The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Airplane was a parody of the disaster movie that proved a hit. This was a sequel that expands the action aboard the space shuttle and contains many SF in-jokes but to generally lesser effect
Horror film in which a group of maniacs escape from an asylum set out to track down the new psychiatrist. This starts with tongue amusingly planted in cheek and contains a great cast line-up
The first of The Amityville Horror sequels and a far more entertaining film than its predecessor by abandoning the pretence at telling a true story and adding a possession plot and makeup effects to the mix
Witty and quite charming low-budget SF film with Don Opper as a gawky android on a space station trying to understand the human condition amid the arrival of escaped convicts
A modest and quite well written children’s film about a gifted twelve year-old (Martha Byrne) who gradually discovers that she is a clone
A very obscure title, this is a fascinatingly enigmatic and arty film in which Edward Woodward has a dream of having a car crash that then starts coming true as he sets out
Film based on true-life New Zealand mass murderer Stanley Graham, a disenfranchised farmer who became a local hero after shooting several police and inspiring a massive manhunt
Remarkable little no-budget film from Frank Henenlotter about the relationship between a man and the deformed, psychopathic torso of his severed Siamese twin
A fairly blatant copy of Mad Max 2, although this is one of the better-made and budgeted. Crucially what is lacking is much in the way of the action that made Mad Max a hit
Modest entry among the early 1980s fad for air bladder transformation effects with Paul Clemens transforming into a cicada creature. Philippe Mora creates some solid directorial set-pieces
Don Coscarelli, director of the culty Phantasm, made this as part of the early 1980s sword and sorcery fad with Marc Singer as a muscular hero who has the ability to communicate with animals
Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since become regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense and detailed vision of the future was copied by dozens of subsequent films
An incredibly bad film, the first ever shot on videotape concerning a man who lets nubile girls move into his home only for them to come under psychic attack
Ulli Lommel film in which Suzanne Love undergoes experimental brain surgery only to start receiving memories from the donor, a woman who was murdered
The third in a trilogy of satirical films from director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell, this takes a biting crosscut of British society as a hospital prepares for a royal visit
An adult film that gained a critical respectability when it came out, an avant garde work set in a future where the populace has become impotent and the handful unaffected perform sex in clubs for paying audiences
The remake of Cat People. In the hands of Paul Schrader, all the ambiguity is made overt and the film becomes one of Schrader’s allegories for tormented sexuality. On its own terms, this is an often smoulderingly sensual work
More of an abstract art short than a film. Dialogueless, almost plotless, this concerns the lone human in a city inhabited by inscrutable beings that amuse themselves by rearranging matter
Adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s pulp adventure stories and the film that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. The script from Oliver Stone takes unevenly from Howard but director John Milius gives the film a brutal, primal majesty
Stephen King and George Romero collaborate on a horror anthology made as homage to the EC Comics, telling five tales that replicate the blacker-than-black sense of humour (and even the visual look) of the comic-book with hilarious results
Australian thriller about an inventor who has created an A.I,, although the film only puts it at the purpose of a routine murder mystery plot
The film that Jim Henson chose to make as successor to The Muppets. An astonishing technical leap beyond Muppetry to create an entire fantasy world in living, breathing detail all only inhabited by puppets. One of the few original screen works that conjures the depth and texture of J.R.R. Tolkien
The late James Herbert was a writer of extraordinary ferocity and gore-drenched extremes. This is an adaptation of his first book The Rats where all the ferocity has been watered down to become an anodyne, standard Animals Amok film – one where the giant rats are played by puppies
Fan filmmaking back from the day when filmmakers struggled with technologies like Super 8, a film driven by its makers’ immense enthusiasm and some surprisingly good creature effects, making one of the few highly original variations on the Alien alien
Essentially a slasher movie version of Witness where a family driving through Death Valley are pursued by a killer after the young son sees his face
Adapted from an Ira Levin play, this is an hilarious parody of the whodunnit with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve engaged in a series of games trying to outsmart the other amid a series of brilliant whiplash reversals
Entry from the 1980s heyday of slasher film made by students at the UCLA film program with a killer stalking the dorm. Featuring an unknown Daphne Zuniga as one victim
Paul Bartel’s black comedy where he and Mary Woronov play a couple who pose as kinksters to lure swingers and then kill them off. all to fund setting up an exclusive restaurant
Modest thriller with sheriff Robert Urich investigating cattle mutilations and finding a possible UFOs and a government conspiracy
Film that is supposedly based on a true story which Barbara Hershey are family are harassed by a poltergeist. Contains the notorious scene where Hershey is raped by the entity
Perhaps the greatest children’s film ever made, the story of the affection between a lonely boy and a stranded alien. Steven Spielberg paints in beautiful, tender emotions from the heart that can only not touch the most cynical
Ingmar Bergman’s final film, a beautifully shot and richly textured family saga that was loosely autobiographical in nature on Bergman’s part. Contains considerable fantasy content.
