Romance Joe (2011)
South Korean film that takes delight in a series of interwoven tales, of stories being told by characters within stories. Has a wilful complexity to it, although the narrative game-playing essentially becomes the film more so than necessarily produces any absorbing individual stories
Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt (2004)
From Paco Plaza, a beautifully made film supposedly based on a true incident featuring Julian Sands as a man placed on trail in 19th Century Spain with the defence that he is a werewolf
Rome 2072 (1983)
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
Rondo and Bob (2020)
A documentary about Rondo Hatton, the 1940s horror actor who suffered acromegaly, and Robert Burns, the eccentric art director from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Room 237: Being An Inquiry Into The Shining in 9 Parts (2012)
Documentary where people offer up various crackpot theories about the hidden meanings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Fascinating in a bizarre freakshow way, an undeniable cult film in the making
Room for Rent (2019)
Modest and well-made film where Lin Shaye has the time of her life as an elderly widow who rents out her room and becomes attached to her tenant in disturbing ways
Rootwood (2018)
A copy of The Blair Witch Project with a trio of filmmakers trekking into the woods with cameras in search of The Wood Devil
Rope (1948)
Alfred Hitchcock conducts an experiment in shooting a film in only eight takes. Based on the true-life Leopold-Lowe case where two gay students murdered a child as an exercise in moral superiority.
Rose Red (2002)
A Stephen King scripted tv mini-series about the investigation into a haunted house. This is not quite a classic in the vein of its model The Haunting but is a solid and effective entry
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Classic film and one of Roman Polanski’s finest works, the comically paranoid story of a housewife who increasingly comes to believe that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by The Devil
Rosemary’s Baby (2014)
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a classic film that popularised the modern interest in occult and deviltry on film; this sad remake is something that only parrots the cliches that have set in in the ensuing 46 years and clumsily mishandles all of Polanski’s comically edgy paranoia
Rosewood Lane (2011)
Victor Salva is one of the genre’s more underrated directors and his films are filled with incredibly eerie jumps. Here Rose McGowan finds her life terrorised by a malevolent paperboy possibly of supernatural origin
Roswell: The Aliens Attack (1999)
Alien invasion film set around the so-called Roswell Incident. Faux science-fiction written by cliche the entire way
Rottweiler (1983)
Straggler in the 1970s Animal Amok genre about a small South Carolina town under attack by killer dogs. This was done better elsewhere by films like The Pack and i>Cujo. Made in short-lived 3D fad so we get dog snouts poking out the screen
Rottweiler (2004)
Brian Yuzna usually makes well worthwhile films but this one about an escaped prisoner hunted by a killer cyborg dog fails to come together
Rough Magic (1995)
Venture into Magical Realism with Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant who undergoes a Mexican ceremony to emerge with real magical powers. Featuring a young Russell Crowe.
Roujin Z (1991)
Katsuhiro Otomo written anime that functions as a parody of the school of Transformer robots as the artificially intelligent hospital bed of a geriatric becomes a giant ramshackle colossus rampaging through the city
Rover Dangerfield (1991)
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield writes, produces and voices the role of a dog in this surprisingly charming and likeable animated film, the best and lest recognised film Dangerfield ever made
Row 19 (2021)
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
Rowing With the Wind (1988)
One of the better of several films depicting the famous meeting between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati that led to her writing Frankenstein. Starring a then unknown Hugh Grant as Byron
Royal Jelly (2021)
Film with a bizarre concept where a teenager girl is recruited into a human beehive
RPG (2013)
A Hunger Games wannabe with elderly people forced to eliminate one another while inhabiting young avatar bodies inside a virtual simulation. It is a long time since I have encountered a film where the fundamental premise makes no sense whatsoever when you look at it logically
Rub Love (1998)
Stylish but not always coherent South Korean near-future thriller about a comic-book artist, a hit woman and an amnesia drug
Rubber (2010)
The best killer car tire film ever – a monster movie spoof wound in so many layers of meta-fiction that it is positively side-splitting. The smartest and funniest monster movie in ages
Rubikon (2022)
Austrian film where three people aboard a space station survive a toxic cloud that obliterates all life on Earth below
Ruby (1977)
The underrated Curtis Harrington makes a quickie possession film about a haunted drive-in theatre. Cast soon after Carrie, the film is headed by a fierily passionate performance from Piper Laurie
Ruby Sparks (2012)
