The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
John Carpenter abandons horror to make one of the better E.T.-inspired cute and cuddly alien visitor films. The film’s grasp of science is sometimes shaky but the film gains an enormous amount from Jeff Bridges’ performance as the alien trying to adjust to being in a human body
A planetary adventure from the director of Battlefield Earth. I waited 35 years to find a copy of this – it looked incredibly promising when I saw production artwork back in the 1980s
Sequel to Starship Rising, a space opera that does some amazing things with effects on a next-to-no budget
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Modest space opera from British director Neil Johnson that achieves things with its effects on a low-budget that easily rivals A-budget films
Passable video-released Starship Troopers sequel the heads more in the direction of a body snatchers film. Directed by Phil Tippett
Travesty of Robert Heinlein’s classic SF novel from Paul Verhoeven. Heinlein’s philosophical argument for militarism is junked in favour of blackly comic mindless violence
The importation of anime director Shinji Aramaki to helm the latest Starship Troopers film provides dazzling animation and hardware, along with some hard, furious military action that easily outstrips all the other films. On the other hand, the film never goes beyond being about soldiers shooting up bugs
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, behind parody films like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, turn to The Hunger Games. There is all the usual inanity and celebrity mocking of their films, although they do seem to make a film that is only marginally less moronic than usual
A low-budget film that mixes the rebels from the future premise of The Terminator with the story of a disembodied soul trying to get back to their own body. Too low-budget to make the idea work.
A beautifully-made post-apocalyptic story told as a mandala of threads and surprise connections that stretch over twenty years
Action film about an artificially intelligent fighter plane that goes amok. Rob Cohen directs in all the cliches of the genre and the seeming need to have something spectacular happening every few minutes
Sixteen years after making Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo returns to direct a full-length anime, making a Steampunk work that is dazzling in its epic quality and vistas of mass destruction
I must admit to being drawn in by the title, but this proves to be a massive cheat. What we get is a painfully cheap future action film
Widely ridiculed adaptation of the DC Comics superhero featuring Shaquille O’Neal that slips down to a simplistic level of Saturday morning cartoons inanity
A killer android/cyborg film from the genre’s 1990s heyday with a tasteless concept where a raped woman kills herself and is then resurrected as an avenging cyborg. A bizarre melding of killer cyborg film and I Spit on Your Grave
Patrick Swayze vehicle that uncreditedly relocates the Western Shane into a post-holocaust setting
The second of three sequels to The Stepford Wives. I found the original implausible on any level and this is quadrupled when you get to replacing their children with android duplicates. A film that has been generated without anybody sitting and thinking about the premise on a practical level
Ira Levin’s original novel wherein the men of a town replace their wives with subservient android duplicates seems to have its satiric point blunted when it comes to the film adaptation
Frank Oz conducts a remake of The Stepford Wives, which becomes a broad comedy take on the gender wars in the modern world
The very first film from David Cronenberg. An incredibly experimental work even today, which consists of people wandering the halls of a university and the soundtrack of voices discussing psychic powers experiments in a dryly funny parody of an academic paper. Fascinatingly oblique
Cheaply made video-released sequel to Lilo & Stitch, which is only a rehash but does surprisingly reunite all the voice talents
Another of the delightful Steampunk adventures from Karel Zeman that blend animation and live-action in unique ways
Another cheap Syfy Channel disaster movie – this one featuring a tornado that rains boulders that explode upon landing. Everything runs to the usual formula plotting and cheap CGI effects of these types of movies
Cheaply made Syfy Channel attempt to copy Roland Emmerich’s 2012 that jumps aboard wacky Erich von Daniken nuttiness but fails to create a worthy End of the World drama due to cut-price effects
British effort that proves to be no more than another copy of Alien – set in a warehouse of storage lockers. The film never consists of anything beyond a crashingly ordinary regurgitation of the moves used by an endless number of Alien copies
Modestly effective Soviet SF film about an expedition to Venus where the cosmonauts encounter a wild and colourful planet of plants and prehistoric wildlife
Film adaptation of a popular series of Young Adult books about a teenage spy. Made not long after the Austin Powers films, this seems unable to decide if it is being serious or a parody
An outrageous Hong Kong prison film that comes filled with mind-bogglingly over-the-top splatter effects
In the vein of realistically grounded space movies such as Gravity and The Martian, a solidly effective film concerning the crew of a Mars mission who discover a stowaway aboard
This is essentially E.T. by way of The Desperate Hours where aliens on the run take a family hostage
Roger Christian was art director on Alien but will always be remembered as director of the notorious Battlefield Earth. Here he is stuck making a cheap, tatty and frequently incomprehensible copy of Alien about alien impregnation
A Kathryn Bigelow directed Cyberpunk film scripted by James Cameron concerning an illicit technology that can replay memories. This offers a powerful vision of a socially divided L.A. on the eve of the millennium
Arch Oboler makes a film in which Claude Rains returns from a holiday to find a Nazi government has overtaken the USA
Appealingly quirky film that pays homage to the alien invaders genre of the 1950s as filtered through post-E.T. sensibilities where the invaders still live in a fifties timwarp
