The Cursed (2021)
The greatly underrated Sean Ellis returns with a beautifully understated film about the hunt for a possible werewolf creature loose in rural 19th Century France. Everything happens in a state of careful ambiguity
Curse of the Nun (2019)
A low-budget mockbuster that joins the horde of ghost nun films that were made following the success of The Nun. From the director of Clowntergeist.
The One Game (1988)
Mind-twisting mini-series where videogame designer Stephen Dillane is wound into a series of reality and illusion games
The Reef (2010)
Gripping Australian survival horror film about a shipwrecked party who have to make a twelve mile swim through shark-infested waters
Sacrilege (2020)
Folk Horror is a term that has emerged as a distinct genre of its own in recent years; this is a B-budgeted attempt to join the bandwagon
13 Fanboy (2021)
Slasher film that comes with a great hook – one where various real-life actresses from the Friday the 13th films are stalked by a masked maniac
Oxygen (2021)
Imprisonment thriller where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule, this expands out to become an excellent SF film
The Feast (2021)
Excellent slow burn film that becomes a work of Folk Horror. This is focused around preparations for a dinner party joined by a mystery waitress where you just know things are going to go badly wrong
Future Force (1989)
1990s VHS SF/action with David Carradine as a future cyborg bounty hunter on the run with a wrongly convicted girl while hunted by his own side
Iron Doors (2010)
A modest German-made film not dissimilar to Cube in which a man wakes up inside a labyrinth of locked rooms and must find a means of escape
Bitter Feast (2010)
An appealingly nasty little film where a celebrity chef imprisons and tortures a scathing food critic. Produced by Larry Fessenden.
Black Site (2018)
Quite a decent little low-budget film about a top secret government agency set up to despatch Lovecraftian Elder Gods.
Nr. 10 (2021)
Alex van Warmerdam makes a very strange black comedy, so deadpan you are not sure if you are meant to be laughing or not
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)
Third of the Fantastic Beasts films, this comes as a mix of ennui with the franchise and promise. It feels like about right now would be a good time to retire the series
Black Glasses (2022)
Dario Argento makes a highly anticipated return to the director’s chair after a decade’s silence, once again revisiting the giallo film, but the results are a major letdown
Red Letters (2019)
A film about occult detectives investigating a missing police officer. This then conducts a mid-film bait and switch on us as to what it is about and actually becomes a faith film
7 Below (2012)
Modest name cast, including a highly entertaining Val Kilmer, in a film about a group of strangers brought together at a mysterious backwoods house
Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (2008)
Feast was an enjoyable monster movie that came with tongue planted in sarcastic cheek. This was the first of two sequels but by now the snappy sarcasm of the original is feeling thinly drawn
The Pool (2018)
Grippingly intense thriller with a couple trapped in an empty swimming pool along with a hungry crocodile
Seobok (2021)
Quite good Korean film about a clone with vast psychic powers, this mounts to a climax that captures something of Akira
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
A multiverse comedy in which Michelle Yeoh is propelled through an hilarious series of alternate selves. One of the most mind-spinning films of recent viewing. Also the first SF film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
Studio 666 (2022)
A horror comedy starring the Foo Fighters where the band’s antics sit alongside some entertainingly outrageous gore
Cabal (2020)
Film from low-budget director Rene Perez where a hitman who wears a beaten steel mask is pitted up against a hulking backwoods killer
1313: Cougar Cult (2012)
Another of David DeCoteau’s bizarre homoerotic horror films featuring a trio of former 80s Scream Queens who are were-cougars
Gintama (2017)
The live-action adaptation of a popular anime and manga, this takes place in an alternate history version of Japan where samurai fight following an alien invasion
Primal: Tales of Savagery (2019)
A surprisingly good animated film about the relationship between a caveman and a dinosaur, all without a line of dialogue. From the director of the Hotel Transylvania films
