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.
The hit 1960s sitcom is repackaged as a frothy Nora Ephron romcom that suffers from a fatal mismatching of a showboating Will Ferrell and a more subdued Nicole Kidman who do not seem to connect in any way as Darren and Samantha
In this homage to the 1970s occult film, Rob Zombie tones back the posturing shock effect of his earlier films and creates atmosphere. Eventually though, Zombie creates a film that feels coiled to unleash something bad but falters
Disney’s original The Little Mermaid was an enormously fresh film. This is the live-action remake that came out amid much controversy and is inevitably a lesser shadow of the original.
NOT the Hayao Miyazaki film but a live-action version based on the same books, made by Takashi Shimizu of the Jun-on/The Grudge films fame. Replicating Miyazaki in live-action is a futile endeavour
Nicolas Cage has never had a good relationship with the horror genre – remember The Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss? This gives all impression it was designed for the 50c bargain bins, in which Nic tries to save his missing son in what amounts to a supernatural version of Taken
A passable B-budget film that came out in anticipation of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. This is actually an Arthurian sequel, featuring Arthur’s son inheriting the sword.
The first of the Fear Street films, somewhat more adult than the usual R.L. Stine adaptations. This can be considered the first Woke era slasher film
Disappointing adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other barbarian hero. Cast with Kevin Sorbo, it comes out as Kull: The Legendary Journeys and the material is killed by the filmmakers taking an unserious approach
This had me watched on the basis of the title alone. An Asylum production, this is less a twisted take on the fairytale than one that turns Little Red Riding Hood into a werewolf hunter
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
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.
Welsh director Caradog James impressed with his previous film The Machine. Here he makes a horror film concerning an urban legend about an old crone haunting those who disturb her, but fails to do anything notable
The Disney live-action remake of Mulan finally arrives mired in controversy but the film itself proves a solid production for the most part, although never quite soars as a work of fantasy
Horror anthology with the novelty where all of the stories are horror versions of fairytales. Particularly amusing is the second episode, a modernised version of Little Red Riding Hood
Jess Franco rips off Ken Russell’s The Devils, although surely only Franco could take a story about nuns being tortured and witches burned at the stake and turn it into a work of softcore erotica
Weird Western where a group of outlaws on the run end up in a town of witches
A very strange Japanese-made blend of fairytale and detective story that takes place in the realm of fairytale where Little Red Riding Hood turns detective to solve a murder at Cinderella’s ball
The weakest of the Muppet movies where they are turned into the characters in a retelling of The Wizard of Oz
A Roger Corman produced erotic horror in which Cliff De Young inherits a castle in Spain where he is tempted by a witch who appears in his dreams
The attempt to create another Lord of the Rings went astray with this adaptation of Philip Pulllman’s fantasy series, which cut many of the core elements of the books so as not to offend religious conservatives
Film that develops a Folk Horror vibe as Eva Green hires a nanny with mysterious healing powers. The horror version of Mary Poppins
Doctor Strange was one of the better MCU films. Here Sam Raimi takes over in the director’s chair. This readily delves into multiverse themes but requires a major crash course in a plethora of Marvel tv series to follow
A Halloween horror from a director with a reasonable genre association, this establishes its genre bona fides but then shoots itself in the foot
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
As part of their attempt to sell everything including the family silver, Disney make a sequel to their witch comedy, bringing back the three original actresses who are now looking a lot longer in the tooth
This has next-to-nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, Luigi Cozzi makes a giallo thriller that makes claims to be the unofficial third chapter of Dario Argento’s at that point unfinished Three Mothers trilogy.
One of the numerous ‘vs’ films that came out after Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, this is actually a B-budget fantasy adventure made for cable. This is not particularly bad, just routine and uninspired on all counts where the budget cramps any of its imaginative horizons
This seemed to promise something of tv’s late lamented Constantine or the first Warlock. Instead what we end up with has been turned into a ponderous effects vehicle for Vin Diesel
Jan-Michael Vincent plays a young man who is reluctantly drawn in by his Native American grandfather’s war against a black sorcerer
The third of the Fear Street films, this takes the story back to a 17th Century filled with absurdly modern attitudes and offers an explanation that ties everything together
Paul W.S. Anderson adapts a George R.R. Martin fantasy story but somehow still manages to make it into another Resident Evil copy still starring Milla Jovovich
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
Cheaply made attempt to turn the fairytale into a fantasy adventure where Beauty becomes a kick-ass heroine who joins the Beast in defeating an evil lord and witch
One of a series of cheaply produced fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films. This adapts the Brothers Grimm fairytale with tatty banality
Sequel to The Asylum’s spendidly grotesque Hansel & Gretel, this pits the two characters against one another for contrived reasons to justify its title but is just cheaply made
Reboot of the Hellboy series promisingly comes from Neil Marshall but is also made by Millennium Films who have a habit of buying up previously successful properties and churning out cheaper spinoffs
A wholly unnecessary sequel to Hoodwinked!, this again runs the fairytale characters over with modern quips and pop culture references
Another of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended to capitalise on the release of Jack the Giant Slayer. Despite setting out to adapt Jack and the Beanstalk, there are no giants in the film
A low-budget Italian sword-and-sorcery film, one of a host of such films that came out following the success of Conan the Barbarian. This was the third entry in the Ator series starring Miles O’Keeffe
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
The second of the video-released sequels to Casper where this time he crosses over to meet Wendy the Good Little Witch as played by Hilary Duff
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
Inane Disney Channel film with twin sisters Tia and Tamera Mowry as sisters who didn’t know it who discover they are witches. A film that has zero interest in its fantasy elements and is entirely taken up by airhead teenage airhead natter
Having to sit through the Mowray twins airhead natter again in a sequel to their early Disney Channel film feels the equivalent of nails being scratched on a blackboard
Uwe Boll strikes again! Sequel to his passable earlier epic fantasy, which is dragged down by a lack of action and the need to provide star Dolph Lundgren with a series of excrutiating witticims
One of the films from director Ted V. Mikels made not long afterRosemary’s Baby and mostly seems an opportunity for Mikels to lecture about historical witchcraft. Certainly, one of the great exploitation titles of all time
A Disney live-action film that engenders no believability in its basic premise. Much of the show is regarded as an opportunity for Bette Midler to steal the limelight and play to over-the-top excess
From the director of Hellbound: Hellraiser II, this is an unfunny monster comedy that plays out like it is trying to be a live-action version of the Hotel Transylvania films
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
The first film from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio, later known for the Blind Dead series. A Euro vampire film starring Anita Ekberg, this proves dreary on all counts
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
A bizarre and entirely incomprehensible Japanese urban fantasy. I reached the end with no idea what this film’s string of strange happenings was about at all
Heavily disappointing remake of the Ray Harryhausen film where the replacement of Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation with CGI fails to achieve any magic
This has the mildly amusing idea of taking films like Dracula vs Frankenstein et al one step further and actually pitting various classic monsters against one another in a wrestling match
UK’s Amicus Films had a reasonable hit with their horror anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. Director/producer David L. Hewitt jumped in with a copy with a soundalike title produced on a poverty row budget
Dreary British occult film that wastes a great cast line-up, including Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and an 82 year-old Boris Karloff in his last performance
Dreary film in which Vincent Price is a magistrate who is haunted by a manifestation of The Devil for his witch persecutions. The publicity falsely tried to sell this as an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation.
Another of the cheap made-for-video Disney animated sequels that were made during the 1990s/2000s, they tries to get by on association with its predecessor’s name
German low-budget film about a resurrected sorcerer, this goes out on a wild edge, winds everything up to 15 on the dial and positively wades in blood, gore and torture scenes
The Three Stooges are transplanted into a retelling of the fairytale, although their slapstick inanity feels drowned out amid the maudlin banality and Cinemascope spectacle
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
Jim Wynorski is a B-budget director whose films feature women with massively oversized breasts. Beyond epic-sized mammaries, this softcore tale about housewives engaged in witchcraft that makes no sense on a plot level
A massive letdown of the year. A sequel that brings back several of the original cast and gives it to Yuen Wo-Ping to direct but is merely slickly paced, uninspired action that substitutes CGI for the graceful wirework of the original
Bizarre family film in which Russian princess Anastasia travels through time to the present day and discovers mall culture
A modernisation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale cast as a hipster romance where the mermaid becomes a stripper, all shot with the gauzy soft focus of a feminine hygiene products commercial
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
Fairly negligible film about a family who move into a house to face the vengeance of a witch
This revival of Conan the Barbarian is a dismal effort that gets little of what made the character work, while Jason Momoa gives little impression he is taking proceedings seriously
The classic comic-strip receives a disastrous film adaption where director Anthony Hickox plays everything for campy silliness
The third of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films that feels like it has no point other than to steal $10 from your hand and give you a bucket of content free mental popcorn in return
The Bare Wench Project was an inane softcore parody of The Blair Witch Project. This is the first of four sequels in which another troupe of girls go wandering in the woods while finding almost any opportunity to take their clothes off
Adaptation of the Finn Mac Coll legend, filmed in Gaelic with a cast that learned their lines by rote. An interesting idea that suffers a painful amateurism
Cannon Films produced remake of The Seven Samurai as an Italian gladiator film starring Lou Ferrigno
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
A really bad low-budget film jumping aboard the Folk Horror bandwagon where construction work at a summer camp stirs druidic rituals from the past
1950s B movie director Bert I Gordon makes a film in which present-day schoolgirl Susan Swift is possessed by her ancestor who was burned at the stake as a witch
One of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s film, this features a totally demented plot involving a man who develops psychic powers and his encounters with witches and LSD trips
NOT the Guy Ritchie film but an Asylum mockbuster released at the same time. The most WTF take on the Arthurian legends ever with the Knights as gun-wielding US Marines
Sequel to the painfully bad Disney Channel film that copied the success of High School Musical and featured the teenage children of classic Disney animated villains. This is just as empty-headed and unwatchable
Amid the early 2010s fad for adult fairytale reinterpretations, this has an anachronistic absurdity that invites you not to take it seriously. A series of action movie poses, CGI and splatter effects are transplanted into the fairytale.
This has an appealing premise – the children of all the Disney villains have grown up and go to school together. This is promptly killed by the awfulness of the film itself, which is essentially High School Musical set in the Disney universe
Another in the spate of animated fairytale parodies that came out in the wake of Shrek, this subjects Cinderella to an excruciating barrage of pop-culture jokes and one-liners
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
The worst film from the usually great Larry Cohen, an unfunny comedy in which a household is taken over by a witch. Bette Davis quit soon into shooting and is replaced partway through by Barbara Carrera
Excruciating sequel to The Beastmaster that transports Marc Singer’s Dar to contemporary L.A. The whole film is wrecked by an attitude that seems unable to take the proceedings seriously.
An incredibly bad Italian-made Sinbad adventure starring Lou Ferrigno that is laughable in its dialogue and acting and incredibly tatty in its budget pinching
One of the worst films ever made – a parody of The Blair Witch Project that mostly consists of various rappers (including Eminem and Vanilla Ice) incoherently improvising a series of monologues about said witch
Probably the worst of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer witless and painfully unfunny films – this just consists of a series of vulgar gags run over a bunch of scenes from films that came out in the last twelve months
Ridiculous cheap 1980s video release about a witch burned at the stake returned as a New Wave punkette to claims souls
Another in the interminable softcore Blair Witch parodies with a group of minimally talented and clothed bimbos wandering around the woods and failing to take proceedings seriously
Following the success of The Blair Witch Project, this was an excruciatingly lame softcore parody with a group of girls tramping in the woods finding almost any excuse to undress and conduct sex-related takes on Blair Witch
The producers of the Christopher Reeve Superman films turn their attentions to Superman’s cousin Kara whose screen debut is derailed by a horrendously overacting Faye Dunaway