Red Dawn (2012)
The idea of remaking John Milus’s ridiculous 1984 survivalist fantasy about a Communist invasion of the USA maybe counts as one of the most absurdly unnecessary of all remakes. The film laughably tries to deal with the absence of a Soviet Union by creating a boogeyman out of North Korea
The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)
RZA of rap group Wu-Tang Clan fame (with the aid of Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino) makes a dual acting/directing appearance with this homage to Shaw Brothers martial arts films … not quite the genuine article but a solid effort where RZA certainly doesn’t embarrass himself
Nightmare Factory (2011)
Documentary about KNB EFX Group, one of the premiere makeup effects companies in contemporary Hollywood. Although nominally focused around KNB and their history, the documentary principally profiles Greg Nicotero, the N of the group
The Spiral Staircase (1975)
A remake of the classic film noir psycho-thriller. Now the story is conducted in colour and with a name star cast but misses all the atmosphere the original had by a wide mile
Vanishing Waves (2012)
Acclaimed Lithuanian film involving a venture into a person’s dreamscape a la The Cell and Inception. Some nicely cool visuals, a strong character arc and some potentially edgy sexual content but the film still remains in the shadow of Inception without quite finding enough original ideas
Manborg (2011)
A miracle of no-budget filmmaking made on a budget of $1000. A homage/parody of 80s/90s cyborg action films with some extremely accomplished effects posing and a sidesplitting ear for the era’s dialogue
Breaking Dawn Part Two (2012)
Perhaps the best thing about this is that the Twilight saga is finally ended. This provides a moderately spectacular showdown but also wraps its plotlines up with absurd deus ex machina wimp outs and an infuriating twist ending
The American Scream (2012)
Michael Paul Stephenson of Best Worst Movie fame makes a documentary about people who turn their homes into Halloween haunts. While lacking the freakshow aspect of Best Worst Movie, this is a likeable effort that follows its subjects in perfecting their art
Dead Sushi (2012)
Completely insane Japanese film about man-eating killer sushi. A film that has an anything goes lunacy, resulting in some of the most surreally crazed monster scenes this author has seen in some time
John Dies at the End (2012)
Phantasm series director Don Coscarelli makes a mind-expanding effort that seems a conceptual collision between Donnie Darko, Limitless, a slacker version of Supernatural and Dr Strange
The History of Future Folk (2012)
Aliens come to Earth and form a bluegrass band! The basic idea holds an undeniable appeal but the film seems caught between wanting to be a B-movie parody and an indie film that takes itself seriously
Quest for Love (1971)
One of the rare cinematic ventures into alternate history, a British film adapted from a story by John Wyndham. This holds up as a fair and reasonable alternate history outing, driven by a strong and original romantic story
El Monstro del Mar! (2010)
Australian exploitation homage that is like a collision between Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! and a monster movie. Low-budget but this has an authentic recapturing of the spirit of trash cinema
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
In Their Skin (2012)
Canadian-made home invasion thriller that reminds of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. A film that seems set to brutalise a middle class couple’s sensibilities only to slip into utter tameness
Sinister (2012)
Scott Derrickson film that is badly underwritten in terms of proper explanatory rationale. That said, you cannot deny that Derrickson manages to produce the scary goods on a number of occasions
Tarzan (1999)
This Disney animated adaptation treats the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with surprising respect and faithfulness for the most part where the addition of talking animals even works for it. Fun and with a great deal of creative energy, one of the better films from the 90s Disney renaissance
We Are the Night (2010)
Slick and visually exciting German vampire film that recaptures something of the chic sumptuousness of The Hunger. Perhaps The Hunger by way of Sex and the City set in a world of conspicuous fashion consumption where vampirism represents women’s ultimate empowerment
Juan of the Dead (2011)
The world’s first Cuban zombie film. Imagine a Latin American version of Shaun of the Dead, conducted with some cleverness, oddball wit and an undeniable satiric undertow
Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)
A puppet film about a satiric Nazi invasion of England in World War II. Imagine It Happened Here by way of Team America. This has its amusements but is uneven
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
The Captains (2011)
Documentary where William Shatner interviews the actors who played the captains in the other incarnations of Star Trek. The entire show is hijacked by the Shatner ego as he constantly overrides his interview subjects
Looper (2012)
From Rian Johnson, a time travel film that is uneven but is mostly conducted with considerable cleverness and intelligence. One of the few multiplex films driven by plot and some clever twists rather than action
Future Cops (1993)
Manically paced Hong Kong action comedy about a time-travelling action team purportedly inspired by the Street Fighter videogame. Imagine The Terminator as a manic slapstick comedy with martial arts sequences.