Clint Eastwood directs/stars in one of the best Cold War thrillers about the theft of a hi-tech fighter plane from inside the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union is portrayed with paranoid effect, while the film reaches an exhilarating climax with the plane in flight
One of Rankin-Bass’s animated films, this has an ambitious epic fantasy plot with original themes about the line between science and magic but is undone by Rankin-Bass’s limited animation
One of the numerous copies of Alien. This was produced by Roger Corman, which means more of an exploitation emphasis – the alien is three times the size, there is more of a T&A emphasis and the effects are cannibalised from his other films
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
Third of the Friday the 13th films, shot in the brief fad for 3D films in the early 80s. This is also the one where Jason adopts his trademark hockey mask
Werewolf films were all the thing around 1980-1 with hits like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. This is cult director Larry Cohen’s often extremely silly but not entirely unamusing comedy take
Unrelated to the Michael Myers saga, John Carpenter tried to use the Halloween name to launch an original horror series. The plot is a baffling mix of Celtic magic and hi-tech but Tommy Lee Wallace creates some way out effects scenes
A slasher film from the classic 1980s heyday set during a party at a sorority house that has been praised as being one effort that is well above the rest of the genre.
US-made ghost story set in Japan with a couple moved into a house haunted by a dead samurai, his wife and her lover. Not a patch on any of the classic Japanese kaidan eiga
Musician Neil Young directs a science-fiction film! I was hoping this would be another Repo Man, instead we get an incoherent mess that throws in a jumble of sf concepts and feels like it was made without a script
Canadian-made slasher film from the director of the original Prom Night. This mixes slasher standard with a variant on the Mad/Deformed Relative in the Attic plot but mostly seems terminally dull
Obscure title that when seen is revealed to be a surprisingly well-made (in places) homage to the 1950s alien invasion genre and replication of the era’s style of filmmaking
Film about a demonic rapist that is far more tastefully presented than its premise would suggest, in fact comes with he plodding sedateness of a tv movie
Extremely silly and at times undeniably funny spoof on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – here Dr Jekyll becomes a coke addict who snorts his formula and turns into a swinger with a giant afro
A detective thriller set in a near-future Germany. Celebrated arthouse director Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays the investigating detective
Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s was dominated by kung fu films but by the end of the decade the search for novelty resulted in some bizarre crosshatches such as this bizarre effort in which a kung fu practitioner against a sorcerer who raises ghosts and even Count Dracula to fight
A successor to the controversial Maniac with Joe Spinell as an obsessed fan stalking an actress played by Caroline Munro. The film has the novelty of being shot guerilla-style during the Cannes festival with many scenes filmed during press conferences and premieres with the crowds unaware
Culty New Wave film with Anne Carlisle as a model who has a miniature UFO land on her New York apartment roof where it devours her lovers for the opiate in the brain produced during orgasm
Another entry from the oeuvre of cult French director Jean Rollin – a film about the bond between a girl and her zombified friend that sits between some gore amateurish effects and a poetic subtlety
Z-budget filmmaker Larry Buchanan makes a Loch Ness Monster film that is so painfully cheap it never travels beyond California state
Lucio Fulci film about a series of supernatural deaths caused by an Egyptian amulet. An Incoherent and plotless mess filled with random supernatural effects and occasional gore scenes
SF film about an international action team outfitted in hi-tech vehicles, this was a big bomb in its day
One of Woody Allen’s slighter films, a sexual rondeau set at the turn of the 20th Century, although mostly riffing on Allen’s familiar sexual neuroses. Contains minor fantasy elements.
