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Matt Damon’s oppressed everyman just wanted to take down Jodie Foster’s elite satellite society before he died of radiation poisoning in Neill Blomkamp’s perfunctory Elysium.
Based on a graphic novel by director Joseph Kosinski, Tom Cruise was beside himself as a technician monitoring a post-apocalyptic Earth following an alien invasion in Oblivion, which took most of its ideas from other, better films. Morgan Freeman turned up as the leader of the human resistance movement.
Despite waiting for a final twist, there wasn’t one in M. Night Shyamalan’s $130-million After Earth, in which Will Smith’s unsympathetic military ranger sent his in-training son (a truly annoying Jaden Smith) on a trek across a post-apocalyptic Earth filled with dangerous creatures.
Idris Elba was the leader of a team of giant robots that battled monsters invading from another dimension in Guillermo del Toro’s disappointing $190-million Pacific Rim, a 3-D tribute to the kaij genre. It was a huge box office hit in China.
Vin Diesel returned for his third outing as the eponymous intergalactic criminal stuck on yet another hostile planet in David Twohy’s Riddick, which the actor’s company produced and financed.
Based on Sydney J. Bounds’ story “The Animators”, the creepy The Last Days on Mars featured Liev Schreiber and a terrific Olivia Williams as members of a space crew trying not to be turned into dehydrated zombies by an alien life-form.
Directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, Cloud Atlas was a sprawling adaptation of David Mitchell’s centuries-spanning novel. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and other actors played multiple roles, with the most interesting of the interconnected stories being set in a post-apocalypse Hawaii.
Chris Hemsworth couldn’t fill Patrick Swayze’s shoes as North Korean troops invaded a sleepy American town in an unnecessary remake of the 1984 movie Red Dawn.
David Cronenberg’s son Brandon directed Antiviral, a none-too-subtle comment on celebrity obsession, in which people were injected with viruses from the famous so that they could feel closer to their idols.
Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) in Spike Jones’ nearfuture romance Her, while Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess shared space between two planets with their own inverted gravities in Juan Solanas’ equally baffling Upside Down.
Slacker Gary King (Simon Pegg) convinced his reluctant school friends (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan, along with token female Rosamund Pike) to reunite for a pub crawl they failed to complete twenty years earlier in Edgar Wright’s enjoyable SF comedy The World’s End. When they arrived in their hometown, they discovered that aliens were replacing everyone with Stepford-like robot duplicates.
Meanwhile, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill and their mates played self-absorbed versions of themselves as The Rapture engulfed Hollywood in the meta-comedy This is the End. Michael Cera, Emma Watson, Rihanna, Paul Rudd, Channing Tatum and the Backstreet Boys all had cameos.
The War of the Worlds Alive on Stage was a filmed record of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of H. G. Wells’ Martian invasion novel, featuring Jason Donovan, Marti Pellow and a holographic version of Liam Neeson.
Ben Stiller starred in and directed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a pointless remake of the 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye and Boris Karloff, based on the 1939 story by James Thurber.
A cross between Sliding Doors and Groundhog Day, Richard Curtis’ time-travelling romcom About Time – about a man who could revisit any moment in his life to try things differently – starred Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams and Bill Nighy.
An exasperated Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) attempted to persuade grumpy author P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to sell him the rights to Mary Poppins in the fact-based Saving Mr. Banks.
Disney’s $150 million CGI fairytale musical Frozen was the animated hit of 2013, grossing more than $760 million worldwide and easily passing The Hunger Games sequel during its second week of release.
Free Birds featured two time-travelling turkeys, the CGI Walking with Dinosaurs in 3-D was narrated by a prehistoric bird, and The Croods was an animated 3-D comedy about an embarrassing prehistoric family.
The year’s other animated releases included the sequels Despicable Me 2, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, The Smurfs 2 and Monsters University, along with Escape from Planet Earth, Justin and the Knights of Valour and Epic.
