The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Wishes are desires brought to life, usually by magical means or something beyond the mundane. The most common wish is the one granted by a Genie after the rubbing of a lamp. In such stories, the user who summons the genie is usually granted three wishes.
Most stories involving wishes are ones that usually take the moral outlook that what is received is not something the wisher always wants. The story may centre around the wish being interpreted literally or the wording misunderstood in a way that traps the wisher, or that the wisher cannot handle the additional unforeseen problems that come with it.
There are several horror films on this subject where the wish becomes a cursed one that has fatal consequences for the wisher, or that the granting of the wish has a grim price to pay.
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
A popular hit among the 1990s renaissance of Disney animation, this is a glib work that allows the original story to be overrun with hip-jokes and Robin Williams being Robin Williams
As part of the ongoing firesale, Disney offer up a live-action remake of their animated hit. where a mismatched Guy Ritchie delivers a mediocre rehash of what was an overrated classic in the first place
A blatant copy of The Craft where a new girl gets wound up into occult rites going on in a sorority house. Featuring porn star Ron Jeremy as a Catholic priest
A modern girl pining for the perfect man is transported back into the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where she ends up disrupting the story
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of the classic tales has been granted a decent budget that allows the stories to emerge with lavish spectacle and the fantasy to fly with exceptional regard
Another animated Barbie film that leaves you quite certain that every problem in life can be solved with a positive upbeat ditty
British comedy made with an acerbic bite featuring Dudley Moore as a hapless loser who makes a pact with Peter Cook’s Devil to win the love of his life but has the wording of each wish contorted around on him
US remake of the British comedy where Brendan Fraser is a schmuck who sells his soul to The Devil who twists the wording of each wish. The bite of the original is lacking
The most charming among the spate of bodyswap fantasies of the 80s. Tom Hanks was Academy Award nominated for his role as a boy who makes a wish to “be big” and wakes up to find himself in a man’s body
Joe Dante makes a zombie comedy. Dante is in his element and the film overspills with classic horror references but Dante feels like he is playing slow catch up with what the zombie genre has become
Eddie Murphy – one of the funniest talents of the 1980s – has been largely absent for much of the 2010s. He returns here with a Christmas comedy in which he is the recipient of a curse given to him by an evil Santa elf
A raucous and eminently predictable variant on the bodyswap comedy that also manages to be expertly played by leads Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds and pulls off some genuine laugh-out-loud moments
From the people behind the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey films, a horror version of Cinderella. And yes, the glass slipper is used to stab people
A horror version of Cinderella where she gets to stab people with the glass slipper. This also features several modernisms where instead of a pumpkin coach, the fairy godmother conjures up Elon Musk to drive Cinderella to the ball in a Tesla
This leprechaun fantasy is one of the best and most underrated live-action films Disney ever made. The effects are at a peak of the era and the film plays with a sublime charm that proves absolutely winning
This is an absolutely fascinating film about the efforts to perfect an occult ritual. It feels as though the filmmakers have dispensed with Hollywood cliches and has researched the real thing
Work of Russian horror that heads into pleasingly dark places as a woman enacts a love spell to bring her boyfriend back to her where you just know that something horrible is going to happen
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
A very unique and unsettling variant on the zombie film wherein a soldier killed in combat in Vietnam is brought back from the dead by the pleading of his parents but returns not quite the same as before
Incredibly unfunny comedy in which a teenager sells his soul to the Devil. As The Devil, Kevin Pollak lets all stop loose in a mind-bogglingly over-the-top performance
Enchanted in which Amy Adams played an animated fairytale princess entering the real world was a reasonable hit. This is the long-planned sequel that reunites the principals but feels like a joke that belabours in the retelling
Horror film in which a young mute boy discovers a book that contains a spell that offers one’s greatest wish, only for he to summon a djinn
One of the spate of 1980s bodyswap comedies a la Big, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son in which octogenarian George Burns swaps bodies with his teenage grandson Charlie Schlatter
Entirely charming film about a woman who claims to be a fairy. In the best tradition of Jacques Tati, this consists of a series of deliriously nonsensical sight gags that become an utter delight