Incredibly shabby film about residents of a Texas boarding house being killed by a supernatural dog
A giallo film with occult overtones centred around the discovery of an Etruscan tomb. As a series of murders occur, the heroine may be the reincarnation of an ancient high priestess
Following the highly successful Animal House, this was the second of the films made using the name of the satirical magazine National Lampoon and is a feeble parody of the slasher film
Stylishly directed Australian psycho-thriller about a woman who inherits a retirement home but finds someone is killing the seniors
Italian exploitation film about gangs fighting in the ruins of a future New York. Enzo G. Catsellari has ripped off both Escape from New York and The Warriors
The slasher film only really came into existence in 1980 but was so prolifically milked that by even two years later it had spawned its own sub-cycle of parodies. This hits in with a wacky anything goes absurdity but, aside from an amusing Carrie spoof, little of it is funny
The second directorial outing of a young Charles Band, this is essentially an earthbound version of Alien. Not a very good film, the principal reasons to watch are some cheap effects and a young Demi Moore
Epic filmed version of the Richard Wagner opera set around the Arthurian legends and the quest for the Holy Grail
Film version of Pink Floyd’s best-selling album, an extraordinary surreal audiovisual dive into the fraying mind of a rock star
Widely rididculed attempt to market Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as a teen pop film by way of The Blue Lagoon. A mind-spinning film that seems to have no limit on how silly it is prepared to be, including numerous anachronistic contemporary pop culture in-jokes and fourth-wall breaking gags
Almost completely ignored at the time of its release, an animated masterpiece where Martin Rosen, the director of Watership Down, adapts another Richard Adams about two escaped laboratory animals. This has an incredible and at times dark emotional range far away from Disney
Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn’t alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that doesn’t always make sense but pulls its effects off flawlessly
Larry Cohen is a cult director and this, which concerns a Quetzalcoatl bird amok in New York City, is the best of his films, peppered with side-splitting dialogue and Michael Moriarty giving the performance of a lifetime
Forgotten 1980s horror where Meg Tilly accepts a dare to spend a night in a mausoleum as a powerful psychic returns to life
Fine Coming of Age story set in 1950s New Zealand with John Carradine as a sinister stranger come to town
The first film from Don Bluth, a Disney animator who formed his on company vowing a return to the studio’s classic tradition. The results are beautiful and quite magical (*)
Ultra-trashy thriller with Morgan Fairchild as a tv newsreader stalked by next-door neighbour Andrew Stevens where she engages in the title seduction to eliminate him. A really bad film
Excellent and overlooked film with Kathryn Harrold as a psychiatrist trying to deal with the fact that one of the patients in an asylum has vast psychic powers
Another failed attempt to film the works of Kurt Vonnegut where Vonnegut’s ironic pessimism ends up as witless slapstick chaos on screen
Supposedly a feminist parody of the slasher film but one has doubts. For one, the film is lacking in discernible irony and otherwise no different from the other slasher films of the era bar the fact it was directed by a woman
The great Osamu Dezai makes a colourful anime that jumps aboard the Stars Wars space opera fad
Second of the Star Trek films, usually regarded as the fan favourite because of its often moving character focus on themes of life, death and aging. Ricardo Montalban makes a grandly theatrical villain and the film gets some great suspense out of space war sequences
The film that Sean S. Cunningham went on to direct after the huge hit of Friday the 13th. Though sold as a horror film, this is more of a kidnap thriller
Fairly negligible film about a family who move into a house to face the vengeance of a witch
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
Made on the coattails of Conan the Barbarian, this is a low-budget sword and sorcery film that crackles with the essence of Robert E. Howard. The first film from Albert Pyun.
One of the various low-budget Italian sword and sorcery of the 1980s that borrows much from Conan the Barbarian
Film based on the popular campus mock killing game where one player snaps and starts to kill for real. Featuring the screen debut of Linda Hamilton
Paul Mazursky conducts a contemporary version of the Shakespeare play set in the Greek islands, which serves to give the original a potent resonance
Another of Dario Argento’s giallo psyeho-thrillers with all the stylistically wild and over-the-top deaths and random plotting one expects
John Carpenter at the peak of his career, remaking The Thing from Another World as a wild and phantasmagoric film steeped in paranoia that proved to be the absolute epitome of the era’s fad for air-bladder transformation effects
One of the films from Rene Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet and Gandahar. Here Laloux collaborates with cult fantasy artist Moebius and the result is a planetary adventure filled with trippily exotic backgrounds and creatures
I had heard about this for years – it had a reputation as ‘the mummy from outer space film’. Seen, it proves disappointingly routine – all the tomb raiding is over after the first scene and the rest is little more than a slasher movie with the mummy akin to a hockey-masked maniac wandering a campus killing co-eds
Rather slight film with the amusing concept of a present-day motorcyclist thrown back in time to the Old West
From the heyday of the slasher film, an effort about a babysitter stalked by an escaped maniac on Halloween Night, which draws great influence from classics of the era such as Halloween and When a Stranger Calls. Nothing standout but what a great supporting cast
A flop in its day, nobody at the time saw how revolutionary this was in that it predicted the idea of cyberspace and the internet. The design of the world inside the computer all in candy apple colours and geometric shapes is extraordinary
A strong contender for Worst Film Ever. Rather than create any effects, it has simply uplifted footage from Star Wars, while the score is a mismash taken from popular films of the era. The dialogue is so bizarrely surreal it makes the brain hurt trying to understand it
Taut and effective effort from the heyday of the slasher film, one of several films on the theme of a woman newscaster being stalked by a psycho. A young Michael Ironside goes to town on the role of the psycho and plays to the gallery with nastily effective results
Controversial film where Kristy MacNichol adopts a stray dog only to find it has been trained by racists to kill African-Americans
A sprawling international political thriller/satire about stolen nuclear weapons starring Sean Connery as a journalist
A British-made copy of Alien that has been construed as a series of bizarre images and scenes that make no real sense – even the title is given no explanation
A psychic powers film like Carrie having been reduced to the crass high school comedy of something like Porky’s