The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Goblins and Trolls are mythical creatures from folklore and fairytale. In mythology, goblins are small, malevolent creatures of hideous appearance. The troll is very similar in temperament and larger in appearance. According to mythology, trolls can be either dwarflike or giants and hide in caves or under bridges.
In fantasy fiction and cinema, troll and goblin are terms that are used interchangeably. On screen, goblins and trolls usually come with green skin, often with reptilian appearance, are dwarfish in stature and often have pointy ears.
Also fairly interchangeable is the orc, a creature invented by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, which is hideous and reptilian but usually more regular-sized. Another variant on the goblin might be the gremlin, a small goblin creature that appeared in urban legends among World War II pilots.
Various goblins and trolls appear in Fairytales where they will harass the heroine of the show often with malevolent intent. They appear in assorted works of Epic Fantasy where they are usually one of a variety of creatures inhabiting a Fantasy Otherworld. There are also a number of horror films that include appearance from goblins and trolls in the present-day.
A children’s fantasy adventure that never strays beyond the environs of an American high school and comes with the lowbrow slapstick, excruciating comic caricatures and incredibly bad effects
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
One of the earliest films from Charles Band. In the years following, Band went onto produce and occasionally direct a great many often enterprisingly cheap low-budget genre films – this is not one of them
Adaptation of the popular Young Adult series about a twelve-year-old super-villain and his adventures with assorted magical creatures. Audiences hated this but I though it overspilled with a madcap creativity
Adapted from a Young Adult series of books, this is a bland and utterly superficial film about a secret society of monster-hunting babysitters
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
Seventh of the animated Barbie films, spinoff of the earlier Barbie Fairytopia, all delivered in sugary upbeat sentiments amid pastel colour schemes that would look eye-poppingly psychedelic if one were high
Cheaply made attempt to turn the fairytale into a fantasy adventure where Beauty becomes a kick-ass heroine who joins the Beast in defeating an evil lord and witch
An interesting and worthwhile attempt to retell the epic legend of Beowulf but to give it grounding as an historical work. Filmed in Iceland with an international cast
From Laika, a stop-motion animated work about misunderstood creatures who wear boxes as shells and are perceived as monsters by polite society. An enormous degree of creativity has gone into this
This is in essence a zombie film version of the classic historical film Zulu with a small group of soldiers tasked with protecting a bridge against a zombie horde
Made by Walden Media following the success of their The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a well-made adaptation of a Christian children’s book even if it sits uncertainly between gentle realism and the push to make it a fantasy film
Set in an alternate version of the present where fantasy creatures – orcs, elves, fairies – live alongside humans, this comes with a cleverness, while being played as a buddy cop drama that anchors it with a realism
An anthology of three Stephen King stories, this comes out with extremely variable results where what were originally a series of tight and mordant tales end up strangely overblown
The second live-action tv adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books (in fact combining two books). This is uneven and oddly padded but beautifully produced
This is a British-made fantasy film in the vein of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones but conducted on a B-budget where it does seem to be making an effort
A remake of the popular 1980s sword and sorcery film that was originally produced by Roger Corman. This version is directed by makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski who fills it with an amazing range of creature effects
Guillermo Del Toro produced cinematic remake of a 1970s tv movie, this creates a good deal of creepy mood and atmosphere with Katie Holmes as a mother who finds goblins in the cellar, but never pushes any of it in a way that jolts audiences in their seats
This sets out to parody the Lord of the Rings fantasy. Or at least you think that is what it is trying to do. All suspension of disbelief is killed by a series of grating and anachronistic quips
An anthology film produced by Charles Band where assorted directors turn in seven episodes all centred around a videogame warrior put through a series of tests by The Devil
Excruciatingly awful take on Cinderella, which overruns the fairytale with hip contemporary in-jokes and pop culture references, shredding any suspension of disbelief in its desire to appeal to a modern teen cool
Disney film in which an animated fairytale princess emerges through into the real world to become Amy Adams. This becomes the opportunity to amusingly puncture the unreal world of the Disney fairytale
The fourth of Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrel comedies. This pits Ernest in a series of knockabouts routines against a troll that is resurrected on Halloween
From the producers of the ABCs of Death films, a further horror anthology where nine directors from around the world deliver eight episodes based on the folklore of their region
Makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski has become a fine director in recent years. Here he makes a Gremlins-styled film about a 1-900 number that unleashes a mischievous goblin
Disney animated film that supposedly adapts Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, although Andersen wouldn’t recognise it. This often feels like a ramshackle assemblage of formula elements rather than the classic it was hailed as
Frozen was the most successful animated film of all time. It also felt the most formulaic and least inspired Disney film of the 2000s. As part of Disney’s new business policy of recycling everything, this is a sequel.