The Little Miss Sunshine directors follow their hit up with a film about a writer who brings his ideal woman to life. Scriptwriter Zoe Kazan sparkles in the title role but the film never pushes its central concept too much beyond being a quirkily sweet indie romance
Rufus (2012)
Not that the title gives you any reason to expect it but this is actually a vampire film, one of the rare entries in a genre that is looking very anemic these days. An original and quite interesting smalltown take that resembles George Romero’s Martin and Let the Right One In
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000)
The second entry in the ultra-annoying animated franchise spun off from the animated tv series that only seems to centre around poo and pee jokes, this is marginally more enjoyable than the first film
Rules of Engagement (1989)
The last gasp of the mid-80s era of nuclear anxieties that brought Threads and The Day After, a tv mini-series about the imposition of martial law in a British city as US-Soviet nuclear war looms in Europe
Rumpelstiltskin (1987)
Another of Cannon Films cheaply made fairytales with Amy Irving starring in an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin
Run Lola Run (1998)
Tom Tykwer’s visually inventive variant on the alternate timelines theme with Franka Potente trying to replay events to save her boyfriend’s life
Run Rabbit Run (2023)
Sarah Snook stars in an Australian ghost story in which her daughter seems to become possessed by the sister who went missing years ago
Run. (2020)
Well constructed thriller where a wheelchair-confined teenager discovers that her mother is up to sinister purpose and attempts to escape despite her lack of mobility
Runaway (1984)
Michael Crichton’s books and films are always run through with a fear of technology run amok. Here Crichton makes an enjoyably straightforward directorial outing about a police squad set up to stop runaway robots,
Running on Karma (2003)
The collaboration of Hong Kong directors Wai Ka Fai and Johnnie To have resulted in some utterly deranged films. This is a madcap one with Andy Lau as a bodybuilding Buddhist monk who can see people’s past lives
Rupture (2016)
Puzzling and enigmatic film in which Noomi Rapace is a regular mom who is abducted and forced to take place in a series of experiments by a group of people who may not even be human
Rush Week (1989)
Passable entry towards the end of the 80s slasher cycle with a killer stalking a campus during fraternity recruiting week
Russian Ark (2002)
Extraordinarily ambitious film all shot in a single take at the former St Petersburg Winter Palace where the camera drifts dream-like from room to room and in and out of periods of Russian history. More n illustrated art and history program than a dramatic film but beautiful to watch.
The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)
Misguided attempt to make a sequel to Carrie, this reduces that film’s cry of the downtrodden to petty teen bitcheries, while the psychic eruptions are absurd, the complete antithesis of anything Brian De Palma directed
The Rambler (2013)
A man just out of jail leaves his wife after an argument and starts hitch-hiking. And then things start to get really weird
The Ranger (2018)
Slasher film with a diabolically funny sense of humour as a psychopathic park ranger stalks a group of partying punks
The Rape of the Vampire (1968)
Director Jean Rollin gained a cult following with his erotically fetishised, strikingly poetic vampire films, of which this was the first. Viewing the film today, one has more than a few problems with the title
The Rapture (1991)
Remarkable film with Mimi Rogers as a grieving widow who is drawn into the certainty that the Biblical Rapture is about to occur
The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)
Maybe one of the great exploitation titles of all time quickly telescopes down to a near-unwatchable film from Andy Milligan. A Victorian-set werewolf film with rats thrown in to capitalise on the success of Willard
The Raven (1915)
Silent movie based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Today we’d call it a biopic, although it readily departs into fantasy with Poe having drunken visions of the raven, ghosts and the afterlife
The Raven (1935)
An entertainingly madcap screen pairing of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi with the latter as a Poe-obsessed surgeon who has built a house of Poe-inspired torture devices
The Raven (1963)
The fifth of the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe films. By this point, there was a clear desire for some novelty so this one is played as a comedy between duelling magicians
The Raven (2012)
This has the great idea of pitting Edgar Allan Poe against a serial killer imitating his stories but instead produces a desultory murder mystery that has done only the most cursory reading about Poe and is ill-informed about the historical period
The Reaping (2007)
Reasonable budgeted film about a series of Biblical plagues being visited upon a rural Louisiana town. An interesting set up that flounders amid a confused script
The Recall (2017)
A group of friends at a cabin in the woods are subject to alien abductions. Directed by a production illustrator on a number of high-profile films, this comes with some unique designs and effects
The Reckoning (2020)
A few years ago, Neil Marshall seemed a major genre director on the rise with The Descent. Here he returns with a film about the historic witch persecutions
