The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Nuclear Threat concerns depictions of nuclear weaponry and the threat of uses they might be put to. This is a separate topic from Nuclear War, which concerns what happens what nuclear weapons are detonated, and After the Holocaust, which consists of works set following the collapse of civilisation.
The most common depictions of nuclear weaponry on screen is in thrillers about the hijacking and theft of nuclear arms and/or the threat of their detonation usually by terrorist groups or Super-Villains. There have also been some comedies about weapons that are lost or misappropriated.
There are some other works that show nuclear weapons in a more useful light such as being employed to fight off an Alien Invasion, a Zombie Apocalypse, giant monsters or in some Disaster Movie scenario such as firing them against oncoming stellar bodies like meteors and asteroids.
The topic also includes several genre works on the subject of Nuclear Power and its misuses.
James Cameron had mixed success with this alien contact film. Much of the show is designed to highlight Cameron’s interest in diving and the effects on display are spectacular but the film peters out at a peculiarly abrupt non-ending
An object lesson in how to create an instant cult film – exceedingly eccentric, a commercial failure at the box-office, it instantly receiving a fan clique – all without it ever being a particularly great film
Film about a mysterious alien artifact unearthed in the Antarctic that falls apart due to a script that is constantly jumping all over the place and spending more time homaging other science-fiction films
TV mini-series released as a theatrical film in some parts of the world that resurrects Captain Nemo in the present-day. It is Irwin Allen returning to his tv roots where Captain Nemo’s adventures become a blatant attempt to copy Star Wars
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
Zack Snyder makes a zombie heist film that if nothing else overspills with interesting ideas and a comic energy that goes along way to forgiving Snyder for trashing George Romero in Dawn of the Dead
When Guillermo Del Toro made Pacific Rim, The Asylum conducted their own copy simply by switching US seaboards. While not exactly Oscar quality, this is one of The Asylum’s better mockbusters
Perhaps the strangest film Mickey Rooney ever made, a comedy in which he is a prospector caught in an atomic explosion and afterwards gains the ability to cause things to explode
The US release of several short Japanese films featuring the superhero Starman. Cheap and entertainingly absurd, filled with tatty superheroics and laughable science
This is more of a Suicide Squad than a Batman film. Based on the popular Arkham videogames, this a Justice League-type adventure but with super-villains where the emphasis is on dark humor and gleeful mayhem
A flop comedy based on a Dave Barry novel about various characters trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. Despite a reasonable name cast, this becomes slapstick inanity in director Barry Sonnenfeld’s hands
B movie in which John Agar is possessed by a glowing alien brain, this unfortunately fails to live up to either its lurid vigour or its bad movie reputation
The English-language remake of the Luc Besson-produced Banlieue 13. The electrifying parkour scenes of the original now seem routine and the film’s social set-up so thinly sketched as to be negligible as science-fiction
John Woo’s second Hollywood film, an action film about nuclear hijacking. Woo’s unique stylistics promptly get buried under the machinery of big-budget action filmmaking
Obscure and little seen thriller where a Florida sheriff deals with a series of radioactive murder victims where all clues seem to lead to an abandoned nuclear power plant
The one and only fiction film made by documentary-maker Michael Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, a broad farce concerning an imaginary war declared on Canada by the USA for political purposes
Laughably cheap and dull tv pilot version of comic-book superhero, which emerges less the Captain America of Marvel Comics fame than Captain America imagined as Evel Knievel superhero
During the James Bond craze of the 1960s, the only Ian Fleming novel not owned by Albert R. Broccoli was turned into a giant farce. The film has five directors, a host of stars (including three playing Bond) and is an incoherent mess
Halfway reasonable action film in which US President Roy Scheider is taken hostage by Taiwanese terrorists who want to use the nuclear launch codes against China. The surprise about the film is how political it is willing to get
An Australian film from many of the people behind Mad Max about the cover-up of a nuclear accident. Essentially The China Syndrome with the addition of car chases
Strong and effective dramatic film released only three weeks before the real-life Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas play a tv camera crew caught in the midst of a nuclear reactor meltdown
Produced not long after 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is one of the smartest and best of the super-computer takes over the world films, directed with a tight economy and written with a snappy wit
An End of the World film in which an atomic bomb causes a crack in the Earth’s crust. From the era before the disaster movie, this has yet to discover the idea of creating pieces of self-contained spectacle but works in its own sprawling way
George Romero’s underrated classic gets a makeover amid the 00/10s fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. Alas, Romero’s modest classic about a madness-inducing biospill has a big-budget thrown to emerge as just another zombie film
Everything indicates this should have been a hit – an impressive star line-up, big polished action sequences – only it tanked. Much has been assembled in the service of a hackneyed idea where the memories of an FBI agent are implanted into criminal Kevin Costner
Gripping submarine drama from Tony Scott with captain Gene Hackman and second-in-command Denzel Washington fighting over whether to obey orders and fire their nuclear missiles after receiving a possibly faulty alert
Low-budget Fred Olen Ray action film is another variant on Die Hard with security guard Treat Williams foiling a terrorist hijacking of a nuclear power plant. For some reason this also includes reuse of footage from Terminator 2
Third of the Cross films, a more fantastical variant on The Expendables, bringing 90s action actors back out of mothballs to form a team as they face various super-villains in present-day L.A.
