The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Devil (or Satan, Lucifer and Beelzebub) is a figure that is regarded as the prime source of evil in Judaeo-Christian mythology. According to Biblical mythology, Satan was an angel who was cast down from Heaven after leading a rebellion against God. He inhabits Hell, commands all demons and has dominion over the souls of the damned in the afterlife. In popular depiction, The Devil has horns, cloven hoofs and often red skin or glowing eyes.
The Devil is constantly of influencing/tempting human beings to do evil and manipulating events to bring individuals to a loss of faith or innocence. One of the most common appearances is in Diabolical Pact stories in which an individual sells their soul to The Devil or one of his agents for some boon only to frequently find themselves trapped by literal or contorted interpretation of the wording of the agreement.
There have been a large number of depictions of The Devil on screen from the silent era onwards. These range from light comic treatments to the 1970s occult cycle where The Devil is attempting to give birth to a child. There have even been treatments that try to rationalise The Devil in terms of science-fiction explanations.
Deliriously frothy and enjoyable George Miller film with Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as three witches who conjure forth Devil figure – Jack Nicholson in full barnstorming mode
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
A strong and imaginative horror/Western hybrid set aboard a train before the realisation that it is travelling to Hell. Deft characterisations and some tight, electric confrontations make this work well
South Korean horror film that generates a more than effectively creepy atmosphere. The downside is that you reached the end of the show with no clear idea what is going on and why things are happening
Blumhouse production where Finn Jones moves to a small town and finds the portrait of the town’s founder is a ringer for him
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
An early Roger Corman film that stirs a fascinating mix of elements involving hypnotic regression, witchery, time travel and appearances from The Devil
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John went stellar in Grease. The same flopped when they reteamed in this comedy where they are caught in a bet between God and The Devil
A clone of Donald Trump battles The Illuminati and the Egyptian god Anubis on Mars before travelling to Hell to sort out The Devil. The sheer dementia of the premise alone has one sitting down to watch
Film spinoff of the rock parody act headed by Jack Black. This emerges like i>The Blues Brothers recast with Cheech and Chong and delivers some occasionally surreal and amusing gags
Trilogy of Edgar Allan Poe tales from three European directors. Roger Vadim’s opening episode drags but both Louis Malle and Federico Fellini deliver standout works in their respective segments
Tales from the Hood was the novelty of an African-American made horror anthology. 23 years later the principal talents (including producer Spike Lee) reunite for a sequel
A Christian-made film based on the intriguing idea of Satan on trial in a courtroom. A film that in its bad acting, laughable dialogue and lack of conviction rivals The Room in bad movie stakes. The usually worthwhile Malcolm McDowell, who for some reason also produces, gives one of his worst performances
Fascinating film set during Puritan witchery as men travel into the woods to confront a witch, this has many similarities to Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale. Made by an historian who makes everything authentic to the era
A classic of the German Expressionist era about a poor student who sells his shadow to The Devil, only to have it become a malevolent doppelganger. As with much of the work to emerge from this era, the film manages directorial effects that still look amazing today
Laughable Irwin Allen film that conducts a tour of human history via stock footage as Vincent Price’s The Devil holds a heavenly tribunal to judge humanity for inventing the atomic bomb
Unfunny comedy in which husband and wife John Ritter and Pam Dawber are trapped in Hell, which consists of various parodies of popular tv shows
A mishmash of Alien copy and supernatural serial killer film set in a drowned future London with a script that makes no real sense. The film’s buddy cop relationship starring Rutger Hauer does have its amusements.
A very disappointing film adaptation of Todd MacFarlane’s cult comic-book where all of the moody darkness emerges with one-dimensional effect as little more than The Punisher with horns
A theatrical release spun off from tv’s cult absurdist/scatological show. Not as sophisticated as later seasons of the tv series but with a raucously wacky bite that is frequently hilarious
This seems a variant on the plot about a cult pursuing a child for their purposes but expectations soon get twisted on their head in interesting ways
The Hallmark tv mini-series version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale is lushly produced but tends to plod when it should come to life as fantasy
Film set in a small 19th Century Orthodox Jewish village struggling to deal with the modern world, featuring Noah Taylor as a fool troubled by visions of The Devil
Alec Baldwin’s financially troubled modernised remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster comes to the screen as a compromised vision
Film where recovering addict Balthazar Getty is dragged into an underworld of vice by mysterious stranger Peter Weller
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
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a classic film that popularised the modern interest in occult and deviltry on film; this sad remake is something that only parrots the cliches that have set in in the ensuing 46 years and clumsily mishandles all of Polanski’s comically edgy paranoia
Classic film and one of Roman Polanski’s finest works, the comically paranoid story of a housewife who increasingly comes to believe that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil
A bad movie classic. A vanity project for Canadian heavy metal star/bodybuilder Jon-Mikl Thor who plays a heavy metal star who takes frequently his shirt off to pose while his band are killed by demonic forces (represented by the screen’s maybe worst ever puppet effects) as they try to record an album
A few years ago, Neil Marshall seemed a major genre director on the rise with The Descent. Here he returns with a film about the historic witch persecutions
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 third and in the opinion of many the best of Hammer’s Quatermass films in which Nigel Kneale introduces a conceptually wild array of ideas about Martians, race memory, psychic powers and The Devil
The fourth of The Prophecy films about war between angels, the first to be made without Christopher Walken with Sean Pertwee as a detective in Bucharest who is drawn in
Standout film about angels warring on Earth that dispenses with any cutsie depiction of angels. Several sequels followed.
