The Perfect Weapon (2016)
Steven Seagal makes an SF film. Even more bizarrely, Seagal plays the villain for one of the few times in his career, namely the dictator of a dystopian future. An overweight and aging Seagal has a handful of scenes philosophising, while the bulk of the film is a super-soldier plot carried by others
Sadako vs Kayako (2016)
The two most popular Japanese horror franchises come together to fight it out. Both series work on the provision of intensely uncanny effect but brought together the result is diluted at best
Automaton Transfusion (2006)
Despite a title that resembles more a 1990s killer cyborg film, this is actually a zombie film. Made soon into the mid-2000s zombie revival, this is driven more by fannish enthusiasm and copious gore than anything else
Over Your Dead Body (2014)
The most sustained film Takashi Miike has made in some time. In this case, he adapts Yotsuya Kaidan, the most famous of all Japanese ghost stories, which has been filmed multiple times, but rather than offer a straight telling also adds a layer where the story comes to replay itself among the actors in the play
Phantom of the Theatre (2016)
A fascinating Chinese version of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanted from a Parisian opera house of the 19th Century to a film being shot in an abandoned theatre in the 1930s. On the other hand, this version makes the most radical changes to the story of any of the Phantom films
Underworld: Blood Wars (2016)
I am at a loss to understand who the audience for the Underworld films is – they are films devoid of minimal requirements like plotting and seem to only exist as a series of forgettable action sequences and interchangeable Gothic poses by characters in black leather – and yet we keep getting more of them
Ice Sharks (2016)
Another killer shark film from The Asylum, the people behind the Sharknado films. This plays itself seriously and turns out a reasonable story about the crew of a polar base under attacks by prehistoric sharks
Unearthly Stranger (1963)
A British response to the 1950s alien invader fad that swept the US. Despite a low-budget, this achieves an undeniable atmosphere of paranoia as a scientist discovers that his newlywed wife may be an alien infiltrator
Slumber Party Massacre III (1990)
Second film to follow-on from The Slumber Party Massacre. While the original was a straight-up slasher film, the second became completely ludicrous as it veered off in trying to copy the A Nightmare on Elm Street films but this returns to the slasher basics for a vigorous workout of the formula
Parasyte Part 1 (2014)
Live-action adaptation of a manga about the war between body-snatching parasites that are capable of rearranging their host’s bodies. This plays out as a madcap version of The Thing relocated to a Japanese high school
Spaghettiman (2016)
Possibly the most absurd notion to hit superhero cinema – a film in which the hero’s power is to fling spaghetti from his fingertips and hides his identity behind a paper bag. A low-budget, no-effects indie comedy with a deadpan sense of humour not likely to be everybody’s taste but I found downright hilarious
Death Race 2050 (2017)
Death Race 2000 was a hit for producer Roger Corman. It was remade minus the satire as a straight action film with Death Race; here Corman remakes the original (albeit very cheaply) and restores the satire
Moana (2016)
Despite being a huge box-office and critical success and being nominated for an Academy Award, I am in a minority in disliking this. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that it appropriates the culture from my neck of the woods and only spins it out as a series of glib jokes and one-liners
Beta Test (2016)
This has the interesting idea of mind-controlled people being used as shooters in a live-action videogame. However, the rest of the film is a routine low-budget action film
The Revenant (2009)
Not to be confused with the high-profile Leonardo DiCaprio film, this is a rather amusing film about a soldier who returns home as undead. Rather than the usual zombie/vampire film one would expect, this develops a wonderfully sustained sarcastic tone to expand out as a kind of undead Boondock Saints
The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967)
Sax Rohmer created the super-villain Fu Manchu, less well-known was his character of the female super-villain Sumuru who leads an all-woman army in a world domination plot. This was one of two Sumuru films
The Complex (2013)
Hideo Nakata will always be known as the director of the original Ring. Here he revisits the kaidan eiga in the story of a haunted apartment but the show falls apart after a confusing Sixth Sense-type twist mid-film
Trolls (2016)
A perfect example of all the things I hate about modern animation. Based around the popular Troll dolls, this is vapidly designed, content-free product based solely around simplistic storylines, manic slapstick sequences, song and dance numbers, and inane contemporary pop culture in-jokes
When the Bough Breaks (2016)
A throwback to the 1980s/90s psycho-thriller that came out after Fatal Attraction featuring a surrogate mother who develops a stalkerish fixation on a husband. The crucial difference is that this is played with an all-Black cast but in a way that sends out weirdly uncomfortable racial messages
Split (2017)
M. Night Shyamalan’s name took a nosedive throughout most of the 2000s (although I am prepared to defend him) but he received some of his best notices in years with his collaborations for Blumhouse, This split personality thriller, anchored by a tour-de-force performance(s) from James McAvoy, continues the upward trend