Holy Motors (2012)
Genuinely mind-screwing effort from Leos Carax. Imagine a version of Cosmopolis as hijacked by Alejandro Jodorowsky – a series of surreal vignettes that arrives at a major “huh?” ending
A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman (2012)
The death of Graham Chapman put paid to a Monty Python reunion. Undeterred, Chapman’s autobiography is bought to life as an animated film in the gonzo Python style with the remaining Pythons providing voice work
The Monkey King: Uproar in Heaven (1965)
3D restoration of a classic Chinese adaptation of Journey to the West and the best film version of the story to date … an incredible film filled with psychedelically eye-popping animation and amazing action scenes, while gleefully celebrating a defiance of all authority
Cloud Atlas (2012)
A cross-historical epic from The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. An uneven film driven more by its determination we view it as an epic. Surely a studio publicist’s nightmare, it grasps at the meaning of it all yet eludes telling audiences what it is about
Consuming Spirits (2012)
Animated venture into Midwestern Gothic that has been a fifteen-year work for one-man band Chris Sullivan. A film that is at once brilliantly original but also tedious where its focus on the minutiae of character’s lives seems to go on forever
East Meets West (2011)
Hong Kong comedy designed to bring together an ensemble of local stars. The film starts out about the efforts to reunite a band and turns into a wacky effort where everybody discovers they are avatars of deities
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
The Paranormal Activity series has had a better run than most horror franchises up until now but the cracks are starting to show through here. This feels like it is straining to find some new way to do the familiar moves but fails to provide anything unexpected or original
Alex Cross (2012)
Reboot of James Patterson’s criminal profiler books makes the mistake of hiring an action director. Tyler Perry lacks the genius mental agility Morgan Freeman previously brought to the role but Matthew Fox does crazy well
Leones (2012)
A group of youths walk through the woods lost then discover why they are there in a hackneyed genre twist ending you can see coming an hour before it does
Ernest and Celestine (2012)
Entirely charming French animated film from the directors of A Town Called Panic. This is a children’s film that comes with a beautiful simplicity, a duo of winning characters and some side-splitting visual gags
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
Grabbers (2012)
The world’s first Irish alien invasion film – and a sideplittingly funny one too. Imagine a conceptual crosshatch between Tremors and the characters from Father Ted
The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)
Cult Polish film that is a series of tall tales nested within a labyrinth of other tales and digressions
McDull – The Pork of Music (2012)
Fifth in a popular series of satiric Hong Kong animated films. Kicks in with an amusingly sarcastic bite that resembles a Beavis and Butt-Head in its story of a talking animal children’s choir but alas by about the halfway point takes itself seriously and starts to get mawkish and sentimental
Moksha – Or The World and I, How Does That Work? (2012)
Imagine a weird mix between the basic premise of Saw and Waiting for Godot. A South Korean film about a man inexplicably chained up in a park that is less interested in his escape than it becomes a surreal existential allegory for life
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
Emperor Visits the Hell (2012)
The idea of (some chapters of) the classic Chinese legend Journey to the West retold in contemporary terms. This makes for some amusing interpolations, while also acting as a social critique of modern-day Chinese society
A Fish (2012)
Willfully cryptic and baffling South Korean film that only ends up being dull and confusing. Disappointingly, the big denouement reveals that all we have is another copy of The Sixth Sense with pretensions to meaningfulness
Mekong Hotel (2012)
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a festival favourite and one genre director whose work is least categorised as such. As with any of Weerasethakul’s films, this has some intensely haunted moments but is severely lacking in plot or any kind of dramatic inertia
Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Imagine Brian De Palma’s Blow Out by way of Barton Fink. Set around the sound recording of a giallo horror, this mounts an impressive spiral down into claustrophobia and paranoia, even if it is never quite the horror film it keeps trying to be
Persistence of Vision (2012)
