The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This is Terry Gilliam largely going back to revisit Brazil, albeit having been updated to the 2010s and the era of the internet. A renaissance of many Gilliam themes, nevertheless this feels like one of his slighter works
Exceptionally written UK mini-series from Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies following a diverse family throughout the 2020s that become a projection of current trends turned nightmarish
Iranian director Babak Anvari impressed with Under the Shadows. This is his follow-up where barman Armie Hammer’s life is turned upside down after he picks up a sinister cellphone
WarGames was a thriller that was way ahead of its time; this sequel is no more than video fodder exploiting recognition factor that reduces the original to hacker movie cliches in a technically ill-informed and incoherent plot
This was the first film to ever depict the internet with Matthew Broderick as a teen innocent hacker who accidentally hacks in and triggers a nuclear alert thinking he is playing a computer game
An adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel modernised into the era of mass data surveillance, social media and Amazon delivery drivers. Shot in the Screenlife process where the film screen becomes a computer screen
Gregory Hoblit has proven a fine director but this film about a site showing murders live on the internet feels like an hysterical rant about the dangers of the internet masquerading as a thriller
Unfriended had a unique novelty approach – everything took place in one take where the film screen was a computer screen. You wonder what a sequel can add to this. The surprise is that we get a film even better than the original
One of the most unique films in some time – everything takes place across social media (chat sessions, video calls) where the cinema screen is the computer screen. A fairly average supernatural retribution story that generates reasonable tension
Tron was a groundreaking work that predicted the advent of cyberspace. Three decades on, this sequel never does anything as imaginative, although advances in effects technology allow for a dazzling reinvention of The Grid
Tron was a genuinely groundbreaking work. It is hard to describe how ill conceived this sequel is where we have gone to predicting the idea of cyberspace to a fight over a glorified 3D printer
A flop in its day, nobody at the time saw how revolutionary this was in that it predicted the idea of cyberspace and the internet. The design of the world inside the computer all in candy apple colours and geometric shapes is extraordinary
A film that bites off some Big Ideas from the transhumanist movement – A.I., nanotechnology, and especially Mind Upload – and fails to do anything with them except for reach for hoary cliches of Frankenstein science. A film that, despite its self-importance, ends up as only a better budgeted version of The Lawnmower Man
Belgian film shot in the first person about an extreme agoraphobic who seeks to cultivate relationships with other people online
After the highs of James Cameron’s first two Terminator films, this was a crashing disappointment. Schwarzenegger is back but his performance has become self-parody and the uninspired action sequences are accompanied by some terrible effects
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film about a rogue A.I. taking over a social media network. A film that is also a heartwarming work about family togetherness
Japanese horror film that launched the name of Shion Sono and is attention grabbing but proves an unfathomable mix of mass suicides, mysterious websites that predict deaths and a pop band seemingly controlling it all
Horror film with a substantial cast of genre veterans where Jeffrey Combs imprisons guests in a hotel and livestreams as a group of killers compete to rack up the most creative kill
The fourth Daniel Craig James Bond film welcomely resurrects one of the great nemeses from the series past – only to fall flat on its face. This is a Bond film severely hampered by a director unattuned to the classical elements of the series and the need to cripple everything by giving Bond backstory and character development
For reasons not clear to me, Space Jam is considered a classic. Now we get a sequel that updates it to the present featuring a different NBA star LeBron James
Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame makes a work set in a near-future L.A., a sprawling film bursting at the edges with too many characters and subplots but not uninteresting
Standout thriller set around the world of computing, one of the earliest techno-thriller to adapt to the new internet age
This is essentially Candyman rewritten for the internet generation about a boogeyman that appears to kill the person on the other end if you type a phrase three times
Slender Man is the fascinating idea of an internet meme that has crossed over to become an urban legend in the real world; this is the film version. This held the potential to be something very uncanny but chooses to play everything incredibly safe and middle-of-the-road
Based on Ray Kurzweil’s non-fiction book about the coming evolution of machine intelligence, this is an odd mix of documentary and SF, including a storyline to illustrate Kurzweil’s main theses … The vision is an extraordinarily utopian one but one has just a few plausibility problems with it
The selfie is such a concept of the moment that I suppose someone had to make the first selfie horror film. The film suffers conceptual confusions and what starts out akin to something like Ring slides into more of a variant on The Den with sinister strangers stalking the heroine online
Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson return to the Scream franchise to turn out the fourth and best sequel yet. The opening scene alone is the funniest one has seen in a film in some time
Enormously entertaining David Cronenberg film about psychic powers. Cronenberg is fascinated with the conceptua possibilities and creates some sensational set-pieces
Bizarrely incomprehensible film from Avi Nesher set in a Cyberpunk future in which Olivier Gruner is turned into a Neanderthal superhuman by aliens living in cyberspace
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
Rather entertaining film from The Asylum about the machine revolution that overspills with madcap technological invention
A film that starts with the premise of teenage girls looking for a party and then going in search of a missing cellphone doesn’t do much to enthuse me. On the other hand, things pick up when the search leads them to a strange house
Steven Spielberg adapted Ernest Cline’s book about a massive virtual treasure hunt through 1980s pop culture trivia. The film winds up the pop culture references by a factor of ten, but misses the book’s compulsive readability