Fear Clinic (2015)
Film spun out from a web series. Robert Englund as a mad psychiatrist who creates a machine that helps people confront their phobias that somehow opens a doorway to creatures from another dimension
Mutant (1984)
One of the handful of films from the underrated 70s/80s director John ‘Bud’ Cardos. Cardos does extremely creating an usual smalltown atmosphere simmering with Southern bigotry, before the film erupts into a more standard toxic waste zombies outbreak film
Men Behind the Sun (1988)
One of a rare handful of films that can be considered the most extreme ever made, this a catalogue of the true-life atrocities and experiments inflicted on prisoners during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in WWII. An intensely uncomfortable watch not recommended for the faint-hearted
Red Riding (2009)
Depending on how you saw this, this is either a UK tv mini-series or three separately released films. Taking place over a decade, the three stories have a common locale and overlapping characters in the story of the hunt for a serial killer and the battle against a corrupt police department in Yorkshire
Friend Request (2016)
Another in the spate of social media horror films, this is a blatant copy of Unfriended, albeit mashed up with Ring to create the idea of a cursed newsfeed. This is also the lamest of the bunch
Max Steel (2016)
An ill-conceived attempt to compete amid the high stakes box-office superheroics enjoyed by Marvel and belatedly DC, this had one of the most disastrous box-office showings of 2016 … Based on a popular line of action toys, this gets nothing right – it’s hard to tell it is meant to be a superhero film for half the show
A Monster Calls (2016)
The story of the relationship between a giant monster and a boy whose mother is dying of cancer, this is perhaps the darkest children’s film ever made. Adapted from an award-winning illustrated book
Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark (2014)
Third in The Asylum’s series of Mega Shark films where they borrow the Godzilla series’ idea of Mecha-Godzilla and pit the Mega Shark against a robot copy of itself. Here the Mega Shark series is starting to approach the entertaining silliness of their Sharknado films but still flounder amid tatty effects
Arizona Dream (1993)
This English-language debut from Emir Kusturica should have been a hit going by its cast that includes a young Johnny Depp romancing a 50+ Faye Dunaway, but is a plotless piece of improv of occasional surreal interludes
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986)
An acclaimed mini-series about a frumpy woman taking gleeful revenge on the husband who abandoned her. Essentially Fatal Attraction rewritten with a feminist manifesto with hilariously barbed results
The Lamp (1987)
Obscure work of 1980s horror that involves a group of teens deciding to party in a museum and being slaughtered in a variety of ridiculous ways after an antique lamp is opened
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
The Troll Hunter director Andre Øvredal creates an intense and absorbing mystery about a corpse on a morgue slab and the unsettling spell it exudes on the two coroners examining it
The Monster (2016)
A monster movie that consists of a mother and daughter cowering in a crashed car on a remote stretch of road. The effectiveness of the film comes in the incredibly raw emotional groundwork laid in the first half
Passengers (2016)
The gratifying pleasure of a solid conceptually-driven science-fiction film – all based around the premise of “what if a cryogenic sleeper woke up halfway through a deep space voyage?” and the moral choices he must make. Strong, intelligent character-driven science-fiction and possibly the best designed film of the year
Time Raiders (2016)
Not a time travel film as the title leads you to expect but a Chinese copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark where you expect they were trying to call it ‘tomb raiders’. The director is also the production designer leading to a gorgeously designed film but also one of constant action postures almost entirely lacking in substance
Scarecrows (1988)
An overlooked effort from the direct-to-VHS era concerning itself with a field of undead scarecrows. Amid the numerous zombie and splatter effects efforts of the day that were being churned out, this settles in with an unusual atmosphere that is often hard to shake
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
The film that formulated giallo cinema. Drawing inspiration from the success of Psycho, Mario Bava strips the psycho-thriller down to a parade of killings amid extravagantly arty surroundings and with a gorgeous colour palette
Borealis (2013)
A pilot for a tv series that never went ahead set in a future where Global Warming has turned the Arctic into a thawed-out tundra where various countries seek to claim the new territory
Me and My Mates vs. the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)
An Australian zombie comedy. The basic premise sets a bunch of lads and their cheerfully Neanderthal, sexist, beer-drinking, sports loving ways up against the zombie apocalypse
Desierto (2015)
Alfonso Cuaron’s son Jonas makes a film about Mexican illegal immigrants being hunted by a white vigilante in a Most Dangerous Game scenario. The film came out just after Trump’s famous wall campaign speech