The third of the films based around Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II concept where a cryogenic sleeper awakes in a post-apocalyptic world
Disney’s 61st animated film. A lost world adventure that emerges as Fantastic Voyage by way of Avatar
1950s British science-fiction entry that draws influence from the Quatermass films. While the title(s) leads you to expect an alien invasion entry, it is in actuality more of a British copy of a giant insect film. A routine effort that is eventually done in by utterly impoverished giant insect effects
A British-made ripoff of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Slow, plodding and talky without the action ever seeming to move beyond the confines of a country pub
Essentially a tv movie version of the Gerry Anderson film Doppelganger in which an astronaut comes around to find he is on a Counter Earth. The premise, an alternate history of sorts, is nonsensical and even then the film abandons it soon in to become a variant on The Fugitive
TV movie with a script from the great Richard Matheson in which Barbara Eden becomes pregnant and starts to behave strangely. The film seems set to be a copy of Rosemary’s Baby before it is suddenly turns into an alien impregnation film – one of the first on the subject, in fact
A film that has been sold on the basis of its deliberately ridiculous title concept – that of alien invaders attempting to take over the airwaves by posing as televangelists
Based on the popular videogame, you cannot complain that this is exactly what you expect – wall-to-wall action, comic-book heroes and villains. The complaint might be that the action is never particularly enervated and the film lacks anything beyond that
The third of Disney Dexter Reilly films in which teen inventor Kurt Russell creates a super-strength cereal
A vigorous copy of the Mad Max post-apocalyptic action film made by the underrated Cirio H. Santiago
One of the films of cult director Larry Cohen in which he makes a body snatchers film involving sentient fast food that also becomes a sharp and witty satire
Extremely likeable variant on the giant bug film – concerning giant mutated wasps, no less. This has largely been predicated around some highly accomplished creature effects and having something gooey happening every few minutes at which it succeeds most enjoyably
A mind-bogglingly surreal John Landis film about a family who take everything literally. A completely demented viewing experience in watching as they bumble around trying to puzzle over who is stealing the garbage
Ian Ziering stars in a B-budget ripoff of The Stepford Wives where he discovers that a computer company is encoding brainwashing messages in a videogame
Steven Seagal submarine action where he tackles a terrorist who has perfected mind control techniques
A thinking person’s disaster movie depicting Japan’s sinking into the ocean
Another android gone amok film with former sex symbol Megan Fox cast as an android nanny who starts defying her programming
Billed as the world’s first interactive film, although it falls well short of what one expected. his involves film noir homage, mad scientists and sinister rejuvenation institutes but lacks any real narrative, just feels like a series of random information pop-ups and flickering MTV graphics
Fourth of the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan films, which performs a confusing continuity reset to recast the role with the younger Ben Affleck. The film’s release was delayed by 9/11, which makes the plot about nuclear terrorism on US soil seems absurdly tame in retrospect
Witty and enormously clever Japanese time travel film. This readily homages Back to the Future but has a great deal of original fun of its own creating a series of hilarious temporal conundrums. One of the most entertaining films I have seen in some time
Beautifully made Mamoru Hosoda film about a rogue A.I. taking over a social media network. A film that is also a heartwarming work about family togetherness
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland make a big serious SF film about a solar expedition, which works with great scientific rigour until the shows heads off at a tangent and falls apart in the latter third
J.J. Abrams makes a homages to 8mm filmmaking and the films of his youth – you could easily imagine this as a Steven Spielberg-produced film of the era. On the other hand, after the obsessive secrecy in pre-release, the results emerge as underwhelming
Excrutiatingly unwatchable live-action film in which trained animals have all been dubbed with smartass voices. In the nominal plot, a group of dogs gain superpowers, which becomes dragged out into a series of witless slapstick scenes, all overrun with agonisingly hip and unfunny one-liners
A documentary about the career of Superman star Christopher Reeve and his dealing with life following the accident that left him a quadriplegic
The first film to be adapted from a videogame and inauspiciously one of the worst. This is a film made on a decent budget that seems to have set out to be as stupid and brainless as possible
Syfy Channel disaster movie about the efforts to dispose of a container of antimatter being carried on board a tanker, where things proceed to go wrong
While the big screen is being deluged with superheroes, here is an amusing spoof from the UK. The film takes a mockumentary approach in following everyday Bob, who is rather of a twit, as he goes on a date and his frustrations id dealing with bureaucracy required to go into action
Standout Russian SF/horror that undeniably captures something of The Thing with scientists encountering a monster in the depths of a deep drilling project
The Christopher Reeve Superman films started superbly but became wrecked by the producers’ insistence on the insertion of comedy element. Here they turn their attentions to Superman’s cousin Kara whose screen debut is derailed by a horrendously overacting Faye Dunaway
Lowell Dean, director of WolfCop, makes what feels like a revival of the low-budget Mad Max film – an action film set in a socially collapsed future
A Scary Movie-styled parody of the early 00s spate of superhero films, this has a few amsingly on-target spoofs of its targets (especially Spider-Man) but is mostly scattershot
Fascinating documentary portrait of a series of individuals who dress up in costume and set out to be real-life superheroes
