Terminator Salvation (2009)
The fourth Terminator film is slightly better than you would expect of something directed by the empty-headed McG. There are some undeniably spectacular action sequences, although the film still stands too much in the shadow of what has gone before
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
The sixth Terminator film that boasts the return of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the franchise. After the troughs of Terminator: Genisys, this makes one forget about the last three sequels
Terminus (1987)
Very strange French SF film about a futuristic truck race
Terminus (2015)
Australian SF film about a man’s discovery of an alien artifact that helps regenerate body parts and gives him prophetic dream warnings of a coming nuclear war. An odd little film more than it is necessarily one that keeps you interested or dramatically engaged
Terra Formars (2016)
Takashi Miike delivers a completely madcap film about evolved cockroaches on Mars being fought by astronauts who take doses of mutagenic serum to give them insect-based super-powers
Terra Incognita 1901 (2024)
A very nicely animated French Steampunk film about an expedition aboard a steam airship to explore the secret entrance to an underground world in the Antarctic. A computer animated film all made by one person.
Terrifier (2016)
A variation on the killer clown film that does rack up quite a degree of tension and pushes the material for something edgy. A popular hit that has produced two sequels.
Territories (2010)
An appealingly politicised variant on the Backwoods Brutality film in which two rogue US border guards decide to set up their own home Guantanamo Bay … not Torture Porn but an effectively brutal study on the effect of torture
Terror (1978)
A key work of British exploitation director Norman J. Warren centred a series of supernatural novelty deaths
Terror Beneath the Sea (1966)
Japanese movie made for international sales where a scientist has built a race of amphibian cyborgs to take over the world
Terror Firmer (1999)
Troma film in which Lloyd Kaufman turns his own autobiography into a Troma film where the results emerge as something akin to Ed Wood as remade by John Waters
Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)
1950s B movie about time travel experiments that produce a deadly woman from the future. Nothing standout but Salome Jens has an otherworldly presence as the woman
Terror in the Midnight Sun (1959)
Possibly the dreariest alien invader film ever made. A US film shot in Sweden about an expedition to find a crashed meteorite. An alien monster that looks like a giant shaggy Yeti turns up in the last few minutes.
Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)
Creaky old film that feels like it belongs in the 1940s about a series of murders at a wax museum. It does have a great cast line-up of genre veterans
Terror is a Man (1959)
This has the distinction of being the film that started off the Filipino exploitation industry. A fairly blatant copy of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, it is mostly routine
Terror of Dracula (2012)
An obscure Canadian film that ambitiously attempts to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula on a low-budget. This introduces some elements of the story that other versions ignore and is not uninteresting
Terror of Mechagodzilla (1976)
The fifteenth Godzilla film, the last of the classic series, featuring a return of Mechagodzilla from the previous film. Original director Ishiro Honda returns to the series and reclaims it from the juvenile focus it had taken over the last few films to make the best entry of the 1970s
Terror Train (1980)
One of the better entries among the 1980s slasher film cycle – and even featuring the era’s quintessential heroine Jamie Lee Curtis. Essentially Halloween aboard a train, at which the film does the basics of the genre with perfect competence and undeniably stylish photography
Terror Train (2022)
Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the classics of the original slasher film fad. This is a remake
Terror Train 2 (2022)
Sequel to the remake of the 1980s horror classic, shot back-to-back with its predecessor, this is a better film than the remake was
Terror-Creatures from the Grave (1965)
An entry in the Italian Gothic cycle featuring the great Barbara Steele, This comes with superbly eerie black-and-white mood but proves slow-paced when it comes to its supernatural retribution plot. It even manages to waste Steele in a nothing role.
