The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
TV Movies refer to films specifically made for television as opposed to theatrical release. These can range from original self-contained dramas to pilots for potential tv series, which may or may not be picked up. This also includes the British tradition of the tv play, self-contained televised works (often adapted from plays) usually for arts audiences. For more long-form televised works, which are self-contained stories split into multiple episodes, see TV Mini-Series.
The Golden Age of TV Movies was during the 1970s, which produced a number of classic works, some of which received theatrical release outside the USA. US TV Movies tended to be tamer than theatrical releases due to being made for public broadcast audiences. This is not the case in the UK and its tv plays, which often contain more adult content
The notion of the tv movie has been largely erased by the advent of cable and streaming services where it becomes difficult to tell the dividing line between a work intended for theatrical, video/dvd or televised release where in many cases a film’s intended destination may have nothing to do with the way it is eventually released. There are still some works that can be regarded as made-for-tv, notedly a number of psycho-thrillers made for the Lifetime network.
A remake of the 1978 tv movie about occult rituals in a girl’s sorority house. This is a film that feels directed and written without any real involvement by those responsible.
British psycho-thriller that is a little too laidback to work but does eventually put some effective twists on its audience
This is possibly the most bizarre entry in the history of the cinematic Superman – a filmed adaptation of Superman Broadway musical. This has to be seen to be believed
A girl sets out to solve the Jack the Ripper killings to free her innocently convicted brother. This is no more, no less factual than any other version but conducts a fine period recreation of Victorian England
Painfully bad attempt to incarnate the comic-book team as live-action tv pilot where the characters are played for comedy in an attempt to mimic the then success of Friends
This tv movie’s premise – “a killer bulldozer” – has had it slotted into bad movie stakes. It was clearly intended as a copy of Duel and its killer truck premise but lacks Steven Spielberg as director
TV movie that does nothing to dispel the dictum that there has never been any such thing as a good killer bee film. As always, the effects let the show down and the rest of the piece is slow going and talky
A near future film that with eviscerates the royals with biting savagery as it depicts Prince Charles becoming the King of England and clashing with the government of the day
A Hanna-Barbera film based around 70s rock group Kiss where they are cast as superheroes fighting a mad scientist who operates from an amusement park with an army of android duplicates
A modernised version of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Whoopi Goldberg as a physicist who time travels back to Camelot
TV movie set in a dystopian future where law mandates that couples can only have one child, concerning a couple who go on the run after becoming pregnant a second time
An adaptation of Jasper Fforde, one of the cleverest of modern humorous fantasy writers. Alas, the finished result is one that understands nothing about the book and is one of the worst ever screen adaptations
One of the most brilliant SF works conducted for television – the adaptation of an Ursula Le Guin book about a a man whose dreams change the world every time he wakes up
This was the second film adaptation of conceptually ingenious Ursula Le Guin novel about a man whose dreams change reality around him whenever he wakes up
A tv movie version of the classic ghost story by Washington Irving and the most faithful version of the story to date. With a young Jeff Goldblum as Ichabod Crane
The first of several tv movies and later tv series about a team that collect mythic artifacts. An unapologetic copy of the Indiana Jones films and surprisingly more fun than you expect
The second of The Librarian tv movies featuring Noah Wyle as an Indiana Jones-modelled adventurer in search of mythical artifacts – here a map to King Solomon’s Mines
Earlier less well known adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book made for tv. This is faithful to the book but is badly hampered by primitive animation and an exceedingly simplistic rendering of the story
Lizzie Borden is one of the more fascinating figures in True Crime. This is very accurate to the details of the case; alas it gets the most sensational aspect over soon in and bogs down in the minutiae of the trial
A formula Syfy Channel film variant on the bugs gone amok film, starring Lucy Lawless as a government official who fights to stop a genetically-engineered swarm of locusts miles wide
A conceptually peculiar mix of Indiana Jones and Waterworld about tomb raiding adventures in a drowned future and the quest for Moses’s staff to turn back the rising waters
TV movie revival of Disney’s Herbie films and one of the better sequels, playing around with the concept and even adding a Herbie origin story
Unusually effective tv movie about two warring alien species fighting for the fate of the Earth. An early effort from producer Aaron Spelling with an eye-opening cast of before they were famous names
A Disney Channel film where Ryan Merriman discovers that he is the child of leprechaun parents. A mad pastiche of Irish culture, related to the earlier film in name only
A routine made-for-tv movie where a small Alaskan town comes under attack as it is overrun by a legion of marabunta ants
Sequel to Single Santa Seeks Mrs Claus where here Santa’s son (Steve Guttenberg) ties the knot – amazingly traditional and conservative in its sentiments and with everything so predictable that there is no real drama
Classic Halloween tv special. As with most of its ilk, it places the focus on a light-hearted treatment where the monsters are no more serious than Halloween revelers
Under the umbrella title ShakespeareRetold, Shakespeare’s tale of fairy enchantments and romantic mix-ups is reimagined in a modern day British holiday camp
Adaptation of the Shakespeare play about fairy enchantments by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies. Davies goes with a standard interpretation alongside radical reinvention – Athens as a fascist dictatorship
Tarantino associate Roger Avary comes up with a modernised take on the Frankenstein story, an interestingly ambitious effort that features Wil Wheaton as a patchwork creation coming to understand his condition
Amiably silly children’s vampire film that manages to take a juvenile approach off with tongue planted in cheek
Murder mystery set on a moonbase. Aside from assuming the Soviet Union would exist in the future and the datedness of its technology, this creates a surprisingly credible lunar environment set amid East-West tensions. Brigitte Nielsen even gives something approaching a performance
TV movie that had a unique selling point – a whodunit set aboard an international space mission – where viewers were invited to guess who the killer was
A tv movie based on the true-life murder of hitchhiker Peter Falconio and the trial by media of his girlfriend Joanne Lees
Way back before Marvel Comics’ extraordinary domination of cinema screens and Samuel L. Jackson’s airing of the role, there was this tv pilot with David Hasselhoff; Although the film has a ridiculed reputation today, David S. Goyer delivers a tongue-in-cheek script filled with side-splitting one-liners
TV movies of the 1970s can be this unexplored treasure trove of sophisticated and intelligent genre treatments. Case in point being this effort, a variant on a 1950s body snatchers film in which a man with a steel plate in his head discovers that the people of a small town are being taken over at night by aliens
Witty and funny attempt to update the vampire to the present day being hunted by a reporter. Darren McGavin gives an enormously entertaining performance. A hit tv movie that was spun out into a series.
