Trans-Atlantic Tunnel (1935)
Early sound era depiction of the attempts to build a tunnel between the UK and USA. The film conjures something of the epic architectural imagination of Metropolis but is crippled by dull, static scenes with characters sitting around talking (a novelty for early sound audiences)
Mockingbird (2014)
Bryan Bertino who made the impressive home invasion thriller The Strangers and this was his follow-up. This was held up so long in release that its originality has been rendered everyday by others milking the Found Footage genre
Hands of a Stranger (1962)
Fourth film version of The Hands of Orlac about a pianist who receives hand transplants from a murderer and believes they are possessing him. Compared to the first two versions, this is dull and prosaic
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
For their seventh Dracula films, Hammer introduced Dracula to the present-day. The result was a wild mishmash where Christopher Lee plays second fiddle to Hammer’s belated attempts to jump aboard the Swinging 60s youth scene
Space Station 76 (2014)
This has an irresistible premise – of doing for 1970s tv SF what GalaxyQuest did for Star Trek – parodying the sets, costumes and cliches. On the other hand, the superb conception fails to ever play out as comedy and the film centres around a series of singularly dull personal dramas
The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014)
A sequel to the 2012 ghost story from the revived Hammer Films, this adds precisely nothing to the original, has nothing to say and nothing in its directorial arsenal that is not a tiresomely over-cliched jump – you just ask, why was this film even made?
Incite Mill (2010)
Hideo Nakata, director of Ring, offers his take on reality tv shows – where contestants are locked up Big Brother-style and encouraged to kill one another. The film comes with much homage to classic murder mysteries
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
Oily Maniac (1976)
Outrageously whacked Hong Kong film that prefigures The Toxic Avenger in having a downtrodden hero jump into a pool of oil and emerge as an avenging superhero made of oil. Crudely made and pitched, the film’s novelty all lies in the bizarreness of its title character
Bellflower (2011)
Unclassifiable film about two fans trying to enact Mad Max fantasies. About the point when this delves down into a seriously disturbed mental space, the results are quite stunning
Sharktopus (2010)
Amid the fad for deliberately absurd killer shark films viz Sharknado, this surely takes the prize for ridiculousness of conception and delivery – a hybrid creature with the head of a shark and the tentacles of an octopus. I defy you not to burst into laughter at some of the scenes (*)
Eden Lake (2008)
Highly effective British variant on the Backwoods Brutality film with an innocent couple being pursued through the woods by a group of murderous children. This gets its teeth into you with gruelling tension and rarely lets up until the end
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
Into the Woods (2014)
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
Salvage (2009)
A modestly effective British variation on the mass insanity outbreak film. The film has one of the best out of the blue openings of any film one has seen in some time and is good at finding a kitchen sink realism, less so when it comes to explanations for what is happening
Le Fear II: Le Sequel (2015)
A rather funny comedy about the making of a disaster-laden low-budget horror film where the filmmaking style depicted makes Ed Wood’s films seem like works of art
Ghost in the Shell: Arise (2013-2014)
Reboot of the Ghost in the Shell series in a quartet of prequel stories. This funnels the essence of Cyberpunk superbly, creating a dazzling world with cyborgised security services fighting terrorists hacking people’s brains
Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013)
A French animated film where a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart goes on a quest for love through a surreal quasi-Steampunk world. With cameos from Georges Melies and Jack the Ripper
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
After two bloated and over-padded Hobbit films, Peter Jackson finally gets it together and produces what everyone was expecting him to deliver, even if it means dragging one battle scene out to last an entire film
The Bell Witch Haunting (2013)
Following Paranormal Activity, The Asylum made a series of Found Footage films with the novelty selling point of claiming the films were taking place on the sites of famous murders or haunted locations
Pandemonium (1982)