TerrorVision (1986)
One of the films from Charles Band’s Empire productions about a family facing an alien manifested out of their tv set
Test Pilot Pirx (1979)
Soviet era science-fiction adapted from a work by Stanislaw Lem, the original author of Solaris. This heads into rather fascinating Philip K. Dick territory, becoming a whodunnit as the title hero tries to work out who aboard a space mission is an android saboteur
Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000 (1994)
Charles Band film directed by David DeCoteau, a lame softcore comedy where two guys travel back from a future where sex is outlawed and end up in a girl’s boarding school
Testament (1983)
Part of a cluster of strong strong and powerful depiction of the outbreak of nuclear war that came out in the mid-1980s. This avoids melodrama by staying focused on a family’s attempts to cope
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992)
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009)
Shinya Tsukamoto’s third Tetsuo film is a disappointingly commercial concession that waters down all of the surrealism and wild sexual fetishism that made the first film so amazing
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Extraordinary directorial debut from Japan’s Shinya Tsukamoto, a frenetic, fetishistic and surreally deranged vision of man-machine fusion that feels like David Lynch having gone away and done a crash reading course of William Gibson
Texas Chainsaw (2013)
A Texas Chainsaw sequel in 3D with chainsaws and gore coming out at the screen seems the complete antithesis of the raw savagery of the original. The result is like a formulaic modern slasher, while the film is wrecked by a ridiculous reversal of sympathies in the last half
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
The ninth Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, this offers the intriguing idea of Leatherface vs millennials
Thale (2012)
Fascinating Norwegian film about the discovery of a mysterious girl who it gradually becomes apparent is not human … The first 20 minutes are a superb piece of scene-setting but the rest of the film consists of not much more than people sitting around a cellar waiting for something to happen
Thanatomorphose (2012)
Low-budget film about a girl who starts to find bruises on her body that progress until every part of her body is rotting and falling apart. A minimalist film where everything other than the slow observation of the girl’s physical decay has been stripped away – with incredibly raw effect
Thanksgiving (2023)
Eli Roth’s homage to the slasher film that comes with a dark sense of humour and a series of novelty deaths that rival the best of the 80s slasher heyday
That Eye, The Sky (1994)
A very strange Australian film set in the Outback where Peter Coyote plays an ambiguous stranger who appears to a troubled family claiming to have been sent from God
The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)
The third film about the title criminal mastermind from Fritz Lang. Here Lang returns to a radically different Germany to the one he fled in the 1930s, the West Germany of the Cold War, to deliver a creepily paranoid work about the surveillance society
The 10th Kingdom (2000)
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
The 12 Slays of Christmas (2016)
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
The 13th Warrior (1999)
Michael Crichton was hot as a result of Jurassic Park. Although mostly seen as an historical spectacle, this is an adaptation of his novel that attempts to retell the legend of Beowulf with Vikings against Neanderthals
The 25th Reich (2012)
Time travel, Nazis in UFOs and a Nazi-ruled alternate timeline, giant robot spiders – ok, I’m sold. A surprisingly good little film where the fact that this is also made on a low budget and with a good deal of conceptual constraint makes it all the more creative an effort
The 27th Day (1957)
A classic of 1950s Reds Under the Bed anti-Communist hysteria in which aliens give selected humans capsules capable of obliterating all life, which quickly pits East against West in a race to obtain them. Clearly influenced by The Day the Earth Stood Still, this is better than most
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)
Adaptation of the Jonathan Swift classic about adventures in the lands of big and small people with stop-motion creature effects by Ray Harryhausen
The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock (1959)
The one and only solo outing from Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello fame made after the duo’s split-up and just before Lou’s death. The film is essentially a comedy remake of the previous year’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman in which Lou’s newlywed wife abruptly becomes a giant
The 355 (2022)
Female-led spy/action film that serves everything up in an enjoyably kinetic mix with likeable characters. Not wheel reinventing but more enjoyable than most Hollywood product
The 3rd Floor (2007)
A low-budget ingenue effort by three friends about a tenant who discovers that the third floor of his apartment building contains the ghosts of dead asylum inmates
The Tai Chi Master (1993)
Hong Kong action choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping directs a masterpiece of martial arts cinema, featuring some of the sensational fight sequences ever put on film
The Taint (2010)
Film about a penis-enlarging drug that creates zombies, this goes for an outrageous bad taste vein are rarely lets up
The Tale of Despereaux (2008)
Appealingly old-fashioned film about chivalry and heroism, much quieter than the other animation out there but this still holds its own
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
Studio Ghibli adaptation of a classic Japanese folktale from Hayao Hiyazaki’s mentor Isao Takahata. This is a slower, very different film than Hayao Miyazaki’s, the animation designed like a traditional Japanese woodprint. Never quite soars like Miyazaki’s films do but not without its charms
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
One of the greatest of all fantasy films. A reasonable percentage of you are going to switch off when I use the word ballet but I urge you to bear with me and discover this stunningly cinematic Technicolor epic that uses sets in extraordinary ways that no other film ever has
The Tall Man (2012)
Pascal Laugier returns with this fascinating effort about a small town subject to child abductions by a possible boogieman. A film that is as blatantly manipulative as it is ingenious in its way-out twists and turns where everything we assume is going on at the outset is eventually turned completely on its head
The Tank (2017)
Thriller set around a NASA habitat built for future Mars exploration in the Arctic where the team is torn apart by the isolation and mental instability of team members. There is nothing here that holds you particularly gripped.