The fourth and final of the Ghoulies films. This one comes from B-budget hack Jim Wynorski who seems to not be taking any of the show seriously
A copy of Gremlins produced by Charles Band’s Empire, featuring much slime and cheap-looking creatures. A surprise hit on video shelves; three sequels followed.
Technically not actually a film about gremlins but about a goblin creature that emerges from a box where it will kill a person unless they pass it on to someone they love
The film about malicious creatures that was the runaway box-office hit of 1984. Director Joe Dante runs amok like a schoolboy with a chemistry kit and gleefully trashes the wholesome innocence of producer Steven Spielberg’s E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial
A far less successful sequel to the mega-hit of Gremlins where director Joe Dante brings the gremlins to Manhattan and allows the silliness to go completely over-the-top and into orbit, even breaking the fourth wall
Amid the early 2010s fad for adult fairytale reinterpretations, this has an anachronistic absurdity that invites you not to take it seriously. A series of action movie poses, CGI and splatter effects are transplanted into the fairytale.
Another in the spate of animated fairytale parodies that came out in the wake of Shrek, this subjects Cinderella to an excruciating barrage of pop-culture jokes and one-liners
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Harry Potter series but the final chapter rounds out the boy wizard saga in rousing style, mounting an epic-sized battle and finding characters depths that hold some of the best writing of the series
The first of the Harry Potter films. The first is the weakest and lumbers due to being placed in the hands of the perpetually banal Chris Columbus who allows visual effects wow and simplistic emotional cues to dominate
Reboot of the Hellboy series promisingly comes from Neil Marshall but is also made by Millennium Films who have a habit of buying up previously successful properties and churning out cheaper spinoffs
After two bloated and over-padded Hobbit films, Peter Jackson finally gets it together and produces what everyone was expecting him to deliver, even if it means dragging one battle scene out to last an entire film
Peter Jackson returns to J.R.R. Tolkien and epic-sized adventure in the first of his Hobbit films. The visual sweep is there but the film feels over-extruded and over-burdened by its own self-importance.
Generally overlooked animated adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien book made for tv by Rankin-Bass. This keeps to the text very faithfully – more so than Peter Jackson – and is only let down by some limited animation
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
A pitifully cheap copy of Gremlins about alien creatures locked in a soundstage and now accidentally unleashed. One of the worst films ever made.
A wholly unnecessary sequel to Hoodwinked!, this again runs the fairytale characters over with modern quips and pop culture references
Sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman. Despite low expectations, this emerged better than one thought it would. It has a better director and seems much more at home being an epic fantasy than the first film
The way this film promotes itself, you go in expecting to see a horror comedy. Instead, we get a film that seems to spend half its running time in build-up with no comedy or monster slaying, although it does at least deliver on its initial promise with an entertainingly low-budget Evil Dead-styled climax
This may count as the worst horror film to be released in the entire 80s VHS era
Stunning Jim Henson directed fantasy film set in a world of visual illusions where the Henson team’s puppetry effects are at the peak of their game to provide the creature effects
Hugely underrated Ridley Scott film that was a box-office flop. Scott attempts to reconstruct the fairytale as something dark and primal and creates moments that are superlative cinema
Anime about the oddball friendship between a teenage girl and three goblins. Strongly reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, it becomes a film about a girl’s deep feeling for her parents that eventually ends up being greatly affecting
Way back before Peter Jackson, Ralph Bakshi conducted this animated adaptation of J.R. Tolkien. While by no means uninteresting, the film was not a success and Bakshi failed to return to complete the announced second part of the story
Peter Jackson wowed the world with this first part of his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy. Epic filmmaking and one that shows Jackson in full command of his craft
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
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga truly gains its feet here, expanding out onto an epic scale where he has fused special effects and story into a singular vision
A spinoff prequel to the Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films that takes the option that several other film/videogame franchises have of Going Anime
One of the better films from B-budget dircetor Bert I. Gordon, a fantasy adventure where Gordon produces some decent effects
A surprisingly good effort to emerge from the arena of fan-made Kickstarter funded filmmaking. Essentially, a group of fans have brought their mutual love of playing Dungeons and Dragons to life but the film, while low-budgeted, places a great deal of care into the characters and building of the world
This creates an intriguingly uncanny atmosphere in the story of a teenage girl who keeps seeing a strange goblin creature but nobody will believe her. The last half far less interestingly turns into a variant on E.T. with her racing to protect the creature
A Syfy Channel film about the present-day discovery of a lost, still extant 19th Century village that has conducted a deal to preserve themselves by annually sacrificing someone to an ogre