Robin Hardy’s classic 1973 film The Wicker Man was re-released in cinemas to celebrate its 40th anniversary in the most complete version ever screened in Britain, and it reportedly took a year and cost Universal $10 million to convert Jurassic Park to 3-D for the 20th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur epic.
Rob Kuhns’ Birth of the Living Dead looked at the making of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its influence on popular media, while Daniel Lutz talked about his childhood experiences living in the most famous haunted house of all time in the documentary My Amityville Horror.
On October 19, Johnny Depp presented ninety-one-year-old Sir Christopher Lee with a BFI Fellowship – the highest accolade given by the organization – at the 57th London Film Festival Awards.
Starting that same month and running until January 2014, the British Film Institute hosted live events and screenings at London’s BFI Southbank and across the UK as part of its “Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film” retrospective. This included outdoor screenings at the British Museum of Night of the Demon and Hammer’s Dracula and The Mummy.
In November, the DVD and game rental chain Blockbuster went into administration in Britain for the second time in 2013, and it finally closed all its 264 stores by the end of the year, with the loss of around 2,000 jobs. Competition from supermarkets, online rentals and streaming were blamed. In America, the chain shut down 300 outlets in October, leaving just fifty franchised stores still open.
Towards the end of World War II, Nazi scientists used Dr Frankenstein’s journal to create an army of super-soldiers stitched together from body parts in the direct-to-DVD Frankenstein’s Army, while Dolph Lundgren led an army of robots against a world filled with zombies in Battle of the Damned.
Based on the 2007 novel by David Wong, Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End featured two slackers (Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes) who discovered a street drug that could transport them to different dimensions. Clancy Brown co-starred, and Angus Scrimm turned up as a priest.
Written and directed by J. T. Petty and based on his graphic novel, Hellbenders also featured Brown, this time as a member of a team of debauched demon-hunters.
The Cloth starred Danny Trejo and Eric Roberts and was about a secret organization which battled the Devil and his army of lost souls, while the busy Trejo was back as “Father Jesús” in another direct-to-DVD release, Zombie Hunter.
Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton were amongst the last survivors of a frozen-over Earth who found themselves menaced by cannibals in The Colony.
Jaime Murray’s art-history professor turned out to be Elizabeth Bathory in Fright Night 2: New Blood, an unnecessary DVD sequel to the 2011 remake, while father and daughter Brad Dourif and Fiona Dourif starred in Curse of Chucky, the evil doll’s sixth outing, written and directed by series creator Don Mancini.
Anne Heche starred in Nothing Left to Fear, a slice of religious horror that was produced by former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.
Malcolm McDowell was a long way from working with Stanley Kubrick and Lindsay Anderson in The Employer, in which his mysterious CEO put prospective employees through a series of murderous tests.
After Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2, director Renny Harlin’s career was also on the skids as his “found footage” movie Devil’s Pass (aka The Dyatlov Pass Incident) was released directly to DVD. It was loosely based on the truelife mystery of nine Russian skiers who were found dead in 1959.
The Collection was a sequel to The Collector and featured the same masked k
iller chopping up his victims with a giant lawnmower.
While it had nothing to do with Psycho, The Bates Haunting (aka The Haunting of Bates Hotel) was set at The Bates Motel & Haunted Hayride, a real-life Halloween attraction in Pennsylvania.
Produced by Marvel Animation Studio, Iron Man & Hulk: Heroes United featured Iron Man (voiced by Adrian Pasdar) and the Hulk (voiced by Fred Tatasciore) battling an energy being called Zzzax, who could absorb human minds. The movie combined computer animation with hand-drawn art.
Criterion issued new restorations of the classic ghost movie The Uninvited (1944), starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, along with René Clair’s comedy I Married a Witch (1942) with Fredric March and Veronica Lake.
Scream Factory’s The Vincent Price Collection brought together The Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death, Witchfinder General and The Abominable Dr. Phibes, while the extras included a commentary with late Phibes director Robert Fuest.
