The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
One of the inspired delights from Disney’s live-action era, a hit that became the template for their subsequent live-action films. The scenes with flying vehicles and basketball teams are entirely charming.
Likeable but lightweight time travel film where Ryan Reynolds gains the aid of his twelve year-old self after travelling back in time to the present on a mission to save the future
Early British silent film that tries to predict the idea of aerial warfare that proves quaintly amusing and archaic in terms of what we know to be the realities today
Ken Russell’s big studio-backed film about drug trips, the meaning of life and William Hurt reverting to a caveman is a glorious madcap and visually stunning work that reaches for the same cosmological grandeur that 2001: A Space Odyssey does
The theme of Mind Upload is waiting for the one film to come along and define its theme. This, in which a comatose wife’s body is loaded into an android body, is not that film and only reaches for cliches
Robert Wise’s standout adaptation of Michael Crichton’s first novel about scientists trying to contain a virus brought back from space. The film does a very faithful job of capturing Crichton’s exacting fascination with the science
TV series remake of Michael Crichton’s novel about the attempts to contain a viral outbreak from space. Crichton’s story was a straightforward work, whereas the mini-series has been absurdly overburdened with other plots
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
One of the most lunatic mad scientist plots of all time in which Boris Karloff kills an ape then puts on its skin to go out and kill people for their spinal fluids to create a cure for polio
Excellent low-key time travel film where Judy Greer is faced with the choice of eliminating the drunk driver who killed her husband from the timeline – only to end up with unexpected results
One of the better in the fad for Artificial Intelligence films we have had since the 2010s with Theo James trying to place his late wife’s consciousness into an android body
Another variant on the Groundhog Day theme with characters trapped in a timeloop. This come with an SF rationale and contains the plot in a single location while spinning each repeat through some smart twists
One of a series of Hollywood films based on popular British adventurer hero Bulldog Drummond. This throws Drummond into the midst of a plot to obtain a raygun
A faith-based film that comes with a great hook where a time-traveller seeks to go back and kill Jesus, eliminating Christianity from history
The second film from Ayn Rand’s libertarian fantasy. This gets more into the meat of Rand’s ideas (wherein the wealthy decide to ignore an undeserving world) and is even more ridiculous than the first film
While the title suggests some lost 1950s atomic monster film, this is a rather dull film that concerns mysterious happenings at a near future nuclear waste reprocessing plant
Lightweight action in which a young carjacker gains possession of a teleportation device and is pursued by government agents
Smart and intelligent Australian thriller about the invention of a stockmarket prediction formula. This digs its teeth into the banking industry with considerable bite
Jackie Chan starring action film that reads like an earthbound Star Wars with he up against a villain in black and his army of super-soldiers
Highly ambitious film for its day, this concerns a memory-recording device that manages to accidentally record the experience of someone dying. Well worth seeing today, including being one of the first films to depict the internet
Ulli Lommel film in which Suzanne Love undergoes experimental brain surgery only to start receiving memories from the donor, a woman who was murdered
A film about the scientific efforts to explore the afterlife, this suffers from too many good ideas and not enough of the effects needed to convey its journey
Adaptation of the classic story Flowers for Algernon with Cliff Robertson winning a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as an intellectually handicapped man who undergoes an experiment that turns him into a genius
A film about a scientist trying to perfect a genetic engineering process. This turns into a strange SF reworking of the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw
One of the earliest film treatments on the subject of cloning, this comes with an intelligent and well written script in which Art Hindle creates twelve copies of himself. The original Orphan Black if you like.
