The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to themes that derive from Biblical and Christian sources. The Bible is divided into two parts – The Old Testament concerning Adam and Eve, their fall from the Garden of Eden, Noah and The Flood, Moses and God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and The New Testament concerning the life of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross to deliver humanity from sin.
For Jewish belief see Judaism. Christianity concerns the belief in God, of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice to deliver humanity from sin and the adherence to a moral code. There are many different interpretations and sects within this – the major one covered here is Catholicism. For films depicting faith in action or critical of religion see Religion in Fantastic Cinema; for strange breakaway groups see Cults.
Many popular ideas in genre cinema derive from the Christian tradition – of an afterlife where the virtuous go to Heaven and the evil and sinful go to Hell. In Heaven, God the creator of the universe lives, and is tended by Angels. Hell is commanded by The Devil, the prime source of evil in Christendom, who command hordes of Demons.
A large number of genre tropes derive from these ideas including stories of angelic intervention, demonic possession, people making Diabolical Pacts to sell their soul, of Miracles from the hand of God. The Vampire Film makes use of the prime Christian symbol, the crucifix, as an icon of power that can drive a vampire away.
There is the popularity of films about the Biblical End Times Prophecies as depicted in The Book of Revelations. The first of these was The Omen (1976) concerning the Antichrist, the coming battle of Armageddon and the Rapture where all true believers are taken up to Heaven. There have also been a number of films concerning the return of Jesus, people who are thought to be Jesus or the retelling of aspects of the story in modern times.
It should be added that the use of these elements in stories do not necessarily denote that the people writing and making them is a Christian believer. One needn’t be a regular church attendee, for instance, to write a story about using a crucifix to fight off a vampire. For films made by Christian believers for other believers and/or to proselytize to non-believers see Christian Cinema.
Droll, elegant camp masterpiece with Vincent Price giving the best performance of his life as a deformed madman employing the Biblical Plagues of Egypt as a motif to take revenge against the surgeons who killed his wife
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
An amiable venture into the light fantasy films that were popular during this era., Here angels come down and intervene to aid a baseball team on a losing streak
Disney remake of the old light fantasy film in which angels step in to aid a losing baseball team. This is pitched to family audiences and holds a surprisingly ardent evangelical message
A faith-based film that comes with a great hook where a time-traveller seeks to go back and kill Jesus, eliminating Christianity from history
The first full length Edgar Allan Poe film from D.W. Griffith of The Birth of a Nation fame. Rather than Roger Corman’s brooding Gothicism, Griffith waters Poe’s melancholia down to a banal Christian morality play
An inane French/Canadian-made children’s film about three cute creatures that come to help a boy stop the resurrection of the Tower of Babel on the eve of the millennium
Perhaps the strangest film on Chuck Norris’s cv – the film where Chuck plays an angel. A work of Christian horror where Chuck’s son Mike plays a decent man trapped in a sinister Western town of devil worshipping children
Thriller in which Antonio Banderas is a Catholic priest dispatched to Jerusalem to deal with the apparent archaeological discovery of Jesus Christ’s body
Denzel Washington as an enigmatic Man With No Name wandering the post-holocaust apocalyptic landscape. This follows the cliches of the genre before it bizarrely morphs into a Biblical allegory partway through
A darkly funny Hal Hartley film set on the eve of The Millennium as Jesus Christ wanders about Manhattan having doubts whether to unleash the Biblical Apocalypse
Made by Walden Media following the success of their The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a well-made adaptation of a Christian children’s book even if it sits uncertainly between gentle realism and the push to make it a fantasy film
A horror film about the life of Jesus as a child. That’s not quite what we end up getting but it is enough to give this a bizarre freakshow appeal and get this site watching. Behind that though, this is surprisingly traditional
A muddled allegorical redemption drama with Eric Balfour sentenced to a maximum security prison where he is haunted by hallucinations
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
The second of the BBC’s tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, the slightest of the works where the story is reduced to two half-hour episode
This was the third of the four BBC tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. The tv versions treats the books with quite reasonable faithfulness but suffer from extremely cheap looking effects
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
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
