The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Early sound era depiction of the attempts to build a tunnel between the UK and USA. The film conjures something of the epic architectural imagination of Metropolis but is crippled by dull, static scenes with characters sitting around talking (a novelty for early sound audiences)
A film from the famous poverty row studios of its era that has gained a certain cult reputation. The film transcends its cheapness to create an undeniable spooky atmosphere in its tale of a ghostly revenant, even if the cult has tended to overstate its effectiveness
The Hollywood remake of Fritz Lang’s classic film about how the criminal underworld hunts a child killer because it is bad for business. Lang’s film is a classic but this comes with visuals maybe even superior to Lang’s version and is highly underrated
Disastrous English-language remake of the brilliant Dutch thriller The Vanishing, which miscalculates everything including mangling the classic ending
Les Diaboliques is one of the great all-time thrillers. This remake, designed to highlight a post-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone, is an abortion that rewrites the classic twist ending for something upbeat
In undergoing a Hollywood remake, Wim Wenders’ exquisitely lovely angel fantasy Wings of Desire becomes a weepy romance with angel Nicolas Cage wooing Meg Ryan
Ole Bornedal conducts an English-language remake of his Danish thriller Nattevagten. Rich in black comedy and dark twists, Bornedal demonstrates a mastery of Hitchcockian suspense
Much disliked English-language version of Godzilla from Roland Emmerich is a more watchable film than one might think. Emmerich does well when the film allows him to do what he does best – being a big, budget, massively scaled epic of mass destruction
The English-language remake of Open Your Eyes, starring Tom Cruise. The Spanish version is still the superior of the two but this stays surprisingly faithful to the original
The English-language remake of the Dutch film The Lift about a killer elevator. Starring a then unknown Naomi Watts in a role that would probably embarrass her now
The US remake of the French time travel comedy Les Visiteurs. With a script by John Hughes, this imports the original film’s stars but misses its comedy charms by a mile
Steven Soderbergh’s English-language remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic SF film. Soderbergh trims Tarkovsky’s long-windedness and makes the plot tighter, more intimate but this still emerges as a lesser version than the original
Christopher Nolan’s second film, an English-language remake of a Norwegian thriller. The action is relocated to Alaska and gets the addition of Robin Williams as a serial killer but the result emerges far less effective than the original
The English-language version of the Japanese horror Ring and actually a much better and far spookier film, giving the story more depth
The English-language remake of Ju-on: The Grudge, this has the good sense to retain the original’s director Takashi Shimizu. The script makes more sense and Shimizu replicates the same eerie scares even if this is a lesser work than the original
The English-language remake of Hideo Nakata’s ghost story made by Walter Salles. This version is surprisingly faithful to the original but entirely miscues Nakata’s jolt ending
Remake of a South Korean film, a romantic fantasy where Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock write letters to each other across time.
As part of the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films, Kiyoshi Kuroawa’s unfathomable but undeniably creepy internet horror is reworked as a standard teen film
David S. Goyer directed remake of a Swedish film about a teenager stuck in a disembodied state between life and death. Despite Goyer’s sterling resume as a screenwriter, this fails to work, not helped by a shrill moralism that takes over in the latter half
English-language remake of the Spanish Found Footage film [Rec]. A lesser work but in the hands of John Erick Dowdle one of the few English-language horror remakes that stands up to the original
An English-language remake of a Thai horror film about haunted photographs. Another by-the-numbers remake that is a pale shadow of its original
Daniel Myrick, one of the co-directors of The Blair Witch Project, conducts a remake of a Danish-Swedish ghost story, relocating it to Lousiana. Myrick does nothing remarkable with the material, even at the twist ending, largely treading in the safety of antebellum cliches
An English-language remake of the ghost story from the Pang Brothers follows the other film faithfully but in terms of atmosphere is a pallid copy of the original
Probably the worst among the mid-00s fad for English-language remakes of Japanese horror films. Takashi Miike’s original is reduced to affectless CGI pop-up scares
Alexandre Aja film about haunted mirrors. Aja is more a director of physical horror and seems less attuned to the supernatural mood
The Hollywood remake of the South Korean ghost story A Tale of Two Sisters that waters down and reduces the effectiveness of the original to generic shocks
Fruit Chan conducts another clunker English-language remake of an Asian horror film. A confused and hokey effort only centred around the provision of schlock effects
Disastrous and miscalculated live-action Hollywood version of the anime series. which turns the characters into just regular teenagers. Nobody involved seems to be making any effort.