Curse of Humpty Dumpty (2021)
The intriguing idea of a horror movie take on the famous nursery rhyme. An earlier work from Scott Jeffrey/Scott Chambers behind the Winnie-the-Pooh horror films
Morbius (2022)
Sony’s attempts to wring everything possible from the Spider-Man copyright in order to compete with the MCU continue with this film devoted to the Spider-Man vampire villain
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)
Sequel to the hit videogame adaptation, this offers up fairly much the same mix of elements as before – a cutely anthrompomorphic creature and Jim Carrey going to rafter-rattling excess
The Bare Wench 3: Nymphs of Mystery Mountain (2002)
Another in the interminable softcore Blair Witch parodies with a group of minimally talented and clothed bimbos wandering around the woods and failing to take proceedings seriously
Andromeda Nebula (1967)
A Soviet SF film about the exploration of an alien planet. Though they tended to the dramatically stolid, these Soviet films had amazing budgets their US counterparts of the era never did
Vlad the Impaler (1979)
Romanian-made film about the real-life historical tyrant Vlad Tepes who loaned his name to Bram Stoker’s Dracula
The Djinn (2021)
Horror film in which a young mute boy discovers a book that contains a spell that offers one’s greatest wish, only for he to summon a djinn
Lady Usher (2020)
A gender-flipped adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story, this is surely the equivalent of The Room among Poe adaptations and may be the worst Poe film adaptation ever
The Northman (2022)
Robert Eggers, the director who made The Witch and The Lighthouse, makes a violent, primal Viking film steeped in Norse mythology
Firestarter (2022)
One of Stephen King’s best books is given a new film workover by Blumhouse. Keith Thomas made a standout directorial debut with The Vigil, but this is a disaster, one of the worst of all King adaptations
Der Todesking (1990)
From Jörg Buttgereit, director of the notorious NEKRomantik, an anthology that depicts various scenes of death and suicide. Essentially the original version of The ABCs of Death
The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond (2009)
Horror film with an interesting cast line-up about a group on a weekend getaway who play a boardgame that serves to bring out secrets and hidden desires
J’Accuse (1919)
Extraordinary filmmaking from Abel Gance made at the height of the silent era. Gance was deeply affected by World War I and makes an epic anti-war parable that stuns you with its cinematic craft
The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity (2020)
A Chinese-made Wu Xia film with an exquisitely polished blend of CGI and visuals. This rather intriguingly operates as a blend of Wu Xia and murder mystery
Meteor Moon (2020)
The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Moonfall. This plays a ridiculous premise with an ingenious absurdity and proves far more entertaining than its bigger budgeted model
The Grandmother (2021)
Paco Plaza, best known for the [Rec] movies, returns with an unsettlingly effective film about a girl forced to tend her grandmother only to find increasingly sinister things going on
The Deep House (2021)
From Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, an incredibly spooky film, almost all of which is shot underwater, about two divers discovering a haunted house at the bottom of a lake
Zeder (1983)
Acclaimed classic of 1980s Italian horror where a mysterious typewriter ribbon leads a writer in search of zones where the dead can return to life
Reincarnation (2005)
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
The Bare-Breasted Countess (1973)
Another of the films from cult exploitation director Jess Franco. This is a vampire film made with a mix of arty erotica with Lina Romay as Countess Irina Karlstein who drains men and women’s lifeforce during sex
Girl Next (2021)
This involves girls abducted into a sex trafficking operation, along with mad science and possible cloning. Quite what it is all about is a good question
Two (2021)
A Spanish film with a wonderfully ick and queasy premise where a man and a woman wake up in bed together to find they have been surgically attached at the waist
Fresh (2022)
Strong and effective film in which Daisy Edgar-Jones is charmed becomes involved with Sebastian Stan, only for him to imprison her, intending to sell her flesh as meat
