The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
UFOs are Unidentified Flying Objects and are a real world phenomenon. Originally referred to as Flying Saucers, the phenomenon was first reported in 1947 and was an attempt to deal with reports of unexplained saucer-like objects observed in the sky. This quickly led to a rash of sightings and the speculation of alien visitors as the cause. The flying saucer phenomenon bled through into 1950s Alien Invasion cinema and flying saucers were a common means whereby aliens arrived.
The UFO phenomenon began to take on other aspects. The real-life based tv movie The UFO Incident (1975) popularised the phenomenon of Alien Abduction and this entered the mythology, as did blanked memory and hypnotic regression to recall abduction experiences. Around the same time, there was also the tying of UFOs to Ancient Astronauts and the fringe science claims that many ancient texts and inscriptions depicted alien visitors and UFOs.
Steven Spielberg made the enormously optimistic UFO and alien contact film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and this popularised UFO experiences. After this, UFOs went from metal saucers to glowing lights in the sky. Other aspects soon began to appear from Grey aliens, alien implants, claims of alien impregnation and the fascination with anal probings following Whitley Strieber’s claims of abduction in his book Communion (1987).
Another key element of UFO mythology is the belief that a UFO had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and that it or aliens from it are being held by the US government at Area 51 – a number of works purport to depict what happened or visit Area 51. There is also belief in the Men in Black, sinister government agents that cover up evidence in the aftermath of an incident. Much of this extends well into the area of Conspiracy Theories.
These conspiracy theories were wound into tv’s hugely popular The X Files (1993-2002, 2016-8), which explored many aspects of UFO mythology during its run, and in turn greatly influenced other works. There have also been a number of films depicting supposed true-life abduction experiences. Also popular in recent years have been Found Footage UFO encounter films.
Most SF films gloss over the issue of communication with aliens, having them either speaking English or with devices like Universal Translators. This is a superbly intelligent film that grapples with how to communicate with something different
Perhaps the greatest children’s film ever made, the story of the affection between a lonely boy and a stranded alien. Steven Spielberg paints in beautiful, tender emotions from the heart that can only not touch the most cynical
John Carpenter at the peak of his career, remaking The Thing from Another World as a wild and phantasmagoric film steeped in paranoia that proved to be the absolute epitome of the era’s fad for air-bladder transformation effects
Steven Spielberg’s film about alien contact was every bit as big as Star Wars in 1977. The whole film is the equivalent of sitting gazing up at a starry sky wondering if we are alone and built up to the wondrous climactic appearance of the UFOs
The Monty Python team’s finest hour, a wickedly irreverent spoof on Christianity that contains some of their most side-splitting gags
A classic of 1950s SF that creates one of the most well remembered screen robots. An uncredited adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there are few other films that devote so much attention to creating a sense of wonder
Alex Coz’s surreal cult film with Emilio Estevez as an L.A. punk working as a repo driver who gets wound into the hunt for a car with radioactive aliens in the trunk
The very first alien invader film of the 1950s. Maybe or maybe not directed by Howard Hawks, this has a dramatic urgency and tight tension that makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the films that came after
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a motion-capture animated film about a young penguin who sets out to fulfill his dream of tap-dancing. This ends up being a film of unexpectedly winning charms
Hilarious Stephen Chow directed/starring film where he plays an agent of the emperor in a series of gonzo exploits that go crazily over-the-top, including breaking the fourth wall
A classic of the 1950s Golden Age of SF, featuring Michael Rennie as an alien visitor film who comes to make a warning about the need to make peace. This stands at the start of the Atomic Age with a stark urgency
Michael Crichton was hot property after the success of Jurassic Park but this was one flop. A by no means uninteresting film about a group of scientists in an underwater habitat making contact with an alien lifeform
This has become legendary as the Worst Film Ever Made. Maybe it is but the audience that celebrates its technical gaffes, the purple prose and bizarre bheind-the-scenes stories has contrarily made it one of cultish fascination
The very first alien body snatchers film. With Jack Arnold’s eerily haunted landscapes and a memorably literate Ray Bradbury script, this is one of the classic SF films of the 1950s era
TV mini-series in ten two-hour parts that deals with UFOs, covering several generations from the 1940s to the present. An interesting take on UFO encounters with the benefit of some phenomenal performances
Absolutely fascinating Bollywood venture into science-fiction. A comedic variant on the theme of the blankly innocent alien visitor trying to make sense of human culture, this has a daringly ambitious bite in tackling the topic of religion and delivering some sharply pointed barbs
Cult stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen jumps aboard the 1950s flying saucer fad, making one of the era’s better alien invader films, climaxing in some great scenes with the saucers demolishing much of Washington D.C.