A story about an apprentice at a mysterious company that deals with magic, this could well serve as a fix for those wanting something more of the Harry Potter franchise
B-budget dircetor Fred Olen Ray has taken the plot of Gremlins and thrown it together with one of his sofctore erotic films in which a mind-controlling goblin creature forces people to have sex
Likeable animated fantasy made for young children
Another of the cheaply made fairytale adaptations from Cannon Films with the bizarre casting of Christopher Walken as Puss in Boots
An obscure animated version of the classic fairytale that comes with excruciating puns, much slapstick and has clearly been animated on a low budget
Essentially Christmas the Action Film featuring Dwayne Johnson as Santa’s bodyguard going into action accompanied by Chris Evans as a nerdy hacker when Santa is abducted
Way back before Peter Jackson, there was another whole era of Tolkien adaptations, including this animated adaptation of the third book, which is a peculiar oddity if nothing else
A British horror anthology made up of three stories from director Michael Armstrong. As always the episodes are variable but the episode with the killer Punch and Judy dolls stands out
Harry Potter, The Hunger Games et al have been object lessons in how to properly adapt a Young Adult series; this could be considered a lesson how not to – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
Chloe Grace Moretz stars in a quite reasonable WWII-set story about gremlins amok aboard a plane
Before this was spun out into a series of ho-hum sequels, the original was an animated film that burst with a freshness and a series of winning voice characterisations
Shrek was a fresh and original hit. The first of four insipid sequels, this seems to merely coast by on our liking of the characters while upping the fairytale parody
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
The third of the Shrek films settles in with a formulaic blandness where the characters turn up more because everyone expects them to than the film finds much for them to do
Lightweight British animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale made for children
The second of 2012’s Snow White films after Mirror Mirror, this turns the fairytale into an epic fantasy. Well produced but ultimately a film that lacks anything unique nor pushes far enough into the dark fantasy it promises to be
Film version of a popular series of children’s books that has a good deal of fun bringing to life a secret world of trolls and goblins
George Lucas’s venture into animation was critically pilloried. It’s not bad, just no different from a formula film like Rise of the Guardians or Epic. From the man who made Star Wars, you had higher expectations
The first in a series of vampire films from Charles Band and Full Moon Productions. Several sequels followed.
A trio of tales from the world’s oldest fairytale collection – but quite different to anything you expect … While there is all the magic, ogres and princesses, this is a beautifully lush film made for adults and less about simple homilies that about fate and its cruel twists
An anthology of Halloween-themed horror tales, all from different genre directors, including some interesting high-profile names. The results are uneven with the film providing a couple of amusing segments but nothing truly standout
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day, even if a certain amount trails off into comic silliness
Dull remake of the classic Arabian Nights film that casts Steve Reeves and tries to make it into a Hercules peplum adventure
An excruciating fan-made parody of The Hobbit films filled with amateur actors delivering performances in ridiculous falsettos. What makes this mind-boggling is its realisation it can’t compete with Peter Jackson on effects, resulting in things like Smaug played by a drag queen
Highly enjoyable Terry Gilliam film about a young boy who joins a group of dwarves on a series of adventures though time
Low-budget Charles Band produced film that has entertainment value for its cheesily absurd creature effects and an amazing cast line-up
Acclaimed as one of the worst films ever made, this has a legendary bizarreness that has made it a cult film, everything from the ridiculousness of its dialogue and effects to the cast that seems made up of unskilled amateurs
Norway attempts to compete with the Godzilla films in the story of a giant troll amok and pull off a work that does the whole mass destruction spectacular well and with some top notch effects
Hilarious Norwegian-made Found Footage film about a documentary team investigating a man who claims to hunt giant trolls. Played in complete deadpan
Incredibly insipid animated film from Don Bluth about a kind-hearted troll that relocates to Central Park. Feels like a wannabe Disney film that is merely going through the moves.
A perfect example of all the things I hate about modern animation. Based around the popular Troll dolls, this is vapidly designed, content-free product based solely around simplistic storylines, manic slapstick sequences, song and dance numbers, and inane contemporary pop culture in-jokes
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, John Landis and George Miller came together to make this film homage to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The episodes are variable but the standout is Miller’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Irish horror about a couple who inherit a house with faerie creatures at the end of the garden
Adapted from the videogame, this is a third hand rehash of the basics of Tolkien. Secondly, it looks like a giant CGI cartoon where almost anything interesting about the world has been sidelined in favour of fantasy action
Mini-series based on the works of Terry Pratchett that feels as though it is made, designed and cast by people who haven’t even read the books