Surprisingly good English-language remake of Let the Right One In, the first release from the revived Hammer Films. It is extremely faithful to the original, while also recreating it with some subtlety
The English-language remake of the Georgian 13 Tzameti about underground Russian Roulette gambling. This has an impressive cast line-up but lacks the stark tension of the original
Haunted house film that comes with the novelty of being shot entirely in one take. This delivers some okay but never standout jumps but in the end you appreciate it more for its technical novelty than producing scares
David Fincher’s English-language remake of the Swedish film is capably made but a lesser shadow of something that worked perfectly the first time. In particular, Rooney Mara is no substitute for Noomi Rapace
English-language remake of the Mexican film, this version made by Jim Mickle who made the fine Stake Land. This version is far less cryptic about what is happening but is more muted and takes far longer to ever arrive at being a horror film, although delivers an effectively brutal ending
Spike Lee’s English-language remake of the ultra-violent Korean revenge film is an abortion. Park Chan-Wook directed the original with an insane energy, whereas Lee only delivers a formula action film. While the script is surprisingly faithful to the original, it signposts everything in a way that blows the big twist ending
A slightly different beast to its Japanese counterparts, this is an impressive revival of the long-running series. Gareth Edwards, who made the excellent Monsters, delivers mass destruction on a mind-bogglingly vast scale in ways that approaches painterly beauty at times
I was very impressed with Daniel Stamm’s previous film The Last Exorcism; this was his follow-up – a brutal English-language remake of a Thai film where people are offered the challenge of engaging in increasingly more malicious and extreme acts to win large sums of money
The English-language remake of the Luc Besson-produced Banlieue 13. The electrifying parkour scenes of the original now seem routine and the film’s social set-up so thinly sketched as to be negligible as science-fiction
Martyrs was one of the most grimly disturbing films of the 2000s; this English-language remake, which waters everything down and rewrites the ending to have one of the girls bursting in to save the other with a shotgun counts as surely one of the great all-time cinematic bad ideas
The 2007 Inside in which a pregnant mother is pursued by a woman with a pair of scissors was one of the most brutal and harrowing viewing experiences amid the fad for so-called French Extremism. This is the English-language remake
Comedic variant on Groundhog Day where Marlon Wayans wakes up naked in an elevator on his wedding and is forced to repeat the same hour over and over as he tries to get to the church.
Antonio Banderas is a writer with a block, Jonathan Rhys Meyers a sinister stranger who moves in. Lots of tense psychological games between the two begin only for the film to almost immediately blow the premise
This US live-action adaptation of the cult anime is a disaster on almost every level. The original’s haunting meditation on the dividing line between machine and human is dumbed down to no more than a Cyberpunk action film
The English-language remake of the popular Japanese franchise that extends to manga, a four film series, a tv series and an anime series. Essentially remaking the first film, this is passable enough in its own right – not terrible – but still no patch on either of the original Japanese films
Survival thriller in which a woman is abducted by a man but affects an escape where she must then make a harrowing run through the woods while pursued by him
The Austrian Goodnight Mommy was one of the most effective horror films of recent years. This is the tone-down English-language remake starring Naomi Watts as the mother
The Danish original was a darkly brilliant film about guests in a home of people who step over boundaries. This is the English-language remake from Blumhouse
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a director of acclaim in recent years. Here he remakes the Korean film Save the Green Planet where crazy conspiracy theorist Jesse Plemons abducts CEO Emma Stone insisting she is an alien