Bitter Feast (2010)
An appealingly nasty little film where a celebrity chef imprisons and tortures a scathing food critic. Produced by Larry Fessenden.
Black Adam (2022)
An entry from the abortive attempt to create a DC Comics shared universe. Dwayne Johnson takes on the role of the DC’s anti-hero in a film that is far more fun than the recent Marvel offerings
Black As Night (2021)
One of the post-Twilight vampire films that have transplanted the basics into different locales – in this, a rundown inner-city New Orleans ghetto neighbourhood
Black Box (2020)
Blumhouse film in which an initial plot about a man suffering amnesia undergoes a twist to become a body theft story
Black Butterfly (2017)
Antonio Banderas is a writer with a block, Jonathan Rhys Meyers a sinister stranger who moves in. Lots of tense psychological games between the two begin only for the film to almost immediately blow the premise
Black Christmas (1974)
Many argue that this is the original slasher film – and it does the whole formula a good deal better than many of those that came along a few years later, having some wry characterisations and a sardonic sense of humour
Black Christmas (2006)
Another in the mid-2000s fad for 1970s remakes. This revives what has been cited as the first slasher film but throws most of the original out and turns the rest into a gore-drenched slasher film
Black Christmas (2019)
A remake of the work that has been cited as the first slasher film. This is less a horror film than a horror film that has been hijacked by a political agenda, delivered with a relentlessly loud and damning misandrist tone
Black Circle Boys (1997)
Modest and effective portrait of troubled youth as a teen is drawn into a group who have sworn allegiance to Satan. The film is driven by an intense compelling performance from Eric Mabius as the group’s leader
Black Death (2010)
Powerful film from Christopher Smith set during the Middle Ages about a group on a journey to a village where a priestess can purportedly raise the dead. The film’s skewering of faith in an unforgettable ending is stunning
Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984)
Watchers of bad films rejoice – this comes as close to total amatuerism as possible. None of this prepares you for the sheer dementia of the saga of an evil doll that inspires a good church-going woman to become a sex addict
Black Eyed Susan (2024)
From the extraordinary and underrated Scooter McCrae, a dark and very disturbing film about the development of a sex robot for men who like to beat and abuse women
Black Friday (1940)
A peculiar mixture of 1940s mad scientist and gangster film in which Boris Karloff transplants a mob boss’s brain into the body of a mild-mannered English professor
Black Friday (2021)
A horror comedy that goes the next logical step and turns Black Friday shoppers into a zombified horde. With Bruce Campbell as a store worker who steps into the fray
Black Glasses (2022)
Dario Argento makes a highly anticipated return to the director’s chair after a decade’s silence, once again revisiting the giallo film, but the results are a major letdown
Black Hollow Cage (2017)
Cryptic Spanish film that eventually coalesces into a unique time travel story, like a more enigmatic version of Timecrimes as we watch pieces of a beautifully wrought temporal jigsaw puzzle slot into place
Black Knight (2001)
An uncredited adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Martin Lawrence as a hip modern African-American man thrown back to Mediaeval times
Black Magic Woman (1991)
Essentially Fatal Attraction with voodoo in which Mark Hamill engages in an affair with Apollonia and breaks it off only to find a voodoo curse has been placed on him
Black Mask (1996)
A Jet Li vehicle that falls into the masked superhero genre where the show has taken a few leaves from the tv series The Green Hornet. Enjoyable fun with some exhilarating action sequences
Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2002)
Tsui Hark takes over the directorial reins of the sequel, filling it with much more fantastical elements, pitting the hero against a mad scientist and his mutant creations in a series of wild martial arts scenes
Black Moon (1975)
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
Black Moon Rising (1986)
Made from an old John Carpenter script, this is a reasonable action film starring Tommy Lee Jones as a professional thief who is tasked with stealing a hi-tech car
Black Mountain Side (2014)
Another copy of The Thing where a team of archaeologists in the frozen north unearth an object being 20,000 years old from a barrow that proceed to affect the team and cause mass insanity
Black Noise (2023)
A team of mercenaries arrive on an island on a retrieval mission only to find everybody has been turned to dust and a mysterious piercing noise that causes them to hallucinate
Black Noon (1971)
Classic tv movie that is one of the earliest horror/Westerns hybrids where Roy Thinnes plays a preacher who ends up in town only to find he cannot leave amid mysterious goings-on
Black Orpheus (1959)
An extraordinary film that offers a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, relocating it amid the Rio Carnival with striking and colourful results
Black Panther (2018)
The most successful Marvel Comics adaptation of all-time up to that point. Enjoyable if I fall short of calling it the best Marvel film ever and its receiving a nomination for a Best Picture Academy Award