The Exorcist was reissued on Blu-ray in a special 40th Anniversary edition and, after showing a 3-D version in US movie theatres for a week in September, Warner Bros. released The Wizard of Oz 75th Anniversary Collector’s Edition as a five-disc set ($105.00). It included Blu-ray, DVD and 3-D versions of the classic 1939 film, along with a new “making-of” documentary.
The BBC/BFI six-disc set Ghost Stories for Christmas featured both versions of M. R. James’ Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968 and 2010) and an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Signalman. Schalcken the Painter from the same distributors was a welcome rediscovery of Leslie Megahey’s chilling 1979 Omnibus drama, based on the story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It came with an illustrated book of essays.
The six-disc set Doctor Who: Regeneration contained every regeneration story from William Hartnell to David Tennant. Animation was used to fill-in for the missing fourth episode from “The Tenth Planet” (1966).
Meanwhile, it was confirmed that nine lost episodes of the show from the 1960s had been found in a Nigerian TV station storeroom. They all starred second Doctor Patrick Troughton in the stories “The Enemy of the World” and “The Web of Fear”, neither of which had been seen for forty-six years. The BBC subsequently made them available to download on iTunes.
The spirit of Forrest J Ackerman – figuratively, if not literally as writer/director Paul Davids would have you believe – hung over The Life After Death Project, which featured Richard Matheson and Whitley Strieber.
The Syfy channel continued to produce low-budget genre movies of varying quality (usually poor), often giving work to actors whose movie or TV careers were all but over.
Shirley Jones’ zombified mother attacked her daughter, played by Daryl Hannah, in director John Gulager’s Zombie Night.
A group of teens had to protect their town from an urban legend in Scarecrow, while an American college student studying in Japan tried to save her dead mother’s soul in Grave Halloween.
Craig Sheffer’s Major Hoffman attempted to find a cure for a werewolf virus that had ravaged New York City, while Dennis Haysbert’s Lt. General Monning just wanted to create a lycanthropic army in Battledogs.
A pair of siblings (Cassie Scerbo and Jonathan Lipnicki) dredging for gold came face-to-face with a horde of horrific sea vampire monsters in Beast of the Bering Sea.
Corin Nemec travelled to the Belizean jungle and encountered a mysterious guerrilla warlord and giant insects in Dragon Wasps, and the busy actor was back when a rocket carrying nano-technology crashed into a zoo and created Robocroc.
A moonshine brew created mutated alligators that began attacking families in the Louisiana bayous in Alligator Alley (aka Ragin Cajun Redneck Gators).
A freak storm dropped a hoard of unconvincing sharks onto Los Angeles in the absolutely awful Sharknado, which featured Tara Reid and John Heard, who should have known better.
Richard Moll played a crotchety lighthouse keeper who knew the secret of a translucent great white shark that was attacking a small coastal community with a dark history in Ghost Shark.
Treat Williams and Ronny Cox tried to stop Los Angeles from being overrun by biotech-created prehistoric creatures in Age of Dinosaurs, and a group of American base-jumpers discovered a hungry breed of marsupials was stalking them through the Australian backwoods in Tasmanian Devils.
Erik Estrada’s DEA agent investigated corpses with their throats ripped out and drained of blood in Chupacabra vs. the Alamo (aka Beast of the Alamo).
A group of apocalypse fanatics (including Brad Dourif) used their knowledge of SF films to save the Earth from a devastating solar flare in End of the World, while Greg Evigan and Denise Crosby battled aliens in Syfy’s Invasion Roswell (aka The Exterminators), which marked the 66th anniversary of the famous UFO crash in New Mexico.
Six high school students were attacked by man-eating fish in Larry Fessenden’s Beneath on the Chiller cable network.
Based on a short story, ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple: Greenshaw’s Folly found the spinster sleuth (Julia McKenzie) staying at the eponymous country pile that was supposedly haunted by a hooded spectral figure. The cast included Fiona Shaw, Jim Moir (aka comedian Vic Reeves), Judy Parfitt, Julia Sawalha and John Gordon Sinclair.