Beautifully colourful 1950s SF film about scientists who are abducted to take part in a war between two alien species
Steven Spielberg makes a thoughtful return to the theme of alien contact. Rather than the rosy optimism of Close Encounters and E.T., he seems to have embraced the dark conspiratorial view of The X Files
One of the key films in the cult of director Larry Cohen, this throws in a mind-bending mix involving an androgynous alien messiah, random shootings, alien abduction and Catholicism
Classic of the 1950s alien invader genre in which a young boy discovers that the adults around him are being taken over by Martian invaders. Director William Cameron Menzies makes striking use of sets to further a sense of alienation
One of the best films from Charles Band’s Empire Productions, a splendid homage to the GI film with a group of soldiers investigating a crashed UFO behind enemy lines
Hands down the best film ever produced by The Asylum. How could one not like an entertainingly madcap concoction that features mad scientists, zombie stormtroopers, Nazi UFOs and Adolf Hitler preserved as a head in a jar attached to a robot body?
The 28th Godzilla film, made for the series fiftieth anniversary and bringing every monster ever created by Toho together for a massive battle. The results are immensely satisfying
A Finnish art project that consists of five episodes that subjectively depict stories of women with mental illness with strikingly surreal effect
A modest thriller with sheriff Robert Urich investigating cattle mutilations in small town Buffalo and finding possible UFOs and a government conspiracy to be behind these
A fascinating lost world/alien lizard people stop-motion animated film that has been in production for a record 56 years, eventually pieced together and released by Charles Band several years after its creator’s death
Likeable comedy variant on E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial in which senior citizen Ben Kingsley befriends an alien visitor after its UFO crashes in his backyard. Few films are made with such an acute awareness of aging
Finnish filmmaker Timo Vuorensola makes a conceptually wild film about invasion by Nazi flying saucers from the Moon. Stunning quality effects on a minuscule budget that rival the work of professional houses
Coen Brothers black comedy with Billy Bob Thornton as an anonymous barber in the 1940s on the receiving end of life’s cruelties as he becomes involved in a blackmail scheme and murder
Film based on a true-life claim about a supposed alien abduction. This probably won’t convince anybody who does not already believe but it is undeniably a well-made film, at its most striking when we go aboard the UFO
Tim Burton makes a film based on the old Topps bubblegum card series about Martian invaders, which becomes an affectionately goofy tribute to 1950s alien invasion cinema
Smart and intelligent Disney film where Joey Cramer play a kid who goes missing and reappears some years later unaged, only to realise he has been abducted by aliens and can control a spaceship
Motion-capture animated version of a popular children’s book. The title suggests a 1950s B movie and the subtext doesn’t bear close examination but the results are engagingly put together
The second of Kevin J. Kindenmuth’s surprisingly good compilations of video shorts around the loose theme of alien invasion and takeover
A huge box-office hit, this comedy turns UFO conspiracy of
A woman alone in a farmhouse fights off invading aliens. Undeniably, effective, this is an uncredited remake of the classic Twilight Zone episode The Invaders
We have had a few UFO Found Footage films, most of which are rehashes on The Blair Witch Project with aliens instead of backwoods hauntings. This is one entry that produces a series of eerie jumps
A thoroughly demented Japanese sf/horror film about passengers of a crashed plane being menaced by a body-snatching alien vampire. Quite unlike any other Japanese monster movie, the colour schemes alone leave you giddy
A beautifully shot b/w homage to exploitation films that feels like a 1950s rock‘n’roll musical injected with a host of gonzo elements including aliens, UFOs and the resurrected dead
An early film from The Asylum set in a hospital for alien abductees, which director Eric Forsberg evokes with some paranoia and a great ending
Culty New Wave film with Anne Carlisle as a model who has a miniature UFO land on her New York apartment roof where it devours her lovers for the opiate in the brain produced during orgasm
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Homage to 1950s SF films, in particular It Came from Outer Space and The Blob, made not as a parody but as an affectionate tribute to the era with everything played seriously
Indie film about UFOs and alien abductions in a small 1950s town. This comes with undeniably eerie effect that heralds a strong new directorial voice. It also has a perfectly realised sense of retro period detail.
Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli’s second film – a gripping Found Footage film about a group breaking into Area 51 in search of evidence of the alien visitors that the US government is holding
Wes Anderson’s quirky individualistic films can be an acquired taste. This is set in a stunningly designed retro 1950s town as various oddball characters intersect in between the appearance of an alien visitor
A low-budget but surprisingly reasonable mix of submarine drama and 1950s alien invader film with a submarine crew tracking a flying saucer
Seventh of the V/H/S Found Footage horror anthologies, this is one of the best with a number of the episodes venturing into SF and others that feature some genuinely outlandish moments
Fascinating quasi-documentary from the early days of the UFO phenomenon, made before all the nonsense about Greys, abductions, alien impregnation etc came in, which gives it a sober groundedness than many more polished productions lack
Appealingly quirky homemade zombie film that launched the career of Australia’s Spierig Brothers. The two demonstrate a considerable inventivity when it comes to the visual and makeup effects, which they created all themselves
Time travel, Nazis in UFOs and a Nazi-ruled alternate timeline, giant robot spiders – ok, I’m sold. A surprisingly good little film where the fact that this is also made on a low budget and with a good deal of conceptual constraint makes it all the more creative an effort
A rather adorable Steven Spielberg produced film about a group of cute baby UFOs that come to the rescue of a tenement house of about-to-be-evicted tenants
Appealingly quirky film that pays homage to the alien invaders genre of the 1950s as filtered through post-E.T. sensibilities where the invaders still live in a fifties timwarp
Appealingly eccentric comedy set in the American Midwest where supermarket cashier Cindy Williams gains a cult following after preaching that the UFOs are coming
Film that seems to be trying to cram in as many exploitation elements as possible from UFOs to spree killers, zombies, Women in Prison and rock’n’roll
A modestly effective film about UFOs and alien abductions. This follows familiar paths to other films but is conducted with a quite reasonable degree of atmospheric
Hong Kong director/writer Stephen Chow is the star of his own highly creative comedy films. Here in one of his quieter films, Chow conducts a comedy take on E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial
Aardman Animation return with a sequel to Shaun the Sheep Movie. More of the same absurdly nonsensical capers and gags, this comes with much in the way of homage and in-jokes to classic SF films
A reasonably effective and spooky Found Footage film set around the unexplained phenomena at the real-life Skinwalker Ranch
A Found Footage film that has fun uniting wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning
Jim Jarmusch is one of the foremost American independent directors and here makes his first zombie comedy. The question is is what can he bring to a genre that has been in full-on self-parody mode since Shaun of the Dead
A satirical Gore Vidal play is bent out of shape to become a vehicle for the slapstick nonsense of Jerry Lewis, cast as an alien visitor. Lewis is a love him or hate him actor; depending on one’s tolerance for such, this has much fast-paced silliness
Former effects supervisor Scott Stewart surprises here in producing a carefully restrained alien abduction film that focuses on the incursion of the inexplicable into the everyday
Ishiro Honda and Toho, the creators of Godzila, turn their attentions to the alien invasion film – the first Japanese entry in the great 1950s SF alien invader fad – and deliver all the same colourful mass destruction we expect
The first in a trilogy of connected video anthology films that tell stories about alien visitors and abductions
Film adaptation of writer Whitley Strieber’s true-life claims to have been abducted by aliens. I am not sure if the film convinces us of Strieber’s claims but what is interesting is the thoughtful way it examines the phenomenon
Cult animated film that adapts several stories from the adult fantasy comic-book Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal. These vary but in its better moments that has a trippy cult hallucinatory quality
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
Jordan Peele seems to have arrived at the same position that M. Night Shyamalan was in in the early 2000s. In his third film as director, he makes a film about UFOs that becomes a baffling scratch of the head
Amiably good natured if unchallenging comedy where Dawn French engages in a relationship with an alien visitor
Another of Robert Rodriguez’s children’s films about the wacky chaos caused by the discovery of a magic wishing stone. Nothing earth-shattering but Rodriguez has a lot of fun with the visual absurdities
An alien invasion film that exists largely as a series of dazzling effects set-pieces, although proves frustrating when it comes to plot or explanatory rationale
