The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Reincarnation is the belief that when a person dies their soul is reborn in a new body. This is one of the core beliefs of many world religions including Hinduism and Eastern Beliefs, in particular Buddhism. Accordingly, souls can be incarnated all the way from insects and animals through multiple human lives until they achieve enlightenment and perfection.
Reincarnation is a commonplace element in films originating in particular from Hong Kong and Thailand where such is a part of cultural belief. The Vampire and Mummy films frequently have their title characters seeking the reincarnations of lost loves. The 1950s brought a spate of past-lives hypnotic regression films following the success of the supposedly non-fiction The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956) where a housewife claimed to recall her former life.
There are various films about the reincarnated possessing the living, evil souls returning to exert influence, people being pursued or lovers seeking one another across multiple lives. Other treatments range from Light Fantasy Films to thrillers to action films, even stories in which the reincarnation is an elaborate hoax.
Bizarre effort in which actors play Laurel and Hardy who are engaged in a comedic caper against a mummy. The film is all excruciating knockabout slapstick
One of Steve Martin’s finest works, a variant of the bodyswap comedy in which he finds himself sharing his body with Lily Tomlin. Martin’s on-screen contortions are side-splitting
Sequel to the hit Korean film Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds about a journey of redemption through the afterlife. This is a much better polished effort than its predecessor
A massive hit in South Korea about a firefighter’s journey through the afterlife and the trials he must undergo. On the other hand, the director seems to be trying to turn a moral redemption story into a superhero film
Children manage to incarnate the soul of their late father inside a robot body. A children’s film where the title is the most imaginative thing about the show.
An Italian-made ripoff of The Exorcist. Probably the most lavishly produced of all Exorcist ripoffs, this soon slips into lurid shock theatrics. Star Carla Gravina should get full marks for going beyond the call of duty
Adaptation of the popular videogame that is lumbered with the game’s inherently uncinematic premise where people only sit around and watch what has already happened in the past
Big serious film about reincarnation that places the arguments for into a courtroom setting. Director Robert Wise and a young Anthony Hopkins fail to do much with a talk-heavy script
Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about the spirit of an Ancient Egyptian queen possessing a modern day woman. Lavishly produced with a series of novelty deaths modeled on The Omen. Also the first mummy film to actually shoot in Egypt
Beautifully made and exquisitely directed film with Nicole Kidman as a widow who meets a ten-year-old boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her late husband
Hammer Films adapt Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about a revived mummy queen. A troubled production that ended up being one of Hammer’s never-quite-rans
One of the films from director Ted V. Mikels made not long afterRosemary’s Baby and mostly seems an opportunity for Mikels to lecture about historical witchcraft. Certainly, one of the great exploitation titles of all time
Canadian-made horror from the heyday of the VHS era about psychic vampires terrorising people via astral projection in order to steal their bodies
If Hayao Miyazaki ever follows through on his threat to retire, the one most likely inheritor would be Mamoru Hosoda. This is a perfectly enjoyably film that is sort of The Karate Kid by way of Disney’s The Jungle Book
Francis Ford Coppola remakes and reinvents Dracula, transforming the text of Bram Stoker’s book into a sensual, visually ravishing film with lush production values that make you gasp in excitement
Low-budget and cheap looking adaptation of a lesser-known Bram Stoker novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This was clearly made to capitalise on Stoker’s name following the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Critical favourite that he is, I find Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s have some incredibly eerie, haunted moments. But these sit alongside banal, uneventful happenings that never seem to intersect in a plot
From the director of the hit Dirty Dancing, an inane romantic comedy in which Cybill Shepard thinks her daughter’s boyfriend Robert Downey Jr is her reincarnated husband
A very strange surrealist film about the strange characters that populate a rundown hotel. Includes reincarnation, alien bug people and John Malkovich as a psychiatrist with red hair in a bow
Ostensibly about occultist Aleister Crowley reincarnating in the present, this overflows with mad ideas involving quantum physics, VR, alternate worlds and a heap of classic references – and moreover, is written by the lead singer of Iron Maiden
My introduction to Wu Xia – imagine some vision of Kwaidan as directed by Sam Raimi, filled with sensationally beautiful and out of this world imagery and completely nutsoid fantastical battles with ghosts and demons
A Chinese Ghost Story was a classic in Hong Kong cinema, followed by two sequels and then animated spinoff sold in the West under the name of series producer and cult director Tsui Hark
This sold itself as the first Iraqi horror film, which it isn’t quite (more accurately a film made by an expatriate), although it is rooted in the mythology of the region
Kenneth Branagh breathes life into the creaky reincarnation thriller with a plot that crackles with tension, while he directs with a virtuoso showmanship that shouts style from every frame
Adaptation of a Lord Dunsany story, this has an appealingly eccentricity – a film told as a series of after dinner conversations about a man recalling his past life as a dog – that works with winning charms
Albert Brooks directed/starring comedy in which he plays a man in the afterlife on trial, required to defend the dull and ordinary life he led, at the same time as he begins a romance with Meryl Streep
The bizarre story of a man who believes his young daughter is the reincarnation of a NASA astronaut. The film makes great claim that it is based on a true story but fails to make a compelling argument for its case
A fascinatingly torrid 1970s film about a magician who seeks to perfect the secret of resurrecting the dead by transferring souls. It doesn’t take long before things start becoming quite twisted.
