The Fury of the Wolfman (1972)
This was the fourth (or maybe the fifth) of the Spanish films in the popular series about the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky starring Paul Naschy. Also one of the shabbiest of the series.
Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)
This gets full marks for an attention-grabbing title. Beyond that, it is is otherwise a very strange and surrealistic film about spy shenanigans in Virtual Reality
Jiu Jitsu (2020)
The action film has largely died off in the 2010s. This is very much a throwback with a set-up reminiscent of Predator about an action team fighting an alien in the jungle
Serenity (2019)
Not to be confused with the Joss Whedon film, this starts out seeming like a weepy romantic drama before pulling one of the most absurd M. Night Shyamaalan-esque conceptual twists ever put on screen on us
The Last Scout (2017)
British SF film about the last survivors of Earth on an expedition to find new planet to make home. This manages to do some reasonable things on a low budget
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
This is a Found Footage film that features a film crew interviewing a crazy hermit who claims to have the carcass of a Bigfoot and naturally enough encountering the real thing
The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)
Ghost story BBC mini-series adapted from a novel by horror writer James Herbert that unfolds between two different eras. With an amazing cast of Before They Were Famous names.
The Clovehitch Killer (2018)
Excellent, superbly written thriller loosely based on the B.T.K. killer story where a teen believes his father (Dylan McDermott in a great performance) might be a serial killer
The Third Day (2020)
A UK TV mini-series that borrow much from The Wicker Man in a complex and fascinating story about the discovery of folk religion on a small island and becoming caught up in pending rituals
The New Mutants (2020)
What will be the very last of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men films, this is more like a superheroic version of The Breakfast Club than any of the other X-Men films
To Your Last Death (2019)
Animated film that is gore-drenched and certainly not for children. Imagine The Belko Experiment conceived as a videogame where the heroine has to survive an office of people trying to kill her while aliens bet on the outcome
Haunts of the Very Rich (1972)
From the Golden Age of TV Movies, a name cast line-up arrive at a luxurious resort only to become trapped there and caught up in increasingly mysterious happenings
Endgame (1983)
Joe D’Amato directs one of the numerous 80s Italian Mad Max 2 copies. One of the very first films to depict televised human bloodsports later popularised by the likes of The Running Man and The Hunger Games
Luther the Geek (1989)
A film about a psychopathic circus geek who kills using a pair of steel dentures. One of the better critically received releases from Troma. Things get quite nasty.
Riot Girls (2019)
A plague has killed off all adults. In the ruins, two girlfriends venture into the domain ruled by the tyrannical football jocks to rescue one’s brother
A Whisker Away (2020)
A sweet and quite lovely anime where a girl befriends the boy she pines after being offered a mask that transforms her into a cat body – only to then have her own body stolen
The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes an uncanny slow burn film about a family gathered to tend a dying father as something evil waits to claim his soul
Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019)
An absorbing documentary about the making of Alien, which charts the film’s origins and the making of the classic chestburster scene
Satan’s School for Girls (2000)
Remake of the classic tv movie with Shannen Doherty investigating her sister’s death among deviltry in a girl’s school
The Cellar (1989)
A low-budget 1980s film where a family buy a house in the desert only to find that there is a Native American demon imprisoned in the cellar
Snowtown (2011)
Underrated and quite brilliant film about a series of true-life Australian serial killings, this has an extraordinary dangerousness in the way it observes highly disturbing things with calm detachment
Virgin Cheerleaders in Chains (2018)
Full marks for an attention-grabbing exploitation title, this is a horror film that takes place on a horror film set where film being shot and sinister characters on the sideline blur in a rubber reality
Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)
After thirty years, the Tremors series has held up in terms of quality much better than most other monster series. This is the seventh and what would appear to be the last of the films
The Witches (2020)
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
Unhinged (2020)
The first film to go into wide US release during Covid lockdown with Russell Crowe snapping and turning psycho after a road rage incident. Much better than the lukewarm reception it received, this is a quite reasonable variant on Duel