The Reconstruction of William Zero (2014)
A low key but modestly effective film where an amnesiac man comes to the gradual realisation that he is a clone
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)
A giallo film where a family curse about the vengeance of a red queen starts being enacted with a mystery figure bumping off relatives following the reading of a will
The Red Shoes (1948)
Sumptuous, beautifully made ballet fantasy from Michael Powell based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. A Technicolor spectacle at a time when most films were still made in black-and-white
The Red Shoes (2005)
South Korean horror film about a pair of high-heeled shoes that take over their owner. Some okay jumps in a standard K-horror ghost story
The Red Tent (1969)
On the face of it, this is not the most likely of films to be included – a depiction of the ill-fated true-life expedition to cross the North Pole in a dirigible in 1928 – but is for a wraparound wherein the survivor is judged by a tribunal of ghosts. A beautifully made and epical film
The Red Turtle (2016)
Studio Ghibli’s first ever international co-production. A desert island castaway fantasy, this makes interesting comparison to the recent Robinson Crusoe/The Wild Life, even if both films are poles apart in style. This is dialogueless, spare and contained with a minimalism of plot and drama
The Red Violin (1998)
A reasonable arthouse hit, this tells the story of a cursed violin through five different periods of history
The Reef (2010)
Gripping Australian survival horror film about a shipwrecked party who have to make a twelve mile swim through shark-infested waters
The Reef: Stalked (2022)
Andrew Traucki, the director of the standout killer crocodile film Black Water, makes a sequel to his earlier grippingly intense work about people trapped in shark-infested waters
The Reflecting Skin (1990)
A dark Coming of Age story set in a surreal depiction of the midwest populated by what might be vampires and angels
The Refrigerator (1991)
A film about a possessed refrigerator!
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)
High-profile film of its era that was mounted with an A-budget sheen. Beyond that, the film is made with the sedate predictability of a tv movie – it takes the hero half the film to work out what the title tells us
The Rejuvenator (1988)
This is essentially a 1940s mad scientist film having been given a workover with an arsenal of gory and gooey 1980s makeup effects. The plot concerns an aging movie star who obtains a rejuvenation serum
The Relic (1997)
This is a copy of Alien with a monster hunting people through darkened corridors and is generic in all regards, although you have to admit that Stan Winston creates an original monster and the film generates reasonable suspense
The Reluctant Astronaut (1967)
Most of the comics of the 1960s made a film dealing with the Space Race and here it is the turn of Don Knotts. Lots of bumbling slapstick ensues in this hardly inspiring entry
The Reluctant Dragon (1941)
One of the more obscure films in the Disney catalogue. A part live-action, part animated dramatised tour of Disney Studios, showing how the studio runs and screening several animated short pieces
The Remains (2016)
The haunted house genre is one that has become thoroughly exhausted by overuse in recent years. This puts the elements together with a professional assemblage but is essentially no different to the 347 other haunted house films that this site has seen in the last twelve months
The Rental (2020)
James Franco’s younger brother Dave makes a very impressive directorial debut in a taut psycho-thriller of sharp adept twists about two couples whose weekend getaway is torn asunder by guilty secrets and a lurking psycho
The Replacement (2017)
Mini-series made for the BBC that seems to have closely studied the late 80s/90s psycho-thriller – Fatal Attraction, Single White Female. Morven Christie is a pregnant mother who takes a leave of absence from work only to discover that her replacement appears to be plotting to kill her
The Reptile (1966)
Classic Hammer film in which Jacqueline Pearce turns into a snake creature. This seems to have been conceived as one of Hammer’s Dracula films but with snakes. It is given more than reasonable atmosphere by director John Gilling
The Requin (2022)
Survival horror film where Alicia Silverstone and husband are stranded in shark-infested waters when a freak storm washes their beachside cabin out to sea
The Resident (2011)
The second effort from the revived Hammer Films, which creates some reasonable creepy effect in the story of Hilary Swank dealing with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a stalker landlord after moving into a dream apartment
The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021)
Charles Band returns to H.P. Lovecraft and conducts a low-budget remake of From Beyond, which he had memorably overseen back in the 80s with Stuart Gordon
The Resurrected (1992)
Alien scripter Dan O’Bannon jumps aboard the 80s/early 90s fad for H.P. Lovecraft adaptations is this directorial outing that eventually develops quite reasonable effect
The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971)
This has the distinction of being the first film to depict cloning. An edgy conspiracy thriller where Senator Bradford Dillman wakes in a secret medical facility that clones important people
