The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cryogenics (sometimes referred to as cryonics) is the science of freezing the human body in a suspended state and then reviving it at a later period.
In science-fiction, cryogenics is used as a means of dealing with lengthy space voyages – there are a number of stories where astronauts wake from sleep to find things gone wrong.
Another popular story is of the cryogenic sleeper who wakes up in a changed future or the present-day, which includes popular characters like Buck Rogers and Captain America. Cryogenics is also seen as a popular means of punishing criminals.
Fantasy regularly deals with suspended animation as in the story of Cinderella pricking her finger and going to sleep for a hundred years. Also popular have been a series of films dealing with dinosaurs and cavemen revived after being frozen in ice.
For more detail and an overview of the genre see the Theme Essay Films About Cryogenics and Suspended Animation.
Enjoyable sequel to Jumanji and actually a much superior film in the hands of Jon Favreau. This expands the idea of the Jumanji boardgame that brings things out from a jungle to life to a space theme
Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Tusk slides off the cliff somewhere between Johnny Depp’s incredibly silly performance, a nemesis you can’t take seriously and what largely becomes a vanity exercise in nepotism – Smith and Depp creating a vehicle to highlight their daughters
From Tommy Wirkola, director of Dead Snow and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, a film where Noomi Rapace plays seven identical sisters hiding their existence in an overpopulated dystopian future, A film where neither the scenario nor the central characters end up convincing in any way
Forgotten 1980s obscurity about aliens come to Earth in search of rock music that feels like someone attempted to conduct a version of Grease for the Star Wars crowd. Filled with utterly excruciating slapstick humour and bland songs from bands that nobody has heard from again
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
Disappointingly tatty rendering of the famous comic-book strip as a low-budget Roger Corman production. Vampirella is missing her distinctive costume and Talisa Soto comes nowhere near the comic-book character’s statuesque voluptuousness
Yet another entry that nobody asked for in a conceptually threadbare series that nobody seems to like … passably better than the last two sequels due to some ok action moves but still empty-headed in terms of ideas
The first of several animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this does a solid job in adapting Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, a retelling of The Avengers origin story
One of the more cheesily entertaining among the Italian-made ripoffs of Mad Max 2 during the 1980s (as well as more than a few dashes of Escape from New York). The film works up a moderate head of steam
2001: A Space Odyssey did not need a sequel but this fits the bill surprisingly well. A warmer and much more human film than Stanley Kubrick made, this has some of the very best effects of its era.
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology, groundbreaking in a number of ways,
The Asylum’s answer to Michael Bay’s Transformers. Bay had a $150 million budget; they try to copy it for $250,000. To its credit, the film flies valiantly in the face of inadequate effects and delivers a watchable show, particularly with a series of terse character interactions
Unimaginative time travel/action film that plays out like
This has an interesting premise where a middle-aged man suddenly faces his teenage girlfriend returned unaged from a relativistic space voyage
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
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
A disappointing end to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. The script lazily wraps up loose ends while sidelining the new characters introduced the last time, and the climax rehashes the climaxes of the two other films
George Lucas’s first sequel to Star Wars and a work that holds up every bit as well as its predecessor, in many places betters it. The story darkens the mythos and introduces new characters, while the special effects sequences are the peak of the series
I had mixed feelings about J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek This time around the actors seem more at home in the characters and the plot works a good deal better (for the most part), while Abrams creates a hurtling effects spectacle that is the most action-oriented of the Trek films
Comedy about a cop from the future who joins the present-day force where he is partnered with a cop thawed out from the 1960s. This is a premise that should have been funny but emerges as something like Sledge Hammer cast with the characters from Dumb and Dumber
Quite a good film about a space expedition where the crew members on a mission to Saturn fall into an increasing paranoia and inability to tell what is real due to the drugs used in the hypersleep process
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
One of the finest of all Disney animated films, an adaptation of the fairytale made with the full artistic resources that studio could bring to bear
A softcore erotic version of the popular fairytale. Largely the film gets the fairytale over and done with in the first eight minutes and thereafter focuses on the erotic tumblings of Beauty awakened in the present-day
Hilarious Woody Allen film in which he plays a contemporary man unthawed in the 22nd century. This satirisises SF cliches and has some side-slitting comedy sequences
This seemed to have a lot of promise in its set-up of Adam Driver crashlanded in Earth’s prehistoric past fighting off dinosaurs
Popular Polish comedy about two men who awake from cryogenic suspension in a women-ruled future where men are obsolete
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
Unsold tv pilot that features Sherlock Holmes cryogenically unfrozen in the present-day. While the characters have some quirky appeal, the exercise seems construed more as a copy of a tv show of the era like Moonlighting
Strong and worthwhile film about the first man woken from cryogenic suspension in the future. A film from Alejandro Amenabar’s regular co-writer, the writer of Open Your Eyes
Low-budget film that was clearly trying to ride on the coattails of Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus. This tells an almost interesting story about a timeloop and gets full marks for winding in the Greek myth of Prometheus
Ridley Scott’s promised prequel to Alien. The first half creates epic mystery but the answers provided are not nearly as interesting as promised, while the latter half disappointingly settles for doing the Alien standard with decidedly lesser effect
Completely ridiculous mix of The Terminator and Die Hard where, for no clear reason, an android terrorist decides to take hostages in an office building and the FBI’s only hope is a cryogenically unfrozen football player
The Predator series continues. Dan Trachtenberg, the director of Prey, makes an animated offering that features encounters between human and Predator in three different eras of history
The film that started it all. This takes what could have been a jokey premise and delivers it in bold, exciting stokes. What elevates the film is Rod Serling’s script. filled with embittered soliloquies that become a biting commentary on the human condition, before the film reaches one of the great cinematic twist endings
A gripping and particularly well conceived planetary survival story. The film that launched Vin Diesel’s career and he has never been better than as the lethal, tight-lipped serial killer Riddick
Pearl White was the original serial heroine in The Perils of Pauline. During the 1960s Batman craze, the serial was revived as this campy comedy
The gratifying pleasure of a solid conceptually-driven science-fiction film – all based around the premise of “what if a cryogenic sleeper woke up halfway through a deep space voyage?” and the moral choices he must make. Strong, intelligent character-driven science-fiction and possibly the best designed film of the year
Rare cinematic treatment of the generation ship story that conducts it with a modest degree of affectiveness. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.
