The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Circuses and carnivals are real world phenomena. They are travelling companies that move from place to place and put on performances consisting of acrobats, clowns, trapeze artists, fortune-tellers, trained animals and other acts, along with novelty attractions, rides like Ferris wheels and dodgem cars, and arcades where one can win prizes. They are pockets where one can step out of the real world and into one of novelty, amazement and make-believe magic.
Circuses have had some fascination in genre cinema. One of the recurrent themes is the belief that there is a real magic beneath the make-believe showmanship, which can be either sinister or transformative. The circus is often seen as housing real monsters and fantastical creatures, or else is a welcoming refuge for such creatures.
Of fascination in the horror genre is the house of horrors attraction, which is often seen to house real horrors, while the circus is also frequently home to the trope of the Killer Clown. Another fascination that often features in horror films is the freakshow, a nowadays defunct part of the circus that would display real human Deformities and Disfigurements.
A recently rediscovered work that was sold as a lost George Romero film. Romero was hired to make a film about the plight of the elderly and creates a surreal allegorical work set around an amusement park
A wildly deranged and gore-drenched ride. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby with an Alien chesburster where a woman is impregnated by a parasite that maintains a monologue as it urges her to kill and drink blood to feed it.
Film about a series of sensationalistic murders at a circus. Producer Herman Cohen is clearly trying to replicate the success of his Horrors of the Black Museum. Joan Crawford chews the scenery in grand style as the circus owner
Tim Burton film where Albert Finney plays a habitual teller of tall tales whose son sets out to find the truth. Burton’s characteristic quirkiness seems buried by such a blandness you get the sneaking suspicion he has been replaced by a clone of Ron Howard
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure proved a quirky hit and so Pee-Wee was spun out in this sequel. This lacks the zany touch of Tim Burton in the director’s chair, nevertheless has its own moments
Another Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptation that feels like it is slung together from vampire film and sword and sorcery cliches. Among the badly mismatched casting, the most eyebrow raising is Ben Kingsley as the vampire villain
Lushly mounted remake of Bride of Frankenstein with Sting as Frankenstein and Jennifer Beals as the Bride. More costume drama than it ever is a horror story.
The second film from Pixar. One of their slighter and usually overlooked works, this is nevertheless an enjoyably eccentric reworking of The Seven Samurai set amidst a circus troupe of talking insects
Not long after RKO had a hit with Cat People, Universal responded with this in which the exotically beautiful Acquanetta turns into a gorilla (actually vice versa). The Jungle Woman went on to appear in two sequels
Carnival of Souls was rediscovered as a cult classic in the 1980s. Then there was this remake that misses all of the haunted mood of the original in favour of makeup effects jumps and reality blurrings that make no sense
Film from Fred Olen Ray’s son Christopher where a group of people have to survive the death traps in the house of a circus master. Christopher reveals himself as a Rob Zombie wannabe on an impoverished budget
Fascinatingly sordid film from the early days of the English horror cycle in which Anton Diffring is a mad surgeon obsessed with facial disfiguration hiding as a circus master and arranging a series of circus-themed deaths for his failed experiments
Adaptation of a series of Young Adult books that should have emerged as Harry Potter made with the sensibilities of a Tim Burton. But the result fails to come to life in Paul Weitz’s hands
The trailer tries to build this up as a venture into a fantasy world. In reality, all that the film is is a documenting of several of Cirque du Soleil’s acts connected by a thin-to-non-existent story
The almost indescribable second film from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, a Dicekensian street urchin fantasy that takes place in a stunningly designed almost-familiar world filled with eccentric characters
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of It: Chapter Two. From Eric Forsberg, one of the better directors to emerge from The Asylum, this involves a group of teens being pursued around a funhouse by a killer clown.
Darren Lynn Bousman, the director best known for the Saw sequels, makes a musical about a circus set in Hell through which three damned souls pass, enacting updated versions of various of Aesop’s Fables
One of the classic films from Disney’s Golden Age, a beautiful piece of anthropomorphism in the tale of an ungainly elephant that flies with its oversized ears
Another in the spate of live-action remakes of Disney animated films – one of four to be released in 2019 alone. This comes from Tim Burton who conceives as Dumbo as another of his oddball outsiders.