Superhost (2021)
A film that one entered with no expectation whereupon it turned into a quite reasonable effort with Gracie Gillam owning the show as a splendidly mad AirBNB host
The Stranger Beside Me (2003)
True crime film based on a woman who was best friends with serial killer Ted Bundy
Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues … (1983)
Charles B. Pierce, a director who gained a cult with his films for 1970s drive-in audiences, makes a sequel to his earlier pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek about the hunt for a Bigfoot creature
Autopsy (1975)
Italian thriller that attained some censorship controversy when it came out. Minsy Farmer is an assistant coroner haunted and obsessed by the corpses she tends
Infinitum: Subject Unknown (2021)
An interesting film shot during Covid lockdown, all filmed on an IPhone, about a woman caught in a timeloop where she keeps repeating through various scenarios
Great White (2021)
An Australian-made survival drama with a group of people who become stranded at sea aboard a life raft while trying to fight off a killer shark that is lurking
The Batman (2022)
The reboot of the Batman franchise post Zack Snyder returns to the Christopher Nolan conception with Robert Pattinson as an emo Batman who resembles The Cure’s Robert Smith. Not completely successful on all fronts but a promising start
Cube (2021)
Japanese remake of the Vincenzo Natali film where a group of people wake up in mysterious labyrinth of identical cubed rooms filled with death traps
Epsilon (1997)
A film from Rolf de Heer, a director who makes highly unusual works and should be better known than he is. In this, an alien woman befriends a man after she appears in the Australian Outback
Tarzan and the She-Devil (1953)
The last of the Tarzan outings featuring Lex Barker, as well as an interesting cast line-up including Raymond Burr as the villain
Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman (1975)
An adult film about aliens that visit Earth to repopulate their own species and abduct women during sex whereupon they stimulate them with the penises that come out of their mouths
American Satan (2017)
A variant on the Pact with the Devil story as a rock group conduct a Faustian deal with Malcolm McDowell’s Devil, leading to their meteoric rise to fame and debauchery
You Are Not My Mother (2021)
An unsettlingly effective Irish Folk Horror film about a teen whose mother disappears and then returns ‘changed’
X (2022)
Ti West returns with a fascinatingly charged psycho film that takes place on the shoot of a 1970s porn film
Diabolik (2021)
A remake of the great and underrated film and Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief who constantly outwits the authorities, this comes with style and wit to spare and strikes the note perfectly
Don’t Go in the Woods (1981)
One of the ‘don’t __’- titled entries of the 1970s/80s. This was an entry in the decade’s popular slasher cycle with a hulking manic stalking trampers in the backwoods
Super Tanker (2011)
Syfy Channel disaster movie about the efforts to dispose of a container of antimatter being carried on board a tanker, where things proceed to go wrong
M (1951)
The Hollywood remake of Fritz Lang’s film about how the criminal underworld hunts a child killer. Lang’s film is a classic but this comes with visuals maybe even superior to Lang’s version
The Reluctant Dragon (1941)
One of the more obscure films in the Disney catalogue. A part live-action, part animated dramatised tour of Disney Studios, showing how the studio runs and screening several animated short pieces
The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021)
Charles Band returns to H.P. Lovecraft and conducts a low-budget remake of From Beyond, which he had memorably overseen back in the 80s with Stuart Gordon
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)
Richard Linklater makes a charming animated film about a kid selected for a secret Moon Landing. Most of all a film with a lovely nostalgia for growing up in the era of the Moon mission
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)
One of the most in-depth film documentaries ever made where Kier-La Janisse exhaustively excavates every example of Folk Horror
The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)
A Hong Kong Wu Xia film from Jeffrey Lau that is near plotless and made at a madcap level of slapstick comedy that is frequently exhausting.