The big screen remake of the popular 70s/80s tv series about an island that makes guests fantasies come true. In the hands of Blumhouse, this has now been turned into a horror film
One of Francis Ford Coppola’s earliest films as director, a musical where Fred Astaire procures a pot of gold and makes a deal with a leprechaun
Adaptation of a classic British children’s book made by Jim Henson Productions where children discover a sand fairy that grants wishes. The film is largely centered around creating slapstick chaos
A really great and overlooked anthology of fantastical tales from the 1940s. The three stories told here by Julien Duvivier blow you away with their extraordinary visual stylishness
The original version of the Disney live-action comedy with mother Barbara Harris and a young Jodie Foster as her daughter who swap bodies for one day. The performances are hilarious and this is filled with witty deadpan gags
Enjoyable remake of the 1970s Disney comedy about a mother and daughter who swap bodies. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan nail the swapped roles to perfection
A superior sequel to the modest The Gate. This borrows from H.P. Lovecraft and delves into the area of cursed wishes that turn on the wisher, all with imaginative results
Guillermo Del Toro offers up his dark, more adult take on the classic children’s story in this beautifully made stop-motion animated film. Winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
Confusingly, despite the title, this is not an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale but a cryptic and often baffling South Korean horror film about people trapped by children at a sinister house in the forest
A French film about a teenager who buys a demonic cellphone and is able to use it to enact comeuppances against the people in his life. A 976-Evil for the cellular era
A pitifully cheap copy of Gremlins about alien creatures locked in a soundstage and now accidentally unleashed. One of the worst films ever made.
An extremely good Filipino film about a family abandoned at the end of WWII where the only recourse seems to be the children trusting a malevolent fairy
TV mini-series that adapts six less well known short stories by H.G. Wells into an anthology with Wells as the central character. A couple of good stories, some that never hit the mark
The last few years have seen the slasher film conduct some odd conceptual crosshatches – this offers a mash-up between a slasher film and It’s a Wonderful Life
A children’s film starring NBA star Shaquille O’Neil as a genie who emerges from a ghetto blaster. Shaquille is not an actor and this has gained a wide reputation as a bad movie
Stunning Jim Henson directed fantasy film set in a world of visual illusions where the Henson team’s puppetry effects are at the peak of their game to provide the creature effects
Low-budget film set following the collapse of society about a boy who goes on a quest for the place where wishes can be fulfilled
The second in the Leprechaun series with Warwick Davis delivering a series of extremely silly novelty deaths accompanied by excruciating one-liners
Third in the series takes Warwick Davis’s Leprechaun to Las Vegas for a series of novelty deaths that have silliness that frequently defies belief
A film with a children’s movie premise – an amoral lawyer is forced to be honest for a day when his kid makes a wish – is over-taken by Jim Carrey in full over the top mode
A light fantasy comedy from Australia in which Rafe Spall finds he is moving ahead through his life one year at a time every few minutes
Adaptation of a book by famous children’s writer Enid Blyton about a series of adventures in a magical tree. Blyton would be turning in her grave at some of the changes and modernisations
1980s light fantasy comedy where spoilt rich girl Ally Sheedy wakes up in a world where nobody recognises her and is forced to take a job as the maid
H.G. Wells scripted film with Roland Young as a man who suddenly finds he can perform miracles
It is hard to believe this ever received a greenlight, a film in which Andrew McCarthy falls for a storefront mannequin (Kim Cattrall) who comes to life. The comedy has an excruciating inanity
Sequel to The Neverending Story made with a better budget. This delivers some amazing sets and creature designs but is killed with a script that discards the metaphors and complex level of meta-fiction of the original
A Blumhouse and James Wan co-production about a malevolent swimming pool
Quirky and wittily clever film from Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube, where two characters wish themselves into a blank white void filled with literally nothing
A nerdy guy’s wish to have a girl love him goes badly wrong turning her into something deranged. This became a word of mouth box-office hit and signals Curry Barker as a major new genre director
On one level, this sets out to be a warm-hearted fantasy about the appearance of a magic child to a childless couple. On another possibly unintentional level, it is a rather unlikeable film about how two parents continually force a child to conform to the social expectations of those around them