Takut: Faces of Fear (2008)
An anthology of horror tales from Indonesia, most being too short to make much distinction,, the exception being The Mo Brothers gore-drenched first film Dara
Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)
One of the films that came out in the aftermath of Jurassic Park, notable only for the absurdity of its premise wherein teen Paul Walker’s brain is transplanted into an animatronic dinosaur body and he struggles to reconnect with girlfriend Denise Richards
Carved: The Slit Mouthed Woman (2007)
J-horror film based on the Japanese urban legend of a boogeywoman with a face slit from ear to ear who appears to kill people
Lake Fear 2: The Swamp (2018)
Slasher film in which a group of unlikeable teens on Springbreak are slaughtered by backwoods hicks in the Everglades. Sold as a sequel to Lake Fear despite neither film being connected in any way
Nocturne (2020)
The best of the Welcome to Blumhouse films set among the rivalry of two sisters at a highly competitive music school where one gets an occult text allowing her an advantage
Evil Eye (2020)
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 Initiation (1984)
An entry in the slasher film fad that features a young, fresh-faced and stunning Daphne Zuniga being stalked around a mall during a sorority hazing prank
Gamera 2: Assault of Legion (1996)
Shusuke Kaneko did extraordinary things in revitalising the Japanese monster movie in the 1990s with his trilogy of Gamera films. This was the second of them, usually seen as the weakest of the trilogy
Mara (2018)
Olga Kurylenko deals with a demon that appears to those affected by sleep paralysis. Another sleep paralysis horror film that only tepidly dips into the subject
Black Box (2020)
Blumhouse film in which an initial plot about a man suffering amnesia undergoes a twist to become a body theft story
The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
Mike Flanagan follows up the hit of The Haunting of Hill House with a mini-series that adapts another classic work The Turn of the Screw out into a similar kind of cross-generational ghost story. The results are extraordinary
Trump vs The Illuminati (2020)
A clone of Donald Trump battles The Illuminati and the Egyptian god Anubis on Mars before travelling to Hell to sort out The Devil. The sheer dementia of the premise alone has one sitting down to watch
Miranda (1948)
The very first mermaid film, a wonderfully droll comedy in which a capricious Glynis Johns innocently wreaks havoc on all the men around her
Arnold (1973)
Comedy-thriller in the Old Dark House tradition with greedy relatives being bumped off in the fight for the will. A film that begins with a corpse getting married can’t be all bad.
The Terror Within (1989)
Roger Corman produces a blatant copy of Alien with a group of people being pursued around a desert laboratory by a rubbery mutant creature
Planet Hulk (2010)
Animated adaptation of the one of the biggest Marvel Comics event storylines of the 2000s – the same one also used in Thor Ragnarok. Essentially Spartacus recast with The Incredible Hulk
The Snarling (2018)
A werewolf comedy that takes place on the set of a zombie film. Comes with much in the way of homage to An American Werewolf in London
Rockabilly Vampire: Burnin’ Love (1996)
Troma film less terrible than most about a modern who gets involved with a vampire from the 1950s
Books of Blood (2020)
A new Clive Barker film is always something to be excited about – Barker has been absent too long as a creative force. This is an anthology based around Barker’s celebrated story collection
Des (2020)
Excellent British tv mini-series that tells the story of true-life serial killer Dennis Nilsen who preyed on gay men in London in the 1980s. David Tennant gives an electrifying performance in the title role
Twice Dead (1988)
An 80s horror film that suffers a bizarre identity crisis and doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a haunted house film, a home invasion film or a makeup effects vehicle
Turnabout (1940)
A madcap screwball comedy in which a husband and wife swap bodies. The very first bodyswap film. From director Hal Roach who discovered Laurel and Hardy
I Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (1998)
In the overworked vein the zombie film, one of the most unique and original voices has been British director Andrew Parkinson. This was the first of Parkinson’s kitchen sink zombie films
Warning from Space (1956)
The first Japanese entry in the great alien invader fad of the 1950s. Nothing great but it does boast the awesomeness of starfish-shaped aliens
The Wind (2018)
A beautifully subtle and ambiguous film about a pioneer woman alone in a cabin on the American Frontier where she is haunted by demons of the prairies that may all be in her mind
Brave New World (2020)