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
The MCU’s sequel to Black Panther. This offers the peculiarity of a work in which the superhero of the title never actually appears and is instead set around his absence following the death of Chadwick Boseman
Black Phone 2 (2025)
Scott Derrickson makes a sequel to his earlier hit The Black Phone. The original was a modest but self-contained story, whereas this has to do some work before coming out as an original and effective follow-up
Black Rainbow (1989)
Enormously underrated film from Mike Hodges with Rosanna Arquette as a fake medium whose abilities start to become real. The quality of writing and Arquette’s performance is exceptional
Black River (2001)
Modest and quite effective Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Jay Mohr is trapped in a small town run by an A.I. that does everything it can to prevent him from leaving
Black Road (2016)
Near future set science-fiction noir as a cyborg-enhanced hero is drawn in to conduct an investigation on behalf of a morally ambiguous femme fatale. Despite a reasonable effort made, this is a little too low key
Black Rock (2012)
Wilderness survival horror in the same vein as Deliverance but with a Chick Flick spin. This starts promisingly but director/star Katie Aselton fails to push the survival scenes for anything dramatic
Black Sabbath (1963)
The great Mario Bava directs a horror anthology of three tales, delivering each with considerable spooky atmosphere. The standout among these is The Wurdulak with Boris Karloff as a vampire preying on his family.
Black Scorpion (1995)
Following Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn as Cat Woman in Batman Returns, this was a copycat from Roger Corman in which Joan Severance becomes a black vinyl clad superheroine exacting justice
Black Scorpion: Ground Zero (1996)
The second of the low-budget Roger Corman produced films made for cable featuring Joan Severance as a black vinyl-clad masked superheroine
Black Sheep (2006)
An enthusiastically gore-drenched New Zealand comedy about mutant sheep, this favourably harkens back to the heyday of Peter Jackson’s early splatter films
Black Site (2018)
Quite a decent little low-budget film about a top secret government agency set up to despatch Lovecraftian Elder Gods.
Black Sunday (1960)
Classic work that defined the Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s and turned Barbara Steele into a cult actress. Mario Bava shoots is vivid, incredibly atmospheric black-and-white
Black Swan (2010)
Award-winning Darren Aronofsky film about the rivalry between two ballerinas. At heart though, this is no more than a Brian De Palma psycho-thriller with pretensions
Black Thunder (1998)
Low-budget action film that blatantly rehshes the plot of Firefox with Michael Dudikoff as a pilot recruited to go into enemy territory and steal back a hi-tech plane
Black Water (2007)
Although overshadowed by the same year’s Rogue, this is another Australian killer crocodile film that racks up a remarkable degree of raw, seat-gouging tension in managing to confine its cast of three to a tree for the duration
Black Water Vampire (2014)
A Found Footage vampire film. This only follows where The Blair Witch Project went before, while the long build-up to the revelation of its creature proves a damp fizzle
Black Water: Abyss (2020)
The Australian-made Black Water was a gripping thriller about three people in a tree being menaced by a crocodile in the water below. This is a sequel with a further group trapped in a cave and menaced by a killer crocodile
Black Widow (1987)
A sharp, sophisticated thriller reminiscent of 1940s film noir with FBI agent Debra Winger tracking Theresa Russell as a femme fatale who marries and kills her husbands
Black Widow (2021)
The first MCU film to emerge since the Great Pause of the pandemic, the question is whether one of the least interesting characters in The Avengers can carry a film all by herself
Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968)
Disney live-action comedy with Peter Ustinov as the ghost of a resurrected pirate who comes to the aid of an ailing collage track team
Blackenstein (1973)
Blacula was a big Blaxploitation hit and was quickly followed by this Blaxploitation take on the Frankenstein film. While others that followed did great things, this only seems a quickie designed to jump aboard the fad
Blackeyes (1989)
TV mini-series from the great Dennis Potter in which the lead character in a smutty novel by an aging writer rebels against her fate. As always with Potter, this blurs fiction, meta-fiction and autobiographical elements
Blackout (2023)
Larry Fessenden is a strong genre force as director, producer and sometimes actor. He has covered most major horror themes in his films. Blackout was his take on the werewolf film
Blackwater Valley Exorcism (2006)
In the aftermath of the huge success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, this was another supposedly true account of an exorcism. Made on a low-budget, this fails to surmount the cliches of The Exorcist
Blacula (1972)
A hit among the Blaxploitation fad of the 1970s, this has the novelty of casting a vampire film with African-American actor William Marshall. A whole series of Blaxploitation takes on horror themes followed.
