The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cults are separatist religious groups. The definition of a cult is a loose one but by general agreement it is a religious group that encourages its adherents to live outside the strictures of regular society, often in isolation and/or a communal existence. Cults will also require devotion to a charismatic leader and their teachings.
Cults have been with us for centuries but gained a fascination in the public eye during the 1960s and 70s with groups like Charles Manson’s Family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple and others since such as the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate who attained notoriety with murders and mass suicides. As a result, a group labelled a cult usually comes with connotations of controlling behaviour, relaxed sexual mores or abuse, slavishly murderous followers and belief in doomsday prophecies.
From the 1940s on, the screen has been filled with cults devoted to vampires, Ancient Egyptian practices, UFOs and aliens or to bringing about resurrections of occult figures. 1960s and 70s films are rife with depictions of Manson-styled murderous hippie cults, as well as cults devoted to Devil Worship set upon facilitating the birth of a Devil Child.
A different treatment came with The Wicker Man (1973) and its depictions of a small pocket of people devoted to Celtic folk religion in the present, which has been echoed by other films. Also popular have been a number of films in which the prophecies of doomsday cults turn out to be right after all.
This theme should be differentiated from Cult Movies about films that have devoted fan followings.
Abbott and Costello’s fourth and final meeting with the Famous Monsters. However, this is a desultory outing where nobody seems to be making much of an effort
Australian-made film about a heroine being drawn into occult conspiracies around her that only treads where Rosemary’s Baby went before
Someone had the bright idea to make a film centred around the creepy doll that appears in the wraparound scenes of The Conjuring. But without James Wan as director, everything disappears into formulaic scares
Gareth Evans, the director of The Raid films, makes a film about the search for a missing sister among a cult. The film borrows from The Wicker Man, before a climactic dive into full-on gore and sadism
A film that takes place with no dialogue set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have forsaken speech as Samara Weaving is pursued by a cult
Story of the sole survivor of a cult mass suicide waking from a coma to be haunted by the cult leader begging her to join them. This becomes a derivative of the A Nightmare on Elm Street films before a contrived ending
Christopher Smith seemed one of the most promising genre directors of the 2000s with films like Triangle and Black Death. Here he returns with a venture into the English ghost story
An oddity among the animated Batman films. This seems less another Batman film – Bruce Wayne gets more screen time than Batman, for instance – than it does a homage to the 1970s martial arts film
DC Universe Animated film that is adapted from an Elseworlds story that offers up an alternate 1920s version of Batman who is fighting up against H.P. Lovecraft entities
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
Big serious film about Santeria religion that readily delves into the voodoo side of it as detective Martin Sheen and his family are targeted by cultists
From The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, a film about two paramedics abducted into a crazed UFO cult who believe their delivery is coming
Quite a decent little low-budget film about a top secret government agency set up to despatch Lovecraftian Elder Gods.
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
Reasonable budgeted film that does no more than rehash Devil Child cliches from The Omen – or even more so the basic plot of Servants of Twilight. Chuck Russell throws in lots of CGI effects to little effect
A blatant copy of Hostel wherein a trio of students cross the Mexican border and fall prey to a Santeria cult. Despite its derivativeness in the plot department, this emerges as a brutal and fairly well made film
This comes with a cutely amusing title – about a boy who witnesses his father becoming a werewolf but nobody will believe him – but only emerges as a cheap and shabby B movie
A homage to 1970s Backwoods Brutality films like The Texas Chain Saw Masscare and in particular The Hills Have Eyes, albeit filtered through the retro lens of a modern take like X
Fan parody/homage of H.P. Lovecraft that comes waist-deep in references and jokes. The film is an amateur effort made with a painful cheapness in some areas; nevertheless it is clear that the team are really into making it and their enthusiasm carries the film
This conducts a seedily grim depiction of the world of the prostitutes working at a highway truck stop. In the midst of this, they try to deal with a killer eliminating their numbers
Ridiculous film that seems to want to say something about modern technological interconnectivity but has simply grafted it onto a slasher formula. while being bsurdly ill-informed about its subject
Mary Harron directs a film about Charles Manson and his Family, taking the perspective of the Manson Girls. The best of several films about the Manson Killings. Former Doctor Who Matt Smith makes a hypnotically fascinating Manson
A fifteen page Stephen King story about a patricidal child cult has spawned this film, nine sequels and a remake. Not a very good film, this is stuck with padding a very slight original out to a full-length film
The second of the films spun off from the Stephen King short story. This is somewhat better that its predecessor, premised around a series of novelty deaths and offering some explanations for what is happening
The third of the films based on the Stephen King short story, this moves the locale to the city but is otherwise based around a series of completely ridiculous makeup effects every few minutes
The popularity of the Children of the Corn franchise – eleven films spun out of a sixteen page Stephen King story – baffles one. This is the fourth film, its greatest distinction being that it stars a then unknown Naomi Watts
Quite who the audience for these Children of the Corn films is that they keep making more of them is a mystery. This was the fifth of eleven films and at least better than the last two entries
This remake of the Stephen King short story (this time with a script from King himself) is a much better film than the earlier 1984 version or any of its numerous sequels