We have had some standout A.I. films in the last few years. This is comedy variant where Melissa McCarthy is befriended by an A.I. who adopts the voice of James Corden
Shot back-to-back with the first Christopher Reeve film, this then became a mess behind the scenes. The end result emerges fairly well with the show dominated by the magnificent Phantom Zones villains and giving depth to the Superman-Lois relationship
The original version of Superman II became mired in problems over the firing of director Richard Donner. After the rediscovery of the original footage, Donner was able to go offer up a restored version. Seeing the storylines the way they were meant to be and Marlon Brando’s original scenes as Jor-el make for a work that is superior in every way
The nadir of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, one where the desire to add a comedy element in the form of Richard Pryor overtakes and wrecks what is already a random and unfocused plot
The last of the Christopher Reeve Superman films after the series was taken over by Cannon Films. Usually regarded as the series low point due to the cheapness of the effects, this to its credits abandons the comedy focus of the preceding two films and has some not uninteresting aspects
A 15 chapter serial that marks the very first live-action screen appearance of Superman. The superheroics and effects are painfully primitive today (where Superman flying is represented by animation) but the serial gets many aspects of the comic-book down right
This is where the modern comic-book superhero began on screen. A film that is almost completely successful in banishing campy silliness and taking itself seriously, allowing Superman to fly with magnificent effects. Christopher Reeve shines as the ultimate boy scout
James Gunn’s almost completely successful reboot of the cinematic Superman, the first film perhaps that comes with a total confidence in the comic-book source and where Gunn is not afraid to be goofy
One of the best of the DC Universe Original Animated Movies under the greatly underrated Lauren Montgomery, this serves to introduce Supergirl and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World
Aside from two earlier serials, this was the first Superman feature film, featuring George Reeves in a dry run for tv’s Adventures of Superman. With its crude effects and avoidance of much in the way of superheroics, this makes fascinating contrast to the modern Superman of Man of Steel
An animated film that seems premised on not much more than bringing various obscure DC Comics characters out of mothballs for one giant-sized punch up
Spinoff of the 1990s animated Superman tv series, made as tie in for Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns Some good action, negligible use of the characters unlike the DC Universe Animated Original Movies that began the following year, at best a routine episode of the tv series
A condensed animated adaptation of the top-selling DC comic-book of all time The Death of Superman that comes with some massively exciting animated action set-pieces
Fine animated film that traces Superman’s early years – Superman: Year One if you like – as we see pieces of the mythos coming together
A very different take on the Superman story that asks What if Superman had grown up in the Soviet Union rather than in the US and become a paragon of Communist virtue
A feature-length Superman fan film made as homage to the Christopher Reeve films. You have to applaud the film for sterling effort even if it comes woefully short in trying to create its superheroics on a $20,000 budget
This has a bad reputation but Bryan Singer does a wonderful job in bringing Superman back to the screen in a version surprisingly reliant on the Christopher Reeve films. The superheroics soar and Kevin Spacey makes for the best screen Lex Luthor ever
Pilot for the excellent Bruce Timm Superman animated tv series of the mid-1990s. This retells the Superman origin story, keeping great faith to the comics, while adding some fantastic action scenes
One of the best among the incredibly underrated animated DC Comics films. A beautifully character-driven venture into the Superman mythos where Brainiac gets a magnificently theatric airing, while Supergirl undergoes some astonishing revisions
This adapts What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?, the highly acclaimed graphic novel that was written as a response to 9/11. Unfortunately, I am not sure condensing the story into a 76 animated film fully does justice to the complex debate of the original
The celebrated Walter Hill directs an Alien-inspired film about a mutated killer loose on a spaceship. This was a problem-ridden production that pans out far less interestingly than it promises to be
Disaster TV mini-series about the end of the world due to the sun about to go supernova. Cliche plotting, canned action scenes and bad science ensue
A cheap Spanish-made copy of the first Christopher Reeve Superman film
Gonzo comedy that looks like a film about post-holocaust mutants that has been directed by Russ Meyer
Eccentric 80s frat rat/surfer comedy – part of the weird joke is that it is called Surf II when there never was a Surf I. Eddie Deezen is a mad scientist turning surfers into zombies with a soda made of industrial waste.
Interesting conceptual SF film where the populace of the future inhabit a series of perfect avatar bodies. Despite a few logical quibbles with the premise, this does a good job in exploring the idea of such a world
The title suggests a work about film fans facing the end of the world but this is actually a documentary about the cult film phenomenon
An Irish-shot post-apocalyptic drama that could not be further than the demolition derbies of Mad Max et al. This remains contained within a small cabin in the woods and with a cast of three, a man and two women, and emerges with a riveting and emotionally raw grimness
A French catastrophe film where the Earth’s poles abruptly reverse, transforming what was ocean into a desert. A survival film that is based on a premise that is fundamentally scientifically absurd
What seems a routine low-budget action film is propelled into the decidedly watchable by a bizarre Philip K. Dick-ian twist that comes mid-film
Wes Craven makes a film based on the DC Comics character but reduces the mood of the original to something cartoonish. One of Craven’s worst films