Blade (1998)
Nobody knew it at the time but this was the beginning of the huge surge of Marvel Comics adaptations on screen in the 00s/10s. This distills the basics of the vampire hunter comic-book down into a smart, kinetic action film
Blade II (2002)
Blade was a solid vampire/action film but the sequel is a quantum leap over that, a visually kinetic and immensely exciting comic-book of a movie thanks to the employment of Guillermo Del Toro in the director’s chair
Blade of the Immortal (2017)
Takashi Miike’s 100th film, the adaptation of a manga about an immortal samurai. Miike bookends the film with awesome sequences with his hero battling hundreds of opponents but the film in between drags
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since been regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense Cyberpunk vision of the future was copied by many subsequent films
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Blade Runner is a landmark classic but this is well worthwhile sequel from Denis Villeneuve that recreates the fascinating Cyberpunk world in more detail and expands out on the themes laid down in the original. Made with impeccably beautiful detail
Blade Trinity (2004)
Third of the Blade films with Wesley Snipes. As director, series screenwriter David S. Goyer emulates the same exhilarating, kinetic moves that Guillermo Del Toro infused the second film with, while the script zings with his wryly cynical dialogue
Blade: The Iron Cross (2020)
A spinoff from Full Moon’s Puppetmaster film series, this stirs killer dolls, mad scientists, psychics and Nazi zombies together in an undeniably entertaining mix
Blades (1989)
Rather witty little Troma release about a killer lawnmower hunting people at a golf course that in its last half becomes an hilarious parody of Jaws
Blair Witch (2016)
The Blair Witch Project was genuinely innovative. It is a surprise that we never saw a string of sequels. Adam Wingard finally does here but at a time when the Found Footage genre feels played out of moves
Blank (2022)
A film about a writer who retreats to a fully automated smarthome in order to complete a novel only to end up imprisoned by a malfunctioning A.I.
Blankman (1994)
One of the original superheroes with no powers comedies, a not particularly funny variant based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. Written by and starring Damon Wayans.
Blast from the Past (1999)
A comedy with the amusing premise where Brendan Fraser is raised in a nuclear fallout shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the present for the first time, mistaking it for a post-apocalyptic world
Blasted (2022)
Norwegian comedy where two friends who were a champion laser tag duo in their teens are now in adult life where they are forced to pair back up to fight off alien invaders
Bleach (2018)
The live-action adaptation of a manga about a teenager who inherits the powers of Soul Reaper and is thrust into a battle against monstrous supernatural entities
Bleading Lady (2010)
Ryan Nicholson makes a slasher film that takes place on a horror movie set where the set driver is a fan of the scream queen star and decides to start eliminating people to start making the film go his way
Bleed (2016)
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
Bleed With Me (2020)
A film where a girl goes to stay with her girl friend at a cabin in the woods but thinks her friend might be drugging her and taking her blood
Bleeding Steel (2017)
Jackie Chan starring action film that reads like an earthbound Star Wars with he up against a villain in black and his army of super-soldiers
Bless the Child (2000)
Reasonable budgeted film that does no more than rehash Devil Child cliches from The Omen – or even more so the basic plot of Servants of Twilight. Chuck Russell throws in lots of CGI effects to little effect
Blind Alley (2011)
This borrows its set-up from Phone Booth with Ana da Armas barricaded into a laundromat from a taunting killer outside. You think that is where everything is going but then the film pulls a left field twist on us
Blind Date (1984)
Thriller where a blind man is given a device that allows him to see sounds and then obtains evidence of a serial killer. Featuring a number of before-they-were-famous names
Blind Obsession (2001)
A unique thriller in which therapist Megan Gallagher becomes obsessed with blind patient Brad Johnson and keeps sneaking into his house, he unaware she is there. The film proceeds to place some fine twists on this
Blindfold: Acts of Obsession (1993)
A Basic Instinct-inspired erotic thriller where Shannen Doherty gets into light bondage and attracts the attentions of a killer. A hypocritical film that is predicated on erotic tease then condemns it as disturbed behaviour
Blindness (2008)
A hugely underrated film that depicts the brutal collapse of society that occurs when the entire world is affected by a plague that causes blindness. Directed in strong and powerful images
Bliss (2019)
This starts out seeming just another drug trip film where artist Dora Madison takes a new drug in search of inspiration. Then things get really deranged. A film where director and lead actress lets all stops out and go for broke with impressive results.