I had a lot of liking for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, a depiction of the inside of a videogame from the viewpoint of the characters. This expands the concept to the internet. Despite being the ultimate product placement film, this also rather appealingly shows Disney poking fun at themselves
This was the first of two sequels to the Wes Craven scripted Pulse, the English language version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intensely spooky film about ghosts from the internet
As part of the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films, Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s unfathomable but undeniably creepy internet horror is reworked as a standard teen film
From Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a ghost story that creates an incredibly haunted atmosphere. As with most of Kurosawa’s work, dazzling ideas sit alongside a murky and impenetrable plot where you are baffled trying to make sense of what is happening
The directorial debut of Satoshi Kon, overseen by Katsuhiro Otomo, an anime concerning a troubled Japanese pop singer being cyber-stalked by a doppelganger
A venture inside the dreamscape from anime director Satoshi Kon who creates a beautifully animated work even if some of the ideas become excessively convoluted
This Nacho Vigalondo film prefigured Unfriended with everything taking place on a computer screen. A far more adventurous film with a wildly entertaining plot about celebrity stalking
Film that tried to jump aboard the newly arrived paradigm of the internet but is mostly a cliched thriller about Sandra Bullock trying to recover her erased identity
This is like an online version of 13 Sins about an internet site that pushes people to take increasingly more outrageous and eventually deadly dares. One of the new thrillers centred around social media that seeks to adopt its visual look, this is slickly polished and aimed direct to the teenage demographic
The second film from the director of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead about demon hunters. A great deal has been expanded on the creature effects and in building the film’s mythology.
An anthology of comedy skits that sets out to be in as bad taste as possible – you are left astounded how far a film has to go to offend in this post-South Park era. That and wondering if the producers had kidnapped some of the stars’ family members to force them to participate
Video-released compilation of above average horror short films all set around the titular website
A surprise delight, an animated film that overspills with madcap creative energy concerning a misfit family on a road trip who come up against the machine revolution
The eighth of the Mission: Impossible films. The previous entry Dead Reckoning was a high point in the series and this is left wrapping up the storyline in what would appear to be Tom Cruise’s final outing for the series
Satiric Argentinean animated film about a Martian stranded on Earth
Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler was one of the worst of all Stephen King adaptations and this is modern sequel generating of the worst order where the Mangler now becomes an A.I. and a computer virus
The fourth of the Die Hard films and the only one that enters into genre territory with Bruce Willis now fighting a catastrophic hack attack that disables the entire US
Fatal Attraction smartly updated for the generation that invented the term ‘YouTube influencer’ with Keiynan Lonsdale as an influencer stalked by a psycho fan Ema Horvath
Like a version of David Fincher’s The Game rewritten for the mobile user generation where a slacker is forced through a series of scenarios that mess with his sense of reality
A strong and dramatic work about a sudden catastrophe that occurs when the world’s internet and cellular system are shut off. Produced by no less than former US President Barack Obama
The Lawnmower Man was far from a classic but this sequel has an absurdity that pushes it into extremely bad movie stakes with Matt Frewer as a messiah trying to move everybody into cyberspace
This has nothing to do with the Stephen King story about a Pan-worshipping lawnmowing service and is a film about Virtual Reality. Harnessing some top-drawer CGI effects of the day, this was influential on subsequent VR films
Dystopian action film that could have only been made during the late 70s Oil Crisis where Lee Majors defies a totalitarian system where vehicles are banned by setting out in his racing car
Wonderfully Kafka-esque film about a man who takes a job laying cable for a new internet company only to find himself in a system of nightmare rules and regulations
The second film from Indonesia’s Mo Brothers follows the internet friendship between a serial killer and another he decides to mentor in the ways of killing. The Mo’s take to the material with a dark relish
The first attempt to film the works of cult Cyberpunk author William Gibson met with very mixed success, nevertheless is a modest effort that does mainline the essence of Gibson’s world
Rowan Atkinson in his third outing as the inept spy. Atkinson is a talented comic but these Johnny English films, which are like less sophisticated versions of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Closeau, are the least of his comedy incarnations
Amiable comedy about an annoyingly intrusive artificially intelligent mobile assistant that wreaks havoc on its owner’s life
Influencer with Cassandra Naud as a psycho who targets and then impersonates social media influencers was a modest hit, filled with a series of sharp whiplash twists. This is a sequel
A standout thriller full of sharp whiplash twists that features Cassandra Naud as a murderous psycho who targets social media influencers and then steals their identities
Described as a cyberporn fantasy, a quasi-pornographic film set in a Cyberpunk future where androids are designed to consume sexual experience
A British film about a teen who gets a cellphone embedded in his head and develops the ability to tap into cellular and internet traffic. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes with an admirably gritty edge
The first major genre film made during the Covid lockdown, a modestly effective work that borrows the basics of Unfriended for a story about a séance being held over a Zoom call
A confusing Taiwanese film about a series of mysterious disappearances. This is a film that feels like a series of random improv scenes constructed without anything resembling a plot
Spike Jonze addresses virtual relationships in this story of a romance between a man and an A.I. A film that is astonishing in its freshness, naturalness and avoidance of any of the cliches that have dogged other treatments.