One of the less successful, nevertheless underrated John Carpenter films where he pays tribute to Nigel Kneale in a conceptually mind-boggling mix of deviltry and quantum physics
Early film from Danish director Anders Rønnow-Klarlund. This starts out as a plague outbreak drama and then does a bizarre mid-film twist to become a possession film
One of the best and most underrated Dean R. Koontz adaptations, which creates eerie atmosphere out a town where the residents have disappeared due to what is revealed as a uniquely different creature
A mind-boggling oddity – a slapstick comedy Western where there seems no limit on how nutty things are allowed to go, including characters venturing to Heaven and Hell
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
An entry in the gonzo killer shark film fad from Mark Polonia, this has some undeniable amusement to its title mash-up as a team go in search of Noah’s Ark, which somehow has killer sharks involved
Roman Polanski makes a return to Rosemary’s Baby territory in this work with Johnny Depp as a rare book collector on the trail of an occult tome. Polanski great a great sense of sinister forces surrounding Depp but the film reaches an unsatisfying ending
Clever concept of five people trapped in an elevator where one of them is The Devil. One of the better films to come out under the much debased name of M. Night Shyamalan who lends his name as producer
Anodyne adaptation of a weaker Stephen king novel about a curio shop that sells objects that cause people to become obsessed and in so doing wreaks havoc throughout a small town
German low-budget film about a resurrected sorcerer, this goes out on a wild edge, winds everything up to 15 on the dial and positively wades in blood, gore and torture scenes
The Monk is a sordid classic of 18th Century Gothic literature, filled with crazed lusts and Catholic guilt and damnation. However, in the hands of French director Dominik Moll, all the tortured sexuality has been watered down and the story stuffed as a costume drama
Fine film that deserves wider recognition with Jeff Goldblum as a man in an asylum who claims to be The Devil
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
One of the forgotten comedies from UK’s Ealing Studios, this rails against the evils of the then new medium of television where The Devil contrives to make people miserable by getting them to watch tv
Fascinating artifact from the silent era. One of the original Italian muscleman films in which the titular strongman is whisked down to Hell where efforts are made to seduce him into staying
Mexican film made to celebrate the Day of the Dead wherein Death befriends a poor peasant and bequeaths him a gift of a gourd of healing water. While not terribly sophisticated, this works as a pure and simple fable
The Adam Sandler comedy and its pitch to the most vulgar common denominator is an acquired taste. This not very funny effort casts Sandler as The Devil’s Son
The last great film from Mario Bava, an exquisitely dreamy giallo/haunted house film that had the ignomity of being butchered and made into an Exorcist copy when it came out
A VHS era light fantasy Nancy Allen plays a futures trader in Chicago who is offered the chance for business success if she will trade her soul
Film set in a police interrogation room in the afterlife where two attorneys argue over whether a dead man should be saved or damned
Lars von Trier returns to finish off his haunted hospital saga The Kingdom after a 25 years absence, despite the death of several principals, and again milks the same darkly hilarious vein
Follow-up to Lars von Trier’s haunted hospital mini-series The Kingdom. The story is continued, although the plot seems rickety and either drops elements or veers off on other tangents as though it is being made up as people go along
A mind-boggling surrealist retelling of the life of Jesus (where the role has been cast with a woman). Crammed with strange imagery and symbolism. Very off the beaten track
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
This wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn’t cursed by bad luck – the death of star Heath Ledger. It’s the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism
A very lightweight made-for-tv comedy where a nerdy teen signs a pact with a desperate agent of The Devil who offers him cool and the girl of his dreams
Low-budget film that absorbs you in an intensive headspace as family members visit a reclusive brother who claims to have The Devil locked in the cellar
A lightweight comedy in which nerd Steve Levitt makes a pact with The Devil to have the perfect male body but soon comes to regret his decision
An Alexandra Aja adaptation of a Joe Hill novel that comes with a diabolical glee as Daniel Radcliffe develops a set of devil horns and finds everyone confessing their deepest secrets to him
A witty afterlife comedy, a modernised retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice where Chad Lowe drives down the highway to hell to rescue his girlfriend
Director Bruce McDonald and writer/star Don McKellar make an hilariously eccentric road movie as McKellar takes a trip down the title route with a dead body while pursued by The Devil
After a disastrous reboot of the Hellboy franchise, Millennium Media get it right, employing the comic’s creator on script, taking the series into wild directions with Hellboy up against Appalachian folk horrors
An entry in the 1940s light fantasy films in which compulsive womaniser Don Ameche arrives in the afterlife where he tells his life story to The Devil
A bizarre pseudo-documentary from the silent era that claims to recount a history of Satanism and witchcraft. Much of the film’s thesis is spurious but the results are facsinating