Bliss (2021)
Quite an entertaining film based on the conspiracy theory that we are all living in The Matrix where Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek become wound up in virtual simulation
Blithe Spirit (1945)
An early David Lean film, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play, a drawing room comedy in which a medium conjures a man’s late wife amid much malarkey and mayhem
Blood & Donuts (1995)
Peculiar Canadian-made indie film about the interactions of a vampire and various people at a Toronto donut shop. David Cronenberg is cast as a Mafia head
Blood (2000)
One of the most impressive overhaulings of the vampire theme in recent years in which vampirism is treated as an addiction in which humans become hooked on the vampire’s blood
Blood (2022)
Brad Anderson, director of Session 9 and The Machinist, makes a great horror film with Michelle Monaghan as a mother trying to cope with her son’s sudden taste for blood
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
Blood and Chocolate (2007)
An interesting attempt to do something different with the werewolf film set in the tribal world of werewolves where Agnes Bruckner decides to defy tradition to liaise with a human
Blood and Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (2019)
A fascinating documentary about B movie and exploitation director Al Adamson, covering the frequently hilarious making of his films and the bizarre circumstances of his murder
Blood and Roses (1960)
Roger Vadim conducts a very sofctore adaptation the classic vampire story Carmilla but this seems pallid and bloodless in contrast to the Hammer Films of the same period, not to mention their later adaptations of the same story
Blood Beach (1980)
Rather forgettable film about a monster devouring people from beneath the sands of a beach that at least comes with the benefit of a tongue-in-cheek approach and some amusing characterisations
Blood Diner (1987)
Wonderfully demented and outrageously over-the-top splatter comedy from Jackie Kong that originally started out intended to be a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast
Blood Dolls (1999)
Another of Charles Band’s doll horror films a la the Puppetmaster and Demonic Toys films. Here Band goes totally gonzo and makes one of the strangest films of his entire career
Blood Feast (1963)
This has the notoriety of being the very first ever splatter film and served to turn director Herschell Gordon Lewis into a cult figure. Shoddy and unpolished, you have to admit it goes for broke
Blood Feast (2016)
Blood Feast was the world’s first splatter film. This is a remake with a better budget but suffers a tameness that fails to come anywhere near the go-for-broke rawness of the original
Blood Frenzy (1987)
An 80s psycho film where several people go camping in the Mojave Desert on an encounter group but one of their number proves to be a killer
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)
Hammer Films adapt Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars about a revived mummy queen. A troubled production that ended up being one of Hammer’s never-quite-rans
Blood Glacier (2013)
Austrian-made film about people being attacked by mutant creatures on a mountainside. This has the cheesily absurd feel of a 1980s B movie and has some fun producing creature effects
Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lampreys (2014)
From The Asylum, the same company behind Sharknado. The major surprise is that this is a monster movie that doesn’t place tongue-in-cheek and aim as absurdly as possible. Average in all regards
Blood of Dracula (1957)
Producer Herman Cohen had great success with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. Here he makes a teenage vampire film where a troubled teen is hypnotically regressed into becoming a vampire
Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)
One of the films from Z-budget director Al Adamson, who should be a rival for Edward D. Wood Jr in the bad movies stakes. This resurrects Count Dracula in the present-day, living in a castle in the California desert
Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972)
Film from Z-budget director Al Adamson that has been slung together from odds and ends of other unfinished films in a laughable ramshackle structure where what starts as a diamond robbery film turns into mad scientist/monster film
Blood of the Vampire (1958)
An obscure effort from the early days of the Anglo-horror cycle. A medical vampire effort and a Hammer imitator with lavish production values and memorable characters that easily sits up alongside Hammer’s better work
Blood of the Werewolf (2001)
Video-released anthology of short films on the theme of werewolves, offering some different and unusual takes