The slasher film only really came into existence in 1980 but was so prolifically milked that by even two years later it had spawned its own sub-cycle of parodies. This hits in with a wacky anything goes absurdity but, aside from an amusing Carrie spoof, little of it is funny
Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968)
Not a Frankenstein film but a werewolf film. Spanish actor Paul Naschy debuts his signature role of the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky. Naschy would return to the role nine times, as well as play most of the classic horror characters
Sleeping Dogs (1977)
The cornerstone of the modern New Zealand film industry – the first film of both Sam Neill and Roger Donaldson – a vigorous dystopian action film that offers up a nightmare of sleepy parochial 1970s NZ being brutally overrun by the imagery of totalitarianism
Young Ones (2014)
Not to be confused with the cult British comedy series, the anonymous title disguises an excellent film about a drought-ridden future. Less another Mad Max-inspired film than an SF version of There Will Be Blood that becomes a study in greed, ambition and the fight for resource control
V/H/S Viral (2014)
Third of the V/H/S films, all horror anthologies in the Found Footage style. While the other two were fairly hit and miss, this is extremely good. Each of the four stories sits among the very best episodes among the current crop of multi-director horror anthologies
The Babadook (2014)
A film about childhood boogeymen that takes place as a work of psychological horrors, where everything could be happening in the imagination of a stressed mother’s collapsing mental state. An extraordinarily assured directorial debut
In the Name of the King 3 (2014)
A Uwe Boll film that feels as though he didn’t cared about what he was making. You’d have to go back to the Italian sword-and-sorcery films of the 1980s to find a more shoddy work of epic fantasy
Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989)
This amusingly updates the story of The Phantom of the Opera to have the Phantom lurking in a modern mall. Cheesily entertaining 1980s horror coasting by on the coattails of the massive success of the musical adaptation where the most amusement comes in the gorily over-the-top despatches
The Triangle (2005)
An impressive line-up of genre names came together for this big event mini-series that sets out to offer a conclusive explanation for the Bermuda Triangle in a plot that juggles an entertaining stew of wild ideas involving timewarps, alternate timelines and government cover-ups
Pig Hunt (2008)
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
Child of God (2013)
Actor James Franco directs an adaptation of a novel about a necrophile serial killer by Cormac McCarthy. Any McCarthy adaptation is doomed by an inability to visually replicate his incredible prose but Franco tries valiantly
Jessabelle (2014)
Ghost story from one of the directors of the Saw sequels that settles in with halfway reasonable build-up, before being killed off by an improbable left field twist ending
Horns (2013)
An Alexandra Aja adaptation of a Joe Hill novel that comes with a diabolical glee as Daniel Radcliffe develops a set of devil horns and finds everyone confessing their deepest secrets to him
Sadako 3D (2012)
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
Ice Twisters (2009)
Another formula Syfy Channel disaster movie based around a scientifically improbable meteorological premise. This does at least make the characters work with more of a sparring vigour than usual
Malibu Shark Attack (2009)
Every B killer shark movie of recent years has tried to become as absurd as possible in (a la Sharknado), but this is one that plays itself seriously and generates okay tension in places
Mother Love (1989)
There was undeniable shock value watching 1960s sex symbol Diana Rigg cast as a venomous middle-aged woman with murder on her mind. While this BBC mini-series won awards, you feel that a 1960s Hammer psycho-thriller would have conducted it in half the time
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Hammer’s seventh and final Frankenstein film and the last great film that the studio would make. Everyone is back on top form – Peter Cushing at his icily arrogant best and director Terence Fisher delivering a stirring show
Radio Free Albemuth (2014)
Adaptation of an autobiographical Philip K. Dick book that he wrote in an attempt to make sense of a series of bizarre hallucinations, this long-rumoured film manages, despite a low-budget, to mainline the brain-twisting nature of Dick’s writing better than any other adaptation
Count Dracula (1977)
The most faithful version of Dracula to date. A BBC mini-series that adapts the book as a no-nonsense costume drama and even shoots in the mentioned locations, giving the impression of the story taking place as Bram Stoker visualised it