Imprisonment thriller where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule, this expands out to become an excellent SF film
A low-budget spy/action film with entertainingly bizarre elements including a cryogenically frozen Hitler and the hero going into action accompanied by a baboon
Excellent film from Alejandro Amenabar in which a handsome playboy finds himself in the midst of a baffling series of reality flips before arriving at an SF twist ending
This falls short of being a great science-fiction film by a hairs breadth. Not the big space/action film it was sold as, more a Philip K. Dickian conceptual breakthrough film that seems to have borrowed large chunks of its set-up from Moon
Way back before Marvel Comics’ extraordinary domination of cinema screens and Samuel L. Jackson’s airing of the role, there was this tv pilot with David Hasselhoff; Although the film has a ridiculed reputation today, David S. Goyer delivers a tongue-in-cheek script filled with side-splitting one-liners
Anthology of three H.P. Lovecraft tales from directors Christophe Gans, Brian Yuzna and Shusuke Kaneko. For claiming such a quintessentially Lovecraftian title as this, you feel that it should have been more than it is
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
Sequel to Hallmark’s earlier tv mini-series Merlin featuring a return performance from Sam Neill in the title role, this is otherwise a generic and unmemorable work of Arthurian fantasy
Film about a monster hunter from the 1940s thawed out in the present-day. This appears to have been made as a tv pilot
Nobody much liked Maleficent but did make a reasonable amount of money, hence we get this sequel. The surprise is that in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, it is far better than anything one expected
Another in the early 2010s fad for fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasy films – in this case, a version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (as opposed to the original fairytale version) told from the viewpoint of the witch. Nicely produced, not much substance – the most interesting parts are when it gets to mess around with the fairytale
Robert Rodriguez escalates his earlier Mexican-themed action film into an insanely creative comic-book overflowing with science-fiction devices (and homages). The casting alone is side-splitting and Rodriguez’s nonsensical absurdism wins the day
SF film with Anthony Ramos as survivor of a crashed ship who must make a journey across a hostile planet to find another survivor while low on oxygen
Luc Besson written action-prison film that blatantly borrows from Escape From New York and emerges as an entertaining comic-book of a movie, even if its depth exists no further than Guy Pearce tossing off flip one-liners
Thoughtful and well-written Cryogenic Sleepers Awake film that charts the culture shock of two men frozen in the 1960s being thawed out in the present
A mini-series where a group of people aboard a train go into suspended animation and emerge to find a devastated world
Live-action film adaptation of the popular animated tv series, this was widely seen as a disaster and a nail in the coffin of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. i am one of the few that liked the film and Shyamalan’s creation of a complex and superbly designed world
Essentially Metropolis remade as a Broadway musical, one of the first US films to depict the future
The tenth Friday the 13th film. This tries to add novelty as Jason is thawed out in the future aboard a space station to slaughter anew. Featuring David Cronenberg as a victim
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he draws from in many respects, but where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
Comic-book creator Enki Bilal creates a visually extraordinary film about Ancient Egyptian gods awakening in a future New York
A film about stupid people that actually is funny – a raucous but often biting satire about how the stupid inherit the future
Enormously entertaining Hong Kong version of Highlander with two rival swordsmen transported into the modern day
Excellent and underrated film that revisits the old revived caveman drama with modern scientific and anthropological realism
This Canadian effort about Soviet super-soldiers unfrozen in the present-day feels like one of a bunch of cheap direct-to-video copies of Universal Soldier that came out in the late 1990s. The film generates remarkably little in the way of action of excitement
A film of reality bending conceptual twists about a psychiatrist tending cryogenically frozen prisoners who then wakes to find he is one of the prisoners
SF/action film with a ludicrous premise with a future prison where criminals are turned into holograms with one lone cop facing an escaped inmate in a hologram body
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
The Adams Family have been one of the most interesting creative talents in recent years – a father, mother and two daughters who perform all the functions on their films. Here they reinvent the Alien-inspired monster movie with highly entertaining results
Web-series, later released as a film, made as promotion for the Halo 4 videogame. While the games have a massively detailed backhistory of the universe, this is disappointingly only a low-budget military recruits in training scenario
Low-budget director Albert Pyun, best known for his kickboxing cyborg action films of the 1990s, conducts a micro-budgeted adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story about a scientist who fends off death by keeping their room chilled