The Retreat (2021)
The Backwoods Brutality film given an LGBT spin where a lesbian couple run afoul of backwoods rednecks
The Return (1981)
Influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this is a strange film about UFOs and cattle mutilations. Explanations are not always clear but the film boasts a great cast
The Return (2006)
Ghost story in which Sarah Michelle Gellar receives a series of mysterious visions as she travels across Texas
The Return of Captain Invincible (1983)
Witty and overlooked parody of the superhero with Alan Arkin as a retired superhero trying to get back into the game. Made before superhero films became big and has a number of charms that were ahead of its time
The Return of Count Yorga (1971)
Count Yorga, Vampire was a minor success that started a spate of modern-day vampire films. This was a slightly lesser sequel that has the same droll wit but gets sidetracked in the middle sections
The Return of Dr Mabuse (1961)
The first of five West German-made sequels featuring Fritz Lang’s great criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, who this time is masterminding a plot to create mind controlled zombies
The Return of Dr X (1939)
Not a sequel to Doctor X despite the title, The main footnote this has is that it stars Humphrey Bogart as a vampire lab assistant. Halfway reasonable despite a bad reputation.
The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930)
The second of the films made about the Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu, the first made in sound. This is where the film series started to find itself, turning in some superlative thrills and a wonderful battle of wits between hero and villain. Pulp thrills at their best
The Return of Dracula (1958)
One of the first contemporary Dracula films. Compared to Christopher Lee’s first appearance as Dracula the same year, this is dull, plodding and without atmosphere where Dracula looks like no more than a door-to-door salesman
The Return of Jafar (1994)
A weak video-released spinoff of Disney’s Aladdin that began Disney’s habit throughout the 90s/00s of generating cheap sequels to their animated classics
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987)
Unsold tv pilot that features Sherlock Holmes cryogenically unfrozen in the present-day. While the characters have some quirky appeal, the exercise seems construed more as a copy of a tv show of the era like Moonlighting
The Return of Swamp Thing (1989)
Wes Craven’s adaptation of DC’s Swamp Thing was not a very good film. This sequel has been handed over to prolific B-budget hack Jim Wynorski who shows he is unable to take any of it seriously
The Return of the King (1980)
Way back before Peter Jackson, there was another whole era of Tolkien adaptations, including this animated adaptation of the third book, which is a peculiar oddity if nothing else
The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994)
The third sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Usually reviled by fans, this is not unworthwhile, capped by a genuinely insane performance from a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey
The Returning (1990)
A New Zealand-made ghost story that hardly seems to have been seen by anybody. The film shuffles around cliches from 1970s ghost story tv movies but only dissembles them into an embarrassingly silly film where very little of substance is directed with a ludicrously overwrought intensity
The Revenant (2009)
Not to be confused with the high-profile Leonardo DiCaprio film, this is a rather amusing film about a soldier who returns home as undead. Rather than the usual zombie/vampire film one would expect, this develops a wonderfully sustained sarcastic tone to expand out as a kind of undead Boondock Saints
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The second of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and a fine work that finds positively ingenious ways to continue on from its predecessor. Terence Fisher and the production team are all on top form.
The Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space (1986)
Excruciating and painfully unfunny attempt to make a deliberately bad SF film with alien vixens attempting to take over a high school
The Rezort (2015)
This has the interesting idea of “what if we did Jurassic Park but with zombies instead of dinosaurs?” – a game resort where people can hunt zombies only for the security grids to go down. The result is a halfway reasonable effort.
The Rift (1990)
A cheap submarine adventure/underwater monster encounter from Spanish director Juan Pique Simon that was intended as a copy of James Cameron’s The Abyss
The Right Stuff (1983)
Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program comes out halfway between admiration of the sheer ballsiness of the astronauts and buying into the flag-waving nationalism the Space Race represented.
The Ring (2002)
This is the English-language version of the Japanese horror Ring and actually a much better and far spookier film, where the new script gives the story more depth
The Ring Two (2005)
Sequel to The Ring, the English-language remake of Ringu. The filmmakers have returned to the source and brought in original director Hideo Nakata only to produce one of the most disappointing of all the Ringu/Ring films