Brides of Blood (1968)
The first of the Blood Island films, a classic of Filipino exploitation cinema. Although not as polished as later efforts, this serves up all the requisite cheesy monsters, mad scientists and gratuitous toplessness you expect
Husk (2011)
An intent seriousness fails to disguise a ridiculous premise – a haunted cornfield where interlopers are made to sit at a sewing machine to sew burlap masks that turn them into undead scarecrows
Psych 9 (2010)
Thriller with a heroine working in an abandoned hospital amid sinister happenings that draws substantially on the fine Danish film Nightwatch. Does an okay if familiar job making us constantly doubt everything that happens before arriving at an ending that only confuses
Doghouse (2009)
A film about a bunch of boorish lads gleefully eliminating zombie women. A comedy this may well be but doesn’t disguise the fact the film’s sympathies are clearly with the guys making crude innuendos and feeling downtrodden by women
The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Silent film whose greatest footnote is that it was Ingmar Bergman’s favourite film. Has some extraordinary fantastic images, even if these are technically primitive today. Less effective is the modern attempts to view it as a ghost story, when it is more a morality play akin to A Christmas Carol
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
Classic from the heyday of the slasher film, an effort that was clearly designed to exploit another holiday title in the wake of the successes of Halloween and Friday the 13th. This snappily adapts the slasher formula and does better than most of its ilk in serving it back up
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014)
The third The Hunger Games film starts in with a more brooding complexity but with the book being split in two parts, the story feels more thinly drawn and comes to an abrupt end just when it starts to get interesting
Ignition (2001)
An action film set against the backdrop of a new Moon mission where Bill Pullman plays a US marshal assigned to protect judge Lena Olin whose life is under threat
The Horde (2009)
This could be The Raid reconceived as a zombie film (and a few borrowings from Assault on Precinct 13). This never reinvents the basics, just delivers a ferociously entertaining, bared to the bone zombie survival film
Eye of the Cat (1969)
Psycho-thriller where derelict Michael Sarrazin is taken home by Gayle Hunnicutt and gets wound up in a series of games between her and batty aunt Eleanor Parker
Fear Runs Silent (1999)
Backwoods horror that starts well, keeping its menace ambiguous but collapses into a mishmash of pretensions and amateurish symbolism
Fire & Ice (2008)
Unassumingly well-made venture into the epic fantasy genre from Pitof, director of Catwoman. A slim story played with conviction and some particularly good dragon effects
The Last Chase (1981)
Dystopian action film that could have only been made during the late 70s Oil Crisis where Lee Majors defies a totalitarian system where vehicles are banned by setting out in his racing car
Rage of the Yeti (2011)
Typical Syfy Channel monster movie directed by actor David Hewlett. Hewlett seems to be taking little of the film seriously, while the two lead characters are played as strung-out thrill-seeking skateboarders
Storm Warriors (2009)
The Pang Brothers are some of the most exciting genre directors in the world. Here they take on the Wu Xia film and make a sequel to The Storm Riders that feels fuelled by too many viewings of 300
Predator 2 (1990)
Predator was one of the better Alien/Aliens copies of the 1980s. This sequel does little more than serve the same up all over again bar the substitution of a near-future L.A. for the jungle but manages to generate a reasonably intensive ride out of the action
The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (2013)
Intended as a homage to giallo cinema, this strips everything else away until the film exists as only a series of fragmentary images and sensations designs to provoke and tease
Mood Indigo (2013)
After the disastrous misstep of The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry returns to the surreal whimsy of The Science of Sleep. A film where Gondry delights in scene after scene of visual nonsense and serving up all the appealingly capricious silliness he can muster – creativity for creativity’s sake alone
Cannibal (2013)
This Spanish film about a cannibal serial killer is almost exactly the opposite of anything we expect of a horror film – a film of muted silences filled with lurking secrets. A fascinating work
The Borderlands (2013)