Sex Mission (1984)
A popular Polish comedy in its day about two men who awake from cryogenic suspension in a women-ruled future where men are obsolete. Some of the comedy reads as very dated watching the film today
Flesh and Fantasy (1943)
A really great and overlooked anthology of fantastical tales from the 1940s. The three stories told here by Julien Duvivier blow you away with their extraordinary visual stylishness
Malice in Wonderland (2009)
A modernised retelling of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice takes a colourfully surreal trip through an urban landscape and criminal underworld
Hellbender (2021)
Another of the family efforts from The Adams Family – John Adams, Toby Poser and daughters. This is a unique and original film about modern witches living in backwoods New York
Moonfall (2022)
Roland Emmerich returns to mass destruction with a film about The Moon on a collision course with Earth, which heads in some conceptually challenging directions
Belle (2021)
A beautiful anime from Momoru Hosoda that retells Beauty and the Beast and spins it in SF terms as tale about a girl who finds fame as a singer in Virtual Reality
Supergrid (2018)
Lowell Dean, director of WolfCop, makes what feels like a revival of the low-budget Mad Max film – an action film set in a socially collapsed future
Contagion (1987)
Not a pandemic film despite the title, an obscure oddity from the great era of Ozploitation where a man undergoes a series of strange experiences as he is drawn to a mystery house in the backwoods
The Gorilla of Soho (1968)
One of the bizarrely colourful German krimi thrillers of the 1960s based on the works of Edgar Wallace involving a series of killings conducted by someone dressed in a gorilla suit
Hell Baby (2013)
From the creators of Reno 911, a comedy spoofing possession, exorcism and diabolical pregnancy cliches. This assembles material that feels as though it should have been funnier than it is
One Cut of the Dead in Hollywood (2019)
One Cut of the Dead was one of the freshest and most hilariously original takes on the zombie film of recent. This is a sequel
The Power (2021)
An incredibly spooky film set at a hospital during a power cut as a nurse on night duty finds ghostly things stirring in the building
Encounter (2021)
A standout work that starts as Riz Ahmed snatches his two boys, fearful of alien body snatchers, before leaving us wondering if this is not all in Ahmed’s mind
Ghosthouse (1988)
From the notorious 1980s heyday of Italian horror, this reads as The Amityville Horror remade as a Lucio Fulci film with the addition of a series of gore-drenched dispatches
Clay (2007)
Ron Bonk is a director out there making modern exploitation films that often push some fairly outrageous edges. This psycho effort was one of his earlier films
Atom Man vs. Superman (1950)
This fifteen chapter serial was the second ever Superman film. It is a vigorously entertaining run through the comic’s basics and features the first screen appearance of Lex Luthor
Every Time I Die (2019)
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
Slaxx (2020)
A horror film about a pair of possessed jeans!
The Adam Project (2022)
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
Lamb (2021)
A standout Icelandic film about a couple on a rural farm who adopt a sheep-human hybrid child and treat it as their own child. With Noomi Rapace as the wife.
The Undying Monster (1942)
One of the first few werewolf films ever made, this takes place at a big old mansion and is a murder mystery whodunnit about who might be the werewolf
Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust (2008)
Sequel to Full Moon’s The Gingerdead Man, this one has been made as an hilariously meta-fictional self-parody, spoofing Full Moon Studios and their films
Snuff (1976)
Arguably the world’s first Found Footage film, this gained a notoriety by conducting a scam that tried to sell it as a real snuff movie
Sadako (2019)
The thirteenth film in the Ring/Ringu franchise. The question is whether the return of original director Hideo Nakata to the franchise can revitalise the series
Apex Predators (2021)
A really, really bad variant on the killer shark film. Painfully bad in every single regard. Dustin Ferguson is quickly establishing himself as the modern Edward D. Wood, Jr
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Sony’s Spider-Man franchise ingeniously competes with Marvel’s shared universe by bringing all their previous incarnations of Spider-Man together
Turning Red (2022)
This was the 25th Pixar film and becomes in effect a Pixar-ised version of The Incredible Hulk about a young girl who transforms into a red panda whenever she gets upset
Witchslayer Gretl (2012)
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot