The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Abbott and Costello take time out from comic hijinks with the Famous Monsters to go to Venus (despite the title) and engage in various datedly sexist gags with a planetful of women
The third of Abbott and Costello’s comedic meet ups with the Famous Monsters – in this case a series of lowjinks as they encounter Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (played by Boris Karloff)
The most well remembered of Abbott and Costello’s films. Universal had shuffled their Famous Monsters through several team-ups and here decided to play them for outright laughs. Undeniably likeable
The second of Abbott and Costello’s outings with Universal’s Famous Monsters. The usual numbskullery is boosted by some excellent invisibility effects
Abbott and Costello’s fourth and final meeting with the Famous Monsters. However, this is a desultory outing where nobody seems to be making much of an effort
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
One of the inspired delights from Disney’s live-action era, a hit that became the template for their subsequent live-action films. The scenes with flying vehicles and basketball teams are entirely charming.
Fourth in a series of energetic Hong Kong slapstick action capers. The film has no pretence to anything more than providing a new action sequence every five minutes, although by now the level is juvenile
The second in a series of Hong Kong slapstick action caper comedies where the action is maintained at such a madcap and dementedly over-the-top pace that it frequently heads into orbit
Likeable but lightweight time travel film where Ryan Reynolds gains the aid of his twelve year-old self after travelling back in time to the present on a mission to save the future
The big screen version of the 1960s tv series and Charles Addams’ cartoons is a highly enjoyable Hollywood Halloween Party, a chance for name actors to put on costume and ape life with a ghoulish, mildly perverse, moderately subversive spin
The big screen Addams Family films ended with the death of Raul Julia. Subsequently the rights were sold to Saban Entertainment who made this cheap, terrible direct-to-video film with a new cast
Sequel to the live-action Addams Family film that reunites the same cast who fine-tune their roles, while the black comedy has an even more barbed bite second time around
Huge flop comedy for Eddie Murphy in which he plays a nightclub owner on The Moon. There is an almost good SF film hiding inside and depiction of a surprisingly detailed Lunar culture but the unnfunny comedy elements kill it
A sequel to the teen spy comedy. This moves the action to England but amplifies everything else into inanely loud and noisy slapstick action
Another in the spy parodies that emerged following Austin Powers. Frankie Muniz is a high school teenager who is recruited as a spy. a mildly amusing set-up that is delivered with surprisingly little wit
Airplane was a parody of the disaster movie that proved a hit. This was a sequel that expands the action aboard the space shuttle and contains many SF in-jokes but to generally lesser effect
One of Woody Allen’s less interesting films, a modernised version of Alice in Wonderland with Mia Farrow as a bored housewife who passes through various surreal experiences
This seems to be intended as a parody of a 1960s beach party film but with the addition of comic aliens. Well and truly a black star film, this is excruciating on every level
Bizarre effort in which actors play Laurel and Hardy who are engaged in a comedic caper against a mummy. The film is all excruciating knockabout slapstick
One of Steve Martin’s finest works, a variant of the bodyswap comedy in which he finds himself sharing his body with Lily Tomlin. Martin’s on-screen contortions are side-splitting
Paul Hogan became a huge international star with the Crocodile Dundee films. He next went on to appear in this oddity star as an aging ex-con who believes he is an angel
Indie superhero comedy that reads a good deal funnier on paper than it ever produces laughs on screen. The production lacks the budget to produce more than a handful of cheap superheroic digital effects
An anthology of comedy skits from several different directors including Joe Dante and John Landis. The result is fairly scattershot with moments of occasional humour falling between laughs that do not come off
A ridiculous American conservative satire that turns Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a heavy-handed farce where a Michael Moore lookalike is made to see the error of his liberal ways
A sleeper awakes comedy where Seth Rogen falls into a vat of pickles in 1919 and is awakened in the present-day. A decided change of pace for Rogen who plays two lead roles throughout
This seems like it had all the elements to be a biting satirical crosscut of the 1970s in which the US President holds a telethon to keep the country from going bankrupt but flounders in a series of unfunny skits
One-gag comedy in which Rob Schneider receives transplants of various animal parts and subsequently ends up exhibiting animal behaviours – usually at the most inopportune time
Not another killer clown film as you might initially assume, but a really funny Irish comedy about a group of dysfunctional clowns in the aftermath of the collapse of civilisation
Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel is turned into a comedy vehicle for Jackie Chan. One of Chan’s biggest flops, an overblown turkey packed with celebrity cameos and replacing Verne’s adventure with incredibly unfunny slapstick
A completely ignored sequel to Arthur, the non-genre comedy hit with Dudley Moore as an alcoholic millionaire. Included here because butler John Gielgud turns up as a ghost
Fourth of the live-action films adapted from the Asterix comic-books with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix. This replicates the absurdist historical wit of the originals while poking fun at the foibles of the British
The second of the live-action Asterix films starring Gerard Depardieu, this is a visual delight that gets the comic-book’s nonsensical visuals down perfectly
The first of the live-action films based on the famous comic-books set during the Roman period, starring Gerard Depardieu who seems born to play the part of Obelix
The third of the live-action Asterix films starring Gerard Depardieu as Obelix. This faithfully replicates the look and visuals of the original comic-books as the two head off to the Olympics
We have had numerous films about asteroids and meteors about to strike the Earth. This is played as a comedy where a man buys his dream home only to find it is ground zero for an oncoming comet strike
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
Perhaps the strangest film Mickey Rooney ever made, a comedy in which he is a prospector caught in an atomic explosion and afterwards gains the ability to cause things to explode
One of the original genre parodies, a very silly and amateurish film that also manages to be occasionally quite funny. Three sequels and an animated tv series followed
Third of the Austin Powers films and the point where the amusements of the other films topples over into a pandering indulgence to Mike Myers’ mugging, which is allowed to overtake the whole show
The first of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers films is at times extremely silly and scatological but does offer a knowing and witty parody of the James Bond films. The result became a cult phenomenon
The second of the Austin Powers films is less sharp in its parody of the James Bond film and more focused on a series of broad scatological gags. Mike Myers owns the show in a trio of entertainingly gregarious performances
Sometimes you shake your head and wonder how a film got greenlit. In this case, we have a comedy where Cam Gigandet’s penis gains a separate life of its own, resulting in a Jekyll/Hyde film of sorts
The second film from The Duplass Brothers, Mark and Jay. Though labelled a slasher parody, it is more of an improvisational comedy that uses the set-up of a backwoods slasher film without much interest in horror
Riding at a peak during the mid-2000s, cult director Michel Gondry made this head-scratcher where he eccentrically devotes an entire film to homemade amateur fan filmmaking – all with appealingly wacky results
US remake of the British comedy where Brendan Fraser is a schmuck who sells his soul to The Devil who then twists around the wording of each wish. The bite of the original is lacking in a comedy that has to spell everything out for the audience.
An unfunny Adam Sandler film in which he plays a guy whose bedtime stories come true. Sandler regards himself as the funniest guy in the room and doesn’t even seem to be making an effort.
Charming fantasy in which James Stewart is tempted by capricious witch Kim Novak. This almost certainly served as the inspiration for tv’s Bewitched
Unfunny comedy set around a morgue where a mad doctor has found a process to resurrect the dead. Sort of like Night Shift crossbred with a PG-rated version of Re-Animator
A sequel to The Blob, although this plays everything for comedy. The one and only film directed by actor Larry Hagman, no less than J.R. Ewing of Dallas fame
Intermittently amusing parody of the disaster movie set aboard an atomically-powered luxury bus where everything proceeds to go wrong. The better parody of the genre would have to wait for Airplane
An amiable comedy that relocates the basic story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame to a modern American campus about the taming of a scruffy hunchback who lives in the university belltower
A flop comedy based on a Dave Barry novel about various characters trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. Despite a reasonable name cast, this becomes slapstick inanity in director Barry Sonnenfeld’s hands
French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of The City of Lost Children and Amelie fame returns with an appealingly eccentric, beautifully designed comedic take on the machine revolution
A miracle of $1.98 no-budget film-making, this Bigfoot comedy shouts out its sheer good nature from every pore. It is a film that wears its shortcomings with pride, while the director and cast have a great comic timing
The two time-travelling slackers are back after nearly thirty years and the film amusingly sees them having reached uneasy middle-age. But was the wait worth it?
The sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where the first film’s humour gets lost amid repetition and blown up by a big-budget. William Sadler’s Death however proves a scene-stealer
A quirky hit that jumped aboard the 1980s popularity of time travel themes and laid into them with an appealingly offbeat eccentricity. The film that propelled Keanu Reeves onto become a star
Hong Kong comedy with a police station under siege from zombies. The emphasis is more on comedy than the horror element
An obnoxious comedy has the view that it is fun to watch Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin wreck a bio-dome experiment simply because the scientists are a bunch of tight-asses
An excruciatingly unfunny slapstick comedy with Soupy Sales as the janitor at an space laboratory who is accidentally made weightless
An uncredited adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Martin Lawrence as a hip modern African-American man thrown back to Mediaeval times
Disney live-action comedy with Peter Ustinov as the ghost of a resurrected pirate who comes to the aid of an ailing collage track team
One of the original superheroes with no powers comedies, a not particularly funny variant based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. Written by and starring Damon Wayans.
