The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A witch is a female practitioner of magic and Witchcraft. This is quite different from the male equivalent discussed in Magicians and Sorcerers (not to say there are not female magicians). Where a magician’s power derives from ancient knowledge – scrolls, occult objects and the like – a witch’s power is more earth magic, herbalism and sympathetic magic. (Wizards and sorcerers, for instance, never seem to use cauldrons, which seems an essential item in the witch’s repertoire).
There is a substantial body of films in fantasy and horror where a witch is a force of evil, ranging from assorted Fairytales to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Witches (1990). In these, she is frequently portrayed as something wizened and hideous. There are also a number of horror films about witches burned at the stake exerting supernatural influence in the present.
There is also a reasonable body of films beginning with I Married a Witch (1942) through tv’s Bewitched (1965-72) that shows the witch in a romantic or domestic relationship and the problems this can present. Other works from The Craft (1996) through Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Wendy the Good Witch to tv’s Charmed (1998-2006) see the witch in a more positive light and even her powers as something of an alternate religious practice.
For films dealing with the historic witch trials, which are nothing to do with witches as characters, see Witch Persecutions.
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
An unusual, visually fascinating fantasy film where a knight enters into the realm of demons to save a girl, while being granted a talisman that allows him to continually be killed and resurrected
A Hallmark TV mini-series version of the classic H. Rider haggard adventure novel that suffers from a non-acting Patrick Swayze badly miscast as Allan Quatermain
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
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
Low-budget Charles Band produced film that has entertainment value for its cheesily absurd creature effects and an amazing cast line-up
This was the fourth and final, as well as the best of the BBC’s tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, which works well enough despite the impoverished production values
Before the films, this was an earlier BBC tv mini-series version of the C.S. Lewis book, one of a series of four adaptations. This is faithful to the story but suffers from impoverished effects
One of the better films from B-budget dircetor Bert I. Gordon, a fantasy adventure where Gordon produces some decent effects
Disney film where an animated fairytale princess emerges into the real world to become Amy Adams. This becomes the opportunity to wittily puncture the unreal world of the Disney fairytale
A comic-book adaptation about vampire wars in a modern East European war zone. A slick Underworld-styled vampire action film that has some interesting ideas going on inside it
The film debut of the horror hostess Elvia (Cassandra Peterson), a good natured film containing more bimbo jokes, double entendres and bad puns than one thought possible
The first of several adaptations of Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife about witchcraft being conducted between rivalry faculty wives in academia. The best version of the story is still the second one Night of the Eagle but this has some eerie moments and great performances
A visually extraordinary True Crime film based on the story of a Spanish woman who may or may not have abducted and killed a string of children in the 1910s
Follow-up to The Ewok Adventure, a tv movie released to theatres internationally. This is a better film than its predecessor that even captures something of the Star Wars spirit on occasions
A real head-scratcher from Pixar that seems to have been pitched as a cross between Braveheart and Disney’s Brother Bear. The usual Pixar humour and polish makes for a mostly amiable film but never lifts the show out of a lame duck premise
Modestly creepy adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a boy who realises that his grandmother is a witch who made a deal with a backwoods entity
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia makes what is essentially a comedy version of From Dusk Till Dawn albeit with witches instead of vampires. This has one of the funniest openings I’ve seen in some time but thereafter dissipates into broadly farcical and overlong runnings around
One of the more amusing titles in the gonzo zombie title mashup fad. On the other hand, this takes itself surprisingly seriously and, while well made, never fully goes for broke
The interesting idea of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast retold in a modern high school setting. Despite itself, the film manages to wring a reasonable sincerity out of the premise
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
One of the video-released sequels to their animated films that Disney made in the 90s/00s, this slavishly imitates its predecessor but does have a likeable line-up of supporting characters
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
Osama Tezuka is a cult figure in anime and manga – what is less well known is that he also made adult animation. This, about a woman’s temptation by The Devil in mediaeval France, is a mind-boggling array of psychedelia and eroticism
Imagine a version of The Craft with a few dashes of The Breakfast Club – all shot as a Found Footage film. This is far more entertaining than one expects it to be
After their successful revival of Godzilla in the 1990s, Toho revived Mothra for a series of standalone battles, albeit with a very juvenile focus made for children. This was the second and better of the three films
The second of the R.L. Stine adapted Fear Street films, this one takes the action back to 1978 where it then becomes a vigorous homage to the slasher film