The Stephen King short story only runs to 16 pages and explains little. This is the eleventh filmspinoff to date (which runs at about one film per 1.4 pages of story). Unlike the other sequels, this claims to be an origin 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
An extraordinary Russian film that takes place in a uniquely designed dreamworld shared by people in comas. This has an imagination and conceptual grasp that rivals Inception
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
A copy of Cat People in which a group of G.I.s violate a Malaysian temple and are subsequently haunted by a mysterious snake woman. This achieves some modest atmosphere
This makes an interesting attempt to rewrite the basics of The Omen as an erotic film. The usual occult happenings but with an emphasis on bodies coupling
Director Rob Savage made a splash with the Zoom horror film Host. His second film here is an insanely crazed horror film that is shot from the point-of-view of a dashcam
Sam Raimi gave some money to independent filmmaker J.R. Bookwalter to see what he would do. The result is a modest and gory if amateurish copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
An early Wes Craven film about a series of killings among an Amish-like cult led by Ernest Borgnine. Craven’s eerie dream horrors sit alongside a confusing script
Robert Quarry gained a fame in the early 70s and was regarded as the American Christopher Lee on the basis of the Count Yorga films. This was one of the works he made where he plays the leader of hippie cult who is a vampire
Little seen Merchant Ivory film directed by Nicholas Meyer set during the British Raj in India with Pierce Brosnan as a British officer who goes undercover to investigate the Thuggee cults
British-made vampire film that very much trying to copy the style of Hammer Films. This has colour and moments of undeniable style that stand out but lacks it in other crucial areas.
A peculiarity from Cannon Films that was a flop, a comedy in which a weird teenager believes he is an alien and suddenly attracts the attention of a bunch of UFO cultists
Essentially a supernatural version of a 1970s car chase movie with Nicolas Cage as a motorist who has escaped from Hell to settle a score. This makes a play for the trashy and absurd and comes out all the more entertaining for it
A bizarrely surreal, anything goes comedy as two bros set out to find their car after a night partying. This feels like Repo Man as though directed by the Farrelly Brothers after they had inhaled a few bongs
A Japanese horror film that winds a convoluted plot involving stolen corpses, a blackmarket in organ harvesting, split personality, twins and religious cults
Could it be too hard to go wrong in making a film about a doomsday cult hunting people through a subway tunnel? Apparently it is and after a promising beginning, the film churns the cliches with little tension
Nominally a sequel to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first film Resolution, this concerns a strange cult but expands outwards to involve a mind-boggling array of backwoods timeloops and reality blurrings
This feels like Children of the Corn remade by Terrence Malick. The film does nicely with the wry, quietly observed naturalism of its Coming of Age story, less so when it moves into horror territory
New Zealand comedy in which a teenage daughter discovers that her father Temuera Morrison is a modern-day Maori cannibal cultist. Everything is given a very broad playing
One of the key films in the cult of director Larry Cohen, this throws in a mind-bending mix involving an androgynous alien messiah, random shootings, alien abduction and Catholicism
Low-budget film about a woman who inherits a British country estate to find someone has opened a portal to unleash entities. One of several low-budget films of late to appropriate Lovecraft’s name
A low-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft’s story about fish people mating with humans relocated to a California AirBNB
A gonzo comedy about an alien invasion that takes place during a getaway at a remote cabin by assorted comically dysfunctional characters including a man who is accompanied by a talking handkerchief
A Euro vampire film that exists under several different titles. Andrew Prine goes to an island after the death of his father only to disturb the tomb of a vampire queen
Seventh and worst of the Hellraiser films. Clive Barker had departed three films ago and the copyright taken by a company that specialises in cheap sequels. This blurs reality and illusion so much it makes no sense
Word of mouth hit that has in its fingertips the capacity to be a great horror film. Moments of intense spookiness and an awards-worthy performance from Toni Colette but Ari Aster has an unfocused script
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences
Construed by prolific B movie hack Fred Olen Ray around its two stars – Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface, and Scream Queen Linnea Quigley, this hits a perfect note between bimbos, tongue-in-cheek and cheap gore
Petty criminal Pete Davidson is given a job at a retirement home only to discover that sinister activities are occurring all around him. From the director of The Purge films
Turkish director Con Evrenol made a splash with the horror film Baskin; this was his follow-up, an often head-scratching film about a housewife who is drawn into the mind-bending activities of a sinister cult
Another shabby Troma release concerning the activities of a crazed cult. This features some nasty deaths but little else
A Found Footage film about a tv crew investigating Lovecraftian cultists who are trying to raise an elder god. This makes an okay stab but is distinctly hampered by a low budget
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s first sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark is like a single 118 minute rollercoaster ride without let-up in terms of action, although at the same time is far less polished in the scripting department
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
An authentic example of 1970s exploitation cinema – a regional film made with next-to-no budget, a no-name cast and with all emphasis on the luridly sensationalistic. A crappy, badly made film that vaguely rambles through a plot that makes little sense
Karyn Kusama welcomely returns to screens with a film about a sinister dinner party. The film is less one that resides in usual horror effects than it takes place in brooding, unsaid things and a palpable sense of something terrible about to happen