TV mini-series adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian novel. Developed by Grant Morrison, this freely adapts the novel but does a strong and intelligent job of reimagining it in contemporary terms
Alien Outbreak (2020)
Fine little film about an invasion of dog-like alien robots and an outbreak of mass insanity that drives people to kill themselves, this does great things on next to nothing
Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) (1969)
This may possibly be the worst Dracula film ever made. A nudie film that has been dubbed over with excruciatingly unfunny one-liners that makes it sound more like a rifftrack film
A Name for Evil (1973)
Obscure almost interesting film where Robert Culp drops out of city life, renovates a possibly haunted house before being drawn into a surreal Free Love fantasia
The Devil’s Honey (1986)
Cult Italian director Lucio Fulci makes an erotic thriller but fails to leave his horror background behind with deranged results quite unlike any other erotic film
Starship (1984)
A planetary adventure from the director of Battlefield Earth. I waited 35 years to find a copy of this – it looked incredibly promising when I saw production artwork back in the 1980s
Stairs (2019)
Soldiers are trapped climbing an endless set of stairs in a timeloop that forces them to revisit a battlefield atrocity
Black Water: Abyss (2020)
The Australian-made Black Water was a gripping thriller about three people in a tree being menaced by a crocodile in the water below. This is a sequel with a further group trapped in a cave and menaced by a killer crocodile
3022 (2019)
Spacegoing film that follows the crew aboard a space station as they survive the destruction of the Earth
Space Zombie Bingo!!! (1993)
Part of the late 80s/early 90s fad for deliberately bad SF films, this has plentiful references to Plan 9 from Outer Space but little that is funny
New Dragon Gate Inn (1992)
A classic Wu Xia/flying swordsman film from the genre’s 1990s’ heyday, a remake of one of the earlier foundational hits of the genre. Produced by the legendary Tsui Hark
The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)
Beautiful anime from Makoto Shinkai, made in the Hayao Miyazaki style set in an alternate history Japan concerning a mysterious hyper-dimensional tower
Rabies (2010)
Billed as Israel’s first horror film, this is more a dark and violent film that delights in taking a crosscut of characters and mercilessly putting the screws on them
The Haunted Airman (2006)
Robert Pattinson (before he was a recognised name) as a convalescing pilot during WWII who is haunted by demonic spiders in an adaptation of a book by occult writer Dennis Wheatley.
Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (2019)
A fascinating documentary about B movie and exploitation director Al Adamson, covering the frequently hilarious making of his films and the bizarre circumstances of his murder
Antebellum (2020)
This highly charged work about race issues received a very mixed critical reception but I liked it for its clever M. Night Shyamalan-esque twistiness that messes with storytelling convention
The Mandela Effect (2019)
Dramatised film based on the popular conspiracy theory that people are living in an alternate timeline where their memories have been edited and that we are all living in a simulation a la The Matrix
Igor and the Lunatics (1985)
Another shabby Troma release concerning the activities of a crazed cult. This features some nasty deaths but little else
Hide and Go Shriek (1988)
A 1980s slasher film that takes place in a furniture store after hours. The film has the novelty of featuring a gay killer – and the results are really quite bizarre
The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955)
Modest and occasionally atmospheric 1950s B-budget alien invasion film where the title is explained as the alien’s ability to control animals, making this arguably the first Animals Amok film
Strange Circus (2005)
Japanese director Shion Sono has emerged as an increasingly worthwhile name in recent years. This is an admirably twisted and perverse work that leaves you quite flabbergasted
Little Evil (2017)
The director of Tucker and Dale vs Evil returns with a comedy that spoofs The Omen about an average guy trying to step-parent the Anti-Christ child
Jonathan (2018)
A smart and intelligent SF film where two brothers both inhabit the same body and then both fall for the same woman. Great acting from Ansel Elgort in the titles role(s)
Mulan (2020)
The Disney live-action remake of Mulan finally arrives mired in controversy but the film itself proves a solid production for the most part, although never quite soars as a work of fantasy
The Wretched (2019)
The biggest box-office hit six weeks in a row in 2020, albeit during Corona lockdown. This gets some extremely creepy effects in that managed to work on a jaded viewer
Ghost Lantern (1993)
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