The Tank (2023)
A New Zealand-made monster movie where a venture down into an old water tank succeeds in disturbing an amphibian creature
The Tattooist (2007)
Incredibly tepid New Zealand horror film about an American tattooist who unleashes evil forces after he appropriates Samoan cultural tattoos
The Tell-Tale Heart (1960)
Adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story about a guilty murderer haunted by the beating of the victim’s heart. A not uninteresting effort written by Brian Clemens, the creator of tv’s The Avengers that aims for dark psychological mood
The Temp (1993)
A Fatal Attraction copycat in which executive Timothy Hutton finds that seductive temp secretary Lara Flynn Boyle is killing off all rivals at his firm. This has the reputation as a Golden Turkey classic.
The Tempest (1979)
Derek Jarman’s take on Shakespeare’s play filled with weird imagery and staged like a journey through a haunted house where all the players are verging on madness
The Tempest (1998)
A retelling of the Shakespeare play, which had been updated to the midst of the American Civil War with some interesting results
The Tempest (2010)
Version of the Shakespeare play that gives us a female Prospero (Helen Mirren) but is otherwise surprisingly faithful. Director Julie Taymor opens the play up with considerable visual extravagance
The Temptation of Dr Antonio (1962)
Federico Fellini’s episode of the anthology Boccacio 70 in which a giant size Anita Ekberg steps off a billboard to tempt a moralist with lust
The Tenant (1976)
One of Roman Polanski’s least recognised films in which he both directs and plays the lead as a mousy man driven to a state of paranoia and the point he loses his identity by the neighbours in a Parisian apartment building
The Tenderness of the Wolves (1973)
Interesting portrait of a true-life serial killer that was produced under the auspices of Rainer Werner Fassbinder concerning a vampire-like gay killer who operated in Germany during the 1920s. Not without some shock value, this is more arthouse film than it is horror
The Tenth Victim (1965)
Satiric film set in a future where contestants hunt and kill one another on a tv show. The first film on the theme of human bloodsports later popularised by The Hunger Games and others
The Terminal Man (1974)
Adaptation of a Michael Crichton book about an experimental neurological implant that ends up going amok. This adopts the blinding white-on-white look that has chilling effect in the early hospital sections but stifles the drama when it is extended to the real world too
The Terminator (1984)
One of the 2-3 most influential SF films since 1980. James Cameron creates a barrelling powerhouse of a film, all lorded over by Arnold Schwarzenegger as the relentless killer machine in the role that defined his career
The Terror (1963)
Roger Corman film legendarily cobbled together on leftover sets and extra shooting time for Boris Karloff. The result emerges surprisingly well despite
The Terror of Dr Hichcock (1962)
Influential if possibly overrated work in the Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s. There’s the haunted figure of Barbara Steele and rich atmosphere, even if the plot doesn’t make much sense
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
The Terrornauts (1967)
SF effort from the UK’s Amicus Films with an ambitious plot about communication from the stars that manages to prefigure films like Contact and 2001. On the other hand, the film fails is in its pitiful and utterly inadequate special effects
The Testament of Dr Cordelier (1959)
Jean Renoir is considered one of the greatest of all film directors – this is his only venture into genre material, a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Though Renoir seems disinterested in making a horror film, he offers up the most faithful interpretation of the story on screen to date
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)
The second of Fritz Lang;s films about the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, which was banned under the Nazi regime and forced Lang to flee the country. Not quite the equal of its predecessor, Lang is still on fine form and makes an exciting crime melodrama
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1962)
Third of the German thrillers of the 1960s featuring the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, a remake of the 1933 film where Mabuse continues his criminal schemes via mind control despite being confined to an asylum
The Testament of Orpheus (1960)
Jean Cocteau’s follow-up to his earlier Orpheus becomes an opportunity where Cocteau makes an autobiographical films, revisiting his own life and works
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one’s nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
A remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic that presaged a host of inferior 70s/80s horror remakes throughout the 2000s/10s. What we have is now a different film although not entirely an uninteresting one
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
The first sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Tobe Hooper returns and pushes the series into an outrageously black sense of humour
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)
Prequel to the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which sets out to tell the origin story of the cannibal family. New director Jonathan Liebesman pushes the gore and sadism to Torture Porn extremes
The Thaw (2009)
Okay borrowing from the set-up of The Thing about an outbreak of flesh-eating prehistoric insects at an Arctic research station
The Theatre Bizarre (2011)
A horror anthology featuring episodes from seven different directors. As with other anthologies, the episodes vary in quality, ranging between the so-so, the mostly quite good and one standout segment
The Thief and the Cobbler (1994)
Legendary animated masterpiece from Richard Williams that was butchered in release. Williams’ animation is visually extraordinary
The Thief Lord (2006)
Children’s film made with care and attention, written and produced to an adult level, far superior to 95% of the US studio efforts
The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
An Arabian Nights adventure that offers up one of the purest blends of fantasy and romance of its era. Filled with stunning directorial set-pieces and magnificent sets and all shot in colour.
