Penguins of Madagascar (2014)
This spinoff from the Madagascar films is a lot more fun that I was anticipating – how could you dislike a film with John Malkovich as an octopus super-villain? Essentially cast as a spy parody, the film has a gonzo insanity that hits in with a manic delirium
Exists (2014)
Eduardo Sanchez, the co-director of The Blair Witch Project, makes a Found Footage Bigfoot film. He makes a solid entry but not one substantially different to the last 238 Found Footage films
The Demons (1972)
Jess Franco rips off Ken Russell’s The Devils, although surely only Franco could take a story about nuns being tortured and witches burned at the stake and turn it into a work of softcore erotica
Tooth and Nail (2007)
Modest post-holocaust film that tries to do something different to the usual action derbies of Mad Max 2 et al, focusing on the survival efforts of a group of young people
Apartment 1303 (2007)
Another J-horror on the bandwagon created by the Ring and Ju-on/The Grudge films. Some promisingly initial scares traipse off into a dull mystery about investigating the past
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
Hard to Be a God (2013)
A modern cinematic masterpiece? A plotless three-hour work that rubs our face in the squalour of the Middle Ages while feeling like people crowded into a narrow room all trying to do cryptic things at cross-purpose
Home (2015)
An animated alien visitor film that is more likeable than anything suggests – it has a bubbly, juvenile pitch but generates a good deal of humour out of the alien fish of water amid human culture routines
At the Devil’s Door (2014)
The second film from The Pact director Nicholas McCarthy. What is happening is kept deliberately vague and elliptical – as you are trying to piece everything together, McCarthy manages to pull some incredibly eerie jolts
Time of the Wolf (2003)
Michael Haneke has risen to great acclaim in recent years; this is one of his earlier works – a slow Tarkovsky-esque work that seems set in a future that is collapsing at the edges. Haneke is a fascinating talent but this is a bit too vague and well free of anything actually happening for me
Baghead (2008)
The second film from The Duplass Brothers, Mark and Jay. Though labelled a slasher parody, it is more of an improvisational comedy that uses the set-up of a backwoods slasher film without much interest in horror
The Time of Their Lives (1946)
An Abbott and Costello comedy. Not one of their monster bashes but a variant on the light comedy that had been popular in the last decade with Lou as an 18th Century ghost haunting Bud Abbott in the present. Can’t say I am a big fan of their humour, most of the slapstick that seems dated today
Boy Eats Girl (2005)
One of wittiest titles of the 2000s zombie revival fad – the suggestion of a high school love story gone really wrong. This actual film is a surprisingly ordinary and unexceptional effort
Hider in the House (1989)
A psycho film with an original premise – Gary Busey as a psycho who builds a hidey-hole in the attic of a house where he spies on and tries to manipulate the lives of the family living there
Song of the Sea (2014)
An Oscar nominees for Best Animated Film – a unique and exquisitely drawn dive into Celtic mythology that comes with wit, humour and the emotional tenderness of a Hayao Miyazaki. This deserves to be seen far more widely than it ended up being
Curtains (1983)
Slasher film that is more like an Agatha Christie whodunnit, this comes with an appealing level of meta-fictionality. Mostly, it is an actor’s film and has been set-up to allow its name cast to do amazing things
Fractured (2013)
Film about an amnesiac man trying to piece his disturbing past together amid a series of surreal nightmares. This ends up not nearly as interesting as you feel it could have been
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
Classic from the heyday of the slasher film. While the plot only recycles Friday the 13th, everything else is above average from the characterisations to the novelty deaths, before the film reaches one of the great unforgettable endings of the cycle
Lurking Fear (1994)
Charles and Albert Band had a success with the H.P. Lovecraft adapted Re-Animator; their attempt to replicate that with another Lovecraft story is lacking Stuart Gordon’s splattery black humour
See No Evil 2 (2014)
The Soska Sisters make a sequel to the 2006 slasher film. You cannot help but think that a sequel to such an average film is the sisters batting well below their capabilities. The surprise is that in their hands the result follows such traditional genre patterns
The Secret of Kells (2009)
Beautifully made animated film that won surprise recognition at the Academy Awards. More a festival film than necessarily a box-office one
Miss Meadows (2014)
