The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Bugs is as an all-embracing term used here to discuss the various species of insects that regularly turn up in genre cinema. We are not particularly concerned here with the taxonomic division between different species or types of bugs.
Treatments range from the giant atomic spiders and other enlarged insects of 1950s SF cinema. These also includes stories of people transforming into flies and other assorted bugs, as well as insectoid superheroes such as Spider-Man.
There are also a number of animated films talking ants, bees and the like.
Unique anthology that offers 26 episodes from different genre directors, each ending with a death. The episodes vary wildly in quality and approach but a sufficient number ignore all good taste and/or travel waaaay across taboo lines
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
The first genre film of Mike Flanagan. A fascinating film about creatures that may be abducting people. The film sits on an ambiguous line that leaves much in doubt, while achieving some strikingly subtle, understated directorial effects
The success of Trainspotting gave birth to this anthology that adapts three Irvine Welsh stories, including episodes in which a man is transformed into a fly and a man swaps minds with a baby
This was a live-action version of the popular story given a reasonable budget and where Pinocchio is brought to life with a blend of CGI and animatronics
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
An animated film about a child who is cruel to ants only to be magically reduced down to their size and then have to become their saviour against an exterminator
While there is little doubt that Edgar Wright would have made a much better film, this emerges with an engaging likeability. Less epic superheroics, this plays out more as a caper comedy where a good ensemble and comedic playing carry the show
Ant-Man was a lightweight but perfectly enjoyable entry in the horde of Marvel Comics adaptations. This sequel has amplified the comedy element, seemingly with the intent of being the joker among the MCU pack
The third of the films devoted to Marvel’s miniature superhero. This ventures into multiverse themes works well when it comes to introducing the MCU’s big new super-villain who ended up never happening
The first animated film from DreamWorks, a rather charming effort that takes place in an ant nest with Woody Allen perfectly voice cast as a nebbish ant who decides to defy the crowd
The sequel to the DCEU’s Aquaman reaches for epic effects spectacle, although the character of Aquaman undergoes a substantial shift and is now given more of a comedy playing
Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, a popular revival of the 1970s bugs amok genre about a town overrun by deadly spiders, although this avoids the horror label and plays itself with much humour
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
Lightweight Luc Besson directed children’s fantasy with a young boy shrunken down to miniature size to engage in a series of CGI animated adventures among a race of fairy-like people. Several sequels followed
This was the second of Luc Besson’s Minimoys films, partly animated children’s films set in a world of miniature creatures. Here the charms of the first film seem thinly stretched
Luc Besson has made some phenomenal action films but I just can’t seem to get into his trilogy of children’s films. This was the third. A silly effort written down to a very juvenile level and padded with inane humour
The original Battlestar Galactica tv series was an incredibly blatant copy built on the success of Star Wars. This is the pilot, which aired on tv in the US but was released theatrically to theatres in other countries
Appealingly nonsensical DreamWorks animated film written by Jerry Seinfeld who also voices a bee who befriends a human woman and then stands up against the exploitation of bees
This was made as a quickie cash-in on Irwin Allen’s big-budgeted bomb The Swarm. Cheap effects and ridiculous plotting cause it to topple well over into bad movie stakes
Giant grasshoppers invade Chicago – what’s not to like? A sterling example of the 1950s atomically enlarged insect film from Bert I. Gordon who found his calling make cheap giant animals/people films during this era.
Giant spider film that seems to be aiming for the same gonzo territory the killer shark film has of recent. Instead we get an average B movie with some good effects and a line of comic banter that falls flat in the delivery
This was designed as a copy of the giant ant film Them! substituting scorpions for ants. The plot is average but what stands it out are the excellent stop-motion animated effects from King Kong creator Willis O’Brien
A standout Swiss-made film, an exceptionally well written work about a pact made with the devil by a mediaeval village that unleashes a plague of spiders and other curses upon them
Possibly the most ridiculous film produced during the Anglo-horror cycle in which scientist Robert Flemyng turns daughter Wanda Ventham into a giant vampiric Deathshead moth
William Castle production about the discovery of a species of insects that can start fires. Easily dismissable as a schlock film but it has an intelligence and eerie insect photography that make it more than that
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
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
A classic animated film. A delightful film about a young pig that seeks to change his fate and gets aid from a spider that can spell. A theatrical outing for Hanna-Barbera, creator of tv’s The Flintstones et al
Charlotte’s Web gets the Babe treatment and is turned into a live-action film with CGI barnyard animals and name actors. Here the enormous charms of the original are replaced by cute and mawkish cues
A horror film produced by Seth Rogen that gains some really creepy effect as a boy finds something is living in the walls of his home
The welcome return of stop-motion animator Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and at his wildly imaginative and darkly menacing best in an adaptation of a book by Neil Gaiman
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
The sequel to DreamWorks’ animated prehistoric film. For a very low expectation effort – the modern animated sequel – this emerges as far more colourful and entertaining than one expects
Disastrous adaptation of the Roger Zelazny novel where the story of a Hell’s Angel on a trek across the post-apocalyptic wasteland is recast with a G.I. and a girl and kid along for the journey, plus the addition of giant mutant cockroaches
An Amicus film directed by Freddie Francis and with a script by Robert Bloch that proves the dictum that there is no such thing as a good killer bee movie
Routine entry in the giant bug cycle of the 1950s, this essentially rehashes The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms with a revived prehistoric giant mantis on the attack
Anime from Yoshiaki Kawajiri, director of Wicked City and Ninja Scroll, concerning a suburb of Tokyo that is transformed into a borderland zone inhabited by demonic forces
More from the world’s cuddliest super-villain and those manic ritalin-deprived kids that are the Minions. Is there are life and creativity left in a franchise that has been milked for six films now?
