Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2002)
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
Witchboard (1986)
A passable 80s horror in which Tawny Kitaen summons an evil spirit via an ouija board. That was a sufficient hit on video shelves that two sequels followed and then a remake.
Witchboard (2024)
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
Witchboard 2 (1993)
Way back before Blumhouse’s Ouija and the subsequent cheap ouija-titled films, there was the 80s horror Witchboard, which proved popular enough that it produced two sequels starting with this
Witchcraft (1964)
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
Witchery (1988)
Italian horror film featuring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair that has little going for it bar some imaginatively gruesome deaths
Witching and Bitching (2013)
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia makes what is essentially a comedy version of From Dusk Till Dawn albeit with witches instead of vampires. This has one of the funniest openings I’ve seen in some time but thereafter dissipates into broadly farcical and overlong runnings around
Witchslayer Gretl (2012)
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
With a Friend Like Harry (2000)
French psycho-thriller where Sergi Lopez gives an unnervingly charming performance as a psychopathic schoolfriend who inserts himself into Laurent Lucas’s life
Within the Rock (1996)
Low-budget Alien copy directed by makeup effects artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe with a plot that prefigures Armageddon as drillers uncover an alien nasty on an asteroid
Without Warning (1980)
One of the first copies of Alien, this essentially acts as a slasher movie but with an alien instead of a hockey-masked killer. It also manages to predict the essentials of Predator in many ways. A B-movie but the cast list makes for eye-opening reading today
Without Warning (1994)
Made for the anniversary of the Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, a tv movie that simulates a a live newscast as alien craft arrive around the world
Without Warning! (1952)
Fascinating early psycho film about the police hunt for Adam Williams who kills girls with garden shears
Witness Infection (2020)
Unexpectedly rather funny comedy that combines Mafia on a witness protection program and zombies
Wizard of Oz (1925)
An earlier silent version of The Wizard of Oz, which twists the story considerably out of shape as a vehicle for the slapstick comedy of star Larry Semon who plays The Scarecrow
Wizards (1977)
Ralph Bakshi left behind counter-culture animation to embark on this original fantasy film that comes with a trippily surreal quality, mixing fantasy tropes with a science-fictional rationalisation
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1984)
A painfully cheap entry in the 1980s fad for sword and sorcery films.
Wolf (1994)
Reasonable box-office hit that offers a stripped-back werewolf film with minimalist effects as milquetoast Jack Nicholson suddenly discovers the beast within
Wolf (2019)
Not to be confused with the Jack Nicholson film, this is a fine low-budget film about a group of centurions during the Roman occupation of Britain encountering werewolves on an expedition north of Hadrian’s Wall
Wolf Children (2012)
Mamoru Hosoda proves himself as one of the major directors in anime with this tender, lovely and enormously affecting work about a mother raising two werewolf children.
Wolf Creek (2005)
Making dubious claim to be based on real-life, this courted considerable controversy with its violence. Essentially an Australian Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Greg McLean readily pushes things to extremes
Wolf Creek 2 (2013)
Greg McLean and John Jarratt return to the Australian Backwood Brutality saga of Wolf Creek for a second outing that is just as effective as the first. McLean often pushes the material into black humour and creates at least one sequence that makes for genuinely uncomfortable watching
Wolf Garden (2023)
This may be or may not be a werewolf film. What we have is a work that is long on mood and much ambiguity as a man hides in the English countryside from a crime he has conducted
Wolf Man (2025)
After reviving The Invisible Man, James Wan associate Leigh Whannell takes on a reworking of The Wolf Man
Wolf Manor (2022)
A British werewolf film that takes place during the shooting of an old-fashioned Hammer-styled film
WolfCop (2014)
Deliberately made to look like a lost 1980s/early 90s film, this has a winning concept and sets in with an appealingly sarcastic amusement. On the other hand, the film is never quite as amusing as it gives the impression it is going to be and starts to lose it in the third act
Wolfen (1981)
Adaptation of a Whitley Strieber book about intelligent wolves hunting in New York City from Michael Wadleigh, the director of Woodstock … The film tends to bury Strieber’s straightforward horror story under social concerns as though wanting to distance itself from the horror label
WolfWalkers (2020)
The third film from Irish animator Tomm Moore, a beautiful Princess Mononoke-like tale of a girl’s friendship with persecuted werewolves in the forest
Wolves (2014)
Evidently intended to be a werewolf equivalent of the Star Wars saga in in its epically contorted familial struggles, this sits just between the stylish and another classic monster repackaged for the teen crowd and cast with handsome good-looking faces
Wolves at the Door (2016)
Another film about the Manson Family murders, this focuses on the Tate-Folger crime scene. It adheres to the fact general but twists them so it now operates more as a home invasion film
Wolves of Wall Street (2002)
Way before The Wolf of Wall Street, we had this David DeCoteau film about werewolf stockbrokers
Woman in the Moon (1929)
A silent film from Fritz Lang where he sets out to depict a realistic attempt (at least in terms of what was known in the era) to build and launch a rocket to The Moon. Lang directs with an epic grandeur that still takes back today.
Woman of the Hour (2023)
Actress Anna Kendrick directs a film based on a true-life serial killer Rodney Alcala who appeared on tv’s The Dating Game
Woman on Top (2000)
Frothy work of Magical Realism with Penelope Cruz as a woman whose cooking weaves a magical spell
Womaneater (1957)
Behind the lurid title, this concerns a mad scientist sacrificing women to a plant in his basement … This came out the same year as Hammer Films burst onto the English horror scene and by comparison is a plodding affair with no greater ambition than being a 1940s Bela Lugosi cheapie
Womb (2010)
The finest film made yet on the subject of cloning. A beautifully directed film that deals with the tricky ethical issues when Eva Green decides to give birth to a clone of her lover Matt Smith and raise him as her son.