There is an irresistible appeal to this film – Katie Holmes as a perfect, sweetly smiling Miss Manners dressed in Sunday Best who, in between correcting people’s manners and punctuation, is also a gun-toting vigilante in the best tradition of Charles Bronson
Insurgent (2015)
Divergent, the first entry in this Young Adult dystopian series, a poor man’s Hunger Games, failed the “I can’t hold any suspension of disbelief” test. This offers more of the same, plus lots of random effects sequences
Queen Kong (1976)
A spectacularly terrible film. Designed to exploit the 1976 remake, this offers up a sex-reversed parody of King Kong – only the Kong producers didn’t see that way and sued to stop the film being released. Robin Askwith, the star of the softcore Confessions films, engages in a romance with a female Kong amid excruciating puns
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1956)
Largely overlooked, this is the first version of the story in colour and has a lavishness that the previous versions lacked. On the minus side, Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo is no more than a simpleton lacking in pathos
Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)
Remake of George Romero’s seminal zombie classic. The 3D is no more than a gimmick, while elsewhere they are some radical changes – a white Ben, a lame explanation for the zombies, some far-too-cute in-jokes – that fails to match the effectiveness of the original
Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981)
One of the original Video Nasties. In all rather regards, this is a fairly scuzzy looking grindhouse psycho film. Nothing terribly interesting to the show, although it does eventually offer a couple of gory killings, which is what got the censors upset during the day
The Canal (2014)
Ghost story that does an effective job of generating dread and eerieness while also existing in a place that leaves you unsure whether it is all not just occurring inside the lead character’s fraying sanity
The Machine (2013)
A fascinating and well told work about artificial intelligence and mind upload. If the third act falls into disappointingly cliched patterns, this is nearly three-quarters of a strong and intelligent science-fiction film
Cinderella (2015)
Live-action remake of the Disney animated film. This varies little from the well-worn elements of the story to the point of over-familiarity but director Kenneth Branagh manages a lush and beautifully staged effort
The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (2015)
Fourth entry in the eminently forgettable sword-and-sorcery series, this heads down into bad movie stakes by writing a series of grating quips over everything, while the action scenes exist in the realm of unbelievability that show that nobody is treating anything with the slightest seriousness
Mosquito (1995)
A ridiculously stupid giant bug film, albeit not unentertainingly so. This is a monster movie that has been premised solely on the provision of ridiculous creature effects every few minutes and very little else that one can take seriously beyond that
Stuck (2007)
Stuart Gordon, the cult director of Re-Animator, makes a film based on a bizarre true incident where a woman ran a homeless man down and drove home with him still impacted through the windshield of her car
The Final Terror (1983)
From the heyday of the slasher film, this seems to be trying to conduct a slasher version of Deliverance. Largely forgotten today and unremarkable but for an amazing cast of before-they-were-famous faces
7500 (2014)
Takashi Shimizu has done commendable work on the Ju-on/The Grudge films and so I anticipated his taking on the airplane-board horror genre. Only he delivers a surprisingly middle-of-the-road handling before reaching a cliched twist ending that truly deserves to be put out to pasture
Crimes of the Future (1970)
The second film from David Cronenberg. Despite the SF title, this is more a work of arthouse surrealism where Cronenberg spends the film documenting strange behaviours in an hilarious deadpan tone that mimics a scientific paper
Chappie (2015)
Neill Blomkamp’s film about A.I. turns into Short Circuit dropped into the militarised future of RoboCop. Of all the rich possibilities in the idea, all we get is a goofy comedy with a pimped-out carjacking robot
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
The Slumber Party Massacre was an mundane and unmemorable slasher entry; this is a nonsensical sequel that tries to turn it into a copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Contains some of the bizarrely ridiculous scenes to ever take part in any slasher film of the era
The Alchemist (1983)
One of the earliest films from Charles Band. In the years following, Band went onto produce and occasionally direct a great many often enterprisingly cheap low-budget genre films – this is not one of them
Hard to Be a God (1989)
Adaptation of the Strugatski Brothers’ book about human observers becoming involved in the affairs of a barbarous alien society. Essentially a Star Trek Prime Directive story, the Strugatskis didn’t much like this version