A fascinating documentary about animator Richard Williams that principally focuses on the tragic failure of Williams’s lifework The Thief and the Cobbler, which would have been the most ambitious hand drawn film ever made
Antiviral (2012)
Brandon Cronenberg makes an impressive writing-directing debut, taking up the thematic reins of his father’s earlier films in a darkly satiric future escalation of contemporary celebrity culture
Frankenstein: A Modern Myth (2012)
Supposedly a documentary about the Frankenstein story but no more than a glorified dvd extra to accompany the Danny Boyle stage production of Frankenstein. This covers the life of Mary Shelley but almost entirely sidesteps the Frankenstein cinematic legacy
A Werewolf Boy (2012)
Despite the title, this South Korean film is less a werewolf story than it is a love story about a feral child. The film seems overburdened by the need to pitch the film to the teen demographic and play the violins and heartstrings as a Twilight wannabe
In Another Country (2012)
South Korean film that replays the same story three times with slight differences, all featuring Isabelle Huppert as a different woman. Told with a rather charming sense of humour and a playful meta-fiction
Dracula (1931)
The legendary Spanish-language version of Dracula that was shot on the same sets as the classic Bela Lugosi version. Although it ultimately stands too much in the shadow of the Lugosi film, it is the better of the two films
Hotel Transylvania (2012)
A variant on the much more charming Mad Monster Party?, an animated film featuring cute cuddly versions of the Famous Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, wolfman etc) with Adam Sandler voicing Dracula
The Master (2012)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose biopic of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is a film composed of great acting and great individual scenes more so than it ever coheses as a story or delves in to interrogate its characters. Far too elusive as a story to quite be the masterpiece it is readily being hailed as
A Letter to Momo (2011)
Anime about the oddball friendship between a teenage girl and three goblins. Reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro, it is a film about a girl’s feelings for her parents that eventually becomes greatly affecting
A Cat in Paris (2011)
French film that was nominated for the 2011 Best Animated Film at the Oscars. Cute but over-rated, the film is all highly stylised hand-drawn caricature that looks great but never works very hard to engage in terms of its characters
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
Another unnecessary entry in a creativity-handicapped series, the continuing popularity of which is baffles. This shuffles through the familiar moves, brings back several familiar characters but only leaves me asking why I have invested some nine hours of time following this series
Toys in the Attic (2009)
Czech stop-motion animated film – imagine Toy Story film reworked by Jan Svankmajer set in a world of toys made up of scavenged junk. On the minus side, the design is the whole of the film and it never much animates the characters or fairytale story
Coma (2012)
TV mini-series remake of the Michael Crichton medical thriller that pointlessly changes and over-extrudes a tight and effective original, while director Mikael Salomon adds absurd red herrings and keys away major surprises well in advance
Frankenstein (2011)
Danny Boyle’s stage adaptation, broadcast live on movie screens, wrings up some unique changes on the classic tale. The role of Frankenstein and creation alternated between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)
Czech Jules Verne adaptation that conducts an extraordinary blend of animation and live-action. Maybe the purest evocation of Steampunk that has ever been placed on screen. A work of underappreciated genius
Rebirth of Mothra (1996)
One of the worst among the usually worthwhile Japanese monster movie revivals of the 1990s. Much of the film is played down at an inanely silly children’s movie level, with there only being the requisite mass destruction effects to enliven the show
Je T’aime, Je T’aime (1968)
French New Wave SF film from director Alain Resnais about a time machine. The idea of a protagonist travelling at random through his own memory is predictive of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
Dracula II: Ascension (2003)
The first of two sequels to Dracula 2000. This is based around the idea of trying to scientifically examine a vampire’s body, sort of a vampire film by way of CSI
Ring Around the Rosie (2006)
This starts out as a seeming ghost story without creating much tension then features Tom Sizemore going psycho, before arriving at one of the most confusing of all attempts to conduct an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Never Too Young to Die (1986)