Syfy Channel film that mashes the disaster movie together with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The result is peculiarly unsatisfying either as disaster movie or the tomb raiding adventure we expect
A video-released submarine drama that is a blatant copy of Crimson Tide with a crew unsure whether to launch a nuclear strike. This is competently made if every move feels spelled out in advance
The Dark Knight is a hard act to follow and Christopher Nolan almost does but not quite. The story keeps Batman off-screen for half the film. Tom Hardy’s Bane dominates the show, while Catwoman is surprisingly subdued
Classic British end of the world movie that presents with enormous conviction a fundamentally implausible scenario in which nuclear tests tilt the Earth off its axis causing a massive heatwave and the attempts to right it
A classic of the 1950s Golden Age of SF, featuring Michael Rennie as an alien visitor film who comes to make a warning about the need to make peace. This stands at the start of the Atomic Age with a stark urgency
Fairly average 90s SF/action video release about soldiers hunting an amok military android before realising the androids have also infiltrated their troupe
One of the numerous action films to use a variant on the Die Hard scenario (with an added nuclear threat). For once, this has an okay script and a sense of humour but is killed by a fatal miscasting of its two leads
A low-budget video-released action effort that attempts to copy the James Bond films featuring the hunt for a device that can trigger all nuclear reactors
Modest and conceptually packed B-budget action film in which a motley team are sent to break into a bunker that has been hijacked by a scientist who is threatening to fire nuclear missiles
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
It is some surprise that Akira Kurosawa’s only full venture into fantastic cinema was with his penultimate film here. A beautifully filmed anthology of eight tales, including several ghost stories and two anti-nuclear parables
The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic SF novel Dune, this delves more deeply into the world of the Fremen, although starts to diverge more from the book
One of the great tv series of the 1980s, a powerful and incisive snapshot of Thatcherite England, the backroom politics of the nuclear power industry and the environmentalist movement. A brilliantly written show featuring great performances
A film remake of one of the great tv series of the 1980s. A complete betrayal by the original’s director Martin Campbell that strips all the politics and simply makes it into a Mel Gibson revenge film
Blatant copy of The Terminator lacking in basic plausibility featuring Renee Soutendijk as an android with an atomic bomb in her chest that goes rogue while on downtown military maneuvers
Film in which a plane in whisked outside of space and time and the passengers are placed on trial from the children of the future for their part in designing nuclear weapons
Twelve-chapter serial that offers one of the first ever depictions of an alien invader on screen. The results are oddly mundane in comparison to the onslaught of great 1950s alien invasion films that came only a couple of years later
The very first film ever made about UFOs. This is fascinating as a work about UFOs made before all the other claptrap about abductions, impregnations etc came in. The film itself is rather dull
Michael Dudikoff-starring action film about the use of advanced technology during a Middle Eastern war as Syrian terrorists hijack and threaten to fire US nuclear missles
An unsold Gene Roddenberry tv pilot that is a fascinating almost-ran. Roddenberry rehashes Star Trek by way of Buck Rogers in a post-holocaust setting. This could have made for a worthwhile series
There seems something crushingly redundant about conducting a big screen revival of tv’s Get Smart in the era after Austin Powers. The film is a middle-of-the-road comedy that never finds the zaniness of the original
You can’t complain that this is not exactly what you expect it to be – two hours of cartoonish action during which the brain singularly fails to engage. This is less unapologetic about being a military fantasy than the first film
A slightly different beast to its Japanese counterparts and an impressive revival of the series. Gareth Edwards, who made the excellent Monsters, delivers mass destruction on a mind-bogglingly vast scale in ways that approach painterly beauty
Reboot of the Godzilla series that forgets about all the sequels and acts as a direct follow-up to the original film. This uses top drawer effects technology of the era to create Godzilla as the fearsome creation he originally was