Lurkers (1987)
A painfully dull and uneventful Roberta Findlay film where almost nothing happens. The film is almost redeemed by an effective twist ending ripped off from The Sentinel
Mindscape (2013)
It would be safe to say that without Inception there would be no Mindscape, which involves people entering memories rather than dreams but is similar in many other ways. Where this fails is in having no interest in the sf potential of the idea beyond using it as springboard for a thriller plot
The BFG (1989)
Animated version of the Roald Dahl tale about the friendship between a young girl and a Big Griendly Giant, this is simply made but has an appealing mix of eccentricity and sweet charms
The Lazarus Effect (2015)
The experiment to bring someone back from the dead has been trod many times before and this Blumhouse production only rehashes it in tired and unimaginative ways
The Turkish Star Wars (1982)
A strong contender for Worst Film Ever. Rather than create any effects, it has simply uplifted footage from Star Wars, while the score is a mismash taken from popular films of the era. The dialogue is so bizarrely surreal it makes the brain hurt trying to understand it
One of Our Spies is Missing (1966)
The third cinematically released film repackaged from episodes of the cultish 1960s spy tv series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Despite a scattershot plot that doglegs all over the place, the film is made with a wonderfully droll sense of humour that makes it undeniably appealing
See No Evil (2006)
Modern slasher film where the sole note of distinction is the wrestler known as Kane cast as the hulking killer. Outside of a moderate level of brutality in the despatches, there is little here that stands out from the genre’s cliches in any way
Shadow Puppets (2007)
A conceptual puzzle film – people wake up in a facility with no memory of who they are – reminiscent of Cube with the smoke monsters from Lost thrown in. Unfortunately, this is too low-budget to create much mystery and the big reveal is not a terribly interesting one
Revelation Road: The Beginning of the End (2013)
One of a number of faith-produced films we have had since the late 90s that concern themselves with the arrival of The Rapture – this one even spawned a trilogy. This is passable if you can palate the relatively light sermonising and at least better written that the Left Behind films
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015)
Why we needed a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine is a big question. Essentially, Back to the Future Part II meets The Hangover, all this does is wind the original’s amiable coarseness up by a factor of ten
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
This rescues the spy film from the silliness of Austin Powers. The film’s sly mocking of its Englishness, with Colin Firth going into action as an impeccably mannered gentleman, along with explosive action sequences is irresistible
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013)
A documentary about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki that offers fascinating insight into the working processes of the amazingly genteel, often frank Miyazaki who seems a fount of youthful vigour
The Dark Backward (1991)
A really strange comedy with Judd Nelson as a socially inept man who tries to make it as a stand-up comedy act after growing a third arm out of his back. Audiences scratched their heads and the film bombed
Passengers (2008)
Well-cast, nicely made film that seems to be setting out as a supernatural variant on Fearless, which had Jeff Bridges as a reinvigorated plane crash survivor, only to fall apart in a groan-worthy twist ending that has become tediously overused in recent years
The Black Castle (1952)
A luridly entertaining effort starring Boris Karloff as a mad 19th Century aristocrat. This sits halfway between being a B-budget historical drama and a horror film
Honeymoon (2014)
A newlywed couple head to a cabin in the woods for their honeymoon. This seems to be a traditional backwoods horror but instead travels into an increasingly unnerving and way out territory
Atlas Shrugged III: Who is John Galt? (2014)
The third of the trilogy of films adapted from Ayn Rand’s absurd fantasy wherein the leaders of the business world decide to go on strike because they don’t feel appreciated enough
What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Hands down, this is the best vampire comedy ever made. An incredibly witty effort that contrasts the cliches of the genre with the mundane business of a group of vampires flatting together in New Zealand. A film that comes with sly deadpan gags packed into the corner of every frame
Goodbye World (2013)