Luc Besson makes a return with an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The surprise about this is that he fairly much uncreditedly remakes Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the story
The 1990s brought us the darkly romantic vampire spearheaded by Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This was a Roger Corman produced bandwagon jumper on the trend
A medium-budget Dracula film that draws much on its cinematic predecessors and comes filled with Underworld-like brooding Gothic poses. Plus the oddity of a blonde Dracula
The second film outing of US horror hostess Elvira, which is construed as a parody/homage to the Roger Corman-Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe films. Everything is overrun with Elvira’s cheesy puns and double entendres
Gaspar Noe’s hallucinatory Day-Glo vision of a soul’s departure into the afterlife all shot in first-person perspective. This could be a 2001: A Space Odyssey for the trance culture generation
The second and best in the series of Hong Kong films filled with wonderfully tongue-in-cheek erotica and a series of entertainingly over-the-top fantastical set-pieces
Film with an interestingly original premise where a guy is murdered and then inhabits the bodies of a group of friends as he tries to expose the killer
Blumhouse film where a Westernised Indian girl rejects her traditional mother’s fears about her new boyfriend being a bad man reincarnated only for them to come true
The Pang Brothers are in this author’s opinion some of the finest genre directors in the world. This sequel to their breakout hit The Eye is an even better film that achieves some genuinely haunted moments
Painfully dull film edited together from two unrelated Mexican films ending an incomprehensible plot featuring a revived Aztec Mummy and another mummy that transforms into a werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr
Adaption of a Young Adult series of books – this is essentially Twilight but with angels instead of vampires. Another YA effort where we never saw successive chapters due to its box-office flop
A beautifully made adaptation of a non-horror James Herbert novel in which a dog realises that is a reincarnated Matthew Modine and sets out to reunite with his human son
One of the worst among the 2000s fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. John Carpenter’s 1980 original has been transformed into a teen horror film where the spookiness collapses into frequently ridiculous shock effects
From Andrew Lau, director of Infernal Affairs, a weepy Hong Kong comedy about a man caught up in a romantic quandary from his previous reincarnation
An erotic film starring Donald Trump – I kid you not! A legendarily awful Bo Derek film where she is a widow who searches the world for the perfect body for her late husband’s ghost to reincarnate in
One of the most ridiculous title creature to ever inspire a horror franchise – a possessed gingerbread man. From low-budget producer Charles Band, this rips off the Chucky series but with baked goods instead of a doll
Mike Cahill’s follow-up to Another Earth, an intriguingly different work about how research into the human eye leads to a very unusual discovery. As much a relationship drama as SF, this is a very well made film that frustratingly ends just when it starts to get interesting
High concept action film with Mark Wahlberg discovering that he is a reincarnated soul engaged in a secret war through the ages
Bizarre family family in which Michael Keaton returns from the dead as a snowman to be near his family
Former Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller plays himself in a routine jungle adventure that uncreditedly steals the plot from H. Rider Haggard’s She
The Wachowskis set out to make a rollicking space opera adventure in the Star Wars vein. As always, the elevate every genre they take on with a creativity light years of any competitor – the film is packed with astonishing action sequences and wild, mind-expanding ideas
The Justice Society of American was the first comic-book superhero team, bringing together all the heroes at DC Comics of the day. This is a film devoted to them
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
Chinese film in which a dead wife comes back to inhabit the body of her son to get her husband to move a tree before their village is redeveloped. At direct contrast to Western films about possession, this is not a horror story but a film rooted in the mundane where the possession is matter-of-factly accepted
Bernardo Bertolucci directs a biopic of the Buddha, which is interspersed with a modern story where a Western boy learns that he is the reincarnation of an abbot
Genial and very likeable spoof of Dracula and the vampire film that succeeds where many others have failed and is very funny. George Hamilton steps into the role of Dracula with debonair, mocking charm
Frenetic Hong Kong slapstick comedy about hoodlums trying to obtain a stash from a house inhabited by a ghost boy
Madcap Hong Kong comedy starring Stephen Chow as a man sent back down from the afterlife to get three people to repent of their ways. Full of deliriously crazed action and slapstick
A quite magical film in which Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis fall in love in the afterlife and then try to find the other after they are reborn
The one moment of triumph from director William Girdler who takes a work that sits just on the threshold of schlock and transforms into something incredibly eerie with an injection of H.P. Lovecraft and American Indian mysticism
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
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a festival favourite and one genre director whose work is least categorised as such. As with any of Weerasethakul’s films, this has some intensely haunted moments but is severely lacking in plot or any kind of dramatic inertia
A film about strange happenings at a mission where all the characters may be reincarnations. A film of the hippie era that gets lost in mysticism and trippiness
The original mummy film starring Boris Karloff. Unlike the sequels where the mummy became a slow, shuffling creature, this is a subtle classic with haunted mood.