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
Another lacklustre entry in the banal Lord of the Rings Lite franchise from C.S. Lewis’s books, a plodding run of the mill fantasy adventure for the most part. The mediocre reception killed off interest in the series
Luc Besson scripted sequel to the serial killer thriller The Crimson Rivers. However, in director Olivier Dahan’s hands, this emerges as a empty-headed series of shock images and random action scenes
Ron Howard directed film version of Dan Brown’s phenomenally best-selling book. The book is historical nonsense woven into a fancifully absurd conspiracy theory (that people at the time managed to take seriously); Howard does no more than offer an illustrated version of the book
Part of an attempt to revive the Blaxploitation film, a gospel horror film of sorts in which a young African-American divinity student fights the demon Temptation
I can’t quite decide whether to write Scott Derrickson off or not. His supposed true-life account of a NYPD cop turned exorcist rehashes every hackneyed possession cliche the horror genre has, yet there comes a point where Derrickson starts to argue faith and the film attains an odd conviction
Despite a premise that sounds more like the punchline of a lawyer joke – The Devil played by Al Pacino is a high-price lawyer in New York – this is lushly produced, played seriously and comes with surprising theological depths
An interesting attempt to bring Dracula into the modern day – the film that Dracula A.D. 1972 should have been. An unknown Gerard Butler makes a captivatingly magnetic Dracula
Outside the Torture Porn genre, Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman delivers a loopy cross between The Number 23 and an occult film whose sole selling point is the significance of the date it was released
Sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Steve Carell is transformed into a modern-day Noah. This was pitched to the Christian audiences but feels like a series of lame gags playing on Noah and the Ark devoid of any biblical context
The definitive film version of the Arthurian legends. John Boorman gives us a magnificent and soaring work of beautiful impassioned imagery that delves deep into the rich mythology of the cycle
Quirkily appealing Canadian fish out of water comedy where John the Baptist is sent to present-day Newfoundland to prevent the End of the World
Disney’s sequel to Fantasia comes weighted with a sense of its own self-importance -the first release of the new millennium. However, it fails to produce much that has the stature of the original
The Asylum build a disaster movie around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who make amid volcanoes eruptions, locust swarms and other worldwide disasters
One of the early films from Paul Verhoeven, an amusingly blasphemous tale that draws more than a little from Don’t Look Now with gay writer Jeroen Krabbe becoming wound into the dealings of femme fatale Renee Soutendijk
Film with people trapped in a mysterious labyrinth, which may be Hell, where they are required to eliminate one another in order to survive. Aka Game of Assassins
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 example of the Acid Western, which combined the Western with psychedelic trippiness. Directed by Robert Downey Jr’s father, this is a surrealistic work about a Christ-like visitor in a zoot suit who turns up in a Western town
Frank Darabont had a big hit with the Stephen King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption. This, another King adaptation concerning a Death Row inmate with healing powers, seems an attempt to repeat the same
Controversy-laden Jean-Luc Godard film that offers an irreverent modern-day retelling of the Immaculate Conception. Ana musing idea that vanishes under Godard’s pretensions
Henry Rollins is a man who may be immortal. Sort of like a dark version of The Man from Earth, this is made by the wittily phlegmatic indifference of Rollins’s performance and fascinatingly littered clues about who he might be
Another in the spate of horror anthologies from various directors with each episode here being set around a holiday. As with these films, some of the episodes work well, some end with a puzzled WTF and most somewhere in between
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen with Kirk Douglas fighting the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant
A film about the Easter Bunny that comes remarkably devoid of any significance of the meaning of Easter and only consists of the usual smartass talking animal antics
Serial killer thriller that brims with much Biblical imagery about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and passes through assorted increasingly improbable twists without much affect
Mind-boggling surrealist retelling of the life of Jesus (cast with a woman)
One of the great wacky titles of all time. The film has its absurdist amusements but soon runs out of steam and fails to provide an interesting enough show to live up to its title
Alex Proyas seemed a highly promising genre director during the 1990s but went astray here. Nicolas Cage finding that a time capsule predicts a series of disasters before the film heads off into a strange Biblical End of the World scenario