Just Before Dawn (1981)
A particularly strong and underrated variant on the Backwoods Brutality film. From Jeff Lieberman, director of the cult killer worm saga Squirm and the LSD flashback psycho film Blue Sunshine
Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991)
The first sequel to the Troma hit and with all of the usual bad taste and moron humour you associate with a Troma film, but also better produced then most their films
Time Freak (2018)
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
Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016)
This had me watched on the basis of the title alone. An Asylum production, this is less a twisted take on the fairytale than one that turns Little Red Riding Hood into a werewolf hunter
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending, head-scratcher about road trips, weird dinner conversations and shifting identity blurrings as what we assume become increasingly more surreal as the film goes on
Peninsula (2020)
Yeon Sang-ho makes a sequel to his international breakout zombie film hit of Train to Busan, appropriating the basics of Escape to New York to good ends
The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982)
Entry from the 1980s heyday of slasher film made by students at the UCLA film program with a killer stalking the dorm. Featuring an unknown Daphne Zuniga as one victim
Witchcraft (1964)
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)
The eighth of the Hellraiser films. By now a long way from Clive Barker’s original vision and no more than a haunted house story where the Cenobites occasionally turn up. With a young unknown Henry Cavill
Man Vs. (2015)
The amusing idea of a mimicry of a Bear Grylls-type wilderness survival reality show – but with the addition of a monster.
The Dustwalker (2019)
A zombie film of sorts in which the people of an Australian outback town are taken over by an alien force. A zombie film that seems to be trying not to be a zombie film.
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
The two time-travelling slackers are back after nearly thirty years and the film amusingly sees them having reached uneasy middle-age. But was the wait worth it?
Superman: Man of Tomorrow (2020)
Fine animated film that traces Superman’s early years – Superman: Year One if you like – as we see pieces of the mythos coming together
Smiley (2012)
This is essentially Candyman rewritten for the internet generation about a boogeyman that appears to kill the person on the other end if you type a phrase three times
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978)
If you don’t know who Karel Zeman is, you need to check out his films – he is quite one of the most extraordinary directors in his blend of live-action and animation. Zeman’s later films are pure animation and tend to be overlooked but are not uninteresting.
Dogora the Space Monster (1964)
One of the overlooked Japanese monster movies directed by Godzilla’s creator Ishiro Honda concerning a giant alien blob that appears in the sky and sucks up coal and diamonds
And Then There Were None (1945)
Agatha Christie created the slasher film (sort of). This murder mystery (usually known by several less politically correct names) with a series of murders on an isolated island holds the kernel of what became the slasher template. This was the first film adaptation.
Snowflake (2017)
A insanely madcap work of meta-fiction. Imagine stupider versions of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction mixed with Stranger Than Fiction as they discover they are fictional characters
Nekrotronic (2018)
The second film from the director of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead about demon hunters. A great deal has been expanded on the creature effects and in building the film’s mythology.
Project Power (2020)
Suffering superhero fatigue from screens overwhelmed with Marvel and DC adaptations? This is one of the most original superhero treatments in some time, concerning a drug that give the user superpowers for five minutes only
Cosmos (2019)
Strong and intelligent SF film about amateur astronomers who receive radio signals from space indicating existence of alien life. A film made with a remarkable economy – most of it takes place inside a car – and rooted in good science
Doomsday Machine (1972)
Incredibly cheaply made film about astronauts on a spaceship to Venus who survive the destruction of the Earth. So cheap that most of the film takes place on two sets
Arabian Nights (1942)
A Hollywood version of the Arabian Nights that throws out the story’s unique narrative structure and substitutes the colourful spectacle of the swashbuckling adventure. With Shemp Howard as Sinbad!
Hack-o-Lantern (1988)
A bizarre film involving Halloween killings and devil worship that seems to have been made without a clear script. Everything is wrecked by a astonishingly awful performance from Hy Pike