Incarnate (2016)
Ever since The Exorcist, filmmakers have been recycling the same cliches for the last forty years. This slings the cliches together with the dream incursion concept from Inception, which makes things somewhat interesting
Killers (2014)
The second film from Indonesia’s Mo Brothers follows the internet friendship between a serial killer and another he decides to mentor in the ways of killing. The Mo’s take to the material with a dark relish
Wandering Rose (2014)
Neither of this film’s titles do it justice – Wandering Rose seems either about a girl who hitchhikes or is very promiscuous, while Demon Baby pushes it over into a devil pregnancy film. What we instead have is a film set in the Scottish Highlands that creates a great sense of dis-ease, even if it never fully delivers on it
Sharktopus vs Pteracuda (2014)
Entry in the gonzo killer shark film (viz Sharknado et al), sequel to the earlier Sharktopus Though produced by veteran B movie producer Roger Corman, these Sharktopus films are some of the shittiest in the gonzo killer shark fad, featuring way below sub par effects and missing the sense of humour
Puzzle (2014)
This starts as a standard Japanese high school drama but takes a turn for the twisted where it doesn’t exactly venture into Saw territory but certainly somewhere that has taken inspiration from it. Alas, everything gets lost in a second half that is burdened by an excessively complicated and non-linear plot
Attack on Titan II: End of the World (2015)
Sequel the demented Attack of Titan with its wild images of humanity under attack from mindless giants that bite their heads off, which was shot back-to-back and released a few months later
Rogue One (2016)
Disney are now doing what Lucasfilm did with their novels in the 80s and spinning adventures off from even minor background characters. This is a grittier Dirty Dozen adventure but still recycles the same basic elements
Hectic Knife (2016)
A clear winner for the Worst Film of 2016. Made by people who have given up any attempt to make a good film and have instead inserted a wilful inanity that is agonisingly unfunny
Kirikou and the Men and Women (2012)
The third of Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou films, delightful tales about the ingenuity and plain-speaking wisdom of a young boy winning out over adult pomposity and foolishness. Animated with a simplicity that is magical
Time Walker (1982)
I had heard about this for years – it had a reputation as ‘the mummy from outer space film’. Seen, it proves disappointingly routine – all the tomb raiding is over after the first scene and the rest is little more than a slasher movie with the mummy akin to a hockey-masked maniac wandering a campus killing co-eds
The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan (1979)
Classic tv movie in which Lindsay Wagner travels back to the 19th Century to romance Marc Singer. Classic what is the question – what we have is a weepy romantic version of a time travel film that eliminates any of the interesting things like culture clash, advanced knowledge and time paradox
Storks (2016)
This did nothing for me in the pre-release. Watching it, it proves far more enjoyable than expectation. It is very baby-centric but it does have a frequently off-the-wall sense of humour that is rather appealing
Hard Target 2 (2016)
Hard Target was one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s better films, featuring an on-fire John Woo as director. While most have forgotten it, we get a sequel here that copycats Woo’s moves to a point of tedium
Urge (2016)
The use of a designer drug causes a small island to descend into mass insanity – this is essentially The Crazies repackaged as a slick empty-headed thriller for teen audiences. The various scenes of madness are frequently laughable and the film arrives at possibly the most ridiculous twist ending one has ever seen
Shark Lake (2015)
In the era of Sharknado and the competition to create the most ridiculous killer shark film possible, it is a brave B movie that chooses to go the serious killer shark film route. A fairly average effort where the so-so shark effects tend to be sidelined by the mundane custody battle on the shore
Peacock King (1988)
Hong Kong-made Wu Xia based on a Japanese manga about warrior monks fighting to stop the opening of portals to Hell. This seems uninspired when it comes to the flights of fantasy the genre specialises in, although picks up when it comes to the vigour of its cheap makeup effects scenes
Peeping Tom (1960)
Classic psycho film that came out the same year as Psycho but was killed in release being seen as morally repugnant. From the great Michael Powell, this features a killer obsessed with filming women as he kills them and finds an uncomfortable brilliance in the way it blurs a director’s obsessions and a viewer’s complicity in what they see on screen
Jaws of Satan (1981)
This seems to have been slung together as a mash-up of Jaws and the 1970s fad for occult films. Ridiculous and badly made on all levels, no more so than the climax with a giant snake conducting a devil worship ceremony
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
Christmas Evil (1980)
One of the original Psycho Santa films. Usually pegged as another Christmas slasher film, rather what we have is a film that draws us into a disturbed headspace that operates on a unique fairytale morality about punishing the naughty
Nine Lives (2016)
