in her own home with the intention of impregnating her. A variant on Rosemary’s Baby conducted far more tastefully than you might think
It is telling that the only film made about workplace sexual harassment up to this point is one that painted the male as a victim. This adaptation of a Michael Crichton book came mired in controversy
Brian De Palma’s homage to Psycho. With De Palma at absolute peak form, this is dazzlingly stylish in its directorial set-pieces and comes with an often outrageous sexual pathology
Hong Kong film that blends gauzy erotica and supernatural (although no ghosts despite the title). Not as a good as the first sequel (one of several that followed) due to crude direction
The third and least interesting of the Hong Kong series that blends erotica and the supernatural. Unlike the other films, this takes itself mostly seriously
The second and best in the series of Hong Kong films filled with wonderfully tongue-in-cheek erotica and a series of entertainingly over-the-top fantastical set-pieces
Film posing as a sequel in the Hong Kong-made Erotic Ghost Story series, this consists of random sexual encounters and comic interludes without much connecting plot
Woody Allen film that takes the title of the best-selling sex manual and spins it out as the basis of a series of hilarious sex-themed skits. Contains the famous episode with the giant breast run amok
Controversial Japanese film about a virus that causes members of a family to engage in gay incest. This is perhaps the dullest taboo-breaking film I have ever sat through
Spanish film set in a dystopian future where physical contact between the sexes is outlawed and rebels discover forbidden broadcasts. This becomes overrun by its pretensions
Federico Fellini conducts his version of the life of the great lover but turns it into a fantastical film of gorgeously surreal excess, filled with extravagant sets and costuming
An animated film from Genndy Tartakovsky, director of the Hotel Transylvania films, that is a really quite filthy and hilarious story of a dog about to have its testicles removed who goes on one last adventure
This offers the amusing idea of a softcore parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. A surprisingly well-made film in terms of effects but the jokes often seems belaboured amid the witless mugging
This sequel to Flesh Gordon, the R-rated parody of the Flash Gordon serials, feels like a joke that is belaboured in the retelling. The film does have a crass level of nonsensical absurdity that proves amusing
One of the key films in the cult of director Larry Cohen, this throws in a mind-bending mix involving an androgynous alien messiah, random shootings, alien abduction and Catholicism
The original version of the Margaret Atwood novel made way before the tv series. This aims in the general direction but is more a film that achieves a sense of disquiet rather than the true horror of its’ heroine’s situation in this world
This starts out seeming a backwoods horror before plants in the woods start erotically influencing the characters, resulting in a series of provocative scenes that combine plants and sex
The Polish Brothers make some great Midwestern dramas but seem out of their depth trying to make a comedy about a sex robot. that comes out an embarrassingly unfunny variant on Weird Science
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
Defying the sensationalistic title, this is actually a fairly reasonable entry in the 1950s alien body snatchers fad in which wives discover their husbands have been taken over by aliens come to Earth to repopulate their species
Rather tatty remake of I Married a Monster from Outer Space made for tv. This is routine tv filler that has been churned out with little care or feel for the original.
A quite indescribable animated film from the great Bill Pympton, this largely consists of a series of bizarre and surreal, often outrageous, transformations and juxtapositions
Described as a cyberporn fantasy, a quasi-pornographic film set in a Cyberpunk future where androids are designed to consume sexual experience
One of the key films from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, a quartet of exquisitely photographed and art directed erotic tales, including one about Countess Bathory
Jane Campion makes one of the best post-Basic Instinct erotic thrillers with Meg Ryan as a teacher in New York caught between erotic awakening and a lurking killer
A film about a shapeshifting demonic rapist. This is far more tastefully presented than its premise would suggest, in fact comes with he plodding sedateness of a tv movie
Wacky South Korean comedy that seems like Species played with the sensibilities of My Stepmother is an Alien – the whole film plays out as a nonsensically charming seduction
From on an early script by Star Trek director Nicholas Meyer, this is an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek effort where women use a serum to turn into deadly bee creatures
Comedy about two idiot soldiers captured by alien women. The painfully unfunny routines, laughable vegetable monsters and attitudes to women make this one of the great unrecognised bad movies of all time
Undeniably effective horror about a deadly shapeshifting phantom that gets passed by sexual contact. Imagine Ring by way of a Larry Clark film. This creates rather good unsettlingly uncanny atmosphere
A David DeCoteau film about a giant alien eyeball that causes people to become erotically aroused. The chessiness of the premise is hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
Conceptually odd mix of an erotic film and a standard copy of Alien. This come with the peculiarity of steamy encounters sitting alongside chestburster scenes
An offbeat science-fiction film sold as a work of erotica but one that actually subverts the genre in interesting ways concerning a futuristic apartment block performers where strippers are being fed a drug
Culty New Wave film with Anne Carlisle as a model who has a miniature UFO land on her New York apartment roof where it devours her lovers for the opiate in the brain produced during orgasm
Yorgos Lanthimos makes a deadpan black humour SF film set in a future where one is forced to find their perfect romantic partner or else be turned into an animal
From Denys Arcand, a strong and powerful examination of all differing aspects of sexuality in the 1990s via a crosscut of characters, including a serial killer also in the mix
Really odd, even at times touching, Japanese film about a man’s thwarted attempts to have sex with his android maid
There is an appealingly satiric concept here – a parody of a nature documentary looking at human mating rituals from an alien perspective where everything is constantly being misinterpreted in terms of an animal behaviour – but what emerges is mostly a one-gag film