Nominal remake of the Boris Karloff The Mummy, which has now been inflated into a big budget Indiana Jones adventure. Stephen Sommers lets the film overspill with CGI spectacle but the exercise is deflated by a jokey, unserious attitude
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
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
A misfire from the usually reliable Wes Craven, this drearily traipses through a slasher/supernatural plot that lacks any surprises or Craven’s characteristic atmosphere
Ridiculous cheap 1980s video release about a witch burned at the stake returned as a New Wave punkette to claims souls
Vampire erotica that is largely premised around seeing Alyssa Milano take her clothes off and little else
Brian De Palma with Paul Schrader on script make a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Cliff Robertson wandering Venice believing he has found the reincarnation of his late wife
Cheap and tatty variant on the Arthurian legends with people trying to prevent a reincarnated sorcerer obtaining Excalibur
Lame comedy with Chevy Chase as a private detective who is killed and then reincarnated in the body of a dog (played by Benji)
Romantic musical in Barbra Steisand discovers psychic powers and her reincarnated past lives. Despite being a flop, this is a film of oddball charms and features an effervescent Stresiand
In this space of three films, Nicholas McCarthy has risen to the top of this site’s Up and Coming Directors to watch list. On a script level, this is a standard Evil Child film but is made something worth watching by McCarthy’s directorial jumps
The first of the long-running series of sequels to Full Moon’s Puppetmaster, this is essentially a rerun of the first film
Takashi Shimizu, creator of the Ju-on/The Grudge series, makes a film about an actress who becomes haunted after taking a role based on a true-life murder
High-profile film of its era that was mounted with an A-budget sheen. Beyond that, the film is made with the sedate predictability of a tv movie – it takes the hero half the film to work out what the title tells us
Ghost story in which Sarah Michelle Gellar receives a series of mysterious visions as she travels across Texas
A bad movie classic. As the title explains, we get a revived mummy pitted against an actor in a ridiculously clunky tin man suit. Third in the Mexican-made Aztec Mummy series, the biggest ripoff is that 3/4 of the film consist of footage recycled from the preceding films
Painfully unfunny vampire comedy from Cannon Films about a vampire teenager who becomes a rock star. This has one of the least credible premises I’ve ever seen in a film. Mostly it seems to have been conceived around placing various musicians of the day in acting roles with bizarre results
The collaboration of Hong Kong directors Wai Ka Fai and Johnnie To have resulted in some utterly deranged films. This is a madcap one with Andy Lau as a bodybuilding Buddhist monk who can see people’s past lives
Dramatic recount of a true-life sensation during the 1950s when an amateur hypnotist claimed that he had regressed a housewife to recall her past life in 19th Century Ireland. The film has an earnestly prostheletysing belief in its own case but sceptical examination pulls holes in its credibility
The most lavish of the silent screen adaptations of H. Rider Haggard’s classic, multiply filmed adventure novel about the discovery of a lost city ruled over by an immortal queen
The first sound version of H. Rider Haggard’s lost city adventure about explorers finding an immortal queen (Helen Gahagan). From the producers of the original King Kong
Hammer Films conduct an adaptation of the classic H. Rider Haggard story about the discovery of a lost city and its immortal queen but the epic spectacle never much comes to life
A strange mix of 1950s hypnotic regression fad and AIP B monster movie elements that has undeniable mood and verve
The black sheep among the Japanese Ringu films. A sequel released the same time as the first film, this lacks the other’s uncanny atmosphere and was ignored
Action film starring Lorenzo Lamas as a detective drawn into underground fight clubs while discovering a mystic sword owned by Alexander the Great
Part of a late 90s spate of mummy movies, this effort from Highlander director Russell Mulcahy revives the genre with a modern arsenal of effects
An all-girl lesbian vampire film that sets out to reclaim the genre that had previously existed as a focus of male titillation and tell it as a story of women’s empowerment
A modestly effective indie film with two people fleeing through the desert backroads pursued by a vampire
Actress Alice Lowe directs/stars in a comedy about a woman who pursues the man she is infatuated with as both reincarnate through history
Michiel Huisman is an air traffic controller who discovers that small inconsequential things are repeating themselves every day and that he is being drawn to reenact a fatal incident. A beautifully made film that arrives at an ending that leaves you scratching your head in puzzlement
An early Roger Corman film that stirs a fascinating mix of elements involving hypnotic regression, witchery, time travel and appearances from The Devil
The directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura. A film premised on the idea of mashing the John Woo-styled gangster film up with the gore-drenched George Romero zombie film.
Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, this is a study in obsession and features a reincarnation plot. What works more so than the contrived plot twists is Hitchcock’s expert direction, all thunderously brooding mood and lush Technicolor dreaminess
Disney Channel film where a modern teenager finds she is the reincarnation of a martial arts warrior
Unremarkable and largely forgotten video release with former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett investigating appears of a mysterious figure that encourages people to suicide
Debut feature from Oxide Pang of the Pang Brothers fame. A variant on the tv series Early Edition in which a man receives newspapers that foretell the future and must race to prevent fates from occurring in order to earn karmic salvation for his girlfriend