The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Another cheap Syfy Channel disaster movie featuring a cold wave that freezes everything in its path. As expected, this ignores basic science while offering cut-price digital mass destruction effects
The Avengers was the height of 1960s chic. Amid the 90s/00s fad for big screen remakes of tv shows, this was a miscalculated disaster that gets everything about the original wrong from the casting to the droll humour
An entry from the abortive attempt to create a DC Comics shared universe. Dwayne Johnson takes on the role of the DC’s anti-hero in a film that is far more fun than the recent Marvel offerings
We’ve had Sharknado. Now comes Catnado, an anthology about storms of cats. This contains episodes so pitiful and ineptly made that this enters into the unwatchable
Phil Lord and Chris Miller, later directors of The Lego Movie, create an animated film that is a delight with its nonsensical visions of a town inundated by weather phenomena made of food
This creates a fascinatingly different future – a world of grim survivalism amid a new Ice Age in the aftermath of Global Warming. The look of the film is fantastic, only to fritter it on an action focus and Mad Max cliches
Syfy Channel film that mashes the disaster movie together with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The result is peculiarly unsatisfying either as disaster movie or the tomb raiding adventure we expect
One of the film from legendary bad movie maker Al Adamson. While it has some SF elements, this is mostly an action film where Adamson has set out to mine the burgeoning Blaxploitation and kung fu genres of the day
One of the best Disney animated films in some time. Set around a Colombian American family that have hereditary magic powers and live in a magical house, this comes with an enormous degree of colour and energy
Another cheap Syfy Channel disaster movie about a superstorm created by an amok weather control experiment. The shoddy CGI effects and cliched pieces of canned drama fly thick
Dino de Laurentiis climbed aboard the Star Wars fad with this remake of the classic serial. Against expectation, the film’s campy tone and eye-popping sets and costumes work and it has become an audience favourite
Directorial debut of Roland Emmerich’s regular screenwriter Dean Devlin who has clearly been given orders to make another Emmerich film. Thus we get all the same effects-driven mass destruction spectacle, absurd science and pro-environmental messages
Another formula Syfy Channel disaster movie based around a scientifically improbable meteorological premise. This does at least make the characters work with more of a sparring vigour than usual
A Syfy Channel disaster movie. Between the formula dramatics and cheap effects, this is better than expected, having a sense of humour and a more original hero than most of its kind
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
The Asylum’s response to the box-office success of The Martian. The script has only made minimal effort to research the science but this works somewhat better than their usual fare
The director of The Troll Hunter returns with a stunningly shot film with Nat Wolff a mystery man found by police who demonstrates increasingly more godlike powers
Roland Emmerich’s first film, made while he was still a student, involving intrigue aboard a weather control station
The bad movie hit of Sharknado was a surprise to everyone and spawned sequels. By this point, creativity appears to have dried up – essentially, the Sharknado series has jumped the shark
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
The fifth of the theatrically released films based on tv’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. This is one of the more overtly comic films with an entertainingly madcap plot that has Napoleon Solo forced into a shotgun wedding and Jack Palance as a mad winemaker attempting to divert the Gulf Stream
Another cheap Syfy Channel disaster movie – this one featuring a tornado that rains boulders that explode upon landing. Everything runs to the usual formula plotting and cheap CGI effects of these types of movies
After the massive success of Jurassic Park, anything with Michael Crichton’s name on it was hot property. This is made from his script about tornado chasers and is a rather entertaining film made with no other purpose that to keep producing a series of spectacular mass destruction scenes on an ever-expanding scale
Sequel to Twister, the Michael Crichton written film about tornado chasers, this updates the story to the 21st Century and aims for much more in the way of mass destruction spectacle
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
From Makoto Shinkai who made Your Name., a lovely anime about a girl who can control the weather. An odd premise about orphans that soon develops unusual and unexpected depths
Bryan Singer’s dynamic and exciting adaptation of the Marvel Comic title fairly much kicked off the massive fad for Marvel superheroes in the 00s/10s. This was also the film that mad Hugh Jackman into an international superstar.
The seventh X-Men chapter arrives with a certain ennui. Bryan Singer creates some epic scenes but the sprawling ensemble and the series’ ragged continuity makes it hard to invest in the characters, while the new villain looks like a B movie wizard and the mass destruction climax comes surprisingly by the book
Despite the bad press surroundings this, I failed to find it as bad as other reviewers. It’s a solid if not standout entry in the series with some fine superheroic action sequences
Brett Ratner inherits the X-Men franchise from Bryan Singer for the third film in the series and promptly killed it off (after this point everything became prequels featuring Young X-Men). Ratner’s handling of the superheroic action lacks Singer’s exhilaration or any affinity for the characters
Bryan Singer’s immediate sequel to X-Men, this ups the number of new mutant characters, although only sporadically manages to kick in with the spectacular superheroic action sequences the first film had