The Thief of Baghdad (1961)
Dull remake of the classic Arabian Nights film that casts Steve Reeves and tries to make it into a Hercules peplum adventure
The Thief of Baghdad (1978)
The fourth film version of the Arabian Nights adventure, a tv movie released theatrically in some parts.
The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter at the peak of his career, remaking The Thing from Another World as a wild and phantasmagoric film steeped in paranoia that proved to be the absolute epitome of the era’s fad for air-bladder transformation effects
The Thing (2011)
Though pitched as a prequel, this is essentially a remake of John Carpenter’s classic. Alas, this only finds the same phantasmagoric outlandishness as Carpenter did in a couple of scenes that may be moderately impressive for those who have never seen the original
The Thing from Another World (1951)
The very first alien invader film of the 1950s. Maybe or maybe not directed by Howard Hawks, this has a dramatic urgency and tight tension that makes it stand head and shoulders above most of the films that came after
The Thing with Two Heads (1972)
Ray Milland is a dying white racist millionaire who has hit head transplanted onto the shoulders of a Black man. A film that sees the absurdities of its premise and plants tongue in cheek.
The Thinning (2016)
Another variant on the Young Adult dystopia a la The Hunger Games and Divergent films, concerning a future where that who fail standardised school tests are executed to keep the population down. The blandness of approach utterly feels to grapple with the ideas at play
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 Third Miracle (1999)
Agnieszka Holland film with Ed Harris as a Catholic priest who has lost his faith who is asked defend the authenticity of a supposed miracle
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
A Roland Emmerich produced Virtual Reality film that toys with some ideas that almost make it a great SF film before cliches and a bad twist ending take over
The Thompsons (2012)
The Hamiltons was an unusual film about a strange family who were eventually revealed to be vampires. By the time of this sequel, all the interesting elements of the original have been eliminated and all that we have is a film of tired poses that fails to add anything to the overworked vampire genre
The Thousand Faces of Dunjia (2017)
One welcomes a collaboration between Tsui Hark, the godfather of Hong Kong fantasy cinema, and Yuen Wo Ping, fight choreographer for The Matrix. But the the results are disappointing with Yuen’s talents seeming buried under CGI
The Three Investigators in the Secret of Terror Castle (2009)
The Three Investigators books were an essential part of my youth. This does a fair job of remaining faithful to the stories, albeit with the addition of some grating modernisations, and creates reasonable atmosphere as they investigate a seemingly spooky mansion
The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962)
The Three Stooges join a number of other comics of this era in taking on the space race. Well they only briefly venture into orbit and mostly this can be described more as a slapstick haunted house comedy with alien invaders
The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962)
The Three Stooges travel through time to take on the Italian muscleman film in a never particularly funny comedy
The Thrill Killers (1964)
One of the better films from cult bad movie maker Ray Dennis Steckler dealing with a quartet of mad killers on the loose. The film also came with a promotional gimmick in which the audience is hypnotised
The Throbbit (2015)
An excruciating fan-made parody of The Hobbit films filled with amateur actors delivering performances in ridiculous falsettos. What makes this mind-boggling is its realisation it can’t compete with Peter Jackson on effects, resulting in things like Smaug played by a drag queen
The Tie That Binds (1995)
Usually a scriptwriter, Wesley Strick makes a reasonable directorial debut in this psycho-thriller about a white trash couple killing those in their way to getting back the daughter that was taken away from them
The Tiger’s Tail (2006)
John Boorman makes a film where Brendan Gleeson has his life taken over by a doppelganger