A comedy with the amusing premise where Brendan Fraser is raised in a nuclear fallout shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the present for the first time, mistaking it for a post-apocalyptic world
Norwegian comedy where two friends who were a champion laser tag duo in their teens are now in adult life where they are forced to pair back up to fight off alien invaders
An early David Lean film, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play, a drawing room comedy in which a medium conjures a man’s late wife amid much malarkey and mayhem
An appealingly eccentric indie comedy directed by and starring Noah Segan as a vampire who suddenly discovers he has fathered a kid
Parody of the horror genre designed to highlight British comedian Kenny Everett. Some quite funny spoofs, some that aren’t. Vincent Price appears as the leader of a coven.
Comedy that resembles something of tv’s The Office where Fran Kranz discovers that management is turning his co-workers into vampires as an efficiency measure
Tyler Perry is an accomplished impressionist but his two Halloween comedies appropriate elements of the horror film while having no interest in the genre. Here all the horror elements only serve to deliver a lecture on child rearing
I don’t dislike the Tyler Perry film – the performances are skillfully accomplished. Here however Perry attempts to make a Halloween comedy while displaying almost zero interest in any of the genre elements
Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre make an unexpectedly great comic pairing in this mad scientist screwball comedy that comes with an exhaustingly madcap pace
The Bowery Boys were a poor man’s Abbott and Costello; here in one of their most entertaining outings they try to compete with Abbott and Costello’s monster bashes
Comedy with a head-scratching premise where a couple discover a teapot that produces money whenever they hurt themselves. Such a loopy premise could work as a black comedy but this plays itself as a frothy light fantasy
Disappointing adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel from Adam Rudolph that substitutes Vonnegut’s satire for clumsy, ham-fisted farce that never gives us any clear idea what it is satirising
A parody of the Twilight series, which feeds the films through the vulgar and sophomoric gags of the Scary Movie type film parody
At contrast to all the serious films being made about A.I, and androids, this is a wonderfully charming and really quite eccentric comedy where a man builds a robot out of junk
John Sayles responded to E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial and its suburban middle-class fantasy with this wry comedy in which a mute Black alien visitor (Joe Morton) arrives in Manhattan
Comedy in which God appears to Jim Carrey and grants him His powers for one week. Expectedly the film is of zero theological depth and all about Carrey going completely over-the-top
In the 1960s, a number of popular comics made films about the Space Race. This was a vehicle for Norman Wisdom, a minor British comic of the era, and has him enrolled in the Navy and launched into orbit
A parody of British boys adventure stories like Biggles and Bulldog Drummond. This is made with a manic silliness that eventually becomes rather entertaining.
Lavishly produced, reasonably historically authentic retelling of the story of the grave robbers from John Landis, which also becomes a wasted opportunity that turns the story into a comedy where the title characters are just two likeable schmucks
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
Ben Stiller directed comedy with Jim Carrey playing a stalkerish cable installer who makes Matthew Broderick’s life a misery. Carrey’s fans didn’t seem to want to see him play psycho and this was his only flop of this period
The one and only fiction film made by documentary-maker Michael Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, a broad farce concerning an imaginary war declared on Canada by the USA for political purposes
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
The film that Bill Maher would prefer to forget. Beyond the deliberately absurd title, this is an amusing spoof of the jungle adventure and contains a far cleverer degree of wit than you expect
Amiable comedy adapted from an Oscar Wllde story with Charles Laughton as a ghost condemned to walks the family castle for his cowardice. Contains much Wartime comedy about the clash between British and American cultures
Twelfth of the popular British comedy series, here the Carry On team conduct a bawdy farce on the Hammer horror film that was all the in-thing at the time
This was the eighth of the Carry On films. The popular British comedy series turn their bawdy sights to conducting a spoof the James Bond film during the height of the spy movie fad
British quota quickie that is a likeable light fantasy comedy about a haunted Scottish castle and comes peopled with a cast of eccentrics
The classic Bob Hope comedy version of the Old Dark House play. Probably overrated, this has a creaky affected atmosphere and laughs but fails to hold a candle to the far superior and more stylish silent version
Witless and inane comedy in which nerdy high school student Daniel Roebuck is thrown back in time to the Stone Age where he romances cavegirl Cindy Ann Thompson
A comedy spoof of One Million Years B.C. and the whole sub-genre of caveman vs dinosaurs films This proves amiably goofy where Ringo Starr seems perfectly cast as the lead caveman
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
Rather funny film that parodies the Hong Kong fad for lush erotic films that popped up in the 1990s. It even manages to wind in a parody of A Chinese Ghost Story
The popular fairytale has the sexes reversed and is reworked as a comedy vehicle for Jerry Lewis, although the upshot of this is that we get a Cinderella who is now a near-imbecilic Beverly Hills stepchild
A laidback slacker comedy where a man is befriended by the ghost of a school friend who proves annoyingly needy and won’t go away
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