Completely insane 1980s spy film – a madcap mahsup of elements including James Bond gadgetry, mad scientists, action and splatter served up with not a shred of realism. The crowning glory is a completely OTT Gene Simmons as a cross-dressing super-villain
Reign of Assassins (2010)
Chinese-made Wu Xia film – sort of a flying swordsman variant on A History of Violence. This comes on an impressive scale but also plays down the action element and leaves all the flying swordsman moves sitting on the fence as being possibly mundane
The Black Sleep (1956)
The very last gasp of the 1930s/40s mad scientist film, a swansong that brings together an amazing cast from the era including Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone and Tor Johnson. Slightly better produced than most of the era’s cheapies
Chain Letter (2010)
Ridiculous film that seems to want to say something about modern technological interconnectivity but has simply grafted it onto a slasher formula. while being bsurdly ill-informed about its subject
The Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2010)
A live-action film based on a popular Japanese young adult novel that has been filmed multiple times before. This is a rather dull film that fails to do anything terribly interesting with its time travel premise
The Photon Effect (2010)
Passable amateur-made superhero film clearly inspired by DC’s The Flash. While the film is written with some at times snappy dialogue and has two good lead actors, it suffers from spotty digital effects
War of the Worlds (2005)
Where the legend of The Asylum and their low-budget mockbusters began, this was a cheap modernised version of the H.G. Wells novel that was released a day before the Spielberg film. Despite cheap effects, this adheres closer to Wells than Spielberg did and is better written than most Asylum product
Pig (2010)
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
Night of the Living Dead Reanimated (2009)
A unique homage to Night of the Living Dead wherein the original has been recreated with a bewildering range of artwork and short pieces of animation from dozens of different artists, even scenes conducted by sock puppets and animated Barbie dolls
The Projectionist (1971)
A Secret Life of Walter Mitty for movie lovers wherein a milquetoast projectionist daydreams himself into a variety of movie scenarios as an inept superhero. Quirkily charming if never more than a single idea. Something you feel should have been a cult film
The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story gets full marks for being set during the Spanish Inquisition. On the other hand, Gordon’s unserious splatter heavy approach and a campy performance from Lance Henriksen deflates the material
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
An indisputable classic fantasy … a gorgeous sparkling fantasy that made full use of Technicolor in an era dominated by black-and-white and is told in such bold and earnestly heartfelt tones that it becomes the nearest we have to a piece of genuine American mythology
4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011)
Abel Ferrara makes an End of the World film that hardly ever leaves the characters’ apartment and in which almost nothing happens. Considering the angry, bleak work of his heyday, you cannot wonder if the 60 year-old Ferrara has lost his mojo
V/H/S (2012)
An anthology of five short Found Footage horror films each from a different director. As with any anthology these are variable in tone but are on the whole mostly effective and contain a number of alternately unearthly and spooky moments
The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011)
Hong Kong director Ching Siu-Tung returns with a Wu Xia film made with extravagant Chinese backing. Wu Xia of the 00s have slowly taken to CGI and Ching readily adapts his moves to this with often breathtaking effect
The Possession (2012)
Based on the urban legend surrounding a dybbuk box that turned up on an EBay auction, although the film throws this out to conduct an utterly generic possession story. Despite the novelty of drawing on Judaic mythology, the film still trades in the same tired cliches as the Christian exorcism film
Grace (2009)
A disturbingly effective story of a mother who gives birth to a baby that is not human. An immensely assured directorial debut that eschews cliche horror effect and becomes a chilling study in psychological disintegration
Coming Soon (2008)
Thai horror film with the interesting idea of ghosts emerging out of a movie screen. This has a couple of undeniably spooky moments but is still just another of the numerous copies of the basics of Ring
Dracula Blows His Cool (1979)