Another End of the World film concerning the collapse of society as a group of friends gather. Feels more like a variant on The Big Chill than a film about the end of everything but is not without its moments
The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969)
The fifth and final of the Fu Manchu films with Christopher Lee as the super-villain Fu Manchu. The last two were made by exploitation director Jess Franco and only worth watching for Lee’s icily autocratic presence
Vampire (1979)
A vampire movie from the creators of Hill Street Blues, the greatest tv cop show ever made??? The mind boggles as to the possibilities and wonder what amazing creative possibilities they could put on it – alas, the show only ends up staying with the tried and true
Android Insurrection (2012)
A painfully cheap film that feels like an amateur effort that was accidentally given a dvd release. Essentially Resident Evil but with killer robots instead of zombies, this shouts its impoverishment from every scene
Wer (2013)
From the director of The Devil Inside comes a werewolf film that wants to convince us it might not be a werewolf and a Found Footage film that is only pretending to be a Found Footage film. The result is a crappily photographed film that takes a long time to ever unleash its werewolf
Seventh Son (2014)
An object lessons in how not to adapt a Young Adult series – take a book series about an apprentice witch hunter set in an alternate England and turn it a generic Lord of the Rings copy
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
The Wachowskis set out to make a space opera adventure in the Star Wars vein. As always, the elevate every genre they take on and the film is packed with astonishing action sequences and wild, mind-expanding ideas
Strange Magic (2015)
George Lucas’s venture into animation was critically pilloried. It’s not bad, just no different from a formula film like Rise of the Guardians or Epic. From the man who made Star Wars, you had higher expectations
When Good Ghouls Go Bad (2001)
Halloween film for children from the pen of horror author R.L. Stine of Goosebumps fame. The children’s horror story (and tv movie) is filled with many insipid and formulaic entries but this is a decent one that is not unafraid to scare people
Djinn (2013)
Tobe Hooper’s career since 1990 felt like a slide down into talentless amateurism. In his last film, Hooper tries to create an Islamic horror film, shooting and casting in the Middle East but slips into hackwork
The Incredible Petrified World (1960)
Jerry Warren;’ films rank alongside Edward D. Wood Jr in their cheapness, complete lack of directorial style and agonising dullness. This is a lost world adventure that mostly consists of people sitting around in a cave
Last Cannibal World (1977)
The Italian cannibal film is the most extreme genre ever seen. An earlier effort from the director of Cannibal Holocaust, this delivers the gut-munching goods
Predestination (2014)
An exceptional time travel film, one of the best to emerge in some time. Adapted from a classic Robert Heinlein story, the pleasure of the film all comes in seeing its twists and turns come together into the most ingenious temporal paradox ever conceived
Project Almanac (2015)
A zero expectation film that turns out to be surprisingly good. Falling somewhere between Primer and Chronicle, this does a reasonable job of showing its time travel device in action and the unintended consequences
Curse of the Undead (1959)
The world’s first vampire Western featuring a vampire gunslinger. Today it’d be called Cowboys vs Vampires but such casual genre cross-hatching didn’t exist back then and it astride two genres with not uninteresting results
Sound of Horror (1965)
There have been great films about unseen threats before (Cat People, The Haunting) but in this case the idea of an invisible monster is just the excuse for a cheap film to avoid any special effects. It has been a long time since I have seen a film so mind-numbingly boring and dull
A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990)
Despite one of the great exploitation titles of all time, this bikini clad babes vs dinosaurs after the apocalypse effort lacks the cheerful cynicism of other Troma films and is just cheap, dull and unwatchable on almost every level
11: 11 (2004)
This Canadian film is a mishmash of hauntings, psychic powers, ghost hunters, possibly imaginary friends and End of the World prophecies that fails to make the slightest sense
Unknown World (1951)
Overlooked 1950s journey to the centre of the earth film that transcends its B-budget with an often uniquely melancholic poetry
Mutant Girls Squad (2010)
The gonzo Japanese splatter film is one of the insanely demented corners of genre cinema today. This is a prime example, filled with mind-bogglingly perverse anatomical rearrangements and attachments, the screen is awash with blood and everything directed with a mad cartoonish energy
The Boy Next Door (2015)
