Vengeance of the Zombies (1973)
One of the few films to come out after George Romero where zombies are still associated with voodoo. Spanish horror star Paul Naschy writes and plays three roles in a film that comes with a wild mix of cross-cultural ideas
Venom (2018)
Anything with the Marvel Comics name on it is box-office gold. This spins a standalone film off from one of the main villains of the Spider-Man comic-book. This is watchable by several showstopping effects set-pieces.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
The first sequel to the passable Venom. Next to Batman & Robin, this could be a strong contender for the worst big-budget superhero film ever made
Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
The third of the Venom films, which has become one of the worst of the modern Marvel spinoffs. By this point any pretence that the films are taking themselves seriously has been long forgotten
Venomous (2001)
Low-budget director Fred Olen Ray makes a head-scratching crosshatch between a plague outbreak film and an Animals Amok film with a town being attacked by snakes infected with a deadly virus
Venus (2022)
Jaume Balaguero of [Rec] fame returns with an occult horror where a woman on the run is drawn into sinister happenings at an apartment
Venus in Furs (1969)
One of the better films from exploitation director Jess Franco that develops a haunted atmosphere that while crude is hard to shake
Veronica (2017)
Paco Plaza has become one of the premiere names in Spanish horror due to the [Rec] films. Here he attempts to follow in the footsteps of The Conjuring with a film based on a supposedly true supernatural incident in 90s Madrid but fails to make a terribly interesting work
Versus (2000)
The directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura. A film premised on the idea of mashing the John Woo-styled gangster film up with the gore-drenched George Romero zombie film.
Vertigo (1958)
Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, this is a study in obsession and features a reincarnation plot. What works more so than the contrived plot twists is Hitchcock’s expert direction, all thunderously brooding mood and lush Technicolor dreaminess
Vesper (2022)
Visually extraordinary film set in an environmentally devastated future, this place enormous creativity into depicting a strange, very alien world
Vexille (2007)
Anime film about an android-overrun future Japan that resembles another episode of the Appleseed franchise
VFW (2019)
Joe Begos makes a homage to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 with a group of war veterans in a bar in an ultra-violent siege against a horde of crazed drug addicts outside
Vibes (1988)
Psychic powers comedy made in the aftermath of Ghostbusters where Jeff Goldblum is upstaged by a kooky Cyndi Lauper
Vice (2015)
Bruce Willis is the CEO of a corporation that provides customers with androids to use for whatever vices they want. Very similar to tv’s recent Westworld but has a script so boneheaded you can almost imagine it acted as an example for Westworld to do the exact opposite
Vice Versa (1988)
One of a spate of bodyswap comedies in the mid-1980s where father and son Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage end up swapping bodies
Vicious (2025)
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes a film where Dakota Fanning receives a cursed box and will die unless she places several requested items inside
Vicious Fun (2020)
Horror comedy set around the wonderfully appealing idea of a support group for serial killers
Victor Crowley (2017)
Adam Green has enjoyed some success with the Hatchet films; this is the fourth entry in the series … Most of the other films have consisted of not much more than buckets of gore and a host of genre cameos – here though, Green adds a considerable sense of humour to the mix
Victor Frankenstein (1977)
Less well known adaptation of the Frankenstein story that can arguably be considered the most faithful of all the film versions
Victor Frankenstein (2015)
An madcap new version of the Mary Shelley story where everything is turned up to an overwrought 11 on the dial. How more nutzoid can you get than a version where Igor the hunchback (a completely miscast Daniel Radcliffe) is the main character?