Adaptation of the best-selling Christian book series about the Biblical End of the World, the coming of the Anti-Christ etc. There is a whole mini-industry of these films and, if one can take the preachiness, this is not entirely bad as the genre goes
The second of the Kirk Cameron Biblical End Times films, which leave you critically divided – on one hand, they are quite competently made B movies, on the other the fundamentalist message is unpalatable
A revival of the Kirk Cameron starring Biblical End of the World films and a sequel to the Nicolas Cage starring reboot. Directed by and starring your favourite internet troll Kevin Sorbo
There have been the various Kirk Cameron and Nicolas Cage starring Left Behind films about the Biblical Rapture; this is an attempt to spin the same off for Young Adult audiences. Trying to set my bias as a non-believer aside and be as critcially neutral as possible, I still have to say this is not very good
The third of the Left Behind films with Kirk Cameron facing the Biblical End of the World and the Antichrist. This travels well down into bad movie territory
An absurd film where angels conduct a war on Earth amid much gunfire and creature effects
Earlier less well known adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book made for tv. This is far more faithful to the original story than some of the other films but is badly hampered by crude and primitive animation that results in an exceedingly simplistic rendering of the story
An extraordinary Argentinean film about a patient in his asylum who calmly insists that he is an alien and begins to affect the inmates. Later uncreditedly ripped-off as K-PAX.
Beautifully written film about an immortal. The result is an entirely captivating SF film whose whole effect emerges simply from people sitting in a living room talking
The Man from Earth built up a reasonable reputation with a simple concept – a 14,000 year old man tells his life story that comes with a killer of a twist. This sequel far less interestingly becomes a detective story about a group of students trying to find if their professor is the same character
Ray Bradbury’s book about the human colonisation of Mars is an SF classic for its wistful, nostalgic poetry. This tv mini-series adaptation is killed by a lumbering director who over-explains Bradbury’s imagery in the most literal ways
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that twists like a pretzel and messes with almost everything we take for granted
Sequel to the Biblical End Times/Antichrist film The Omega Code, this dispenses with preaching faith but still slips into absurdity
Mike Flanagan returns with his best work to date. Effectively a Catholic version of Salem’s Lot, this comes with some flat out great pieces of writing
Very impressive British mini-series about a woman exorcist. This dispenses with the usual head-turning, barf-bag theatrics and feels like the first theologically thought out work of its type, one that largely eschews horror effect to come together as a superbly well-written story
A John Hughes written remake of the classic Christmas film where a man (Richard Attenborough) claiming to be Santa ends up tried in court.
The Monty Python team’s finest hour, a wickedly irreverent spoof on Christianity that contains some of their most side-splitting gags
Darren Aronofsky’s surreal drama wildly divided critics – many panned, while others called it the Best Film of the Year – and was a box-office flop with general audiences. Naturally, what I thought the film was about was completely different to what Aronofsky stated the film was about
Nominal remake of the Boris Karloff The Mummy, which has now been inflated into a big budget Indiana Jones adventure. Stephen Sommers lets the film overspill with CGI spectacle but the exercise is deflated by a jokey, unserious attitude
Strange film with Keir Dullea as a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who may have come from the future
Erotic horror as the demon Lilith attempts to take over a fashion magazine
Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the Biblical legend was mired in controversy. I can only applaud his decision to defy those who claim ownership of the story and set out to make an interesting film. Yet Noah remains an epic that never seems to quite fill the screen and a human drama that never quite comes to life
An entry in the gonzo killer shark film fad from Mark Polonia, this has some undeniable amusement to its title mash-up
The Omen and imitators had been exploiting Biblical End Times prophecies for years but this is one that approaches it from a Christian perspective. The film also started a wave of serious faith-based films that employed name actors in order to carry them to crossover audiences
This is where all the cliches of Devil Children began. A big hit among the 1970s occult boom, this is essentially Sunday tabloid Christianity – a lurid, doom-filled take on Book of Revelation End Times prophecies that moves with a slick polish and a series of schlocky deaths every few minutes
The classic 1976 Anti-Christ film is given the remake treatment. The production look slick but quickly disappears into forgettability
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
Remake of The Bishop’s Wife with Denzel Washington as an angel come to aid an overworked pastor but falling for his wife Whitney Houston
The second animated film from DreamWorks, an impressively produced retelling of The Book of Exodus and the story of Moses.
