The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Toys feature in various ways in fantastic cinema. There are plentiful stories in fantasy and fairytale about toys come to life or having secret lives aside from their owners. These range from the stories of the Nutcracker to the enormous popularity of the Toy Story films or the foul-mouthed teddy bear of the Ted films. Equally horror is filled with plentiful tales of toys come to life with malevolent purpose.
One of the best of the horror anthologies from UK’s Amicus Films. This adapts four stories from Robert Bloch, which are all tales told by the inmates of the titular asylum and settle in with chill effectiveness
The Disney musical version of a story that takes place among the denizens of fairytale. Some visual nonsense but the film dies a slow lumbering death amid the sugary sentiment
An entry among the 1970s occult cycle post-Rosemary’s Baby where a family stray into a sinister small town where a coven of Satanists are abducting children for sinister purpose
An entertaining B-budget film about malevolent toys from low-budget producer Charles Band, known for the Ghoulies and Puppetmaster films. One of the first works from screenwriter David S. Goyer
A model maker is hired to build a miniature of a famous actress’s house but then finds the model is capable of influencing reality. An ingenious premise that plays out with near-perfection
Based on a popular children’s book, this is a simplistic animated film for very young children about a toy mouse that goes on a quest to find freedom
Disney’s sequel to Fantasia comes weighted with a sense of its own self-importance – the first theatrical release of the new millennium. However, it fails to produce much that has the stature of the original
The first film from French animator Rene Laloux, a trippily surreal vision and one of the few portraits of a genuinely alien world on film
One of four cheap Mexican films that were the last works an 81 year old Boris Karloff appeared in. Here he presides over relatives gathered for the reading of his will as they are killed by malevolent toys
A largely routine Blumhouse film where a woman’s return to her childhood home ends up awakening her imaginary companion who has now turned sinister
A quite delightful film from former Muppeteer Frank Oz in which a boy receives the gift of a magic cabinet that brings his toy Indian and any other toy that is placed inside it
The cinematic madman Takashi Miike takes on a live-action adaptation of one of Japan’s longest running mangas concerning high-school teenagers with powers and unique hairstyles
This was the second and weakest of the Josh Kirby juvenile time travel adventures that takes the young hero and companions to a future where they are enslaved by giants
This was the third of the Josh Kirby juvenile time travelling adventures from Charles Band that takes Josh and his companions to a planet of living toys
Czech puppet fantasy about a toy’s journey through a forest filled with a bizarre menagerie of creatures that are both cutely affecting and sinisterly threatening in the Maurice Sendak vein
Drawing on the Teutonic traditions of the anti-Santa, this gleefully wades into anti-Christmas spirit. Although never as much as it promises to be, it does astonish at a major studio releasing such a dark film right on Christmas season
Adaptation of a classic SF short story about children’s toys from the future that give them expanded mental powers. Much of the story has been dropped in favour of banal New Age thinking
A horror film about an artificially intelligent children’s doll that resembles one of the Big Eyes paintings, which then proceeds to go full-on Terminator
Roland Emmerich’s second film, a confused oddity that seems to be trying to model itself as a Spielberg film about a kid who gains psychic powers and whose toys come to life
Spanish-Argentinean animated film about the miniature players of a table football game come to life. The animation is not the high-end quality of most theatrical releases but passable; everything plays out to to fairly predictable sports movies cliches
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
Osgood Perkins adapts a Stephen King story about a toy monkey that causes deaths whenever it is wound, which becomes the opportunity for Perkins to go into full-on Final Destination territory with bizarre deaths
Family film with Dustin Hoffman as the eccentric owner of a magical toyshop
TV mini-series that adapts eight Stephen King short stories. As with any anthology, the stories vary in quality but are generally quite reasonable
Big, no-expense-spared Disney production of the fairytale. The film is stunning to look at it in terms of design and costuming but has a simplicity that leaves little for adults to engage with
Exquisitely lovely anime set in a world of creatures that live on scavenged human junk. If in the end, the heroine’s allegorical quest is on the generic side, the film captivates you with the richness of colour and detail that has gone into imagining its world
Oddball German comedy in which a toy table footballer magically comes to life and becomes a star soccer player
Not to be confused with the recent tv series Penny Dreadful, this is another in the recent spate of multi-director horror anthologies – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S films etc. Directed with a retro vibe, the episodes are expectedly uneven but better than might be expected from the hands involved
Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that doesn’t always make sense but pulls its effects off flawlessly
It has become an overused phrase in this site’s critical arsenal to say “yet another 70s/80s remake that is inferior to the original”. The 1982 Poltergeist was one of the great ghost stories of the era; this hits all the beats and with bigger effects but fails to find any of the haunted mood of the original
A documentary about the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe phenomenon. This covers everything from the origins of the toys through the animated series to the live-action film
A film overstuffed with mad ideas and genre cameos about psychic experiments that have unleashed a series of other-dimensional entities
Essentially Christmas the Action Film featuring Dwayne Johnson as Santa’s bodyguard going into action accompanied by Chris Evans as a nerdy hacker when Santa is abducted
William Brent Bell, director of The Devil Inside and The Boy, returns with a ghost story where a widower and daughter are haunted by his ex-wife
Joe Dante has resorted to a rehash of his biggest hit Gremlins, seemingly conceptually slung together with Toy Story – concerning an army of malevolent toy soldiers come to life
The second of the feature films repackaged from the tv series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one of the better copies of the James Bond spy fad of the 1960s. Despite the low conceptual horizons of a tv episode, this plays itself with a splendidly droll tongue-in-cheek panache
Comedy about a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear. This gets its laughs from much scatological, decidedly non-PC humour that occasionally manages to be funny, especially when it comes to some of the 80s pop culture jokes
Whether you loved or hated the crude and raucous, un-PC stoner/fratboy humour of Ted, Seth MacFarlane is back with exactly the same mix here. This manages to be offensive in an amiably inoffensive, even occasionally quite funny, way
Children’s film with the promising idea of kids finding a bunch of toys from the future that grant them amazing abilities unaware they have world-destroying potential.; The idea is alas watered down to the blandness of family formula and the limited conceptual horizons of a low budget
The first film from Pixar and a breakthrough in being the first computer-animated film. Even aside from its technical innovations, this is enormously good fun with extremely well-constructed character arcs
Pixar’s sequel to their first film and arguably an even better work where they get the plaintive emotion, character arcs and witty humour down perfect
After such high standards with the previous two films, there is considerable onus on Pixar when it comes to this third entry nevertheless they manage to wring some strong and effective new twists on the familiar
Pixar sequelise their very first film for a third time but the surprise is a film that creates a range of eccentric characters and finds the wit and warmth that has been missing through their last few films
Genuinely eccentric Barry Levinson film that plays out as a post-Reaganite version of Willy Wonka and features some of the most amazing sets ever designed for a film.
Czech stop-motion animated film – imagine Toy Story film reworked by Jan Svankmajer set in a world of toys made up of scavenged junk. On the minus side, the design is the whole of the film and it never much animates the characters or fairytale story
On the slight side as a Disney theatrical film, nevertheless this keeps to the essence of the original tales and comes with some appealingly playful fourth-wall breaking visuals
A British-made copy of Alien that has been construed as a series of bizarre images and scenes that make no real sense – even the title is given no explanation