Videodrome (1983)
Absolutely fascinating David Cronenberg film that swims with a heady mix of ideas that blur tv, reality and the human body
Vidocq (2001)
A film based on the real-life figure of Francois Vidocq, who became the world’s first detective, which the film uses as the stepping off point to create an exquisite dark fantasy
Viking (2022)
A sublimely funny comedy about a group in a habitat who have been selected to roleplay the astronauts on a Mars mission
Viking Wolf (2022)
A Norwegian-made werewolf film where you have to admit the title Viking Wolf sets up some intriguing possibilities
Vile (2011)
I’m tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting
Village of Dreams (1996)
Japanese Coming of Age tale about two mischief-making twin brothers growing up in the 1940s
Village of the Damned (1960)
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
Village of the Damned (1995)
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Village of the Giants (1965)
Bert I. Gordon, who spent most of his career making giant animal and people films, makes a film about giant rock’n’rolling teenagers. Supposedly adapted from a novel by H.G. Wells
Villains (2019)
A film with a wonderfully eccentric and offbeat sense of humour where Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe are inept criminals fleeing after a robbery who end up prisoners of a psychopathic couple
Vincent (2014)
The peculiar story of a man who gains super-strength and various other powers whenever he is in water, this essentially plays out as a superhero film but in a more low key way without any costumes. Quirky, charming and rather likeably appealing
Vinyan (2008)
The second film from Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz is an intensely haunted albeit enigmatic journey into Southeast Asian jungles in search of a missing child
Violent Blood Bath (1974)
A Spanish thriller about the investigation into mysterious payment made to an executed killer, which is then followed by a series of copycat killings that mimic those conducted by the dead killer
Violent Night (2022)
Dark and definitely not sentimental Christmas film with David Harbour as a cynical Santa repelling a home invasion. This does not let down on the violent half of the title
Violent Shit (1989)
Boundary-pushing film that consists almost entirely of very enthusiastic splatter and gore scenes. Amateurishly shot on video nevertheless this gained a cult following and produced sequels
Violent Shit: The Movie (2015)
The original i>Violent Shit films were a series of plotless, gore-drenched German films of the 80-90s. This is a very loose Italian-made remake that is more about the activities of an occult serial killer. Not very well made but there are a lot of homages to classic giallo cinema
Viral (2016)
Effort from the near-ubiquitous Blumhouse that is constantly confounding expectations – a plague outbreak drama but not quite, a zombie film but not quite. In the end, not a great or groundbreaking film but certainly a modest one that takes things in some interesting and original directions
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
Virgin Witch (1971)
1970s British film about two sisters being drawn into the coven of witches. This comes with much in the way of softcore nudity but there is a surprising degree of innocence about all of it
Virginia Creepers (2009)
Documentary about the phenomenon of the tv horror host
Virtual Combat (1995)
Completely ridiculous martial arts SF film with Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson as a future cop fighting a videogame character incarnated in the real world
Virtual Girl (1998)
One of the numerous Virtual Reality films to come out in the mid-90s, this seems undecided whether it wants to be an SF or an erotic film
Virtual Seduction (1995)
Produced by Roger Corman back when the idea of Virtual Reality was new and fascinated with the erotic possibilities. Jeff Fahey tests out a VR system and becomes lost in it after creating a simulation of his late girlfriend
Virtual Sexuality (1999)
Essentially a frothy British romantic comedy version of Weird Science where a girl manifests the perfect guy. The VR aspect is no more than a trendy buzzword appropriated as explain-all
Virtuosity (1995)
Director Brett Leonard started the fascination with Virtual Reality off with The Lawnmower Man but shot himself in the foot with this absurd braindead follow-up in which Denzel Washington pursues a madly OTT Russell Crowe as an android serial killer
Virus (1999)
This has the novelty of a monster that is an evolving fusion of machinery and organics. While it is all directed with much noise and fury, it is ultimately no more than another copy of Alien
Virus: 32 (2022)
Slapped with a misleading pandemic-related title, this is an Argentinean zombie film made with an admirable ferocity
Visions (2015)
Another effort from the near-ubiquitous Blumhouse horror company. A film that teases many things – occult rituals, cultists after the pregnant heroine’s baby – that prove red herrings as it eventually telescopes down to a frustratingly ordinary explanation
Visit to a Small Planet (1960)
A satirical Gore Vidal play is bent out of shape to become a vehicle for the slapstick nonsense of Jerry Lewis, cast as an alien visitor. Lewis is a love him or hate him actor; depending on one’s tolerance for such, this has much fast-paced silliness
Visiting Hours (1982)
Taut and effective effort from the heyday of the slasher film, one of several films on the theme of a woman newscaster being stalked by a psycho. A young Michael Ironside goes to town on the role of the psycho and plays to the gallery with nastily effective results
Visitor Q (2001)
One of the key films in the cult of Takashi Miike that has been frequently banned for its taboo-defying outrages in which a mysterious visitor causes a family household to descend into perverse extremes
Visitors (2003)
Strong return to genre material for Australian director Richard Franklin with Radha Mitchell as a yachtswoman in a round the world race facing ghosts on board that may well all be in her imagination
Viva La Muerte (1971)
Obscure film in which director Fernando Arrabal depicts a series of vignettes from his childhood depicting the sadism and cruelty of the Spanish Fascists
Vivarium (2019)
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can’t leave. Then things start to get really strange.
