The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Sports refers to any type of event or game where participants must participate in some form of physical competition either individually or as a team. These can be sports of strength, skill, dexterity or physical endurance.
Almost any sports film discussed here falls into two categories. The first is the familiar sports film trope of The Underdog Wins Out plot where an individual or team enters a competition despite vast odds stacked against them. The other is where they receive some form of fantastical odds in the form of formulas, superpowers, or help from ghosts, angels, aliens, talking horses or vehicles with personalities.
Also discussed here are depictions of sports of the future or in fantasy settings.
Another of the films featuring Santo, the Mexican masked wrestler superhero. In one of the duller entries, Santo here travels to Spain and is pitted against a mad scientist operating an artworks theft operation
In something like his 30th film and amid the tatty production values of a Edward D. Wood Jr film, El Santo fight mobsters who have employed alien monsters that look like giant ambulatory bean bags
Another of Albert Pyun’s cyborg films set around a kickboxing competition where Pyun seems to have cut costs by using real competition footage with dramatically dull results
This has the mildly amusing idea of taking films like Dracula vs Frankenstein et al one step further and actually pitting various classic monsters against one another in a wrestling match
The zombie film of the 2010s has become marked by a search for the most bizarre and incongruous title/conceptual mash-ups. True to its promise, the film pits several WWE wrestlers up against zombies, alas the creativity begins and ends with the mild amusement of the title concept
The third and probably the best of the children’s dinosaur films from Charles Band where the pitiful effects are at least compensated for by an eccentric sense of humour
Ageswap fantasy in which middle-aged Matthew Perry is rejuvenated as a teenage Zac Efron. A glib fantasy that seems made by abstinence campaigners
An inane invisibility film that plays out as no more than a crude 1980s teen makeout comedy with the addition of invisibility gags
This is surely one of the great exploitation titles of all time. Another Mexican wrestling superhero film where a duo of woman wrestlers take on the Aztec Mummy from another Mexican horror series
The first of the sequels to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Marginally less grating than the first film but that’s being relative – all the things that one hated the first time are back
Sequel to the Eddie Murphy Dr Dolittle films without Murphy where the title role is inherited by Kyla Pratt as his teenage daughter. The humour is pitched at an excruciating level of inanity
Following the release of Nacho Libre, we had this parody – a porn film about lucha libre (Mexican masked wrestlers), an idea that in practice ends up about as random and lame as it sounds
An excruciating comedy built out of the basics of Mr Ed where Bobcat Goldthwait gives an imbecilic performance as an idiot who inherits a talking horse
Embarrassingly bad Mel Brooks produced film that seems to have been conceived in terms of conducting a juvenile Mad Max film on rollerskates and throwing SF cliches about without any coherent script
Feeble sequel to the unexpected Michael J. Fox comedy hit where Jason Bateman plays his cousin who discovers his inner wolf as he heads to university
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