The Found Footage horror film quickly became worn out. However, this effort about the investigation into a haunted church in the English countryside manages to generate some quite reasonable atmosphere
Prisoners of the Sun (2013)
The director of Battlefield Earth teams up with Uwe Boll to deliver a sub-Indiana Jones adventure about venturing into an Egyptian pyramid in search of Ancient Astronauts. The tomb raider cliches are so tired and creaky that the film fails to generate any excitement
WΔZ (2007)
Serial killer thriller that eventually emerges as I Spit on Your Grave reimagined as a police procedural. Much effort is made to portray a grim urban environment but little to engage as a thriller, although Selma Blair owns the show as the avenged woman in the latter third
The Guest (2014)
Adam Wingard thriller about a sinister stranger who inveigles his way into a household. This does well playing off the handsomely polished charms of Dan Stevens, less well when it turns into an a left field action film
Serial Mom (1994)
One of John Waters’ more mainstream films with Kathleen Turner as a gleefully murderous housewife
The Book of Life (2014)
An animated film produced by Guillermo Del Toro that draws on his Mexican heritage and Day of the Dead mythology. An amazingly colourful and happy film with one of the most unique design schemes ever
Interstellar (2014)
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
Big Hero 6 (2014)
Disney animation and Marvel Comics come together; Marvel loses and most of the comic-book is tossed out the window and this becomes a simple story about a boy and his robot story before settling into familiar sueprheroics
Colin (2008)
Zombie film made on a shoestring micro-budget from the point-of-view of a young man as he transforms into a zombie. The guerrilla approach results in an amateurism but also a work made with more imagination than you expect
These Final Hours (2013)
Excellent Australian End of the World film. Think On the Beach by way of Last Night. The visions of social collapse are astonishingly raw, while the centre of the film is the emotional journey between a man and a child
Feed the Gods (2014)
A film about a sinister small town with secrets and Bigfoot creatures lurking around in the background. Quite what is going on any more than that is unclear
Spring (2014)
Fascinatingly original monster movie – a wild mix of H.P. Lovecraft, The Man from Earth and Before Sunrise. A beautifully realised work that leaves you with the sense of not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)
A compulsively watchable documentary about the making of the 1996 The Island of Dr Moreau and the bizarre stories of how the personalities and star egos made it into a cinematic train wreck
ABCs of Death 2 (2014)
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
The Sacrament (2013)
Ti West, a rising name in horror in the last few years, makes a film about the activities of a sinister cult. Soon into the film, you realise that he is actually conducting a modern Found Footage retelling of the infamous Jonestown mass suicide of the 1970s
Berkshire County (2014)
Canadian film about a babysitter being stalked by masked home invaders on Halloween night. Capably put together and generates an okay tension but this still seems to be recycling over-familiar genre tropes
Starry Eyes (2014)
Bizarre horror about an actress trying to get her big break in Hollywood that takes all manner of strange turns as she becomes infected and starts physically decaying. More explanation about what is going on would have helped no end but the film still arrives in memorably perverse territory
The Blue Bird (1976)
A ghastly fairytale adaptation. Classic Hollywood director George Cukor took several stars to shoot in the Soviet Union and the results look like a badly choreographed amateur pantomime, lacking in any essential whimsy
Suburban Gothic (2014)
From the director of Excision, another film that satirically digs its claws into middle-class values but there is the feeling we have seen all of this before and the film fails to provide anything funny. Added to this is a barely scary ghost plot the film occasionally remembers to get back to
Ouija (2014)
Blumhouse horror film based around the Parker Brothers boardgame. Modern multiplex horror films don’t come more generic than this. On the other hand, you cannot deny that debuting director Stiles White creates some occasionally quite spooky moments, it’s just that the rest of the show comes entirely by the numbers
Dracula Untold (2014)
Dracula gets an origin story for Universal’s Famous Monsters shared universe. Vlad the Impaler, one of the great tyrants of history, gets rewritten as an honourable warrior and decent family man
Appleseed Alpha (2014)