A X-rated, German-made adaptation that blends together several fairytales. The result should be seen for its sheer bizarreness
Underrated 1950s SF film, a murder mystery as the equipment at a space research laboratory tries to kill people. Contains the first ever depiction of a computer virus
You can’t complain that this is not exactly what you expect it to be – two hours of cartoonish action during which the brain singularly fails to engage. This is less unapologetic about being a military fantasy than the first film
An unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot that is a fascinating almost-ran in sf. Roddenberry was trying to rehash Star Trek by way of Buck Rogers in a post-holocaust setting. The set-up could have made for a worthwhile series
The final film of French animator Rene Laloux, a planetary adventure set on a world where Laloux delights in creating exotically trippy aliens and landscapes. Released in English as Light Years with an Isaac Asimov script
The major distinction this has is as starring murdered Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten. An SF comedy made in the aftermath of Star Wars where Stratten is an android on a ship voyage romancing her human commander
SF film with Stephen Moyer as a spaceship survivor who boards a ship with the crew mysteriously dead and becomes caught up in interplanetary politicking
The fourth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and the most conceptually wild with Frankenstein conducting soul transplants, including transferring his assistant’s soul into a woman’s body
Popular film with Mel Gibson as a as a man who is cryogenically frozen in the 1940s and thawed out in the present. The romantic focus of the film is undone by some absurd plotting incredulities. An early script from J.J. Abrams
Westernised homage to Wu Xia and the Shaw Brothers film with an American teen transported back to Ancient China, this has all the thrill of junior-grade martial arts tournament
Indie SF film where Denis Leary wakes up as patient in a psychiatric institution where he insists he has been awoken from cryogenic suspension in a future where he is awaiting execution
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
An excruciatingly unfunny teen comedy with Brendan Fraser as a caveman who is unfrozen in the present-day. The film served to introduce Fraser and Pauly Shore, one of the most annoying figures to ever appear on screen
TV mini-series that came out the same time as Star Trek: The Next Generation, clearly hoping to ride its coattails – one became a classic, the other a forgotten footnote that looked dated barely ten years later. Somehow the idea of teenagers on a space mission didn’t get many audiences enthused
Robert Heinlein’s time travel novel gets a surprisingly faithful adaptation from Japan. This keeps the story’s double structure that tells one story and then with considerable conceptual dexterity reveals another hidden in the margins
Doom was the videogame if you had a computer in the 1990s. This is the second film based based on the game and actually does a far better job of getting the essence of the game and paying fanservice to its elements than the earlier bigger budgeted 2005 film did
The perfect film for the Covid era. A devastatingly on the ball satire on the ineptitude of people’s response in the face of an extinction level threat to the Earth from an oncoming comet
It is hard to find SF films that come with a bigger conceptual grasp. This has distinct overtones of 2001: Space Odyssey and Event Horizon about an expedition to Mars to investigate a mysterious black sphere – only to find that it offers a gateway to Heaven
One of Sylvester Stallone’s better films, a satirically funny work where he plays a contemporary police officer unfrozen in a future overrun by Political Correctness to chase down criminal Wesley Snipes
Action film set aboard a space station that houses cryogenically frozen survivors of a devastated Earth as C. Thomas Howell tries to stop a mad Matt Frewer
John Carpenter’s first film, made as a student project in collaboration with an also unknown Dan O’Bannon. A send-up of the boldly going space exploration of Star Trek, this features a ship where the crew are going stir crazy. The results are quite hilarious
This offers the promising idea of the fairytale Sleeping Beauty reworked as a horror film (and set in the modern day). Never as interesting as it sounds in synopsis, this becomes more a Sleeping Beauty-themed haunted house ride
This has an intriguing premise where a group awake from cryogenic suspension with their memories blank as someone among their number now begins killing them
A surprisingly better than expected film from the Disney Channel, a Coming of Age story set on The Moon about a group of kids who break out to go on a jaunt across the lunar surface
A film about a scientist trying to perfect a genetic engineering process. This turns into a strange SF reworking of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw
Fine Swiss-made SF film where cryogenic sleepers are awoken aboard a deep space mission to find someone is killing the crew and even that the very purpose of their mission may be a lie
One of the more disappointing of the Marvel Comics adaptations. Despite all the elements assembled, this never comes to life in director Joe Johnston’s hands and takes forever to get into action
Less Captain America 3 than The Avengers 3 – the entire film has been conceived as a massive superheroic punch-up. The results move with an exhilarating pace, but the Russo Brothers haven’t yet mastered Joss Whedon’s hand with character humour