The third of the Prophecy films with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel, This time the wry humour and interplay of ideas of the other films feels more thinly drawn
Standout film about angels warring on Earth that dispenses with any cutsie depiction of angels. Several sequels followed.
Okay sequel to the angel film The Prophecy. As in the previous film, a returning Christopher Walken steals the show and gets all the best lines
Cheaply made and frequently unintentionally hilarious variant on UFO conspiracies that wheels out all the usual cliches – alien implants, the Men in Black, recovered memories etc
Christian film in which Sean Patrick Flanery is a recovering rock musician who fights to rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of a music promoter who is the Ant-Christ
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s homage to the adventure films of the 1940s was a huge hit in its day, spawning several sequels and many imitators. The film is pure action and adventure, delivered with enormous charm and wit
Remarkable film with Mimi Rogers as a grieving widow who is drawn into the certainty that the Biblical Rapture is about to occur
There is irresistible appeal to the idea of a comedy that conducts a spoof of the Biblical Rapture. Despite a script from one of the Bill and Ted writers, this emerges as a remarkably unfunny film that consists of about an hour of Craig Robinson delivering crude sexual innuendos
Reasonable budgeted film about a series of Biblical plagues being visited upon a rural Louisiana town. An interesting set up that flounders amid a confused script
Quite reasonable serial killer thriller, undeniably influenced by Se7en, with Christopher Lambert tracking a killer who believes he can resurrect Christ
The second in a series of Biblical End Times films from Canada’s faith-based Cloud Ten Pictures, this offers the peculiarity of the Anti-Christ appearing in Virtual Reality
One of a number of faith-produced films we have had since the late 90s that concern themselves with the arrival of The Rapture – this one even spawned a trilogy. This is passable if you can palate the relatively light sermonising and at least better written that the Left Behind films
Not wishing to insult anyone’s beliefs but Christian cinema has produced some really bad films. With such lowered expectations, this Rapture film approaches halfway watchable with a story that somewhat resembles Mad Max 1 about a biker seeking vengeance against a decent man
Uneven New Zealand-made film where a girl meets a mystery man who claims that he is Jesus Christ
Classic serial killer film from David Fincher, a superb effort from the casting to a script that seems weighted by the moral ills of the 20th Century to the unforgettable twist ending
An almost interesting low-budget film with artistic pretensions that invokes the mythic Christian figure of Prester John
One of the most excruciatingly painful films ever made – a softcore comedy in which God and The Devil make a bet to replay the Garden of Eden by reincarnating Adam and Eve throughout history. Filled with ghastly over-the-top performances and much eye-rolling innuendo
Cheap Syfy Channel CGI disaster spectacle about runaway plant roots – from the Garden of Eden, no less – growing to endanger the entire planet. Utterly formulaic and seeming to consist of no more than canned pieces of cliche action
A much more elevated version of an Omen-styled Biblical End Times film with Demi Moore worried if her child can save the world
This comes with a fantastic conceptual hook “Man is invited to a meeting with God at a hut in the woods”. Alas, what we get is no more than a work of faith-based cinema that drowns in its feelgood Christianity Lite sentiments and appeal to Middle American wholesomeness
Positively the most insane, offensive and over-the-top film I have seen in some time. A bride finds she has a vagina possessed by Satan and uses it to go all I Spit on Your Grave on the gang who ate her husband on her wedding night, resulting in an outrageous splatter bloodbath
Reasonable copy of The Silence of the Lambs with Scott Glenn as an FBI agent tracking a killer obsessed with Noah’s Ark
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
The Stand is regarded as Stephen King’s best novel, an epic that depicts the final showdown between good and evil in the aftermath of civilisation. The mini-series adaptation was alas placed into the ham fists of one of King’s worst adapters. Mick Garris