Lightweight British animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale made for children
The Hallmark tv mini-series version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale is lushly produced but tends to plod when it should come to life as fantasy
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
The second of 2012’s Snow White films after Mirror Mirror, this turns the fairytale into an epic fantasy. Well produced but ultimately a film that lacks anything unique nor pushes far enough into the dark fantasy it promises to be
The live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White comes surrounded by controversy on every side and served to make it a critical and box-office flop that left doubt over the future of the Disney remake industry
A X-rated, West German-made film that blends together several fairytales in a very adult adaptation. The result should be seen for its sheer bizarreness
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
The third of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, this came out the same year as Star Wars and Harryhauden’s stop-motion animated creatures look much more flat in comparison
Another work of Russian dark fantasy where a man asks a witch for a spell to help his wife, only to get very different results than intended
An object lessons in how not to adapt a Young Adult series – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
Medieavel fantasy action film with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman assigned to escort a witch who may be able to deliver the land from the Black Plague. The wider moral issues of the film are buried under action and CGI
Back when Dwayne Johnson was a wrestler billing himself as The Rock, this was a forgettable sword and sorcery effort spun off from his appearance in The Mummy Returns. This led to a surprising number of sequels
Tim Burton’s slide into mediocrity continues with this comedic update of the cult Gothic soap opera tv series, which is now played at a level of cartoonish unseriousness that resembles the Addams Family
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
One of the worst among the usually worthwhile Japanese monster movie revivals of the 1990s. Much of the film is played down at an inanely silly children’s movie level, with there only being the requisite mass destruction effects to enliven the show
Makeup effects artist Stan Winston takes the director’s chair and creates one of the truly original monsters of the 1980s. Several sequels followed
Animator Don Bluth conducts a spinoff from his previous film Anastasia, focusing on the adventures of the talking bat sidekick
A low-budget adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story Dreams in the Witch House about a student who moves into a house with occult geometry and stirs dark forces
Chick Flick with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as two sisters from a family of witches. The film never really settles on a consistent tone between comedy, thriller or romance and veers all over the place
Low-budget occult film about guests at a motel trapped in a mysterious twilight zone. A work sits between the cheap and occasionally effective
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
This would be the last of the films made by stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen where he turns his creations towards conducting another Greek Mythology adventure. With an all-star cast playing the Greek gods.
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
One of the spate of sword and sorcery films that came out during this period, marginally better than most. The plot is a blatant copy of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where a swordsman (David Carradine) sets two rival gang factions in a town against one another
Probably the least satisfying of Terry Gilliam’s films that turns the real-life fairytale authors into scam ghost hunters in an adventure. Purportedly the subject of behind the scenes troubles, the film never quite comes to life on screen
The second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. This essentially operates as Wizard of Oz fanfiction and substantially wrenches the characters and backstories from the 1939 film out of shape to write its own story
The first half of a two-part adaptation of the hit Broadway musical that is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, showing The Wicked Witch’s origin story
Outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, not much else that George Lucas has made has been a success. This Ron Howard-directed epic fantasy proved to be a big flop where Howard’s lightweight touch fails to make a one-dimensional plot fly
A new Russian-made version of the Baba Yaga folktale where the old witch is rewritten as a seductive nanny stealing children and their parents’ memories of them
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
1970s British film about two sisters being drawn into the coven of witches. This comes with much in the way of softcore nudity but there is a surprising degree of innocence about all of it
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life
The earliest surviving film version of The Wizard of Oz , one of a number made during the silent era. It makes interesting contrast to the 1939 version but at best serves as a series of highlights from the story and drawing heavily on the stage version in its often crude methods of presentation
A B-budget venture into the Arthurian Legends that never much finds the rich myth of the cycle and emerges as just a routine fantasy adventure
Forgotten Disney animated film that was not a success at the time it came out. It seeks to tell an epic fantasy tale in the J.R.R. Tolkien vein but ends up falling too much in the shadow of Star Wars
A supernatural variant on Overlord where G.I.’s during WWII enter the Black Forest and encounter something supernatural