Carl Sagan’s novel about SETI is inflated into a big budget film determined to impress even though the story did not need it. Sagan’s interesting debate about religion and science is emasculated so as not to offend any religious groups
The film that inspired The Terminator! Michael Rennie plays a cyborg who travels back in time to prevent a machine-dominated future coming about, while being hunted by two killer androids sent back to stop him
The film that started the great 1950s age of science fiction. A bold exciting work from George Pal and Robert Heinlein that says the Moon is our to conquer and lays out a credible road map about how to do so
Alex Garland directed-written tv mini-series that grasps at big ideas about the meaning of it all concerning a computer that can track every particle and predict past and future. This emerges as one of the finest SF work of the last few years
Robert Redford plays a scientist who finds proof of the existence of the afterlife only to then face a worldwide rash of suicides. From the director of the fascinatingly weird The One I Love
A conceptually wild film about the use of a device that can contact the dead that winds in the use of Thomas Edison’s spirit phone, modern physics and multiverse theory in something uniquely different
This gave the impression that is was going to venture deep inside Cronenbergian territory but instead, we have a darkly fascinating work set in the world of scientific research
An undeniably imaginative SF film in which scientist Sasha Roiz to invent a device to view memory only for things to go wrong and become trapped in someone else’s memories
An all-time favourite based on the notion of a journey through the human body via a miniaturised submarine, an idea that comes with a sublime poetry despite the sometimes dodgy effects and plot holes
Adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel about a Victorian journey to the Moon and encounter with its denizens. The film comes with Ray Harryhausen effects but is considerably weakened by a buffoonish tone
Very nicely produced BBC retelling of the H.G. Wells novel that conducts an extremely faithful adaptation of the story and captures a perfect period sense of wonder
Matthew Modine stars in the remake of the classic story about an experiment that turns an intellectually handicapped man into a genius. Everything comes in the simplistic emotions of a tv movie
Remake of Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor where the charms of the original are buried under an excess of twee – where the professor now gets a cute robot assistant and the flubber becomes sentient and highly imitative
Dull big-budget thriller about Nazi fuel formulas and Big Oil conspiracies. This seems intended as a copy of The Boys from Brazil centred around George C. Scott and Marlon Brando trying to out over-act one another
An early effort from Hammer Films and director Terence Fisher. Rather than the florid Gothic that Hammer and Fisher would discover four years later, this is a film with one foot in the mad science genre of the 1940s about the invention of a matter duplication machine
Surprisingly good 1950s film in which scientist Robert Lansing invents a process that allows him to become insubstantial and walk through walls. The effects are very good and this attains some eerie effect
One of a series of Jules Verne adaptations that were popular in the 1950s about a Victorian-era Lunar rocket launch, this starts with great promise but loses impetus once it gets into orbit
A work from the great era of German Expressionism. This concerns an engineering process that can turn lead to gold and contains some amazing effects, as well as Brigitte Helm from Metropolis as a seductress
Director Jack Arnold was one of the great voices of 1950s SF cinema. Here he turns to making a none-too-funny comedy set in an underwater habitat. Featuring a teenage Richard Dreyfuss
The first sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which far less effectively reverses the scenario and has Rick Moranis accidentally enlarging his child to giant size
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
Soviet film about the invention of a death ray. The first half is a spy thriller, which is fascinating to see from the other side of the fence to James Bond while the second half concerns a great engineering discovery
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
A time travel that has the near-soporific pace of a Lifetime tv movie. Here Haley Joel Osment discovers that his father built a stable wormhole that allowed him to travel back in time to 1947
There is a great idea here – of a device that allows people to enter an author’s imagination – in this animated film from Peru but it serves as no more an excuse to have a bunch of children having adventures inside the stories of a thinly disguised facsimile of Jules Verne
Georges Melies’ successor to A Trip to the Moon featuring a journey to the sun by astronauts aboard a combination train-submarine-dirigible. A charming whimsy with remarkably technically accomplished effects for the era
Film with Lovecraftian overtones about a group at the Miskatonic University doing research into time travel
W.C. Fields starring screwball comedy set at a hotel around a series of variety sketches and featuring an early prediction of television
Blumhouse deliver an invisible man, although one that has nothing to do with H.G. Wells or the previous invisible man films. Indeed, this feels like an invisible man film that doesn’t even want to be about an invisible man at all.
A 12 chapter serial about the hunt for a criminal who operates with the use of an invisibility ray
Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi pairing from the heyday of mad science cinema. The science is portrayed with a fascinating and fearful Gothic awe, which leads to some undeniably captivatingly directed scenes, even if the script is nonsensical from a scientific standpoint
An interesting twist on the bodyswap film where millennials at a party use a device that allows them to swap bodies – only for two of the host bodies to be killed in an accident
Enjoyable comedy where a scientist is visited by his older self travelled back in time to beg him not to invent the time machine he is about to create
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman set out to repeat the success of their hit Twins in this amiable comedy with Schwarzenegger as a pregnant man
Classic Ealing comedy where Alex Guinness causes social disruption when he invents a suit that never wears out or gets dirty
The first screen appearance of the famous comic-book stage magician superhero in a serial adaptation
John McTiernan was one of the great action directors of the 1980s but this drama with Sean Connery as a scientist in the Amazonian rainforest and his bickering relationship with Lorraine Bracco failed to come off
Fascinating film that conjures something of Primer in which a scientist creates a machine that splits his personality into ten parts
Film that takes place across three future eras that questions what happens when Virtual Reality produces artificial memories more vivid than real world ones
Quirky and charming sequel to The Mouse That Roared in which the world’s smallest country decides to launch a mission to the Moon and accidentally end up winning the Space Race
The novelty of a film that was science-fiction at the time it was made but no longer is today – namely concerning the invention of a television. This is rather dull Bela Lugosi starring murder mystery but what makes it fascinating is watching what people thought television would be vs the reality today
The first of several film adaptations of Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The original book is a desert island adventure story where Captain Nemo turns up at the end; the film throws all of that out and has a story about Nemo encountering a race of merpeople
A 1930s screwball comedy about the invention of a ray that can petrify people that is then used to bring statues of Greek gods to life
Popular entry among the early 1970s spate of British sex comedies featuring Hywell Bennett as the recipient of the world’s first penis transplant. Mostly this serves as an excuse to string a series of sexual encounters together.