A comedy in which Griffin Dunne’s penis begins talking to him. Contrary to expectation, most of the film is PG-13 but some of the films attitudes and unfunny routines are fairly mind-boggling
A remake of the classic bad movie Cat-Women of the Moon in which explorers to the Moon encounter an all-women society. Things do not improve in the bad movie stakes here
The third and last of the Monty Python films, a variety of skits that are variously outrageous and frequently leave behind all good taste
A horror anthology with a mordant sense of humour with Clancy Brown doing a great turn as an octogenarian mortuary attendant who tells several stories of the bodies he has tended
Ishiro Honda and Toho, the creators of Godzila, turn their attentions to the alien invasion film – the first Japanese entry in the great 1950s SF alien invader fad – and deliver all the same colourful mass destruction we expect
Indian film set in a future where female infanticide has become so widespread there are no longer any women. A fundamentally implausible idea is treated with some conviction
This has the most ridiculous premise of any alien invasion film – an alien is abducting women from ads for models placed in girlie magazines – but is played with a stone-faced seriousness that defies you to laugh
Film about a zombie-creating sexually transmitted disease that feels like it was made by a bunch of drunken adolescents trying to out-gross each other after an all-weekend beer party. A film that is readily ventures into bad taste and is prepared to offend
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
Film that depicts an alternate world where women have gained the upper-hand and men are a disappearing minority. This proved an unexpected delight, a mockumentary that comes in perfect and side-splitting deadpan, not to mention explores its premise with absolutely logical regard
Bizarre attempt to mix the 1970s SF film with the British sex comedy as a group of people are abducted by three alien women who are ignorant about sex
Popular entry among the early 1970s spate of British sex comedies featuring Hywell Bennett as the recipient of the world’s first penis transplant. Mostly this serves as an excuse to string a series of sexual encounters together.
Sequel to the British sex comedy Percy about the world’s first penis transplant in which the central character is now the last fertile man on Earth
Softcore erotic film set aboard a space mission where a crew have to deliver an assignment of empathic alien women
Todd Haynes’ first film, three stories, two of which are fantastic … Being Haynes’ first film, this is less polished than his later work but circles through familiar themes of social outsiders, gay identity and recreations of previous cinematic styles, including one segment that is a mocked-up 1940s mad scientist film
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
The No 1 cult film of all time, more a phenomenon than a film, a demented glitter rock homage to mad science cinema and 50s sf films run through with celebration of a gender-bender joie de vivre
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
One of the most excruciatingly painful films ever made – a softcore comedy in which God and The Devil make a bet to replay the Garden of Eden by reincarnating Adam and Eve throughout history. Filled with ghastly over-the-top performances and much eye-rolling innuendo
What starts out seeming like a frat boy comedy about a guy receiving a list of all the women he will sleep with turns into an intriguingly different beast altogether
Sequel to the Hong Kong erotic film, an entirely unrelated work that inflates the original into a madcap Wu Xia film filled with crude, rude humour
Charming and delightful Hong Kong erotic comedy about a scholar who sets out on a journey of sexual freedom
A revival of the 1990s Sex and Zen series of erotic comedies, this comes with the novelty of being presented in 3D
A popular Polish comedy in its day about two men who awake from cryogenic suspension in a women-ruled future where men are obsolete. Some of the comedy reads as very dated watching the film today
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
David Cronenberg’s first commercial release, a vivid work about parasites that turn the residents of an apartment building into sexual fetishists. Cronenberg has set out to shock while beneath that he creates fascinating metaphors about sex
A second film from John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame where Mitchell sets out to chart different flavours of sexuality in the 00s and does so with sometimes funny, othertimes outrageous effect. Included here for a heroine whose orgasm has the ability to cause power fluctuations
Really quite funny film in which a teenage girl becomes pregnant with a body-snatching parasite. Think Mean Girls meets The Hidden
Sequel to Species that this time offers up the male of the species. The film feels put together as an exercise in makeup effects but their physiological absurdity causes the film to topple into silliness
Slick and rather silly copy of Alien that conceptually cross-hatches it to emerge as essentially Basic Instinct with tentacles
The third of the Species films, which follows Sil’s daughter. Some okay makeup effects but the plotting gets fairly silly
Fourth entry in the Species series where at least the series seems to have gravitated to the arena of the trashily absurd B movie it belongs
Rather of an oddity – a French adult film about women from the future that in the aftermath of Star Wars was re-edited to become a film about alien women visitors come to kill off the human species via sex. Often directed with an artiness that proves far more than you expect
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
Gonzo comedy that looks like a film about post-holocaust mutants that has been directed by Russ Meyer
Larry Clark remakes the old Roger Corman film and makes a beeline for his usual proclivities about teenagers having sex in a fairly outrageous post-apocalyptic work
An outrageous premise – a girl has a vagina with teeth – that is played with far more good taste that one expects
Charles Band film directed by David DeCoteau, a lame softcore comedy where two guys travel back from a future where sex is outlawed and end up in a girl’s boarding school
One of the numerous Virtual Reality films to come out in the mid-90s, this seems undecided whether it wants to be an SF or an erotic film
An adult film about aliens that visit Earth to repopulate their own species and abduct women during sex whereupon they stimulate them with the penises that come out of their mouths
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around