New Zealand-made horror film with Karl Urban as a lecturer on the run from a Satanist cult
I had no high expectations of a film from one of the directors of the Saw sequels but was pleasantly surprised by this where a family’s attempts to conduct a cult deprogramming go awry as masked cult members surround the house prepared to do anything to get their recruit back
Coming out the same year as Deep Impact and Armageddon, this was an oncoming asteroid collision film that has been bizarrely crosshatched with a ‘hood drama
A Devil Child variant with a couple finding that June, the foster child they take on becomes possessed by an entity and develops incredible psychic powers when upset. The main problem with the film is the lack of coherent explanation for what is happening
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a critically celebrated name in recent years. Here it feels like he has made an anthology of three surreal tales that come in black deadpan
Ken Russell adapts a Bram Stoker novel about a snake cult and turns it into a campy over-the-top comedy
Shoddy Greek made film that imports Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence concerning a cult of minotaur worshippers
Sequel to the sleeper 2010 Found Footage hit. Alas, this is a sequel that understands almost nothing about what made the first film so original. In abandoning the Found Footage look and unique central character, this is just a possession film that comes utterly by the numbers
Fitfully amusing fanboy comedy set around the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You suspect that Lovecraft, a noted conservative, would have deplored the idea of the nerd comedy, although you have to admit that the film gets a more authentic flavour of Lovecraft’s works than most adaptations do
A ghost story that borrows more than a few touches from Assault on Precinct 13 in its tale of a haunted police station. Director Anthony DiBlasi has little time for cliche jumps and spends his time on accumulating atmosphere with considerable effetiveness
Crazed Evil Dead-styled film directed by sf/horror writer S.P. Somtow about modern-day Aztec sacrifices, this makes a beeline for bizarre gore effects
The second of the films based on Dolores Redondo’s police procedurals, this heads into an admirably dark and perverse place with plenty of jolt twists
Film about the Manson Family killings told through the eyes of one of Manson Girls Leslie Van Houten that becomes a savage and biting indictment of 1960s social morality
Clearly inspired by South Park comes this satiric Claymation animated version of the Manson Family killings. The film quickly heads for some astonishing bad taste areas, flailing about before eventually finding itself in some bitingly black humour and songs
An entry from the revived Hammer Films directed by duo who made the standout Goodnight Mommy. This is a slow burn of a film about cabin fever and fragmenting psychology that is often reminiscent of The Shining
Clive Braker’s third and so far final outing as a director. Barker is trying to tell an occult detective story but fails to get any of the mood that film noir operates by, while the film registers blandly in terms of horror
An obscure but fascinating 1970s film where Mary Wilcox is an heiress who has an obsession with necrophilia who is then drawn into the activities of a strange cult
Found Footage film that has fun uniting UFOs and wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning but the film commits the mistake of delivering them to us quasi-documentary style rather than dramatically
30 years in the making and the results are sensational,one of the best films of the year. An action film so relentlessly foot-to-the-floor and full of kinetic wildness that it blows all its contemporaries away and sets the bar anew, while the vision of the future it creates is something utterly out of this world
Nicolas Cage goes all Death Wish and slaughters a cult that murdered his wife. A regular revenge film is transformed by director Panos Cosmatos into something bizarrely primal with a thunderously over-emphatic score and blood red lighting scheme
Manos: The Hands of Fate is considered one of the worst films of all time. 42 years later some of those involved in the original decided to make a sequel
Regarded as one of the worst films ever made, more than anything this is just dull and boring. The plot concerns a couple straying into a desert home where a warlock is about to be resurrected
Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose biopic of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is a film composed of great acting and great individual scenes more so than it ever coheses as a story or delves in to interrogate its characters. Far too elusive as a story to quite be the masterpiece it is readily being hailed as
Ti West and Mia Goth round out their trilogy of films begun with X with a psycho film set in 1980s Hollywood
Mike Flanagan horror mini-series adapted from Christopher Pike’s book, this is set around a group of patients in a hospice who form a group to tell each other horror stories
This feels like a reworking of late 70s/early 80s sf films like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the film is based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failure as science-fiction is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
Ari Aster made a big word of mouth splash with his debut film Hereditary, which had him acclaimed a major new name. This was his follow-up, a fascinating dive into Folk Horror territory in the depiction of a pagan cult
One of three films produced by Fangoria magazine, this takes place in a post-holocaust wasteland of crazies and is certainly gore-drenched but unfortunately only churns cliches
Folk Horror about the discovery of a witch’s body in a bog, this is a slow burn film that falls together with great subtlety
An early film from Ron Bonk misleadingly sold with connection to the notorious Italian cannibal film, concerning the tenants of an apartment building under siege by a mysterious cult
Sequel to the 1999 The Mummy. Here Stephen Sommers amplifies everything in that film by a factor of ten where the constant bombardment by the spectacular reaches an point of absurd overkill
This was the fourth and final of Universal’s Mummy films starring Lon Chaney Jr. However, by this point the series had become trapped in a series of repetitive plot moves
The fourth and second to last of Universal’s Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr in the role. By now the series has been reduced to a well-worn formula