Excruciating West German-made vampire sex comedy (that doesn’t feature Count Dracula despite the title). Painful and agonisingly unfunny comedy routines directed by someone who has no idea how to set them up
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)
As might be expected, a collaboration between Werner Herzog and David Lynch makes for an exceedingly strange film, involving matricide, mental illness and ostriches – and all apparently based on a true life murder. Very strange, if in the end it only produces a puzzled scratch of the head
Ghost Month (2007)
Low-budgeted independent US film that sets a ghost story around Chinese rituals. You can admire the serious ambition but the film only provides scares that are utterly tame
Captain America II (1979)
Another of the mostly disastrous Marvel tv adaptations of the 1970s. Captain America is sidelined for much of the show. This does conduct the coup of casting Christopher Lee as the villain but criminally gives him nothing to do
The Apparition (2012)
This feels like an amateur film made on a big budget that consists of utterly tepid scares where the director fails to do anything not borrowed from a dozen other ghost stories
Attack Girls’ Swim Team vs. the Undead (2007)
You feel that a film about lesbian Japanese schoolgirls vs zombies should have been more interesting. The zombies barely mount to a dozen and the director seems more preoccupied by his softcore predilections
The Summer of Massacre (2011)
The unique idea of an anthology made up of five different slasher tales. Unfortunately, the film’s only raison d’etre is serving up serial gore scenes, which have the effect taken out of them because they are all conducted digitally and look biologically preposterous
The Fall of the House of Usher (1979)
Maybe the worst Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever, a version made for tv that fails utterly to project any of Poe’s gloom and despair, while a badly overacting Martin Landau is disastrously miscast as Roderick Usher
The Dunwich Horror (2009)
An adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story. While more faithful to the story than the earlier 1969 adaptation, the film is very cheaply made and collapses into the frequently ridiculous
Earth’s Final Hours (2011)
Another Syfy Channel low-budget disaster film. This creates a fascinating if scientifically dubious end of the world premise about a white hole but spends the show on the routine stuff of car chases and gunfights
Seconds Apart (2011)
A wonderfully cool film about malevolent twins with psychic abilities. that is an astonishingly assured effort where the various set-pieces come with the confidence of a director who has been working in the genre for years
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)
Maybe the definitive Tarzan film, one that drops the pulp adventure and recasts the story as British arthouse theatre. Superbly mounted and cast. Christopher Lambert has never better in the title role
ParaNorman (2012)
Stop-motion animated children’s film from Laika that demonstrates a willingness to be scary. The film starts to move out of the amiably likeable after around the halfway point when it begins to play a number of horror tropes against expectation to deliver a reasonable message about fear and prejudice
Special (2006)
Before the likes of Defendor, Kick-Ass and Super, there was this, one of the best comedies about superheroes with no powers. The film loves screwing with its audience and comes with a series of mind-bending flips between drug hallucination and subjective view of the superpowers in action
The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012)
On one level, this sets out to be a warm-hearted fantasy about the appearance of a magic child to a childless couple. On another possibly unintentional level, it is a rather unlikeable film about how two parents continually force a child to conform to the social expectations of those around them
Dark Age (1987)
Undeniably influenced by Jaws, this Australian effort is the first ever killer crocodile film. Nothing extraordinary, although the film does have an interesting subtext about the conflict between European and Aborigine cultures
The Martian Chronicles (1980)
Ray Bradbury’s book about the human colonisation of Mars is an SF classic for its wistful, nostalgic poetry. This tv mini-series adaptation is killed by a lumbering director who over-explains Bradbury’s imagery in the most literal ways
Blubberella (2011)
Uwe Boll sets out to offend everybody in a film founded on making constant insults about its’ plus-size heroine’s weight and bad jokes about the Holocaust, including the Boll playing a comic Hitler
Grimm’s Snow White (2012)
Another entry among 2012’s spate of Snow White films following Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. this was a low-budget mockbuster copycat from The Asylum