One of the few flops that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made, a broad satire where Burton is a Devil figure who escape from an asylum, leaving a trail of bodiesas he makes his way up to control the presidency
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
Ridiculous sequel to the Marvel Comics adaptation with an indifferently written script assembled from cliches, forgettable action scenes and Nicolas Cage giving one of his silliest performances in ages
Film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ demon superhero emerges as better than it had the right to be. The risibility of the image of a motorcycle-riding demon hero is made to work through some vivid and way-out effects
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
Alexander Sokurov, the director behind Russian Ark, turns to the classic story about a man who sells his soul to The Devil. A very different version than we are used to that takes place in an earthy, cluttered Mediaeval world
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer offers up his wonderfully bizarre part-live-action, part-Claymation interpretation of the classic story of Faust and his pact with The Devil
F.W. Murnau’s version of the classic tale of an aging scholar selling his soul to the Devil for youth and love is one of the most fabulous pieces of pure cinema to come out of the German Expressionist era
Troma film that ventures back into their regular bad taste territory. This often feels like a film that never coheses into a particularly clear idea of what it is trying to do, possibly the result of six different directors
Classic 1970s haunted film – at least the ending reveals otherwise. While most haunted house films focus on creating spooky atmosphere, this has been designed as a copy of The Omen driven by a series of bizarre novelty deaths
Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on The Devil on the eve of the millennium. This is essentially The Omen and one of its ilk having been reworked as a mindless big-budget action and effects movie
A film based on true-life serial killer Ed Kemper. Director Chad Ferrin made the terrible Pig Killer, a true crime film that got everything wrong about its subject. Here however Ferrin gets it right and makes one of his best films yet
An anthology film produced by Charles Band where assorted directors turn in seven episodes all centred around a videogame warrior put through a series of tests by The Devil
Not an adaptation of Bram Stoker but an anime based on the Marvel comic-book Tomb of Dracula (the same title that gave birth to Blade)
Jason Connery directs a film that draws upon the basics of The Keep about soldiers venturing into a tomb in Iraq where they awaken a great evil housed there
Big-budget Satanism film that came out during the mid-70s occult film fad, this promptly collapses into a bad movie through many unintentionally absurd touches and a nonsensical screenplay
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
Ingmar Bergman comedy in which The Devil sends Don Juan to tempt a vicar’s wife. A minor Bergman entry where he seems unsuited to directing comedy and allows his usual weighty philosophical preoccupations to intrude
Beautifully pure-hearted French Wartime allegory set during the Middle Ages about The Devil who has sent out envoys to tempt mortals into damnation via affairs of the heart
TV movie that copies Rosemary’s Baby as closely as copyright will allow with Belinda J. Montgomery encountering Satanists and the realisation she is the devil’s daughter
Darren Lynn Bousman, the director best known for the Saw sequels, makes a musical about a circus set in Hell through which three damned souls pass, enacting updated versions of various of Aesop’s Fables
Despite a premise that sounds more like the punchline of a lawyer joke – The Devil (Al Pacino) is a high-price lawyer in New York – this is lushly produced, played seriously and with surprising theological depths
This has an insane plot about Satanists stealing the Shroud of Turin to clone a body to incarnate The Devil and a priest possessed by the archangel Michael wading into action with a glowing sword
Dreary Disney live-action comedy that casts Bill Cosby as The Devil who tasks a hapless Elliott Gould with trying to find redemption by getting three innocents to sell their souls
A Woody Allen film in which he plays a writer on his way to receive an award. The film drifts in and out of a series of vignettes and stories he has written, including a number of fantastic interludes, with highly amusing effect
The second film from Spain’s Alex de la Iglesia, a comedy poking fun at Biblical End Times prophecies. Quite a promising idea that eventually dissolves into a caper comedy
Conceptually ridiculous film where a spaceship crew in lunar orbit come across a space shuttle that disappeared through the Bermuda Triangle and contains a parasitic organism that is The Devil
Modernised version of the classic journey though Hell conducted with cardboard puppets – a uniquely appealing experiment peppered with a number of biting contemporary jibes
An extraordinary find, the first ever feature film, a depiction of Dante’s Inferno and a descent down to visit the damned in Hell conducted with an incredible ambition for the time the film was made
Dreary film in which Vincent Price is a magistrate who is haunted by a manifestation of The Devil for his witch persecutions. The publicity falsely tried to sell this as an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation.
One of Walter Hill’s finest films that sets out in search of the soul of blues music, featuring a superlative performance from Joe Seneca as an aging bluesman who wants back the soul he traded to The Devil for success
Enigmatic Manoel de Oliveira film that may be about wife Catherine Deneuve making a pact with The Devil to dispose of the woman husband John Malkovich is attracted to. Or maybe not