Wonder Man (1944)
Madcap screwball comedy with Danny Kaye required to pose as his dead twin brother who is then taken over by his ghost during a trial
Wonder Woman (2009)
Fine animated version of the DC Comics superheroine that gets the character just right and tells the story in a way that eclipses all previous filmed versions
Wonder Woman (2017)
After three films of mixed success, DC Comics finally get their Cinematic Universe right. Director Patty Jenkins blows all of the others away with a series of exhilarating action sequences that have an entire audience cheering
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
The much-anticipated sequel to the Gal Gadot starring Wonder Woman is a highly divided success, partly due to an inane plot centred around a magic wishing stone
Wonder Woman: Bloodlines (2019)
The second of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies made as a standalone entry for Wonder Woman, clearly building on the success of the Gal Gadot film
Wonka (2023)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a cult classic. This offers a Willy Wonka origin story but seems to be far too nice a work that is missing the dark bite of the original
Woodenhead (2003)
Strange surrealist New Zealand made film that emerges as a Brothers Grimm fairytale as directed by a David Lynch or a Guy Maddin
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)
One of the most in-depth film documentaries ever made where Kier-La Janisse exhaustively excavates every example of Folk Horror
World Apartment Horror (1991)
After making the groundbreaking anime Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo then chose to direct this oddity – a live-action comedy about a frustrated Yakuza enforcer trying to evict an apartment of foreigners that turns into a horror film in its last third
World of Cars: Planes (2013)
A spinoff from Pixar’s Cars series (although is not in itself a Pixar film but comes from Disney) that sets out to do the same with anthropomorphic planes. Amiable, even likeable but more a wannabe that seems like it is trying to be than actually hits the cleverness and creative heights of Pixar
World on a Wire (1973)
Fascinating work from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the earliest depictions of Virtual Reality on screen and one that sets most of the genre’s tropes in place
World War Z (2013)
You wonder what this can do with such an overworked genre as the zombie apocalypse. It is not a film that reinvents the wheel for the genre but spins the basics out into an exciting, international locale hopping survival story
Worldbreaker (2025)
The underrated Brad Anderson makes a film about a father and daughter trying to survive in a world overrun by monsters. A film that reaches for the epic but lets it fall through its hands
Would You Rather (2012)
The old party game about choosing between two difficult decisions is spun out into a rather lame attempt to make another Saw. Given a generic commercial handling, the film fails to get inside the psychological tension of its life and death decisions
Wound (2010)
The always interesting David Blyth returns to screens with what feels like an amateur remake of Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29 that becomes a confused and plotless mishmash of hallucinations, random BDSM scenarios and shock effects
Wounds (2019)
Iranian director Babak Anvari impressed with Under the Shadows. This is his follow-up where barman Armie Hammer’s life is turned upside down after he picks up a sinister cellphone
Wraiths of Roanoke (2007)
B-budget Syfy Channel outing that attempts to answer the true-life Unsolved Mystery of the lost colony at Roanoke. Unfortunately, the film’s answers are no more interesting than a bunch of Viking spirits, while the film generates little atmosphere or anything beyond rudimentary historical conviction
Wrath of the Titans (2012)
Sequel to the Clash of the Titans remake. Much the same as before except with bigger monsters and more CGI spectacle that washes over you with all the substance of the light from a disco ball
Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
One of the best Disney animated films in ages. Has the winning concept of the secret lives of the characters inside videogames. Imagine Tron by way of Toy Story. The animators have clever fun with the idea, while the film creates a character arc that become the strength of the film
Wrecker (2015)
I have to search my memory to think of another film that is so openly plagiaristic – this is almost a scene-for-scene remake of Steven Spielberg’s Duel about a man facing a killer truck on a highway. This misses the subtlety of the original so widely you could run a highway through it
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)
Oddball film set in an afterlife for suicides. You keep expecting the film to burst out into a vein of rich black comedy that never comes and you are left with a film that feels as though it is being eccentric for the sake of it.
Written By (2009)
Unique venture into meta-fiction by Wai Ka Fai that creates fascinatingly wound layers of fiction and reality that eventually become so complex that one gets lost
Wrong (2012)
Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to the hilariously culty Rubber, an absurdist film about a man setting out to find his missing dog. You keep expecting something as mind-bendingly hilarious as Rubber but this is more of a mild amusement in the David Lynch-ian deadpan surrealist vein
Wrong is Right (1982)
A sprawling international political thriller/satire about stolen nuclear weapons starring Sean Connery as a journalist
Wrong Turn (2003)
Passable effort that copies that basics of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a group of stranded teens running afoul of an in-bred family
Wrong Turn (2021)
A reimagining of the long-running Wrong Turn series of Backwoods Brutality films, this does imaginative things with the set-up and emerges as the best of the series so far
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
A sequel that has been arranged for the sole purpose of serving up a series of gory dispatch set-pieces every few minutes
Wu Dang (2012)
Martial Arts/Wu Xia fantasy with various people involved in a competition while hunting for a fabled sword
Wu Yen (2001)
Frenetic Hong Kong comedy about fairy enchantments involving all the cast undergoing gender reversals
WW 3 (2001)
A routine biowarfare outbreak thriller that holds a fascination in that it imagines the attacker to be al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden two months before 9/11
Wyrmwood: Apocalypse (2021)
Sequel to the cult Australian zombie film, this refines the first film and exists as even more of a visual comic-book – all that seems missing is dialogue that comes in comic balloons
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014)
Australian zombie film that comes with a hyperactive fierceness and energy that reminds of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. On the minus side, the zombie genre is now so creatively strip-mined that the film never offers anything original
Wyvern Hill (2021)
Low-budget British film about a mysterious killer lurking in the house
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