Film contained in the single location of a house as a team of four scientists struggle to perfect a process that will resurrect the dead. Normally, you would expect this is to come out as a horror film but the approach here is more akin to a film like Primer
Taiwanese film in which multiple personalities are implanted into a prisoner’s body, one of which is a serial killer, in an effort to find a missing child
SF film that plays out like it should be an episode of Black Mirror where Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple who sign up for a process where a baby can be gestated and born externally inside an egg
Complex and fascinating film where two friends accidentally create a time machine and soon faces multiple versions of themselves
A zero expectation film that turns out to be surprisingly good. Falling somewhere between Primer and Chronicle, this does a reasonable job of showing its time travel device in action and the unintended consequences
Film about a device that can record and play back memory. This comes with a reasonable cast but the great disappointment is the idea is never used for anything more than a mundane murder mystery
Comedy released under the National Lampoon banner in which a nerdy student accidentally creates a clone of his object of desire. This feels like a mash-up between Weird Science or Multiplicity and one of the frat rat comedies inspired by National Lampoon’s Animal House
An film from the early days of the Space Age about the attempts to capture meteorites to use as building for rockets. The basic premise is scientifically preposterous but the film is not uninteresting
Toho Films of the 1960s are best known for the Godzilla films and assorted monster bashes. This is one of their non-monster films, part of a spate of mutant supervillain films concerning a villain who has invented a teleportation machine and is using it to exact revenge
Sequel to Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor that only unimaginatively shuffles around the same elements and lacks the inspired touch of the first film
David Lean conducts a fictional account of the efforts to build a plane that breaks the sound barrier
A genetically engineered creature film from Vincenzo Natali, this ventures into some fascinating places but ultimately returns to Frankenstein science territory
The very first film from David Cronenberg. An incredibly experimental work even today, which consists of people wandering the halls of a university and the soundtrack of voices discussing psychic powers experiments in a dryly funny parody of an academic paper. Fascinatingly oblique
After delays, Christopher Nolan’s unique time travel film is with us, a dense challenging work that plays like an intellectual version of a James Bond film
A case of science prediction where Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum create the world’s first artificial heart
Time travel film in which Asa Butterfield invents a time machine to go back and stop Sophie Turner breaking up with him. On the lightweight side but eventually not unworthwhile
A perfect example of a film carried by the ingenuity of its concept – a camera that takes photos 24 hours into the future – told with a superb tightness of economy – two sets and mostly three actors (largely unknowns) – and some wonderfully contorted twists
Multiverse films are all the in-thing in superhero films right now. This anime is a treatment of multiverse themes far away from superheroics that works beautifully in its sophistication of ideas
Early sound era depiction of the attempts to build a tunnel between the UK and USA. The film conjures something of the epic architectural imagination of Metropolis but is crippled by dull, static scenes with characters sitting around talking (a novelty for early sound audiences)
After the massive success of Jurassic Park, anything with Michael Crichton’s name on it was hot property. This is made from his script about tornado chasers and is a rather entertaining film made with no other purpose that to keep producing a series of spectacular mass destruction scenes on an ever-expanding scale
Australian film in which Kodi Smit-McPhee heads through a time portal to save a polluted world resulting in a time paradox that ties back to his childhood. This had promise but badly lets down on its premise
Zany Czech film where a scientist invents a device that can cause dream to manifest only to cause the sexy comic-book heroine her husband is dreaming about to appear
A silent film from Fritz Lang where he sets out to depict a realistic attempt (at least in terms of what was known in the era) to build and launch a rocket to The Moon. Lang directs with an epic grandeur that still takes back today.