Shinji Aramaki returns to the Appleseed franchise for a third time with this prequel. Though it abandons the Cyberpunk milieu, Aramaki crafts action scenes with a stunning realism
The Incident (2014)
Fascinating Mexican film in which characters become trapped in the same limited stretch of space. It is striking watching them forced to repeat the same things over and over
Left Behind (2014)
Nicolas Cage stars in a new film based on the best-selling books about the Biblical end of the world. Despite a much bigger budget than the Kirk Cameron version, nothing terribly interesting happens
Arctic Blast (2010)
Another cheap Syfy Channel disaster movie featuring a cold wave that freezes everything in its path. As expected, this ignores basic science while offering cut-price digital mass destruction effects
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Claimedly the world’s first Iranian vampire film. Although not quite the case, this is an attention grabbing pitch. The film has the wonderfully haunted quality of a Nadja while inverting vampiric and Islamic imagery with sensational regard
The Infinite Man (2014)
An enormously clever Australian time travel film about the mind-boggling conundrums that occur when a man tries to go back in time and stop his girlfriend leaving only to encounter multiple versions of himself come to fix the snowballing situation
The BoxTrolls (2014)
From Laika, a stop-motion animated work about misunderstood creatures who wear boxes as shells and are perceived as monsters by polite society. An enormous degree of creativity has gone into this
Teknolust (2002)
Strange film where Tilda Swinton creates three copies of herself
Annabelle (2014)
Someone had the bright idea to make a film centred around the creepy doll that appears in the wraparound scenes of The Conjuring. But without James Wan as director, everything disappears into formulaic scares
Rocks in My Pockets (2014)
Forget about movie melodrama like A Beautiful Mind , this may be one of the best, most credible films about mental illness … Essentially a surreal animated family history of a Latvian animator, this distils some incredibly bleak anecdotal material with a wittily and biting incisive brilliance
Alleluia (2014)
The story of the true-life killers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, most famously adapted into The Honeymoon Killers, gets a retelling from Fabrice du Welz with a modern updating
The Well (2014)
Modest variant on the post-holocaust film with the novel variant being that this is set in a drought-ridden future. The usual action movie emphasis of the genre has been toned down and an emphasis placed on the fight for survival in this world
Jauja (2014)
This starts out seeming like a non-fantastic drama about explorers in 19th Century Argentina. However, the film seems to disregard this and heads towards a bafflingly surreal and undeniably fascinating ending
Bloody Knuckles (2014)
Canadian horror comedy that feels like a warmed-over rehash of Oliver Stone’s The Hand. A film made in wilful bad taste that feels like it came along twenty years too late for the mid-80s heyday of Troma
Housebound (2014)
An NZ-made haunted house comedy that runs through a frenzied array of genre plot devices, a couple of minor jumps and some easy middle-of-the-road laughs leaving you feeling there should have been more to it
The Womb (2014)
The first occasion I have had to review a horror film from Peru – a thriller about a young woman imprisoned and forced to bear a child. This is never a work that particularly reinvents the wheel, just turns out a solid and suspenseful imprisonment thriller
Nuoc 2030 (2014)
The novelty of the world’s first Vietnamese science-fiction film set in a future where many areas are underwater as a result of climate change. Much of this is a very dull film observing the day to day life of people affected but the SF elements intrude in occasionally interesting ways
The Midnight After (2014)
Reminiscent of The Quiet Earth, this concerns a bus of people who end up in a deserted Hong Kong, The film seems unsure whether it is comedy or drama, while it creates an intriguing mystery about what is happening only to leave it unanswered in a frustratingly abrupt ending
Ow (2014)
This begins fantastically well – the appearance of a mysterious alien object that paralyses everybody who looks upon it – only to take a major nosedive in its second act where we promptly realise that the filmmakers didn’t have a clue where to take the story after that
Sharing (2014)
I went to see this on the description that called it a horror film about premonitions of disaster but far less interestingly it is a fictional attempt to analyse people’s attempts to grieve over the Fukushima Disaster – not uninteresting but with little interest in being a fantastic film