Third of the original Planet of the Apes films. This is an enjoyable take that brings the talking apes back in time to the present-day and where the emphasis is more on comedy
The first Fantastic Beasts was a welcome opening up of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and contained a quartet of characters that offered something fresh in the series. This is a much more mixed bag where it feels like it is back to business as usual for Rowling
This film version of the massively popular Broadway musical was a miserable flop. The musical is a minimalist one but the film has replaced all of that with literalisations that kill the effect
An anthology of fantastical tales from the 1940s. The three stories told here by Julien Duvivier blow you away with their extraordinary visual stylishness
A series of short film interpretations of the Frankenstein story, with interpretations ranging from BDSM to kung fu and modern police procedural
Wonderfully nonsensical film directed by/starring Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame about the lives of a group of mutant freaks. Amazing makeup effects, a bizarre sense of humour and several well-known actors sending themselves up
Shock film in which director Tod Browning depicts the lives of the deformities at a circus, casting real-life freaks in the roles. This was banned for many years before being discovered as a cult classic
One of the more underrated horror anthologies featuring an aging Vincent Price as narrator. Four strong tales that venture into pleasingly dark and grisly places
One of the Disney animated portmanteaus of the 1940s featuring stories about a circus bear and a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk starring Donald, Mickey and Goofy
Tobe Hooper makes a slasher film but one that is well above the average and one of his better films. Taking place in a carnival haunted house, Hooper shakes the slasher film tropes up with undeniably freakish effect at times
Guillermo Del Toro offers up his dark, more adult take on the classic children’s story in this beautifully made stop-motion animated film. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
The second of Universal’s team-ups of their in-house monsters and superior to the first of these, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Despite some imaginative moments, the script has the feel of stitched-together improbability
A cheaply produced video sequel to the 1996 Disney animated film that actually emerges as superior to the original
A film based on the album by Finnish symphonic metal group Nightwish. Most of the film takes place inside the allegorical mental terrain of a dying rock star. Before one can say Pink Floyd – The Wall, most of this collapses into the over-inflated amateur symbolism of a music video
This wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam if it wasn’t cursed by bad luck being affected by the death of star Heath Ledger. It’s the most Gilliam-esque film in some years where Gilliam and his designers leap off into deliriously madcap surrealism
A French animated film where a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart goes on a quest for love through a surreal quasi-Steampunk Victorian world, which includes cameos from Georges Melies and Jack the Ripper
Film with a class of teenagers a class of teenagers on a field trip is pursued through a haunted carnival by a mythical boogeyman
Mired in controversy, the fourth entry in the Jeepers Creepers franchise emerges on screen
The fifth of the Josh Kirby juvenile adventures where the young hero sets out on a quest to find the Shroom People
Freddie Francis directed werewolf film from the latter days entry in the Anglo-horror cycle, which owes much to Hammer’s earlier Curse of the Werewolf
Not the Disney film, this is a live-action film that occasionally has things in common with the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Not a work that travels too much out of being a nicely made average film but one that has been conducted on a low-budget with evident care
It is hard to find enthusiasm going into this – the Madagascar series was a cute idea first time around but has been stretched more than its worth by the sequels. Nevertheless, the film works at you with a colourful light-heartedness and energy that is hard to resist
A much better than usual film from Charles Band, an erotic fairytale in which Sherilyn Fenn becomes involved with a circusmaster and his twin brother who turns into a werewolf
Neil Gaiman and comic-book artist Dave McKean create a venture into a fantasy world with an extraordinary level of visual imagination and peopled with a remarkable panoply of creations. The results are quite unlike any other film you have seen
Rather tedious throwback to the 1940s mad scientist film in which Donald Pleasence is turning people into plant mutations and pawning his mistakes off to the circus
Sequel to the 1996 CGI The Adventures of Pinocchio, this is a shabby and drearily made piece of filler that unimaginatively shuffles around the basic elements of the first film without making an effort at all
Classic film starring Tyrone Power as an ambitious carnival barker who has success with a mind-reader act. Filled with great film noir atmosphere and a doomed sense of fate at play
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Guillermo Del Toro’s remake of the 1947 film noirfilm about a fake clairvoyant is an exquisite piece of mood and design
The thirteenth James Bond film. the fifth for Roger Moore. While the preceding entry had tried to trim back the cartoonish excesses of the Moore era, it is back to business as usual here. The film frequently feels divorced from the remotest shred of realism
A beautifully made new live-action version of the classic story about a puppet boy. More faithful to the original story than any other screen version and with amazing creature effects. Think something that resembles Jim Henson circa The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth made with the sensibilities of a Terry Gilliam
The first of two Pinocchio adaptations of 2022, Here Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis delivers a live-action remake of the Disney animated film
One of the great Disney animated classics from the still unsurpassed era between 1937-42. The studio were at the peak of their game artistically and the film embodies a near-perfect sense of childlike innocence
The perpetually awful Mick Garris inflicts adaptations of Stephen King and Clive Barker stories on us in what looks like an unsold pilot for a horror anthology tv series
Near indescribable mix of horror, hallucination, surrealism and tormented sexuality – quite possibly cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky at his best
Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets came with a winning concept – a Garfield like series of wry observations on humanity by pets – and this is one amongst the current plague of animated sequels that emerges equally likably
One of the not-quite-rans in Woody Allen’s oeuvre, a homage to Franz Kafka and German Expressionism with Allen as a mousy clerk caught up in the hunt for a strangler
A horror film made as homage to the classic Freaks, this is a fascinatingly sordid work set during the vanished era of the carnival sideshow
Adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel about a sinister circus come to town and one of the films that get Bradbury right principally because Bradbury himself wrote the script
Very disappointing film adaptation of Todd MacFarlane’s cult comic-book where all of the moody darkness emerges with one-dimensional effect as little more than The Punisher with horns
Following the success of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, this was the second of Amicus’s trademark horror anthologies with Burgess Meredith as a carnival barker showing people their fates
Classic, wonderfully twisted Tod Browning film with Lon Chaney as an armless circus performer who lusts for Joan Crawford
Fascinating vampire film from the latter days of Hammer Films, this tries to do something different to the usual
An madcap new version of the Mary Shelley story where everything is turned up to an overwrought 11 on the dial. How more nutzoid can you get than a version where Igor the hunchback (a completely miscast Daniel Radcliffe) is the main character?
This is a superbly written and directed work of Southern Gothic that consists of three interwoven tales that gradually expose dark family secrets
The Adams Family have made a series of striking horror films in recent years. This is an impressive work set around a circus, a cross-country murder spree and dark magic