The 25th Godzilla film which employs director Shusuke Kaneko who had done amazing things reviving the Gamera franchise. Kaneko doesn’t quite deliver the epic expected of him but does produce an amazing effects spectacle
The third of the James Bond films and the point where everything that has been defined as the formula of the series – the gadgets, the villains, the henchmen, the cars, the world domination plots – falls into place perfectly
The Green Hornet was a tv series based on the radio and serial masked hero. Following Bruce Lee’s ascent to superstardom, three episodes of the series were re-edited as a feature film
Australian film that is a romantic comedy take on The Quiet Earth, the classic work about three people who awake in an entirely deserted world
At last a good film spun off from the Halo videogame (and produced Ridley Scott!). A harsh story of planetary survival as stranded soldiers fight to escape aboard a two-person ship
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen industrialist Kirk Douglas fighting the coming of the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant
Sequel to the James Coburn-starring Our Man Flint, one of the James Bond parodies of the 1960s. Unlike its predecessor, this one is less interested in the humour and seems to be taking the silliness seriously
The fourth of the Indiana Jones films, returning after a 19 year gap to general disappointment. Largely a film about Indy getting old, this tries but the action scenes pale against what the series was in its heyday
The first animated film from Brad Bird is a sweet and lovely piece about the friendship between a young boy and a giant robot
The first film from Bert I. Gordon, known for his cheap giant animal films through the 1950s, about a space expedition to a planet inhabited by dinosaurs
Film spinoff from a YouTube channel that features two comedians giving absurdly over-the-top survivalist tips. The general observation with these YouTube spinoff films is that what works as a series of short clips has difficulty in extending said gags to sustain a dramatic plot
A film from the heyday of Cold War hysteria made not long after the launch of the first ICBM about a mysterious hypersonic missile that is possibly of alien origin that terrorises the US
Robert Rodriguez escalates his earlier Mexican-themed action film into an insanely creative comic-book overflowing with science-fiction devices (and homages). The casting alone is side-splitting and Rodriguez’s nonsensical absurdism wins the day
An anarchic Japanese film where a school teacher builds an atomic bomb and then begins blackmailing the authorities with his demands
Teen thriller where Christopher Collett decides to build an atomic bomb for the school science prize
If you could take it seriously, Mega Piranha would be a strong contender for a bad movie; however, its awareness of its own absurd shortcomings becomes its saving grace. The sight of giant piranha skipping down rivers and impaling themselves in the sides of buildings has an appealing delirium
An effort from the heyday of the 1970s disaster movie that was a big flop when it came out. Widely ridiculed for its bad special effects, it is a film I am partially prepared to defend, it setting aside the usual soap opera dramatics of these films to make an interesting parable about Cold War tensions. It also prefigures Armageddon with its plot of trying to divert a meteor on a collision course with Earth
Disaster TV mini-series where assorted well-known faces fight through the chaos to prevent an impending meteor strike
The seventh of Mission: Impossible films with Tom Cruise still on great form at age 61. He and the team raise the bar for the series to a new high
The sixth of the Mission: Impossible films. Not the best of the series but Tom Cruise and associates have everything polished to an expertly honed formula by now and the film is a kinetic ride of intensive and often jaw-dropping action sequences
The best of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films to this point. The live-action directorial debut of Pixar director Brad Bird proves an inspired move and Bird gets all the gadgetry just right along with a series of sensational action sequences
The eighth of the Mission: Impossible films. The previous entry Dead Reckoning was a high point in the series and this is left wrapping up the storyline in what would appear to be Tom Cruise’s final outing for the series
The Asylum offer up a mockbuster copy of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall that is far more entertaining than the original
Peter Sellers comedy where the smallest country in the world invades the USA and ends up accidentally winning
Hayao Miyazaki’s second film, a visually stunning work set in the aftermath of a holocaust. Miyazai’s frequent themes of pacifism and respect for the environment and run through building to a emotionally wrenching climax