Less famous sequel to the cult tv movie The Night Stalker but a far superior work. This repeats much of the first film but with Darren McGavin’s Kolchak hunting an immortal killer. Much better script and featuring a superbly eerie climactic venture down into the Seattle Underground
Another in the fad for horror films about escape rooms we have had in the last few years, this concerns a possibly haunted venue and reaches an interestingly odd ending
The best of the Welcome to Blumhouse films set among the rivalry of two sisters at a highly competitive music school where one gets an occult text allowing her an advantage
Not to be confused with Now You See Me, the one about the bank-robbing magicians, this is a surprisingly good film for the usual creative wasteland that is the Disney Channel about a reality show for illusionists who discovers a teen whose powers would appear to be real
Disastrous tv movie version of the classic musical based on The Princess and the Pea
A West German-made film where a space mission to Jupiter returns only for the crew to find the Earth deserted. This captures something of the original Planet of the Apes in its better moments
Disney Channel film about a cloned kid. The result indifferently slung together and the basic premise dealt with in a hardly serious way
Smart and fascinating venture into the alternate universe hopping theme that suggests something of what the underwhelming Sliders should have been. Originally made as the pilot for a tv series, this comes with much intriguing backstory set-up for a potential series
Absolutely extraordinary British tv play that was one of the formative works in the development of Folk Horror on screen
Quite magical Francis Ford Coppola produced film about a schoolteacher who discovers she had taken a position in a town of alien refugees
Sequel to the Lifetime channel adaptation of Virginia C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. Andrews’ prolific output of Gothic melodramas are really the horror equivalent of daytime soap operas. Though marginally better, this drowns in the same stultifying blandness as its predecessor
A Disney Channel film, this has the amusing idea of translating The Phantom of the Opera to a modern multiplex and telling it as a children’s story
From producer Dan Curtis, creator of tv’s Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel about a libertine who remains eternally youthful while his debaucheries are transferred to a portrait. This has to count as the best version of the story to date.
The second of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s unsold Genesis II pilots. While you can see the series had some potential, the plot about the venture to a society where women keep men as slaves has a giggly silliness that feels like a throwback to 50s films like Queen of Outer Space
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
Fairly silly fairytale parody with a prince transformed into a frog trying to find a modern girl to give him the kiss of true love
A tv movie revival of the hit 1980s tv sitcom ALF. Looking back it’s hard to wonder what ever seemed funny about the show at the time
A remake of the first Quatermass story conducted as a live broadcast tv movie. Quite a considerable technical achievement considering the limitations and one that works with quite reasonable results
Another of the unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilots, the story of an android searching for its purpose. This is excellent science-fiction, one of the most credible portraits of an android intelligence on screen up to this point, while Questor later became the model for Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation
The perpetually awful Mick Garris inflicts adaptations of Stephen King and Clive Barker stories on us in what looks like an unsold pilot for a horror anthology tv series
TV movie in which aging William Devane travels back in time to try and prevent the death of his father
BBC tv play adaptation of a short story by John Wyndham that also furnished the earlier film Quest for Love about a man finding himself in an alternate world. Despite this version being more faithful to Wyndham, the earlier film makes the central relationship work better
TV adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Alan Garner of the mysterious connections between three stories that take place in different historic eras
B killer shark films where environmentalists, oil rig workers and drug dealers converge on a Louisiana river where a shark lurks
Syfy Channel film that seems to offer the intriguing premise of a Modernised Little Red Riding Hood but only deals with this in the vaguest ways. Otherwise this is a standard werewolf film and contains maybe the crappiest CGI wolf transformation scenes ever
This tv movie was the first English-language remake of the classic French thriller Les Diaboliques. It follows the original closely and still works effectively, although being shot in colour rather than black-and-white lacks the stark tension. Sam Waterston gives a performance of amazing cruelty as the husband
Unsold tv pilot that features Sherlock Holmes cryogenically unfrozen in the present-day. While the characters have some quirky appeal, the exercise seems construed more as a copy of a tv show of the era like Moonlighting
Way back before Peter Jackson, there was another whole era of Tolkien adaptations, including this animated adaptation of the third book, which is a peculiar oddity if nothing else
The first adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s series of novels where every person who ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet is given an abysmal treatment as a tv movie that ditches and rewrites major aspects of the books