Rather odd but amiable Chinese film about friendship between a real-life artist and his model & with flying swordsmen and alien visitors all thrown in for no discernibly apparent reason
A William Shatner-hosted documentary based on the works of pseudo-science author Erich von Daniken and his claims that various archaeological mysteries were created by alien visitors
The co-director of The Blair Witch Project makes a film about soldiers lost in the desert encountering mysterious lights in the sky. Essentially Blair Witch but with lost soldiers facing UFO phenomena
An earlier treatment of the Phoenix Lights incidents, also a Found Footage film and with an almost identical plot to Phoenix Forgotten. The Found Footage has delved into the alien abduction theme before and this is an average treatment without any notable distinction
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
Film set around the Phoenix Lights, one of the most well-documented modern UFO sightings. Despite being co-produced by Ridley Scott and receiving a theatrical release, this does not seem too different from the standard Found Footage film that novices make for about $2000
A wannabe entry in the Japanese monster movie, this has the distinction of featuring possibly the most ridiculous monster to ever turn up in one of these films
Film spinoff from tv’s hit ultra-paranoid alien conspiracy drama. The film is caught in the unenviable position of trying to give fans what they want and reiterate the basics of the series for new audiences, while giving away no plot details in advance, and as a result ended up pleasing nobody
Modestly made alien contact film that came out not long after Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a darling of the arthouse and makes bafflingly cryptic films with a very haunted mood. This features Tilda Swinton in search of a series of mysterious sounds
A group of friends at a cabin in the woods are subject to alien abductions. Directed by a production illustrator on a number of high-profile films, this comes with some unique designs and effects
Revival of the Disney Witch Mountain films of the 1970s. Now the films have been dragged into the post-X Files era and flashy effects added to negligible result
Influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this is a strange film about UFOs and cattle mutilations. Explanations are not always clear but the film boasts a great cast
Comedy about stupid alien visitors largely construed as a vehicle for popular British comedy duo Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones. Some witty SF in-jokes among a haphazard script
The third and final film to date directed, written by and starring Yahoo Serious where he plays an accident prone man obsessed with alien life
The third and one of the better of the generally insipid Muppet movies produced following Jim Henson’s death. This tells the story of Gonzo’s origins as an alien where the film borrows spoofs the then-popularity of tv’s The X Files
Disney film about a group of teens who find that heart of a UFO that opens up a time warp at their high school
Though pitched as a prequel, this is essentially a remake of John Carpenter’s classic. Alas, this only finds the same phantasmagoric outlandishness as Carpenter did in a couple of scenes that may be moderately impressive for those who have never seen the original
The Spice Girls conduct their own version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, a largely plotless film with them clowning around. Including appearances from aliens.
M. Night Shyamalan delves into the crop circle phenomenon and makes an alien invasion film. At this point his films were predicated on big conceptual surprises and this comes out as a damp squib when we find out what is going on
One of the earliest works about Alien Abduction, predating the fascination with the topic that came not long after with tv’s The X Files. From genre regular Dan Curtis, the creator of tv’s Dark Shadows
This is the Bollywood version of E.T.. That is if one can imagine an E.T. with singing, dancing and romantic scenes. A simplistic but popular hit that spawned several sequels
A documentary that purports to examine the mystery of the so-called Bermuda Triangle but soon dives off into an hilarious series of claims involving UFOs, Atlantis, time warps and The Philadelphia Experiment
This comes with a great initial set-up as it becomes apparent that law enforcement investigating a missing woman are dealing with alien abductions
A B movie that essentially locates The Thing from Another World underwater with an alien monster invading a sub-oceanic research laboratory. Not dissimilar to a host of B movie copying Alien in the 80s/90s
A B-budgeted film made not long after Close Encounters of the Third Kind about a family on a ranch encountering mysterious alien phenomena. An early Charles Band produced film
One of the spate of teen monster movies of the 1950s, this is a B movie that at least has the benefit of not taking itself too seriously and the creation of some memorable alien creatures