Japanese Coming of Age tale about two mischief-making twin brothers growing up in the 1940s
A live-action film based on the titular segment from Fantasia. From Jerry Bruckheimer meaning that it is a film of empty-headed special effects that fails to conjure any magic of its own
Cannon Films make an adaptation of the Mediaeval legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Routine 1980s fantasy cinema with Sean Connery looking embarrassed as the Green Knight
Blumhouse revival of/sequel to The Craft, the film about a quartet of teenage witches. This updates the original to the modern era in ways the original never did
The second of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as the title character in the popular Brothers Grimm fairytale, which has been considerably embellished. This suffers the glassy plasticity of the early Mainframe films
A smart and well cast film about a quartet of modern teen high school girls who form a coven of witches. This starts well but loses it in an overblown second act
This sequel to Conan the Barbarian makes the mistake of watering the primal brutalism down to a PG rating and what results ends up being a pedestrian comic-book adventure
This team-up of C-list DC super-villains proved a surprise hit. The script is all over the place but Margot Robbie owns the screen as the gleefully insane Kewpie Doll gone wrong Harley Quinn
Forgettable Disney animated film telling the story of King Arthur’s boyhood where the Arthurian legends are sidelined in favour of talking animals and slapstick
This has the feel of a fairytale where Christina Ricci plays a girl who suffers from a hereditary curse that has left her with a pig-like snout
Adaptation of a book by NZ author Margaret Mahy. Mahy has a sublimely poetic turn of phrase in the writing but the film strips the book down to the point we get no more than a by-the-numbers Young Adult work
Disney fairytale Lite. The story of Rapunzel gets hiply modernised and is now no more than a cute adventure/romance about a handsome rogue and a girl who has magical hair. Eminently forgettable Disney animation.
Amiably lightweight 80s comedy in which average teenage underdog Robyn Lively gains magical abilities and the complications these create
A key work of British exploitation director Norman J. Warren centred a series of supernatural novelty deaths
The film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s book sought to appeal to audiences for the Lord of the Rings films but between Lewis’s heavy-handed Christian allegories and Andrew Adamson’s inexperience as a director fails to fly
Animated film from Don Bluth, an insipid adaptation of the fairytale that eventually bogs down as a comic picaresque (*)
The second of the Narnia films. Director Andrew Adamson seems so intent on copying Peter Jackson that the film becomes all epic fantasy flourishes and battle scenes to the exclusion of all else – even much of C.S. Lewis’s book
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story gets full marks for being set during the Spanish Inquisition. On the other hand, Gordon’s unserious splatter heavy approach and a campy performance from Lance Henriksen deflates the material
Directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson conduct a remake of their earlier film about resurrected cheerleaders. The question might be why – both have demonstrated they can do far better than this
Tim Burton film where Albert Finney plays a habitual teller of tall tales whose son sets out to find the truth. Burton’s characteristic quirkiness seems buried by such a blandness you suspect he has been replaced by a clone of Ron Howard
Low-budget film about a demon slaughtering a woman’s ex’s. Despite being made by industry professionals, this looks like an amateur-made film
After 27 years, Dario Argento finally rounds out his Three Mothers trilogy begun way back with Suspiria but the underwhelming results give all evidence of his having lost his mojo
From the same people who made Demonic Christmas Tree, this is a supernatural retribution film that was sold as a Krampus film
Classic tv movie that is one of the earliest horror/Westerns hybrids where Roy Thinnes plays a preacher who ends up in town only to find he cannot leave amid mysterious goings-on
Sequel to the Russian-made horror film Viy, this is an historical fantasy with a big budget that mounts spectacular effects sequence and provides name stars, even if the results are utterly bizarre
Sequel to Hallmark’s earlier tv mini-series Merlin featuring a return performance from Sam Neill in the title role, this is otherwise a generic and unmemorable work of Arthurian fantasy
A blatant attempt to copy Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, night down to employing the same lead actors and director, but this fails through shoddy stop-motion animated effects
US film based on a real Japanese historical incident that has been oddly spun out into a Keanu Reeves-starring epic samurai fantasy film. One of the biggest financial flops of 2013
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
A reboot of Masters of the Universe, this fully embraces the mythology of the animated series and gives them great life. But is also a work that is constantly deflating any chance you are taking it seriously
This offers the amusing idea of a softcore parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. A surprisingly well-made film in terms of effects but the jokes often seems belaboured amid the witless mugging
Another in the early 2010s fad for fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasy films – in this case, a version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty told from the viewpoint of the witch
An anthology of blackly funny tales, including episodes directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, all centred around Tim Roth as a long-suffering hotel bellboy