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
Clive Barker based work about a monk pursuing two demonic succubi through time to the present. Clive Barker watered down for the Sci-Fi Channel but worth watching for the imaginative creature effects
Pilot for a forgotten short-lived tv series starring Andy Griffith as a junk dealer who decides to mount his own expedition to The Moon. Snappily written and pulls its premise off with a reasonable degree of plausibility
TV movie where Jenny McCarthy plays Santa’s daughter who takes over the family business
Remake of the classic tv movie with Shannen Doherty investigating her sister’s death among deviltry in a girl’s school
There has very rarely been a good killer bee movie. This is one exception, a directorial effort from no less than the creator of Mission: Impossible that gains its effectiveness by using real rather than optical bees
A trio of Japanese tv movies that retell supposedly true life ghost stories
A psycho-thriller that offers up the plot of Jane Eyre by way of Psycho. With Bette Davis rising to form as an alcoholic mother
Mawkishly sentimental Christmas tv movie with Steve Guttenberg as Santa’s son who needs to find a wife before he can take over the role. So cliched and written to expectation that it lacks any conflict
Caroline Thompson, a regular Tim Burton scriptwriter, directs a uniquely revisionist version of the fairytale in which she digs in to explain the origins of many of the familiar aspects of the story
One of the most original variants on the deathdream film where pilots crashed in the desert come to the realisation they are dead
One of the lesser known John Carpenter films, a tv movie in which Lauren Hutton is stalked by a neighbour spying on her from the apartment building opposite
Passable but slight tv movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a teacher facing undead pupils
Another unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot, this would have made for a potentially worthwhile series involving Robert Culp and Gig Young as occult investigators
The first big screen incarnation of the Marvel Comics character, the theatrically released pilot for a dreary tv series starring Nicholas Hammond that stripped Spider-Man down to being no more than a superpowered detective in a tv cop show
Few people today have an idea of what a huge name comic-book creator Will Eisner was. This was an unsold tv pilot adaptation of Eisner’s most famous creation, the masked hero The Spirit. The pilot is not a very successful effort but at least it makes an effort to get many of the details and zany spirit of the comic right
TV movie where Kyle MacLachlan comes across a town where the residents have discovered a Fountain of Youth
British tv psycho film that works through a multi-layered plot of dexterous twists and a handsomely engaging lead actor
A Star Trek film spun off around Michelle Yeoh and the secret service that appears in the modern revival series
The tv special that George Lucas would have all copies destroyed, a work of legendary badness – a Star Wars Thanksgiving special featuring most of the original cast and a series of variety performances that are mind-boggling in their ineptitude, not to mention complete and utter fumbling of everything that Star Wars was
Made-for-tv disaster movie released to theatres about the attempts to rescue a plane that becomes trapped in orbit
The second of three sequels to The Stepford Wives. I found the original implausible on any level and this is quadrupled when you get to replacing their children with android duplicates. A film that has been generated without anybody sitting and thinking about the premise on a practical level
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
BBC production that seems to be a straightforward biopic of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle only for it to take a very strange dogleg into meta-fiction
The third of the films based around Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II concept where a cryogenic sleeper awakes in a post-apocalyptic world
An The Exorcist copy made as a tv movie – where The Exorcist shocked audiences with barf bag theatrics and obscenities, this merely has Karen Black shucking her staid fashion sense and buying a sexy red dress. Rather peculiarly, this becomes a possession story as women’s self-actualisation drama
True crime film based on a woman who was best friends with serial killer Ted Bundy
Essentially a tv movie version of the Gerry Anderson film Doppelganger in which an astronaut comes around to find he is on a Counter Earth. The premise, an alternate history of sorts, is nonsensical and even then the film abandons it soon in to become a variant on The Fugitive
TV movie with a script from Richard Matheson in which Barbara Eden becomes mysteriously pregnant. The film seems to be a copy of Rosemary’s Baby before it is suddenly turns into an alien impregnation film
An early, little known Wes Craven film originally shot for tv in which Linda Blair believes that that cousin who comes to stay might be a witch
A blatant copy of Snakes on a Plane featuring mutated ants aboard a plane. Without the other film’s tongue-in-cheek approach, this collapses into absurdity
Released before the Tim Burton version, this is a British tv production that offers a grimly realistic, non-musical historical portrait of Sweeney Todd with Ray Winstone in the title role
A 1970s Animals Attack film as deadly tarantula spiders take over a small town