Another variant on Alien – a monster movie with Mark Dacascos as a doctor facing a genetically engineered insect monster in the jungles of Borneo
Typical Syfy Channel creature film with people encountering giant fire-breathing genetically-engineered wasps in the jungles of Belize
Rather tatty effort in the 1950s giant bug cycle from director Bert I. Gordon who spent most of this era making similar films about big and small creatures and people
One of a spate of remakes of old AIP titles conducted in 2001, this spins the original giant spider amok film out into a superhero-gone-wrong take on Spider-Man
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin turn their attentions to revamping the 1950s giant insect film. They bring top-drawer effects to bear but everything else plays to standard formula
In the 1950s Bert I. Gordon specialised in cheap giant insect films. Here he takes H.G. Wells’ name in vain and jumps aboard the 1970s Animals Amok cycle but still makes another shoddy film about giant ants
I will defend Orson Scott Card as an exceptional science-fiction writer, his controversies aside. While this is an extremely faithful adaptation of his book, it works unevenly as a film and never soars dramatically
Denis Villeneuve slips into a very Cronenbergian vein to deliver a film about Jake Gyllenhaal and a mysterious doppelganger. A fascinatingly oblique and cryptic work, just as long as one does not require that it comes with any easy explanations
The animated films of Blue Sky Studios (the people behind the Ice Age sequels) have become so formulaic they have been drained of any spark of originality or creativity. This feels more like a series of test-marketing cues than a film
A visually striking compilation of five animated French horror tales. Each varies widely in style but the result is far more extraordinary than many live-action counterparts
Darryl Hannah is the queen of a species of body-snatching insects intent on invading Earth. This is a clear winner head and shoulders above any other contenders for the most ridiculous alien invasion work ever made.
A teleporter accident causes a scientist to swap head and arm with a fly. This requires you to suspend believability but is otherwise one of the classic monster movies of the era. Several sequels and a remake followed.
David Cronenberg remakes the 1958 film, transforming its improbable scenario into a fascinating study of biological transformation with Jeff Goldblum genetically mutating into a fly hybrid. Kafka’s Metamorphosis with a lot more slime.
Sequel to the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly directed by that film’s effects creator Chris Walas. This reduces Cronenberg’s obsessive bodily transformation film into just another monster on the loose tale
The Asylum build a disaster movie around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who are causing various volcanoes eruptions, locust swarms and other worldwide disasters
Classic film from the 1970s Nature’s Revenge fad with a group gathered for a party on an island finding that flora and fauna all around has become malevolent and turned against humanity
Shusuke Kaneko did extraordinary things in revitalising the Japanese monster movie in the 1990s with his trilogy of Gamera films. This was the second of them, usually seen as the weakest of the trilogy
From Bill Rebane, a film about a rampaging giant spider (having emerged from a black hole we are told). This has a bad movie reputation, although on most accounts it emerges as strictly average
The 19th Godzilla film, part of the 1990s revival where the series started to employ modern animatronics. This revives Mothra in quite beautiful ways and mounts to a rousing monster battle
The twelfth Godzilla film. Under director Jun Fukuda, a juvenile inanity had by now come to dominate the series by this point. The special effects, often recycled from previous films, are very cheesy
The 24th Godzilla film where Godzilla faces a giant prehistoric dragonfly. While the modern Godzilla films have readily adopted CGI and animatronics, the effects here are much more variable
A film based on the hugely popular children’s horror series. The film creates a story where the creatures from all the books are unleashed. This is fun to watch, yet what we ultimately have is easy, undemanding horror for family audiences
A tomb raiding adventure about the venture into a tomb filled with deadly spiders in search of an immortality serum. A Chinese-Australian-co-production.
