The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
As directors, women are underrepresented – in terms of the content listed on this side, for example, probably less than 5% has been made by women. As a believer in equal opportunities for all, one can only cheer on XX where five women have gotten together to make a horror anthology
Julian Sands returns in a sequel to Warlock where the frequently unserious effects of director Anthony Hickox turn it into a silly comic-book of a film
The exorcism film has made a big comeback in the 00s. From one of the co-directors of the Crank films, this only offers up the same mix of cliches as usual – indeed, often seems like a series of random jump scares without any rationale as to why they would be happening
The third in a series of Biblical End Times films withGary Busey as a decent cop who wakes up in a future ruled by the Anti-Christ. The heavy-handed slinging of Bible verses makes this hard-going for anyone who is not a believer, while the conspiratorial tone frequently verges on nuttiness
An early mockbuster from The Asylum that came out the same day as The Omen remake, this conducts a blatant copy of The Omen on a low-budget
Dean R. Koontz adaptation with Bruce Greenwood as a private detective drawn into helping a woman protect her child from crazed cultists that believe he is the Antichrist
The second in a series of Biblical End Times films from Canada’s faith-based Cloud Ten Pictures, this offers the peculiarity of the Anti-Christ appearing in Virtual Reality
There is irresistible appeal to the idea of a comedy that conducts a spoof of the Biblical Rapture. Despite a script from one of the Bill and Ted writers, this emerges as a remarkably unfunny film that consists of about an hour of Craig Robinson delivering crude sexual innuendos
Christian film in which Sean Patrick Flanery is a recovering rock musician who fights to rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of a music promoter who is the Ant-Christ
The Omen and imitators had been exploiting Biblical End Times prophecies for years but this is one that approaches it from a Christian perspective. The film also started a wave of serious faith-based films that employed name actors in order to carry them to crossover audiences
Sequel to the Biblical End Times/Antichrist film The Omega Code, this dispenses with preaching faith but still slips into absurdity
Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski takes the director’s chair and conducts a modest and effective revival of the 1970s occult/Anti-Christ film
The director of Tucker and Dale vs Evil returns with a comedy that spoofs The Omen about an average guy trying to step-parent the Anti-Christ child
The third of the Left Behind films with Kirk Cameron facing the Biblical End of the World and the Antichrist. This travels well down into bad movie territory
There have been the various adaptations of the Left Behind books about the Biblical Rapture; this is an attempt to spin the same off for Young Adult audiences and is not very good
A revival of the Kirk Cameron starring Biblical End of the World films and a sequel to the Nicolas Cage starring reboot. Directed by and starring your favourite internet troll Kevin Sorbo
The second of the Kirk Cameron Biblical End Times films. On one hand, these are quite competently made B movies; on the other the fundamentalist message is unpalatable
Adaptation of the best-selling Christian book series about the Biblical End of the World. There is a mini-industry of these films and, if one can stomach the preachiness, this is not entirely bad
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen industrialist Kirk Douglas fighting the coming of the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant
Hysterically bad film where Chuck Norris turns one-man fighting machine and goes all out to save the world from the Anti-Christ calling down the Armageddon
TV mini-series based on the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett novel that spoofs The Omen and Biblical End Times prophecies. The series is very close to the book as though it didn’t want to edit any precious gag
Did the world ask for a prequel to the events of The Omen, explaining how Damien was born etc? It’s not an issue that has given me sleepless night, but it is a question the film sets out to answer anyway
The third and by general consensus the weakest of The Omen films. It fails to deliver its promise of depicting the Armageddon but Sam Neill gives a performance of magnificently dark charisma as the grown-up Damien
From Frank LaLogiaa, a director who has made too few films, a low-budget film with Stefan Arngrim as a teenage Antichrist. This is a film filled with as much promise as it does absurd effect
A Found Footage film that seeks to overhaul the Satanic impregnation film a la Rosemary’s Baby. Both the Found Footage and the Satanic impregnation genres feel well-mined by now and this fails to offer anything new
The first of the sequels to The Omen, this follows Damien through his teenage years as he comes into his powers. Mostly though, the film seems to exist to stage more bizarre novelty death scenes