Jessica Brown Findlay, Vanessa Kirby, John Hurt and Janet Suzman starred in the two-part Labyrinth, a German/South African co-production based on the bestselling novel by Kate Mosse, in which the lives of two women were linked centuries apart in a search for the Holy Grail.
Based on the bestselling novel by Diane Setterfield, Christopher Hampton’s overwrought adaptation of The Thirteenth Tale for the BBC starred Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Coleman in a story about a dying writer haunted by the actions of her murderous twin.
Narrated by Mark Strong, The Great Martian War 1913–1917 on the History Channel was a feature-length docudrama mash-up between an uncredited H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and events surrounding the First World War, with impressive CGI Martian war machines.
Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor and new companion Clara Oswald (Jenna-Louise Coleman) were belatedly back in March with eight new episodes of the seventh season of the revived Doctor Who. The slightly disappointing stories included Neil Cross’ resurrection of a mummified god on a distant planet and a ghost hunt in an abandoned mansion on the moors; Mark Gatiss’ regeneration of a Martian Ice Warrior on a Russian submarine and the discovery of bright-red corpses near a Victorian factory in Yorkshire; and Neil Gaiman’s revival of the Cybermen in an intergalactic theme park.
Steven Moffat’s over-ambitious season finale saw the return of the Great Intelligence and his funereal Whisper Men, along with archival footage of all the earlier Doctors and the surprise revelation of a previously unknown incarnation.
Guest stars over the eight episodes included Alex Kingston, Celia Imrie, Liam Cunningham, David Warner, Dougray Scott, Diana Rigg and daughter Rachael Stirling, Warwick Davis, Tamzin Outhwaite and Richard E. Grant.
Tactfully ignoring the show’s enforced hiatus between 1989–2005, the BBC celebrated the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in a big way.
In March, Royal Mail issued a set of sixteen special postage stamps featuring all eleven Doctors, along with various monsters and the Tardis printed in a miniature sheet. That same month, BBC Books reissued eleven Doctor Who novels in matching retro covers, and Eoin Colfer wrote A Big Hand for the Doctor, the first of eleven ebooks for Puffin.
Doctor Who: The Companions was a 164-page special edition of Radio Times magazine, while a pair of lenticular posters depicted the eleventh Doctor and the Daleks.
AudioGO and Big Finish teamed up to release eleven talking books featuring each of the Doctor’s incarnations, read by an actor who played one of his companions, and every month London’s British Film Institute showed a vintage episode on the big screen (including “The Mind of Evil” with Jon Pertwee, which only existed in black and white until it was colourized), along with Q&As with special guests.
; Made for BBC America, Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited was a half-hour documentary series that focused on one Doctor per episode. Steven Moffat, Neil Gaiman and Matt Smith were among the talking heads. Along similar lines, The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who was a two-hour special in which an amnesiac Doctor (Matt Smith) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) looked back over all the previous incarnations of the character.
In early August, host Zoë Ball revealed on Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor that Peter Capaldi would be taking over the role. In 1974, a fifteen-year-old Capaldi had a letter published in Radio Times congratulating the magazine on its “excellent Dr Who Special”.
There were several other TV specials – such as The Science of Doctor Who with Professor Brian Cox, Doctor Who: Greatest Monsters and Villains, and Me, You and Doctor Who: A Culture Show Special hosted by Matthew Sweet – before a seven-minute mini-episode, Doctor Who: The Night of the Doctor, was released online by the BBC in early November. A dying eighth Doctor (a surprise reappearance by Paul McGann after the 1996 movie) was regenerated – with the help of Clare Higgins’ Priestess of Karn – into the hitherto unknown “War Doctor” (John Hurt).
This led directly into the highly anticipated 50th anniversary show, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, which was broadcast around the world on November 23 – the same date that the very first episode was shown back in 1963. Steven Moffat’s exciting seventy-five minute special teamed up three incarnations of the Doctor (played by Matt Smith, David Tennant and John Hurt) to battle a triple threat across time and space. Not only was there archive footage of all the previous Doctors, but also guest appearances by Billie Piper and a surprise Tom Baker.