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 that year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
The second of the Harry Potter films and better than its predecessor. Chris Columbus has his tendency to overblown effects more in check but that does leave the film more dependent on J.K. Rowling’s contrived deus ex machina plotting
Full-length comedy from The Three Stooges where the idiots are janitors at a space centre who accidentally launch themselves into space. One of several Space Age films where popular comics where launched into space
After a disastrous reboot of the Hellboy franchise, Millennium Media get it right, employing the comic’s creator on script, taking the series into wild directions with Hellboy up against Appalachian folk horrors
The Hobbit became Peter Jackson’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels and this is the weakest work he has produced under the J.R.R. Tolkien banner. Five picaresque chapters of the book are extruded into bloated set-pieces
Bill Zebub is possibly the most offensive filmmaker at work today. This largely plotless film features topless Nazi women fighting cannibal tribes, giant bugs and a Bigfoot
A delightful Disney film about the adventures of a group of kids who are accidentally miniaturised and have to make their way across a now giant-sized backyard. The effects are top-notch and the film pure and unabashed fun
An extremely good Filipino film about a family abandoned at the end of WWII where the only recourse seems to be the children trusting a malevolent fairy
The most successful Taiwanese horror film of all time, a Found Footage film about paranormal investigators who witness a ritual and are afterwards haunted by it
One of the greatest of all 1950s SF films in which average man Grant Williams begins to shrink in size, a film that becomes as much an effects tour-de-force as it is an existential allegory about a man in an alien universe
A throwback to the 1950s giant bug film concerning an insect invasion. From Mel Gibson’s production company, no less!
This ratchets up quite a reasonable degree of scary tension in taking a kitchen sink view as spiders overrun a low-income Paris apartment building
TV mini-series that adapts six less well known short stories by H.G. Wells into an anthology that winds in Wells as the central character. A couple of good stories, some that never quite hit the mark but mostly an okay effort
From regular horror director Brian Yuzna, a sequel to the Christmas slasher films series. This is quite possibly not only the weirdest Christmas film ever made but the weirdest Christmas horror film ever made
From on an early script by Star Trek director Nicholas Meyer, this is an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek effort where women use a serum to turn into deadly bee creatures
Henry Selick’s follow-up to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a Roald Dahl adaptation filled with enormous visual creativity
Bizarrely off-the-wall film where Jerry O’Connell gets an apartment in New York City and finds he is sharing it with singing cockroaches
Supposed adaptation of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island that gives the impression that none of the screenwriters have read the book … a consistently silly and nonsensical film that operates at the level of a children’s cartoon
Another of The Asylum’s mockbusters made to coincide with the big-budget Brendan Fraser film. As is the case with many of The Asylum’s public domain adaptations, resemblance to the Jules Verne book ends at the title – rather bizarrely, the centre of the Earth is depicted as being the sunlit outdoors
A sequel to Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. Chow hands the director’s chair over to Tsui Hark, a legend of HK cinema, who leaps in with wildly fantastic regard. On the other hand, forced to also incorporate Chow’s slapstick results in a very silly film
The sixth film in the Jurassic Park/World franchise offers very much a return to the familiar but also shakes several things up
TV movie that does nothing to dispel the dictum that there has never been any such thing as a good killer bee film. As always, the effects let the show down and the rest of the piece is slow going and talky
Peter Jackson’s dream project, a remake of the 1933 film, and his finest work as a filmmaker. Jackson builds the original out considerably and his command of the effects gives us something quite dazzling
Not a sequel but a reboot where King Kong is now part of a shared universe. This means we get less a tragic love story about Kong falling for a girl and being brought down by civilisation than Kong has become a heroic defender fighting off other monsters
Big-budget fantasy film made by people with little understanding of the genre. The fantasy elements feel leaden and fail to take any imaginative flight
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. Unlike the simple-minded comic supporting relief of most other animation, Laika take a big bite and tell an epic adventure. The only failing is that the stop-motion has become so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
In the same vein as the recent fad for gonzo killer shark films, we now have one about giant fire-breathing spiders. The film is lifted from formula by a considerable sense of humour and even peculiarly brings many of the cast of the Police Academy series out of retirement
A formula Syfy Channel film variant on the bugs gone amok film, starring Lucy Lawless as a government official who fights to stop a genetically-engineered swarm of locusts miles wide
The weakest of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, the most variant from the source material and the one where Jackson allows visual effects bloat to take over
A nerdy guy sets out across a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with giant animals to be with the girl of his dreams. This sound promising in description but suffers an identity crisis on screen
Very strange Sam Raimi produced film in which Raimi’s brother Ted plays a man suffering from hallucinations who tries to connect with the girl of his dreams. Head scracthingly strange with the forcedness of filmmakers trying very hard to create cult material
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s bizarrely deadpan comedies in which two amiable idiots discover a fly that is about the size of a dog
B-movie in which a chemical spill at a lab causes a mass murderer to turn into a giant mosquito hybrid. An efficient cobbling of cliches that comes out as a B budget variation n The Fly.
Routine made-for-tv movie about a legion of marabunta ants overrunning a small town
Rather funny satiric comedy about a family of insects who set up house in suburbia posing as humans
Peter Jackson‘s second film, what might be called The Muppet Show by way of John Waters, an inspired work of puppet depravity that makes a beeline for bad taste
Wildly experimental South Korean adaptation of the Kafka story about a man turning into an insect – a film shot entirely by the director in bed with the camera pointed at his feet