The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to adventures that take place underground. Ever since Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), writers and filmmakers have been engaging in a variety of excursions into the underground, revealing it to be filled with lost worlds and cities, prehistoric life and even finding the geologically absurd notion of a Hollow Earth there.
There have been multiple screen adaptations of Journey to the Center of the Earth and a variety of other works venturing into underground Lost Worlds. Other films deal with creatures and lifeforms that emerge from the underground.
There have also been fantasy works that imagine the centre of the Earth as a Fantasy Otherworld or peopled by goblins and trolls. In science-fiction works, the underground can sometimes be a place where humanity relocates after an apocalypse renders the surface world uninhabitable.
The 2000s brought a spate of spelunking films dealing with a realistic exploration of the underground and cave networks and featuring encounters with Troglodytes. Also included here are works set in sewers and underground railway lines, which on a number of occasions become venues for horror films and monster movies.
Head-scratching Albert Pyun oddity made for Cannon Films with Kathy Ireland searching for Atlantis underground. This emerges as a weird mix of Valley Girl comedy and Journey to the Center of the Earth
Another of the DC animated films, based on a work that reinterpreted Superman. This is somewhat bitsy in condensing a 12-issue series to a 73-minute film but holds some moments of great writing
Giant fire-breathing spiders invade New Orleans. A passably entertaining film of its type made for the Syfy Channel with effects that are above-average and it taking itself seriously
A low-budget film about a venture into the Hollow Earth in search of a missing person and encounters with creatures there. So low budget the underground caves seem shot in a darkened room
Adaptation of the popular Young Adult series about a twelve-year-old super-villain and his adventures with assorted magical creatures. Audiences hated this but I though it overspilled with a madcap creativity
Second in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations starring Doug McClure. This opens with the fabulous invention of the drilling mole but the arrival at the earth’s core look cheap and tatty
A British film that jumps into a full flight Reds Under the Bed hysteria concerning the discovery of Communist Chinese saboteurs building a vast network of tunnels beneath the USA
A B budget variant on the 1950s an alien body snatchers film uncreditedly based on Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Other films in this niche created great paranoid atmosphere but here the results only look cheap and tatty
This big-budget film came out the same year as The Descent and is a very similar work about a cast of name explorers in a vast network of underground caves being hunted by monsters
One of the spate of underground horror films that came out in 2005 including The Descent and The Cave. This is a B-budget wannabe obviously shot in a studio. The addition of giant beetles takes it into the cheesily ridiculous
Makoto Shinkai conducts a flawless capturing of Hiyao Miyazaki’s style – the clean simplicity of the animation, reverence for nature, the tender intimacy of the characters – in this beautifully animated work about the discovery of an underground realm
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
A quite good monster movie from Singapore about people trapped down the disused brand of an underground railway line where they are hunted by a monster
Excellent Young Adult adapted work about teenagers in a vast underground city coming to an awareness of the forgotten surface world. The underground world is a production designer’s marvel
A CGI disaster film about a journey to the centre of the Earth to restart the magnetic core. This is a film construed as no more than a series of spectacular self-contained disaster set-pieces, often irrespective of any of them making sense
A tense and well sustained horror with Franka Potente trapped in the London Underground after hours and menaced by a deformed creature that lurks in the tunnels
Despite the hope that this might have been an adaptation of DC’s disembodied superhero, this is no more than a post-apocalyptic adventure that takes place in tunnels only about three feet high, including the car chases
From the director of the standout Meander, a dark and claustrophobic film set in the 1950s about miners disturbing a Lovecraftian entity buried in the depths of a mineshaft
Film about an all-girl caving expedition encountering underground dwelling monsters. This made the name of Neil Marshall who ratchets up a degree of gripping seat-edge tension that far exceeds any other film in recent memory
Neil Marshall’s The Descent was a ferociously effective horror film that proved a sleeper success. This is an unnecessary sequel that only offers up a limited variation on the same jumps
After several other film incarnations that went nowhere, The Fantastic Four make their first appearance in The MCU. The film creates a wonderful retro world of 1960s futurism based on their original comic-books for them to inhabit
BBC mini-series adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ classic children’s book about a secret underworld of bogeys who love all that is filthy and disgusting and their encounter with a human family