Your mind struggles to process the premise of Nine Lives – where Kevin Spacey finds himself in the body of a cat. It seems a variation on the earlier Oh Heavenly Dog in which Chevy Chase was reincarnated as Benji. Some cute effects but what a lightweight effort for an actor of Spacey’s calibre
Sinister Squad (2016)
The Asylum made Avengers Grimm as a copycat of The Avengers films, featuring a team-up of fairytale heroines, and so for the release of Suicide Squad they made this sequel featuring a team-up of fairytale villains. Both films are utterly incomprehensible and require you to essentially ignore the originals
X-Ray (1982)
An early Cannon Films offering among the 80s slasher fad premised around a hospital setting and seeing the phenomenally well-stacked former Playmate Barbi Benton undressed. Most of the paper thin plot seems to have been made up on set and the direction is ridiculously overwrought
Where the Devil Hides (2014)
This is a modestly effective effort that sits just on the dividing line between interesting and cliched – the undeniably captivating premise involves an Amish-like cult dealing with a series of prophecies about devil children and killings of their number
The Wailing (2016)
South Korean horror film that generates a more than effectively creepy atmosphere. The downside is that you reached the end of the show with no clear idea what is going on and why things are happening
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016)
Someone figured out Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin from the 1960s Batman tv series, were still around and put them in this animated film that replicates the look of the show and pays homage to its willful silliness
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. This takes a big bite and tells an epic adventure. The only flaw is that the stop-motion is so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
Summer Camp (2015)
Not a title that automatically suggests a horror film – and even if it does, you automatically think of the locale for a 1980s slasher film. What we get is a Spanish-made effort about a madness-inducing infection – a modestly and tightly contained effort that twists around on itself with considerable vigour
Delivery (2013)
This was the first Found Footage film to deal with the Satanic pregnancy theme, prefiguring the more high-profile Devil’s Due. This draws on the plotting conventions and cliches laid down by Rosemary’s Baby in every way
Ju-on: The Beginning of the End (2014)
The tenth of the Japanese Ju-on/The Grudge series. Newcomer Masayuki Ochiai has some effective touches but the series is running out of original moves
Repentance (2014)
A film with identity disorder – the title and promotion makes it seem a revenge-action film only for it to conduct a number of strange doglegs and eventually arrive at a plot wherein life coach Anthony Mackie is tied up in the cellar by Forest Whitaker who feeds his inspirational lines back at him
Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made (2015)
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a scene-for-scene remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot on video by two teenagers over seven years, has become the stuff of legend. This is a documentary about its making, filled with hair-raising story of seat of the pants filmmaking
Arrival (2016)
Most SF films gloss over the issue of communication with aliens, having them either speaking English or with devices like Universal Translators. This is a superbly intelligent film that grapples with how to communicate with something different
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Spinoff from the Harry Potter films – unlike those, written directly for the screen and feels more like it belongs there. The US locations open the story up, while the magic creatures and new ensemble cast prove a delight
Abattoir (2016)
Darren Lynn Bousman is the director most associated with the Saw sequels and its Torture Porn excesses. His other films have been lacking. This comes with one of the most off the wall premises one has seen
Monster in the Closet (1986)
Monster movie parody that spoofs a number of classic films, including King Kong where it takes the title literally and the monster makes off with the hero giving the film a certain LGBT community relevance in its day. Contains quite an impressive cast list, including featuring both Paul Walker and singer Fergie as kids
Patema Inverted (2013)
This anime has a surprising number of similarities to Upside Down, which was released one year earlier, both being set in two different worlds where gravity in each operates in the opposite directions and of the forbidden relationship between a boy and a girl from either world
Hercules Reborn (2014)
The Asylum’s offering amid the Hercules movie revival of 2014 – The Legend of Hercules and the Dwayne Johnson-starring Hercules. Those were ridiculed, while this rises to a level of averageness
The Survivalist (2015)
An Irish-shot post-apocalyptic drama that could not be further than the demolition derbies of Mad Max et al. This remains contained within a small cabin in the woods and with a cast of three, a man and two women, and emerges with a riveting and emotionally raw grimness
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (2016)
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
Inferno (2016)
The third film based on Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books. This is essentially the same plot as The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks following clues to a deadly virus hidden in classic artworks around Europe