A serial killer thriller with Lou Diamond Phillips as a detective investigating a killer who challenges the police to games of hangman
Film that wants to be an expose of the lives of hackers but seems an absurd agglomeration of cliches that stumbles over its own feet trying to establish its counter-culture cool
A film about Grimcutty, a boogeyman that lurks inside an internet meme and thrives on causing parental fears. This sits on the edge of being almost interesting
Another End of the World film concerning the collapse of society as a group of friends gather. Feels more like a variant on The Big Chill than a film about the end of everything but is not without its moments
A completely mad and all over the place film with Sam Rockwell as a time traveller (or madman) arrived at a diner to recruit six people on a mission to save the world from an evil A.I.
The 17th James Bond film, the first featuring Pierce Brosnan who gives a dazzlingly ruthless performance. The series is rebooted and takes the opportunity to reconstruct the mythos in terms of modern politics in ways that often take you aback
Slasher film that comes with the interestingly original setting of a college dorm webcam porn site. Unfortunately, the film takes an awfully safe and tasteful route in delivering it
Another anime film in the Ghost in the Shell franchise. This was the fifth episode of the Ghost in the Shell: Arise reboot series that received a theatrical release
Reboot of the Ghost in the Shell series in a quartet of prequel stories. This funnels the essence of Cyberpunk superbly, creating a dazzling world with cyborgised security services fighting terrorists hacking people’s brains
Classic anime from Mamoru Oshii, a Cyberpunk work with a heroine who is a cyborg special forces officer, a work that delves deeply into the philosophical questions of what is human and what is machine
Made in the aftermath of The Lawnmower Man, this utterly ridiculous film has a serial killer uploaded to the internet. Written by people who know nothing about computers and filled with absurdly over-the-top effects
Another in the spate of social media horror films, this is a blatant copy of Unfriended, albeit mashed up with Ring to create the idea of a cursed newsfeed. This is also the lamest of the bunch
The one really good film from Brett Leonard, director of The Lawnmower Man, this delves into the fetish community of feederism and determines to push the material to something provocative
Internet horror film that rehashes Ring with a haunted website instead of a tv broadcast. This suffers from a muddled concept where it is not at all clear what is happening.
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
The field has been open for one work to come and set the benchmark for A.I. films. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina arrives at that work. Rather than flashy effects, this resides in a series of beautifully cool debates and sharply intelligent twists
An animated film that bizarrely speculates that the emojis in your text messages are actually living entities that have lives inside the phone. A not-too-well-thought out concept that leaves you with strange questions about its world
This is a film that had the capacity within its hands to be a classic work about A.I. and robotics. Adapted from the art of Simon Stålenhag and directed by the Russo Brothers who were behind the last two Avengers films
The first film from Mamoru Hosoda based on a tv series that was a blatant attempt to copy the Pokemon phenomenon and concerning cute creatures that live on the internet
George Romero returns to zombies, making a Found Footage film. After the disappointment of Land of the Dead, he delivers the goods here, while making powerful political points about modern media
Routine horror film about students being drawn to an internet site that is controlled by The Devil and is then driving them to kill others and themselves
Unfriended gained attention as a horror film that took place across social media where the computer screen became the video screen. It was done first in The Den about a snuff internet site that stalks people who innocently log in
Corporate thriller in which Connie Nielsen discovers an underground of snuff S&M. This develops a compulsive hold but its pullback to kneejerk moralism is dissatisfying
The return of the talented Steve Barron after a decade’s absence in a film that was shot in my own backyard (literally). Disappointingly, all we get is a work that unimaginatively rehashes cliches about amok A.I.s
A film from low-budget producer/director Charles Band about a trio of horror podcasters who come across a vampire that livestreams its kills on the internet, only for their attention to bring it after them
A rather funny horror comedy based around the concept of a livestream conducted from a haunted house – all of which proceeds to quite hilariously go wrong
This imagines a future where people have become so absorbed in online communication that they live in isolated cubicles. An interesting idea that the film does zero to make believable
This exploits the topical fascination with the darknet in a story ostensibly about making snuff videos for sale there. In actuality, this telescopes down to being no more a variant on The Most Dangerous Game
A film based around real-life YouTube influencer Brian ‘Faze Rug’ Awadis as he buys a new mansion only to move in and find his neighbours are an alley of sinister clowns
Everything indicates this should have been a hit – an impressive star line-up, big polished action sequences – only it tanked. Much has been assembled in the service of a hackneyed idea where the memories of an FBI agent are implanted into criminal Kevin Costner
This feels like the Final Destination franchise updated for the mobile user generation concerning a sinister app that predicts how long the user has to live
An action movie where the toughest criminals are forced into a barehanded survivalism competition against one another while this is livestreamed. As the hero, wrestler Steve Austin has zero charisma