Vivo (2021)
Animated film about a talking and singing monkey from Cuba that travels to the US on a quest
Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus! (2010)
Another excruciatingly bad mock exploitation film from Tony Watt, who may well be the world’s worst filmmaker. This mixes killer women, aliens, UFOs, Mafia into an incomprehensible mix
Viy (1967)
The only horror film ever made in Communist Russia. Adaptation of a classic story about a monk sequestered with the body of a woman for three nights, the film creates an undeniable atmosphere and mounts to a wildly fantastical climax where he must face all the minions of Hell
Viy (2014)
Russian-made adaptation of a classic horror story that takes place as an exquisitely stylised 19th Century Gothic fantasy world but is a head-scratchingly incoherent mishmash on a plotting level
Vlad the Impaler (1979)
Romanian-made film about the real-life historical tyrant Vlad Tepes who loaned his name to Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Vlad the Impaler (2000)
A film based on the historic tyrant that gave the world the name Dracula. This ends up being too sympathetic and loses all credibility when it tries to tie in vampire mythology
Voice from the Stone (2017)
Strongly reminiscent of The Innocents, Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones plays a nanny arriving at an estate to tend a boy who claims to hear his dead mother’s voice in the stone walls.
Volcano (1997)
A disaster movie made early into the CGI era based around the ludicrous notion of an active volcano suddenly appearing in Los Angeles
Volcano High (2001)
Energetic South Korean attempt to employ the Wu Xia action moves popularised by The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a high school setting
Volver (2006)
Pedro Almodovar film in which two daughters try to deal with their mother’s seeming return from the dead
Voodoo (1995)
A low-budget film where Corey Feldman is a university student who signs into an oddball fraternity only to find that it practices voodoo rites and he has signed away his soul
Voodoo Academy (2000)
Completely ridiculous David DeCoteau film about voodoo rites in a boys boarding school that gets hijacked by DeCoteau’s typical homo-erotic predilections
Voodoo Black Exorcist (1974)
Essentially a 1940s mummy film with a voodoo priest resurrected in the present and stalking the reincarnation of his love. In English translation, this has been thrown together with a meaningless word salad title to appeal to the era’s fads for Blaxploitation and exorcism films
Voodoo Woman (1957)
Low-budget AIP monster movie largely premised around rehashing the monster from The She-Creature and a cheap backlot jungle. Marla English plays for all she can and gives the film an undeniable vigour
Voyage (1993)
Psycho-thriller set aboard a yacht as a couple invite old friends Eric Roberts and Connie Nielsen to join them only to find they have sinister intent
Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)
Forgotten 1980s obscurity about aliens come to Earth in search of rock music that feels like someone attempted to conduct a version of Grease for the Star Wars crowd. Filled with utterly excruciating slapstick humour and bland songs from bands that nobody has heard from again
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
This was the film that inspired the popular tv series set aboard a futuristic submarine. As always with Irwin Allen, stolid dramatics, bad science and colourful spectacle dominate
Voyage to the End of the Universe (1963)
Czech film from a Stanislaw Lem novel made from the height of the Soviet era depicting day-to-day life about a space mission to explore another planet
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)
Roger Corman had a good deal of success in the 1960s by buying up footage from Soviet SF films, shooting English language inserts and reissuing them. Bar a handful of scenes with some Hollywood actors, this is almost the whole of the Russian film Storm Planet
Voyagers (2021)
The promising idea of a generation ship story, although you realise soon in that this has been conceived as no more than Lord of the Flies in space