The first of two Pinocchio adaptations of 2022, Here Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis delivers a live-action remake of the Disney animated film
One of the great Disney animated classics from the still unsurpassed era between 1937-42. The studio were at the peak of their game artistically and the film embodies a near-perfect sense of childlike innocence
A weak video-released spinoff of Disney’s Aladdin that began Disney’s habit throughout the 90s/00s of generating cheap sequels to their animated classics
Cheaply made video sequel to the Macaulay Culkin Richie Rich based on the popular comic-book character, this steals the basic plot of It’s a Wonderful Life
Road to Morocco was the third of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road films and takes them on a parody of the Arabian Nights adventure
Not to be confused with Tommy Wiseau’s bad movie classic. This comes from Christian Volckman who made an impressive debut a few years ago with the animated Cyberpunk film Renaissance. Moving to live-action, this creates an air of unspeakable dread as a couple buy a house that has a hidden room that can manifest anything they wish for
Third of the Santa Clause films starring Tim Allen as Santa where his reality is upended by the evil Jack Frost
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
Ghastly children’s film with Martin Short as an inept fairy godmother. Inanity ensues where there seems no ceiling on how over-the-top performances are allowed to go
Live-action adaptation of the one of the great early comic-strips Little Nemo in Slumberland, a work that was ground-breaking for its experimental innovation
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
Adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel about a sinister circus come to town and one of the films that get Bradbury right principally because Bradbury himself wrote the script
A David DeCoteau film that comes with one of the great exploitation titles of all time but is otherwise a cheap Scream Queen vehicle about a demonically possessed bowling trophy
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
Light fantasy comedy in which a teenager gets a magical cellphone that causes whatever he types into his status update to come true
Amicus adapts several stories from the notorious EC Comics as one of their anthology films. Missing is EC’s black humour but this is a worthwhile Amicus anthology
Horror anthology with a specific focus around African-American issues. This conducts a fine revival of the anthology genre and delivers a series of episodes that are all solid and well above-average horror tales
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
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
Essentially a rehash of Big in which a tormented teen wishes she was thirty and wakes up as Jennifer Garner. Amiably average without ever finding the wistful charms that Big had
Part of the fad during the 1940s for swashbuckling Arabian Nights adventures, this tells the story of Aladdin and is more embracing of the fantasy elements than most of the other films of this period
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a fantastical and charming film where djinn Idris Elba appears to Tilda Swinton
This is a 1950s Coming of Age story with Patrick Swayze as a mysterious stranger dispensing wisdom, before the film arrives at a very peculiar fantastic ending
Another film amid Woody Allen’s European renaissance, four tales all set around the gorgeously shot location of Rome. The stories are on the slight side and it is lesser Allen but there is great casting and moments where Allen is on good form
George Pal adapts the Brothers Grimm fairytale with Russ Tamblyn as a miniature youth amid colourful effects and extended slapstick scenes
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, John Landis and George Miller came together to make this homage to tv’s The Twilight Zone. The episodes are variable but the standout is Miller’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Film made to celebrate the millennium where a totalitarian government creates a wall that divides Belgium along linguistic lines
John Hughes cornered a certain 80s market on teen angst with films like The Breakfast Club. He also made this head-scratching oddity in which two nerds create the perfect woman
The first of the sequels to Wishmaster and better than the ones that would follow, although still not a patch on the imaginative makeup effects in the original
The Wishmaster series was a franchise based around a series of novelty effects wherein a malevolent djinn turned wishes against the wisher. This third entry is the utter nadir of the series
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
Rather enjoyable effort about an evil djinn that grants cursed wishes. Directed by makeup effects artist Robert Kurtzman, this has been designed to highlight various effects. Three sequels followed.
The much-anticipated sequel to the Gal Gadot starring Wonder Woman is a highly divided success, partly due to an inane plot centred around a magic wishing stone
Enjoyable sequel to Jumanji and actually a much superior film in the hands of Jon Favreau. This expands the idea of the Jumanji boardgame that brings things from a jungle to life to a space theme