Rogue James Bond film made outside the regular series due to a complicated copyright battle. Sean Connery was inveigled back the role and this has some standout casting that is a welcome relief from the unserious Roger Moore films
This adapts a Philip K. Dick story and then throws it out to make a generic action film with Nicolas Cage as a psychic. All the potential of its idea is lost amid a series of ridiculous plot twists
One of the numerous gore-drenched Italian zombie films of the 1980s copying George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The film is like the kid in class who doesn’t have much skill but who throws himself into what he does with wholehearted abandon
The thirteenth James Bond film. the fifth for Roger Moore. While the preceding entry had tried to trim back the cartoonish excesses of the Moore era, it is back to business as usual here. The film frequently feels divorced from the remotest shred of realism
There have been some impressive works about A.I. in the last few years. This plays out as Ex Machina by way of Training Day and is only notable in its ridiculous implausibility
Smart and fascinating venture into the alternate universe hopping theme that suggests something of what the underwhelming Sliders should have been. Originally made as the pilot for a tv series, this comes with much intriguing backstory set-up for a potential series
French animated film about a group of kids with psychic powers going amok. Is okay at what it does but had much of its thunder stolen by the more recent and more spectacular Chronicle
Sequel to the ridiculous Project Shadowchaser, which has another android terrorist this time take over a nuclear power plant
Animal rights activism film with Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt as Air Force employees shocked at the tests being performed on chimpanzees
The second of the Rocket Man serials in which Commando Cody faces invaders from the Moon. This comes with the creative impoverishment of serials where the alien invaders are no more than regular gangsters.
The first of the Resident Evil sequels and a better film than its predecessor, getting in a series of spectacular, if at times ridiculously silly, action sequences
Witty and overlooked parody of the superhero with Alan Arkin as a retired superhero trying to get back into the game. Made before superhero films became big and has a number of charms that were ahead of its time
Spinoff of Night of the Living Dead that emerged from a complicated copyright split with George Romero. Director Dan O’Bannon substitutes black humour to deliver an hilariously different take on Romero’s zombie film
Completely obscure, this is fairly terrible on almost every level – an effort about a rock singer given the gift by an alien woman of a special frequency that creates peace when he sings. This would be a guaranteed bad movie classic if anybody else had ever heard about it
Incredible Communist fear film largely made up of stock footage that urges the US to build a strong missile defence as the Soviet Union arms itself to attack
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
Beautifully produced film version of the old radio superhero where director Russell Mulcahy does a wonderful job with the period design and adventure
The 29th of the Japanese Godzilla films. Coming after the longest gap in the series to date, this functions as a complete reboot of the original. Godzilla is reconceived as a fearsome creation amid epic mass destruction and what are hands down the best effects of any film in the series
One of the less remembered films from Jack Arnold who directed a number of 1950s SF classics in which the children of rocket engineers are used by an alien force to sabotage a space launch. Not one of Arnold’s greats but still a modestly effective work.
The 1970s Spider-Man tv series was a miserable failure at live-action superheroics, little more than a crime show with a costumed hero. This was the best of three theatrically released films edited from it with the plot of students building an atomic bomb has an undeniable real world credibility
The tenth of the James Bond films, the third for Roger Moore. This determines to be spectacular in terms of international locales, effects and sets. It was also the point where the Moore Bond films started to become giant cartoon spectacles of the absurd
The Stand is regarded as Stephen King’s best novel, an epic that depicts the final showdown between good and evil in the aftermath of civilisation. The mini-series adaptation was alas placed into the ham fists of one of King’s worst adapters. Mick Garris
The Stand is in my opinion Stephen King’s greatest book. The question is whether this new mini-series version will improve on the laughably failed 1994 version