The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Strange, surrealist animation from Spain – the characters are the small, cute talking animals you might encounter in a standard piece of cutsie moppet animation but it exists in a disturbing world that is anything but where characters are plagued by drug addictions, mental illness and police brutality
Strong and worthwhile film about the first man woken from cryogenic suspension in the future. A film from Alejandro Amenabar’s regular co-writer, the writer of Open Your Eyes
![[Rec] (2007) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-2007-poster-3.jpg)
Furious and highly engaging Spanish Found Footage film about the infected dead taking over an apartment building. Three sequels and an English-language remake followed
![[Rec] 2 (2009) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-2-2009-poster.jpg)
Lesser sequel to the Spanish Found Footage zombie film [Rec] that repeats the original to variable effect but needlessly breaks up the single camera point-of-view
![[Rec]3 Genesis (2012) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-3-genesis-2012-poster.jpg)
Third entry in the Spanish Found Footage series. The Found Footage look is abandoned soon in but this decides to have fun and turns out the gore-drenched goods
![[Rec]4 Apocalypse (2014) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-4-apocalypse-2014-poster.jpg)
The fourth film in the [Rec] series. This abandons the Found Footage look but without it, all we have is just another zombie film, nevertheless this builds to an intensively gore-drenched climax
Strong, well-written film from Buried director Rodrigo Cortes about investigators of psychic frauds encountering a possibly real example. This takes a welcomely sceptical, rationalist perspective, has a great cast and fine build-up but alas falls apart in a lame twist ending
This comes with a wonderfully satiric idea of a plague that kills the world’s wealthiest people
A cheap submarine adventure/underwater monster encounter from Spanish director Juan Pique Simon that was intended as a copy of James Cameron’s The Abyss
An utterly charming film, all told without dialogue, about a dog living in 1980s New York who purchases a robot as its new best friend
From Paco Plaza, a beautifully made film supposedly based on a true incident featuring Julian Sands as a man placed on trail in 19th Century Spain with the defence that he is a werewolf
Brian Yuzna usually makes well worthwhile films but this one about an escaped prisoner hunted by a killer cyborg dog fails to come together
One of the better of several films depicting the famous meeting between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati that led to her writing Frankenstein. Starring a then unknown Hugh Grant as Byron
A film from cult exploitation director Jesus Franco that combines a masked thief and a killer artist plot but emerges tawdrily, not to mention has nothing whatsoever to do with the suggestive title
An early film from prolific exploitation director Jess Franco, one that comes with some beautifully Gothic photography in its tale of a hooded killer
Paco Plaza, co-director of the [Rec] films, shows James Wan how to do a nun horror film properly. This is a prequel to Plaza’s earlier Veronica, telling an origin story for Sister Death
Pedro Almodovar’s exquisitely lush homage to the mad surgeon fiilm Eyes Without a Face features a superb left field twist to become an extraordinary meditation on gender and identity
Jaume Balaguero delivers this dark and gripping psycho-thriller about a likeable building manager who enjoys secretly playing cruel games and making life miserable for his tenants
A Spanish film that comes with overtones of I Walked with a Zombie and Patrick where a comatose wife starts to take control of the mind of the nurse who is tending her
Killer slug movie from hack Spanish director Juan Piquer Simon where the sole notable aspect amid the cheapness of the production is some very gory deaths
There have been great films about unseen threats before (Cat People, The Haunting) but in this case the idea of an invisible monster is just the excuse for a cheap film to avoid any special effects. It has been a long time since I have seen a film so mind-numbingly boring and dull
Visually extraordinary Coming of Age story set during the Spanish Civil War in which a young girl imagines seeing the Frankenstein monster
This film’s pitch line – Casanova meets Dracula – had me in the door in an instant, yet the film is a maddeningly dull one – slow, plotless with talky scenes that drag on for minutes at a time. The film has no interest in depicting Casanova the famous lover, while he and Dracula never even talk together
Not a title that automatically suggests a horror film – and even if it does, you automatically think of the locale for a 1980s slasher film. What we get is a Spanish-made effort about a madness-inducing infection – a modestly and tightly contained effort that twists around on itself with considerable vigour
A cheap Spanish-made copy of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film
The debut film from Nacho Vigalondo, a time travel (or more correctly time paradox) film that holds a real delight in its conceptual dexterity with which Vigalondo keeps winding the story around on itself
The first in a series of films from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio about blind Knights Templar zombies. De Ossorio is clearly influenced by Night of the Living Dead but creates considerable atmosphere
Cheap and tatty copycat of Raiders of the Lost Ark shot in the short-lived 1980s 3D revival fad
Appealing and well told fantasy in which a couple are each individually offered the opportunity to go back in time and change the circumstances that led to their breakup
A Spanish film with a wonderfully ick and queasy premise where a man and a woman wake up in bed together to find they have been surgically attached at the waist
Quite possibly the most boring 1970s Euro horror film ever made. Innocent travellers stray into a village of vampires but hardly anything happens in this soporific Spanish effort least of all the title orgy
Another film in the cult of Jess Franco. Jumping aboard the early 1970s fad for lesbian vampire films, Franco offers up a sofctore take on the story of Dracula but cast with women.
One of the few films to come out after George Romero where zombies are still associated with voodoo. Spanish horror star Paul Naschy writes and plays three roles in a film that comes with a wild mix of cross-cultural ideas
Jaume Balaguero of [Rec] fame returns with an occult horror where a woman on the run is drawn into sinister happenings at an apartment
Paco Plaza has become one of the premiere names in Spanish horror due to the [Rec] films. Here he attempts to follow in the footsteps of The Conjuring with a film based on a supposedly true supernatural incident in 90s Madrid but fails to make a terribly interesting work
A Spanish thriller about the investigation into mysterious payment made to an executed killer, which is then followed by a series of copycat killings that mimic those conducted by the dead killer
Pedro Almodovar film in which two daughters try to deal with their mother’s seeming return from the dead
Essentially a 1940s mummy film with a voodoo priest resurrected in the present and stalking the reincarnation of his love. In English translation, this has been thrown together with a meaningless word salad title to appeal to the era’s fads for Blaxploitation and exorcism films
A standout Spanish film about a 19th Century family at remote house in the midst of a great plain who are under attack by monsters that may just as easily exist in the mind
The third of Spanish star Paul Naschy’s films about the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. This becomes a crossover where Daninsky meets up to fight Countess Bathory
Fine Spanish-made killer children film inspired by The Birds where children inexplicably turn and kill adults. This has developed a modest cult and works with frequently unsettling effect
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia makes what is essentially a comedy version of From Dusk Till Dawn albeit with witches instead of vampires. This has one of the funniest openings I’ve seen in some time but thereafter dissipates into broadly farcical and overlong runnings around