Nightlight (2015)
Any Found Footage film about people venturing into a haunted forest cannot help but draw comparison to the progenitor of the genre, The Blair Witch Project. This comes up with some sufficiently original twists and spooky moments, even if it is eventually unbuckled by its pretensions
Night Slaves (1970)
TV movies of the 1970s can be this unexplored treasure trove of sophisticated and intelligent genre treatments. Case in point being this effort, a variant on a 1950s body snatchers film in which a man with a steel plate in his head discovers that the people of a small town are being taken over at night by aliens
The Hunters (2013)
The premise of a group of adventurers seeking artifacts from fairytales has mild possibilities but is given zero conviction by anybody involved. A sub-Indiana Jones adventure that was made as a tv pilot
The Penny Dreadful Picture Show (2013)
Not to be confused with the recent tv series Penny Dreadful, this is another in the recent spate of multi-director horror anthologies – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S films etc. Directed with a retro vibe, the episodes are expectedly uneven but better than might be expected from the hands involved
Zhongkui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (2015)
Lush, visually extravagant Chinese-made Wu Xia film, shot with an epic widescreen eye that looks amazing. It falls down somewhat when the two leads become replaced by CGI and only look like the avatars from a videogame
Hidden (2015)
A film from Duffer Brothers creators of tv’s Stranger Things. This is a fallout shelter drama where the Duffers create a strong paranoid mood but kill the film with a ridiculous twist ending
Yoga Hosers (2016)
Kevin Smith’s follow-up to Tusk slides off the cliff somewhere between Johnny Depp’s incredibly silly performance, a nemesis you can’t take seriously and what largely becomes a vanity exercise in nepotism – Smith and Depp creating a vehicle to highlight their daughters
Muck (2015)
Group of friends are attacked by a horde of albinoid creatures – this is the whole of the film with no more explanations that that. The self-absorbed characters and the director’s obsession with including undressed girls at every opportunity gets in the way of developing what could have been a decent film
Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014)
Lizzie Borden is one of the more fascinating figures in True Crime. This is very accurate to the details of the case; alas it gets the most sensational aspect over soon in and bogs down in the minutiae of the trial
Hellraiser: Deader (2005)
Seventh and worst of the Hellraiser films. Clive Barker had departed three films ago and the copyright taken by a company that specialises in cheap sequels. This blurs reality and illusion so much it makes no sense
Schramm (1993)
Jörg Buttgereit made the notorious NEKRomantik films and is a director about an uncompromising and determined to outrage as possible. This inevitably falls in the shadow of NEKRomantik but is a grim and disturbing in its own right in its kitchen sink depiction of the life of a serial killer
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
I really enjoyed Illumination Entertainment’s debut film Despicable Me but thereafter they just seemed to slip into formula and following what every other animation studio is. Despite low initial enthusiasm, they regain their form here, doing nothing radically out of the ordinary but producing a modestly engaging work
Nerve (2016)
This is like an online version of 13 Sins about an internet site that pushes people to take increasingly more outrageous and eventually deadly dares. One of the new thrillers centred around social media that seeks to adopt its visual look, this is slickly polished and aimed direct to the teenage demographic
Doctor Strange (2016)
Scott Derrickson acquits himself well taking on one of Marvel’s magician superhero. He replicates well the psychedelic esoterica that gained the comic book a cult following and Benedict Cumberbatch anchors the show perfectly
Justice League: Gods and Monsters (2015)
An alternate world take on DC Comics characters, who are much more morally ambiguous – Superman is General Zod’s son and Batman’s role is taken by Man-Bat and is an actual vampire
My World Dies Screaming (1958)
One of the first films to copy William Castle’s gimmick and filmed in Psychorama wherein frightening images and words were subliminally projected on the screen. The plot where a newlywed wife has a recurrent dream of a sinister house only for it to be the one they move into has a disappointingly mundane rationale
The Bat (1926)
The first of the screen’s Old Dark House thrillers set around large mansions with the cast stalked by a masked killer. None of this prepares you for the utterly sensational visuals of this film, which leap off the screen with vivid effect
The Leech Woman (1960)
Disappointingly not a work about human-animal hybrids but about a woman who obtains a rejuvenation serum but finds it requires devouring male pineal glands. This comes with much amusingly dated sexism
Poignant (2016)
This is one of a plethora of hard-to-differentiate apart ghost stories that have littered the dvd shelves in recent years, frequently copying Insidious in appropriating a sinister-seeming adjective as title. There is not a single directorial or musical cue, sound effect or line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a cliche