Second tv version of the Raymond Briggs book about a secret society of bogeys who love all that is filthy and disgusting, This cheats when it comes to the bogeys but goes all out on the disgustingness of their lifestyle
One of fantastic cinema’s great titles bouts is a spectacular effects show. At the same time, it also has one of the single most ridiculous script I have ever come across in the entire time I have been running this site
A follow-up to Godzilla vs Kong, this tries to offer more of the same but suffers another ridiculous script. This ended up being overshadowed by the acclaim that the Japanese-made Godzilla: Minus One received
An Irish film that creates quite a reasonable degree of atmosphere in its story of a mother who believes her son has been replaced by something else
Another of Blue Sky Studios’ interminable animated sequels to its likeable original about prehistoric talking animals. This has little substance beyond a kinetic rush from one gag to the next
Timo Vuorensola’s follow-up to Iron Sky. It is hard to believe that a film with a premise that combines Nazis on the Moon with alien lizard people from the hollow core of the Earth could go wrong
This family friendly adaptation of the classic Jules Verne novel was made to highlight the 3D process and throws most of the book out to essentially become Jules Verne the theme park ride
The success of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea created a spate of Jules Verne’s adaptation. Here Verne’s tale of explorers in an underground realm has been turned into an absurdly colourful adventure
Ostensibly as a teen version of the Jules Verne novel made by Cannon Films. However, this started under one director and finished under another with totally incomprehensible results
Hallmark TV mini-series version of the Jules Verne novel that keeps faith to the book for the most part before heading off on some colourfully exotic adventures
A mockbusters from The Asylum made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. Resemblance to the Jules Verne book fairly much ends at the title
A film that was as groundbreaking when it came out as Star Wars was in its day. The Wachowskis create a defining work on Virtual Reality themes and do so with a sublime cool and a series of breathtaking action moves that blew everybody away
The first of the sequels to The Matrix inevitably disappointed on the massive build-up. The Wachowskis leave more questions than answers, while the new action scenes are often jaw-dropping they also feel boiler-plated on
One of The Wachowskis returns to the world of The Matrix and rather wittily turns it into an anti-blockbuster about her reluctance to do so
Third of The Matrix sequels and the weakest of the series. This offers one showstopping effects sequence, on the other hand it also leaves a host of unanswered questions dangling
You can almost see the process in the scriptwriters head “What if we had Monster Truck rallies where the trucks were actual monsters?”. Way more entertaining than you ever expect it to be
Hands down the best film ever produced by The Asylum. How could one not like an entertainingly madcap concoction that features mad scientists, zombie stormtroopers, Nazi UFOs and Adolf Hitler preserved as a head in a jar attached to a robot body?
This anime has a surprising number of similarities to Upside Down, which was released one year earlier, both being set in two different worlds where gravity in each operates in the opposite directions and of the forbidden relationship between a boy and a girl from either world
An oddity from the heyday of the serial that has singing cowboy star Gene Autry discover the doorway to an underground kingdom on his ranch Made with a crude pulp vigour
This was dismissed as a copy of a A Quiet Place and had an almost identical plot about survivors sheltering from creatures that attack the smallest sound. In actuality, this was based on a book that predates A Quiet Place
Disney’s 61st animated film. A lost world adventure that emerges as Fantastic Voyage by way of Avatar
One of the first women-directed horror films. Also one of the first on the subject of people venturing underground and encountering cave monsters
Standout Russian SF/horror that undeniably captures something of The Thing with scientists encountering a monster in the depths of a deep drilling project
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
A very nicely animated French Steampunk film about an expedition aboard a steam airship to explore the secret entrance to an underground world in the Antarctic. A computer animated film all made by one person.
Incredibly insipid animated film from Don Bluth about a kind-hearted troll that relocates to Central Park. This feels like a wannabe Disney film that is merely going through the moves.
Overlooked 1950s journey to the centre of the earth film that transcends its B-budget with an often uniquely melancholic poetry
The most bizarre of the variants on the buddy cop film that came out after Lethal Weapon in which Anthony Michael Hall is partnered with a gnome. Directed by makeup effects man Stan Winston and an embarrassment to all involved
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to the massive hit of Get Out. This is a doppelganger film where the metaphors that Peele is trying to make are not entirely clear but what you cannot deny is that he demonstrates considerable assurance as a genre director
The popular V/H/S series, an anthology of Found Footage horror tales, is revived for a fourth entry