A cougar version of Fatal Attraction with Jennifer Lopez stalked by a teenage boy. On every level this invites ridicule, from J-Lo sleepwalking through her performance to a director who has never made a good film to a script detached from human psychology
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)
The third entry in a franchise that seems to be stretching to find anything to do with its premise beyond the first film. Everyone involved seems to have only turned up to collect a paycheque and be going through the motions in a show that entirely coasts by solely on your familiarity with the characters
The Astro-Zombies (1968)
A real Grade Z film. A mind-boggling stew involving John Carradine conducting mad science experiments, technical gaffes aplenty, spy capers featuring Tura Satana and even M.A.S.H.‘s Wayne Rogers on script
Luster (2010)
British director Adam Mason has been a rising name of note in recent years. Here he makes a Jekyll and Hyde story with Andrew Howard as a mild-mannered man at war with his own evil half
Heavy Traffic (1973)
The second film from animator Ralph Bakshi, follow-up to Fritz the Cat. As opposed to Fritz‘s surreal trippiness, this is more down-to-earth and sees Bakshi conducting a loose, bawdy trip through his own childhood in Brooklyn
Delete (2013)
The return of the talented Steve Barron after a decade’s absence in a film that was shot in my own backyard (literally). Disappointingly, all we get is a work that unimaginatively rehashes cliches about amok A.I.s
Jesus and Her Gospel of Yes (2004)
A mind-boggling surrealist retelling of the life of Jesus (where the role has been cast with a woman). Crammed with strange imagery and symbolism. Very off the beaten track
Invader (1992)
A completely ridiculous film that throws in an incomprehensible mix of an amok A.I.’s that takes over a stealth plane, UFOs, mind control and military conspiracy and proves badly made on every single count
International House (1933)
W.C. Fields starring screwball comedy set at a hotel around a series of variety sketches and featuring an early prediction of television
Tusk (2014)
Really, Kevin Smith?!? A film wherein a mad lunatic transforms another man into a walrus? While you can applaud Smith’s completely out there leap off into Human Centipede territory, you feel unsure whether you should be reacting in shock or laughter at the absurdity of the premise
Infra Man (1976)
A deranged madcap film produced by the Shaw Brothers featuring an enhanced superhero fighting off a bizarre menagerie of monsters commanded by an alien princess
The Invisible Ghost (1941)
A low-budget cheapie starring Bela Lugosi as a widower who goes into a trance and starts killing women after having visions of his late wife’s ghost
Beauty and the Beast (2014)
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
Paddington (2014)
From the awful slapstick-heavy trailer, the prospects for this seem dismal – less Paddington Bear than a reprise of the live-action Yogi Bear. The finished result confounds expectation and the story of a small unassuming bear at large in the world comes full of considerable charm
Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (2010)
The first sequel to The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and marginally a better film. This is less sparing with the cheap effects, while in every other regard it plants tongue-in-cheek and tries to make a virtue out of the sheer ridiculousness of the action
Dark Space (2013)
A low budget indie film about a spaceship crashlanded on an alien planet that is no more than a glorified fan film that features a level of effects that are extremely well accomplished
The Fades (2011)
An underrated mini-series – sort of the anti-Supernatural. This creates a highly original afterlife mythology and some great characters arcs, while overspilling with wry nerdish in-humour
Neverlake (2013)
Italian-made film centred around a haunted lake that sits just between earnest amateurism and promising ambition. Features a range of mysterious happenings that you leave you for some time wondering what is going on before these are pulled together in a surprise ending
The Spy With My Face (1965)
The second of the feature films repackaged from the tv series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one of the better copies of the James Bond spy fad of the 1960s. Despite the low conceptual horizons of a tv episode, this plays itself with a splendidly droll tongue-in-cheek panache
Dead Snow 2 (2014)
The Nazi zombies from Norway are back in a better film than the first that is far more polished, the black humour more outrageous and the splatter effects are at the top of their game
In Fear (2013)
English variation on the Backwoods Brutality film that almost entirely takes place inside a car as a couple become lost and are taunted by unseen figures. This generates an incredible degree of ominous foreboding
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